[ahi]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

The main obstacle I see is the sentence structure, grammar. Let us say you assign an English word to every character. But the way sentences are formed is totally different. No tenses (you, for example, indicate past tense by adding a little word 了LE or 過了GUO LE or just simply yesterday). Verbs never change. You have no cases, no conjunctive (again, just denoted by a adding a simple word). Word order is different and arranging the same words in different order can give a totally different meaning. You have counters (like one PAIR of pants in English) for everything. Most characters have many different meanings. Some characters (like the above 過 GUO and 了LE), have no English word equivalent at all.

So, to sum it up. All Chinese languages are structurally almost the same and well suited for using Chinese characters, that is why you have the situation as explained. Japanese is not, and that is why they have Hiragana to write what cannot be expressed by the characters (usually because of the totally different Japanese grammar). It is not possible to write English in Chinese characters, but as a purely academic excercise, yes, it is possible to learn Chinese writing without learning spoken Chinese. It just makes no sense at all to do so. To learn writing and understand the meaning of the whole sentence, you have to be totally immersed in the language.

You pointed out some scholars who did this, they could read Chinese but could not speak it. My guess is that they actually could speak it, but that their pronunciation was very bad and people didn't understand them -- so that they were embarrassed to use the spoken language. And they also weren't able to pick up the tones and other matters to be able to understand a native speaker. So it must have been a matter of knowing the spoken language but not having mastered a good enough pronunciation to be able to communicate in verbal form. Pronunciation is a much greater obstacle in Sinotibetan languages than in European ones! And people tend to laugh at foreigners who get it wrong. The scholars probably didn't want to subject themselves to such ridicule and therefore pretended they couldn't speak at all.

Thanks, Hans! That makes perfect sense.

You have disabused me of some more of my Sinitic misconceptions.

- Ahi