Quote:
Originally Posted by Stensie4JC
Oooh, you're a dragon! That's the best one. Maybe all your luck is being stored up for something big!
Yes, Chinese is an incredibly hard language. There's so much memorization involved: how to make the strokes and what order they go in for each character (very important!), how to pronounce it, the tone, and the meaning, of course.
Actually my husband tells me, at least among the people he knows, an interesting phenomenon is occurring. They study until high school and even into college to memorize how to write characters. But since he's graduated high school, he rarely writes things out by hand. With texting and computers there's not that many things done on paper anymore, and he has to think about how to write less-used characters. I think this is an interesting phenomenon of the digital age, and I have wondered if, in the next 50 years China will cease teaching the writing of characters, and it will become an art more than an essential skill.
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So they tell me, but my life has been more of a series of weird adventures (which I have, until now, survived, so I guess I am lucky).
I have always thought of both Japanese and Chinese calligraphy as more of an art form than a great way to communicate in the digital age. Of course, I've got a screaming Western bias, and there is no helping that. However, only needing to memorize 26 letters and a few additional symbols in order to work effectively in several other languages does make it easier .... but it still amazes me that they learn the plain old Greco Roman alphabet in order to write phonetically on your typical IBM keyboard. Hijo-la!!
Here's something entirely off topic, but I was watching a show last night in part about Dr. Chang Diaz who is a brilliant astrophysicist originally from Bolivia. Now "Chang" is not what I would call your usual Bolivian last name ... not even hyphenated. Can't help but wonder if he had some Chinese ancestors.
