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Learning Chinese is seriously, seriously bad for my health.

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Originally posted by: UncleWai
English is a easier language to for mass communication.
But if we are talking about depth and usage, Traditional Chinese is a superior language. Simplified Chinese just sucks ass.
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???, ??????
 
Get the program Dim Sum. It'll save your life. It actually has a program that lets you draw teh character and it'll tell you the most probable words .

i could not have gotten through Chinese 183 without it
 
why is traditional chinese superior than simplified chinese? what aspects of it are missing from simplified? I thought simplified is simply tradtional with easier writing...
 
Originally posted by: z0mb13
why is traditional chinese superior than simplified chinese? what aspects of it are missing from simplified? I thought simplified is simply tradtional with easier writing...
Click to expand...
I think it's superior in the sense that it looks much prettier. The closest relation i can find would be kind of like writing in caligraphy vs. handwritten text now. No actual information is lost, its just the reduction of strokes so charactesr are easier to learn.

i support the simplifed text because it promotes literacy and given how hard chinese is to begin with, making it a little easier is not so bad. And once you know simplified, you can infer alot of the words while reading traditional
 
Originally posted by: jai6638
Originally posted by: fuzzybabybunny
OMG. 2 hours. I have managed to read 11 sentences. I'm on my third year of Chinese, can understand and speak Chinese quite well, but have no clue how to read or write.

Hey, I've got a question! What's this character? I can't find it in any of the three online Chinese character dictionaries. Oh wait, I have no way of showing it to you guys other than to draw it in Paint and upload the jpg, or scan the character from my book. I can't just type it here because that would mean I already know what it sounds like, which I don't. Haha, joke's on me!!! *smacks desk*
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Thats pretty good.. HOw did you get fluent in three years? Did you do a study abroad in china or somethign to expose yourself to the language?
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I was always fluent because I'm Chinese 🙁
 
hi fuzzybabybunny 🙂

🙁 i'm sorry

my RA at Wake used to be up until 6am the nights he had to do his Chinese homework, and he'd start around midnight and work straight. so i can kinda relate.
 
Originally posted by: Mo0o
Originally posted by: z0mb13
why is traditional chinese superior than simplified chinese? what aspects of it are missing from simplified? I thought simplified is simply tradtional with easier writing...
Click to expand...
I think it's superior in the sense that it looks much prettier. The closest relation i can find would be kind of like writing in caligraphy vs. handwritten text now. No actual information is lost, its just the reduction of strokes so charactesr are easier to learn.

i support the simplifed text because it promotes literacy and given how hard chinese is to begin with, making it a little easier is not so bad. And once you know simplified, you can infer alot of the words while reading traditional
Click to expand...

Simplified Chinese did more than just reduction of strokes. I really don't know the technical terms to explain this. Simplified Chinese uses basic phonetic indicator (the right side of a character), and then add a little to it to differentiate different same sounding characters. This took away the pictogram aspect of the traditional Chinese language. The look of the characters in some of the Simplified Chinese become meaningless.

I want to give some examples, but I can't type simplified Chinese.
let me do a little picture explanation in a sec.
 
Now that we all type on computers, I think we should all go back to traditional, who actually handwrite chinese these days except for callighrahy?
 
Originally posted by: UncleWai
Originally posted by: Mo0o
Originally posted by: z0mb13
why is traditional chinese superior than simplified chinese? what aspects of it are missing from simplified? I thought simplified is simply tradtional with easier writing...
Click to expand...
I think it's superior in the sense that it looks much prettier. The closest relation i can find would be kind of like writing in caligraphy vs. handwritten text now. No actual information is lost, its just the reduction of strokes so charactesr are easier to learn.

i support the simplifed text because it promotes literacy and given how hard chinese is to begin with, making it a little easier is not so bad. And once you know simplified, you can infer alot of the words while reading traditional
Click to expand...

Simplified Chinese did more than just reduction of strokes. I really don't know the technical terms to explain this. Simplified Chinese uses basic phonetic indicator (the right side of a character), and then add a little to it to differentiate different same sounding characters. This took away the pictogram aspect of the traditional Chinese language. The look of the characters in some of the Simplified Chinese become meaningless.
Not all pictographic meaning is lost. THe word Ma (horse) still resembles the traditional one and you can still see the pictrographic origin

I want to give some examples, but I can't type simplified Chinese.
let me do a little picture explanation in a sec.
Click to expand...

 
Well, it's another Chinese homework night, and I'm happy to say that it's not taking nearly as long this time, mostly due to my use of the trial version of NJStar Chinese Pen, which is a character recognition software that I just draw the characters in. Its character recognition is EXTREMELY impressive and nearly flawless. I've tried the one in DimSum but all that seems to be is a stroke number-based recognition system. I was able to fool it into giving me bad results by typing in ?and lots of little dots like ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, under it. So basically it has no spatial recognition, unlike Chinese Pen. Of course, it's free, while Chinese Pen is $60.

Last night I was really debating shelling out $160 for a Mini ScanEye:

http://www.amazon.com/Penpower-OCR-Mini...-0186204-2807941?ie=UTF8&s=electronics

Just scan the pen over the Chinese and it'll digitize the sentence into its software, where it can then automatically give a translation or the pinyin for the sentence. It's not portable though, so if I went to Chinese and had to read books or magazines on the go, I'd be screwed 🙁
 
I learned traditional when I started and I am SO happy I did. It makes learning the language so much easier because you can see the 'meaning' in many of the characters and how the relate to the word or part of the word itself.

As for those of you questioning the validity of the language as a whole - I must say that Linguists and Linguistic Anthropologists have always held (and still hold) the understanding that all languages are mutually 'correct' and no one language is 'worse' then another. Every language is equally complex and gets the job done - otherwise why would people use it? The problem is (if you follow Noam Chompsky's line of reasoning in linguistic) there is a 'fuse box' in the head (a metaphor of course) that has switches that are flicked on and off as a child - by age 13 most of the switches have been flicked - so the way your language is setup programs you to understand language in that manner. That is why it is so hard for some of us (like me) starting to learn Chinese in college or later.

As for the case about the writing and the peasants - that was no different from Rome, medival Europe, or another other time period. The peasents never had the time to gain literacy like the landed gentry, upper class, elites, nobles, or kings and queens.
 
Originally posted by: goodoptics
Originally posted by: UncleWai
?????,?????????
Click to expand...

Rewritten in Simplified Chinese:
?????,?????????
Click to expand...

What was the point of that? LOL

Anyways g/l to anyone learning it 🙂 ????????~?????????????? 🙂
Its my goal to be able to be fluent, so we'll see what happens 🙂 Btw - for some reason I have no idea how to get SCIM to let me use pinyin for traditional chars 😉
 
Originally posted by: AnthroAndStargate
I learned traditional when I started and I am SO happy I did. It makes learning the language so much easier because you can see the 'meaning' in many of the characters and how the relate to the word or part of the word itself.

As for those of you questioning the validity of the language as a whole - I must say that Linguists and Linguistic Anthropologists have always held (and still hold) the understanding that all languages are mutually 'correct' and no one language is 'worse' then another. Every language is equally complex and gets the job done - otherwise why would people use it? The problem is (if you follow Noam Chompsky's line of reasoning in linguistic) there is a 'fuse box' in the head (a metaphor of course) that has switches that are flicked on and off as a child - by age 13 most of the switches have been flicked - so the way your language is setup programs you to understand language in that manner. That is why it is so hard for some of us (like me) starting to learn Chinese in college or later.

As for the case about the writing and the peasants - that was no different from Rome, medival Europe, or another other time period. The peasents never had the time to gain literacy like the landed gentry, upper class, elites, nobles, or kings and queens.
Click to expand...
You only started in college? What school do you go to? Most of the time when they teach beginners its almost always with simplified now
 
Originally posted by: goodoptics
Originally posted by: UncleWai
?????,?????????
Click to expand...

Rewritten in Simplified Chinese:
?????,?????????
Click to expand...

Should it be this:

?????,????????

??? would assume that he didn't have chinese recognition software on his computer. ??? would say he doesn't understand it. and ?isn't right since that refers to ???
just trying to keep things accurate for people
 
i majored in computer science in college. no foreign language requirements. i am chinese though, and understand almost nothing. took the entry level chinese class at ucla to try to connect with my heritage.

one of the hardest clases i took. not only was it really hard to memorize all tha tstuff, everyone else in the class could apparently speak and understand chinese because they were taking it as an easy grade. memorization is so hard.
 
Originally posted by: hans007
i majored in computer science in college. no foreign language requirements. i am chinese though, and understand almost nothing. took the entry level chinese class at ucla to try to connect with my heritage.

one of the hardest clases i took. not only was it really hard to memorize all tha tstuff, everyone else in the class could apparently speak and understand chinese because they were taking it as an easy grade. memorization is so hard.
Click to expand...

fellow ucla alumnus? i don't find that too surprising because kids at my high school did the same thing--they were all fluent in chinese and just in there to get an easy A. past about 12-13 years of age, picking up a foreign language becomes exponentially hard.

i said this in another thread, but pick up chinse music, chinese movies, and chinese friends. it makes the learning experience a little more fun and easier if you're constantly hearing/using it vs. sitting at your desk and rotely memorizing. and it always helps if you have somebody to speak it with.

as for traditional vs. simplified...we could debate it for days. my family's from hk and most of my friends are hk ppl/taiwanese so needless to say, i'm pretty biased. have fun.
 
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