So does the average chinese person know less vocabulary words than someone using an a

[Crono]

Combining Chinese characters to come up with new words isn't that different from using compound words in English or just new phrases combining words. There are plenty of instances (especially in the current age of computer technology) where concepts are given new words.

"Hard drive" would be meaningless or confusing at best if not for the context of computer technology, and yet the two words "hard" and "drive" are relatively simple. There are plenty of loan words for both Chinese languages and English, even further confusing the issue of how many words the "average" person of the respective culture knows.

I think English, because of its burgeoning role as the lingua franca of this age, probably has a greater number of words, but the vocabulary size of individuals probably varies greatly by age, region, and education throughout the world. Chinese probably isn't limited greatly by its use of characters/logograms, but it definitely will evolve more in the future by its interactions with other languages.

 

[William Gaatjes]

being fluent in both english and chinese, I disagree that rote memorization is always needed for chinese words. many chinese words are formed by combining common characters in a logical and intuitive way. it is actually a very intuitive language once you have a "critical mass" of characters memorized. it's actually english that often requires memorization of completely new strings of characters that have no clear logic to their structures.

This always makes me think that there is some logic or connection at the start, but the evolution of language is complex. Occasionally there is some structured update but mostly language is changing over time because of many events. At least, this seems to be the case for Germanic languages. I notice it with dutch for example when looking at the past of the dutch language.

 

[Doppel]

According to this, the average Chinese person knows 3,500 characters. The average American knows something like 30,000 words.

Education plays a big role, though, so the number for either Chinese language or English speakers can be much higher.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhnUgAaea4M F**K YEAH!

 

[0roo0roo]

Characters: A B C D, etc...


The word CAT is three Characters put together. We combine them all the time. This is how we get many, many thousands of words from just 26 Characters.

The difference with kanji is the characters also carry a meaning.


Or is that too hard for you to understand???

Touchy touchy. But there is the difference in that you can make any word from such characters because you don't have to take into account any inherent meaning which may make for more flexibility, if you make an entirely new word in chinese how does that work?

Yes I know you can combine two words to do something, but that can't be the only way.

 

[0roo0roo]

我 - i
他 - he/him
们 - plural
我们 - we
他们 - them

or something more advanced

等 - equal
离 - separate
子 - particle
等离子 - plasma

see the logic?

Well I do remember some of those characters since they are simple enough, but beyond the similarity I'm not sure I see the logic in how each character evolves into the other. It seems more like the side effect of language evolving. The characters are related but I'm not sure you can find universal rules to apply to all the words. I do remember this http://www.clearchinese.com/chinese-writing/history.htm which is the evolution of the character from the original picture which was supposed to help me remember the character somehow, but I didn't really find it personally useful for the task even if it was historically interesting, you can only remember so many stories like that.
"The evolution of the character qu (to go) is illustrated below, from oracular bones to inscriptions on bronze, to Small Seal style, Administrative Style, Exemplar Style and Cursive. The original pictograph showed a man going out of his cave."

 

[bunnyfubbles]

silly kung-fu letters

http://youtu.be/g2yeSnboUWw?t=12s

 

[0roo0roo]

Not sure, but I know at least one AT poster who doesn't know the difference between the basic English words "less" and "fewer."

Perhaps this poster spent fewer time composing his thread title than he needed.

You mean like "10 items or less" at the supermarket

Don't be a grammar nazi, esp with rules that are pretty much obsolete.

 

[Perknose]

You mean like "10 items or less" at the supermarket

Don't be a grammar nazi, esp with rules that are pretty much obsolete.

Your one bastardized example is just that, a bastardized example. It does not mean the distinction between "less" and "fewer" is obsolete, no matter how much you may wish it to.

It most certainly doesn't mean there's fewer need for the distinction, or less instances of ear-grinding grammatical ignorance to be challenged.

That said, I wish to thank all the other posters here for teaching me some basics about the Chinese language. It's been a fascinating introduction. Thanks! :thumbsup:

 

[darkxshade]

Touchy touchy. But there is the difference in that you can make any word from such characters because you don't have to take into account any inherent meaning which may make for more flexibility, if you make an entirely new word in chinese how does that work?

Yes I know you can combine two words to do something, but that can't be the only way.

With so many words/characters(especially more than the 26 in the alphabet), why can't you simply combine words to create new meanings indifinitely? Using the same logic, it's like saying, I know you can combine a pattern of letters to create a new word but that can't be the only way... why don't you create a 27th letter?

 

[yuchai]

士多碑梨

I think the real Chinese name for that is 草苺...士多碑梨 really only applies for Cantonese speakers.

 

[Born2bwire]

I think the real Chinese name for that is 草苺...士多碑梨 really only applies for Cantonese speakers.

Well to be fair I was thinking of sandwich in Cantonese myself but it seems it's practically the same in Mandarin.

 

[yuchai]

Just to recap here:

Chinese Characters are really most similar to English alphabets, but the distinction is that a character actually does mean something while individual English letters don't necessarily mean anything at all. But without combining characters, the meaning is usually very vague (you can easily have 5 or 8 different possible meanings for a single character)

Characters are very often formed into "words" (詞&#35486. Like some examples given in this thread, like the "computer" example, there is usually some logic to it. Of course, it is still impossible for someone to determine the exact meaning without looking it up. I am not sure if there are any statistics on how many "words" there are in the Chinese language.

The Chinese language also makes use of a lot of "set phrases" (成&#35486. This is a group of characters, typically 4, that has a specific meaning and usually has a story associated with it. I think the closest relative to this in the English language is an idiom? I bring this point up because the use of these "set phrases" is very common in Chinese, relative to English use of idioms.
Edit: found a beginner's list
http://www.dpdotcom.com/freebie/DLam2extract.pdf

So the comparison is really pretty complicated when it comes to trying to determine which language has a bigger vocabulary. My guess is that Chinese has a larger total vocabulary, but a large portion of it is not commonly used or even known to the average user (there is a LOT of ancient Chinese vocabulary out there that nobody really uses anymore). English seems to have a smaller available vocabulary, but the common English speaker is able to use a bigger percentage of it.

 

[dighn]

I think the real Chinese name for that is 草苺...士多碑梨 really only applies for Cantonese speakers.

i'm actually a mandarin speaker myself. first time I saw it I was like wtf is a 士多碑梨, but yeah in cantonese it actually sounds pretty close to its english pronunciation.

 

[sdifox]

士多碑梨



wouldn't it be awesome if we called electricity lightning in english? my blender runs on lightning

that is a phonetic translation local to HK.

 

[sdifox]

Well to be fair I was thinking of sandwich in Cantonese myself but it seems it's practically the same in Mandarin.

Sandwich itself is named after a person, so the phonetic translation to Chinese is not much of an issue anyway.

 

[sdifox]

as to the topic at hand, it is essentially op not understanding how Chinese characters work.

 

[Scotteq]

Touchy touchy. But there is the difference in that you can make any word from such characters because you don't have to take into account any inherent meaning which may make for more flexibility, if you make an entirely new word in chinese how does that work?

Yes I know you can combine two words to do something, but that can't be the only way.

You have hopelessly created a one on one link between the meaning of a character and your concept of a Word. Until you can separate the two concepts, you'll be stuck with the completely asinine idea that 3,000 characters equates to only 3,000 words. And to be completely honest, that's a simple enough concept that I am of the opinion you are intentionally trolling. Hence the disdain.

If you want to make an entirely new word in Chinese (or Japanese, or Korean), you may take characters with appropriate meaning and assemble them into something that's actually descriptive of the idea you wish to get across. This counts, not just for words, but also for complex characters, which may be a group of several simple ones.

In English, you either know the word or you don't. But a Japanese or Korean can go to China, look at the characters, and understand the meaning.

as to the topic at hand, it is essentially op not understanding how Chinese characters work.

Deliberately so, IMHO. And in order to imply <Other People> are somehow stupid.

 

[Slew Foot]

Moot point since in 10 years human interaction will be reduced to


OMG hi r u my bff? Lol WTF BBQ!!!

 

[Scotteq]

Moot point since in 10 years human interaction will be reduced to


OMG hi r u my bff? Lol WTF BBQ!!!

Leturz r hrd lol

 

[piasabird]

I was watching a korean show, "Tamra Island" and they used something like baby or wild baby horse to describe children which are troublemakers. I like Korean Historical Movies with sub-titles. Korea has used several different alphabets, Like Old Chosun, Chinese, and Phonetic Korean Alphabet.

 

[darkxshade]

Moot point since in 10 years human interaction will be reduced to


OMG hi r u my bff? Lol WTF BBQ!!!

or in the case of Asians:

^.^ *o* T.T

 

[Born2bwire]

Sandwich itself is named after a person, so the phonetic translation to Chinese is not much of an issue anyway.

I know, but it's just so cute!

&#22533;&#23612;&#22320;&#22478;

 

[Born2bwire]

In English, you either know the word or you don't. But a Japanese or Korean can go to China, look at the characters, and understand the meaning.

This isn't completely true however. While anyone should be ready to admit that English is a bit of a hodge-podge of languages and colloqialisms, there is still a large amount of consistent rules and constructions that can help infer the meaning. Take for example the word natural. If you know your latin you can infer a lot of meaning for many words that are derivatives of the language. So natural is taken from Latin's naturalis and natura. Then, if you know the root word natural you can infer the meaning of other words like prenatural or supernatural just from knowing the basic prefixes pre- and super-. Then we have sufixes which give us words like unnaturally. So even if we only knew the specific word nature, knowledge of the basic building blocks of English would allow us to understand a myriad of words like prenatural, supernatural, unnaturally, etc.

EDIT: Completely unrelated, I just remembered that the French equivalent of the phrase "French leave" is "English leave." :awe:

 

[sdifox]

I know, but it's just so cute!

&#22533;&#23612;&#22320;&#22478;

I have no idea what that is.

 

[Born2bwire]

I have no idea what that is.

Gin-neh-day-sehn

Kennedy Town.