Re: "Usefull languages"

13/02/02 23:35:31, Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
>> Anyway, do the Chinese have spelling bees, or the like? It seems like
>> they'd have more problem then the English at the correspondence
>> between
>> the written form and the spoken form.
>>
>
>On the contrary, since the written form doesn't have the pretention to give
>phonetic clues (in fact it does, but in a way unclear enough that it doesn't
>impede things). The only difficulty comes from the big number of signs to
>learn, and the fact that the written language represents well only the Mandarin
>of the capital, which is only one dialect of just one of the languages of the
>country.
>
>The only spelling bee I can think of is the distinction between traditional and
>simplified spelling. But I don't know much about it, so one of our Sinologues
>should step in here :)) .

What could be compared to spelling in chinese. A single character caries the
meaning, and not the phonetics. So there is no way to ask "how do you write the
word
pronounced XXXX" but of course you write words. And of course you can make mistakes or
inpressisions. wether a word is corectly written or not is base not only on the
look of it, but also on the stroke number and the stroke order. It is really
possible to see if you wrote the strokes in the right order or not (fast
wrtting alters always the
character the same way if you folow the same stroke order). So stroke number and order
are important. More over the chinese culture grants much more importance to the
writing skills than we do, since the number of
characters you know is considered an indicator of your culutre level. I don't know any
spellng bee, but I do know about calygraphy constests.

Florian

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