Re: Mixed writing systems (WAS: Newbie says hi)

On Sat, Nov 02, 2002 at 02:27:26AM +0000, Mat McVeagh wrote:
[snip]
> to the point where you can do so in the first place. Consider the claims
> that an entire year of children's education is wasted learning irregular
> spellings in English and getting over it to be able to read and write.
!!!!

Wait till you hear what children have to go through to learn how to
read/write Mandarin...

> How
> much longer does it take to learn an ideographic system, how much education
> time does it eat up?
[snip]

If you're counting years, probably equivalent to English. (No, I'm not
kidding. There may be a LOT more ideographs to learn, but once you have a
basic set, learning the rest is just the same as learning more arcane
words in English once you mastered the basics. I.e., learning to write new
ideographs once you grasped the basics is essentially the same as learning
to spell a new word.)

But if you're counting *hours*, then I agree, it's a lot more. When you
first start learning to write Chinese characters, you basically have to
sit down every day, and copy a set of about 5-10 characters about 50-100
times. Yep, we have exercise books with pages divided into squares, with
characters written across the top row. Our daily task is then to copy
these characters down the columns. Initially, you actually have to fill a
page or half a page with the SAME character until you can produce a
decent-looking copy (as determined by the teacher). Later, you're assumed
to be able to learn new characters more easily, so you only have to fill
the columns for each character. (But then there will be more characters
per day to learn, so that doesn't make it any easier.)

And if you know anything about Chinese characters, you know that this is a
very non-trivial task, as some characters take so many strokes to produce
that you could've written a 10-page English essay in the number of strokes
it takes to fill a page. (I had the (mis)fortune to learn the traditional,
non-simplified Chinese writing. Unfortunately, I found the ordeal too much
for me, and so did not learn very much at all. Now, to my great regret, I
can no longer read/write Chinese beyond the grade 1 level.) Not to mention
the additional exercises the teacher will give you (for the SAME
characters) if she thinks your writing isn't good enough. Or if you didn't
draw the strokes in the right order. (Somehow the teachers could always
tell the difference. Go figure.)

And I haven't talked about writing with ink & brush yet. We had to fill
pages upon pages of characters written with ink & brush. Now I'm sure you
know how agile children are at drawing those delicate thick-to-thin,
thin-to-thick strokes, complete with serifs, the right thickness, right
amount of curvature, etc., etc., etc., all the while managing to not spill
ink all over themselves, the table, the chair, and on top of a precious,
almost completed page of painstakingly painted characters. (And did I
mention the ink stinks? And the brushes are so delicate that there is no
way a child can handle one without completely ruining the bristles, making
it impossible to produce writing of the demanded quality until the poor
parents shell out more cash to buy a replacement. Thank goodness that
toward the end of primary school, people started inventing sponge-tipped
brushes, which are a LOT more manageable for kids who aren't going to
become professional Chinese calligraphers. Those bristles sure were a
hairy affair.)


T

--
Only boring people get bored. -- JM