Quote:
Originally Posted by ProDigit
I think a language should be an essential tool to connect and make things clear to another person.
If a language is so difficult that it takes you all the way to highschool, before you can actually do something with it, then perhaps the chinese should learn roman alphabet and (like the Japanese Kanjii) write their words in roman letters.
At least, I've been able to learn 3 languages before the age of 18, rather than becoming 30 something before I fully mastered one language.
I agree that any language can become so complex as you want it to be,and that one can study poetry and stuff many years after one graduates. But I certainly hope that Chinese kids at the age of 7 can write just about anything they can talk about using a keyboard?
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The literacy level of anglophone children is well below that of children whose languages are written almost entirely phonetically for years after they learn to read. Yet the United Kingdom hasn't acted to adopt an alphabet that unambiguously indicates English's 15-18 different vowels, and definitely more than 20 consonant sounds.
Also,
Kanji is the Japanese name for what the Chinese call Hanzi... i.e.: chinese characters. What you must have been thinking of is Romaji. But to suggest that it replaced Kanji (or Hiragana/Katakana) is incorrect. The average Japanese can get by in a Romaji only environment, but a person that knows only Romaji would be largely illiterate in Japan.
If China were to abandon its current primary writing system, there is still no reason for them to adopt the roman alphabet. They have
bopomofo.