What of bopomofo replaced Chinese characters at an earlier stage? (train, move)
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I always wondered what if Bopomofo (Zhuyin fuhao see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo) was in widespread use in Greater China (Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore) and it's effect on the economy and China as a whole?
I strongly think it would happen to have massive benefits and probably should have been implemented much earlier during Mao's early days (when he tried to remove Chinese characters altogether).
The benefits I see:
1. Chinese is notoriously difficult based on rote learning and this is not very good training/grounding for creative thinking....if your memory is being used up with characters leaves very little room for free thinking!
2. Looking at hangul (another alphabet system) and Japanese Hirigana/Katakana, it would massively help reduce illiteracy....an alphabet set it conductive for intuition.
3. It would encourage foreigners to take up Chinese much more, the Bopomofo system is unlike pinyin which looks really inappropriate for Chinese and I'm told less accurate than Bopomofo.
If you really learn some Chinese, you will find out bopomofo or any phonetically based script won't work well with Chinese.
Even Japanese have to keep some Chinese characters.
If you really learn some Chinese, you will find out bopomofo or any phonetically based script won't work well with Chinese.
Even Japanese have to keep some Chinese characters.
I don't believe it. How was Korean able to effectively replace Chinese characters with Hangul? Or, even Vietnamese which is a tonal language, adopted the Latin alphabet and it works perfectly fine? The way I also see it, when you are speaking to someone face to face, your vision doesn't have subtitles on the bottom of your field of view to remove ambiguities in speech .
I don't believe it. How was Korean able to effectively replace Chinese characters with Hangul? Or, even Vietnamese which is a tonal language, adopted the Latin alphabet and it works perfectly fine? The way I also see it, when you are speaking to someone face to face, your vision doesn't have subtitles on the bottom of your field of view to remove ambiguities in speech .
Bopomofo is said to be the most accurate phonetic system for the Chinese language and probably most aesthetically pleasant (compared with pinyin or any latin based system). It could have worked wonders for a then and perhaps to some extend, still poor and mostly rural population.
If you really learn some Chinese, you will find out bopomofo or any phonetically based script won't work well with Chinese.
If you really know bopomofo you will find out that it works just fine with Mandarin. If there's inconsistency with the Mandarin you are used to speak and listen to daily, then it's because the pronunciation of many words varies between China and Taiwan, not because bopomofo is as lame as pinyin.
I strongly think it would happen to have massive benefits and probably should have been implemented much earlier during Mao's early days (when he tried to remove Chinese characters altogether).
Communists like a unified world. And as a communist, Mao insisted all languages used in China should be written in roman alphabet. I don't blame him.
Quote:
Originally Posted by willister
1. Chinese is notoriously difficult based on rote learning and this is not very good training/grounding for creative thinking....if your memory is being used up with characters leaves very little room for free thinking!
If your memory is being used up with combinations of alphabets leaves very large room for free thinking?
A single Chinese chat contains more meaning than a single english word which bring Chinese book much more thinner than the original one. So it is easy to find that a 3 hundred pages book in english was just a thin booklet in Chinese.
Quote:
Originally Posted by willister
2. Looking at hangul (another alphabet system) and Japanese Hirigana/Katakana, it would massively help reduce illiteracy....an alphabet set it conductive for intuition.
As far as I know, the writing system of Japanese is the most difficult one. Chinese writing system is much simpler.
Quote:
Originally Posted by willister
3. It would encourage foreigners to take up Chinese much more, the Bopomofo system is unlike pinyin which looks really inappropriate for Chinese and I'm told less accurate than Bopomofo.
If you really know bopomofo you will find out that it works just fine with Mandarin. If there's inconsistency with the Mandarin you are used to speak and listen to daily, then it's because the pronunciation of many words varies between China and Taiwan, not because bopomofo is as lame as pinyin.
I know bopomofo and pinyin. No big difference between them.
Traditionally, there are two methods for representing pronunciations of Chinese characters: one is Duruo, 讀若, and the other is Fanqie, 反切.
Duruo means "read as". A duruo B, means A is read as B. B is one character.
Fanqie means "combinations of A's initial part and B's last part". Such as 三思甘切, 三 is combination of 思's initial part and 甘's last part. The last character 切 or 反 indicate the method, Fanqie. Therefore, there are two characters for representing single character's pronunciation.
With bopomofo, you sometimes have to use three symbols for one character. This is not traditional at all.
Besides, ㄔ represents Chi in Pinyin. Notice with i at the end in Pinyin.
ㄔㄤ don't represent Chi+ang but Chang in Pinyin. Where did the i go?
I don't mean Pinyin is superior to Bopomofo, but if Pinyin is lame, so is Bopomofo.
As far as I know, the writing system of Japanese is the most difficult one. Chinese writing system is much simpler.
Well, I learned the kana system of Japanese and didn't find it too difficult. I think what's difficult and complex about Japanese is the hybrid systems and how to use them (hiragana, katakana, and kanji) and when to use them. You have to learn a whole lot less Kanji in Japanese than if you learned Chinese.
So do Chinese characters. Even if you don't know the pronunciation of a characters, if you look at the radicals and how it's made up, you can figure out the meaning of the characters or even a combination of characters by the pictographs.
With bopomofo, you sometimes have to use three symbols for one character. This is not traditional at all.
What's wrong with using three symbols for one character? I never said that bopomofo is better because it follows the "tradition" better. Whatever that means.
Quote:
Besides, ㄔ represents Chi in Pinyin. Notice with i at the end in Pinyin.
ㄔㄤ don't represent Chi+ang but Chang in Pinyin. Where did the i go?
Your example is oxymoronic. If anything that just proves how pinyin doesn't make sense at all sometimes.
Idk where the **** did the i go. It shouldn't have been there in the first place. ㄔ sounds nothing like "chi", that'd be ㄑ, which for some reason becomes mother****ing "qi" in your mighty pinyin bs. Lol.
But whatever, carry on.
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