Quote:
Originally Posted by LDBoblo
Well actually, numerous people have learned to read Chinese to high capacity and never actually learned to speak the language in any real form. In fact, this was common in the early 20th Century. Many of the more famous translators of Chinese literature and poetry into English, for example, could not speak Chinese worth a damn.
As far as grammar is concerned, many features are present in "proper" Mandarin, but are casually ignored. A good example of this is a perfect tense, which many foreigners incorrectly believe doesn't exist in Chinese, and most Chinese subsequently fail to notice it as well.
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Do you mean "never learned the sounds"? Or just never learned how to properly pronounce the sounds?
Do you have any books or links you could recommend on this topic?
Quote:
Originally Posted by LDBoblo
Personally I see characters and phonetic systems as tradeoffs of one another in the Chinese system. Phonetics are flawed due to the number of homophones, and characters are flawed for cognitive reasons. Neither is a great solution, though the written form is far more universal than spoken Mandarin.
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There is an amusing number of articles
here excerpted from books, by mostly non-Chinese/non-Japanese academics, about why Hanzi/Kanji is bad/evil/unnecessary.
Do Chinese / Japanese people not find entire books written by foreigners about why the Chinese/Japanese are fools not to convert to the superior latin alphabet somewhat offensive, or at least arrogant?
- Ahi