I have changed the title from "Why Chinese Needs All Those Characters" to "Chinese Doesn't Have Many Syllables (And Why That's Interesting)". This current title was in fact the original title, but after a little while I (quite absent-mindedly) decided to switch the title to "Why Chinese Needs All Those Characters" for - and I'll be honest here - clickbait purposes, and because I thought retrospectively that this video could function as a good argument for keeping the characters. A lot of people have pointed out that this isn't a complete argument - and this is true, because it wasn't originally meant to be a complete argument, and it was disingenuous of me to refer to the video as such. I don't denounce the points I make in the video - but the points I brought up were originally more to do with the problems with transliterations, rather than a full argument for keeping Chinese characters. Mind you, I DO believe in keeping the Chinese characters alive for a variety of reasons, but I completely conceed that a full argument for this is NOT given in this video. I also changed the title because, understandably, 99% of comments are focused on my argument about pinyin, either defending it or attacking it, which is all well and good - but really the majority of this video has nothing to do with Chinese characters or transliterations, but rather with 1. explaining what phonotactics are and 2. the interesting ways in which Chinese deals with homonyms. And honestly, those are the parts of the video I'd much rather have engagement on, because they are what I myself find interesting and where most of the effort for this video went.
Unrelated question: With the importance of tonemes, what would it be like to write songs in Chinese? Changing the tones would surely change some of the lyric's meaning, would it not?
@@Lime-rr6zf AFAIK some varieties of Chinese, including Mandarin, don't worry about tones in song because context tends to iron out the kinks, but some like Cantonese do actually incorporate tones into their music, or at least have historically done so, I'm not so sure about pop music in Cantonese and such varieties
It feels weird that Chinese can't be written in Pinyin or Japanese solely in Hiragana/Katakana. I know Japanese so I am aware of how difficult it can be to read without Kanji because of all the homophones, but why is it also not a problem with speaking? Using the same Pinyin for homophones does make things hard to read but why doesn't saying them the same way cause the same issue in talking? If it works for the spoken word, then surely phonetic writing should work as well. After all, they're just sounds in the form of shapes. I'm not familiar with any of the Polynesian languages but they have far smaller syllable inventories so they should need something like Chinese characters but they seem to be doing fine with the Latin alphabet.
@@အုပ်စိုးပိုင် Generally, you can get by just fine writing Japanese in just hiragana. The thing is, it's still *easier to read* when kanji are used in tandem. Japan's literacy rate is ~99%, so people already are used to the system, and within that framework, it's easier to read kanji+hiragana (+katakana) than to read hiragana alone. If you've ever tried it you know what I mean.
Their is a video " word generating power of sanskrit" in YT.....can make a video on that topic video is about 4-5 min. By a channel name sanskrit Tutorial
Only to clarify, Japanese still very much *needs* all those characters as well because of the same reason. Using hiragana or katakana alone just isn’t enough to let you know if せんこう is a major of study 専攻 something with precedence 先行 a submarine travel 潜航 an incense stick 線香 or your dead dad 先考
Yeah, Japanese needs them because of on-yomi words from Chinese. They inherited the same problem as Chinese, and maybe made it even worse because of their lower number of consonants, and lack of complex tones.
That just makes me wonder how Korean gets away with it. Kanji is only really difficult when you don't know it, once you know it, it can even be good for foreigners because you can guess new words. But really how often are you going to see those words out of context, surely if you're talking about a Buddhist Temple it's unlikely you are talking about submarine travel etc. What is it Korean can do that Japanese can't?
@@jimmythechimp2 I have no clue. I speak Japanese fluently, and tried learning Korean, but found it impossible because of this exact same reason. I just couldn’t get any vocab into my head without Kanji. It all sounded very similar, and I had no visual cues to help me learn. Grammar was super easy coming from Japanese though, so that was good.
@@jimmythechimp2 Korean has the same problem, not as bad as what’s in Japanese but a lot professional writings and laws, still use Chinese characters to help people telling things apart. Many Korean schools have Chinese classes.
This is EXACTLY what I’ve been trying to explain for so long. My friends ask me why can’t we just write in pinyin wǒ shì zhōngguórén can be read and we can understand it but when it comes to things like búyào lí can be read as don’t leave or no pears and often causes confusion if context is not given. 不要离 means don’t leave and 不要梨 means no pears. But overall you did an outstanding job in explaining the need of hanzi 🙏🙏🙏.
Yeah, languages who have used or continued to use Hanzi(Hanja, Kanji, etc.) are mostly languages which are context-based(especially Chinese and Japanese), that is also one of the reasons why Japanese hasn't abandoned Kanji/Hanzi; In Japanese, Hashi/はし could be 端, 箸, or 橋, The characters really helped in differentiating the contextual meaning of similar sounding words. Hanzi is really interesting as a writing system.
Not only that, but hanzi, especially the traditional set, is easily the most beautiful writing system in the world. Each character is like a work of art. It would be a huge pity if this was lost.
@@roonilwazlib4433 i think there's more context when you speak. When people write, most words are 1 syllable and when you speak, most words are 2 syllables.
**for language nerds** I teach Mandarin, and my students are surprised when I explain how much faster it is to type in Chinese (thanks to built-in text prediction). If you're lazy enough, you can type just the initial sound of each syllable, and the software will help choose/predict the most likely character combination, for multiple words simultaneously. In this way, I can write out: "他们想吃香蕉" ("they would like to eat bananas" by just pressing T-M-X-C-X-J (6 strokes), Or "我也看过那个电影" ("I've also seen that movie [before]" with W-Y-K-G-N-G-D-Y (8 strokes). Honestly, it can be annoying when I have to type on a basic English keyboard again and can't write out a concept like "cultural differences" with 4 quick presses (文化差异，W-H-C-Y).
Yeah, but you'll develop problem with your wrist real fast typing Chinese because you'll have to pick 1,2,3,4, very frequently while in English, you won't have to.
I'm a native Chinese speaker and I never type like that. I type the full pinyin for all characters in a phrase except the last one so I never have to choose words using the numpad.
in most of chinese history, the spoken language has been largely irrelevant due to having to manage a huge empire that will inevitably span across many language, dialect, cultural zones. the first emperor did NOT unify the spoken language but instead unified the WRITTEN language. since everybody already used logograms already so it worked. The PURPOSE of written language is to convey MEANING, not sound.
Exact reason why there are so many dialects. The "standard Chinese" or mandarin was originally a dialect of the North. It was dubbed the official spoken language as China modernized from it's Imperial Dynasties.
And that's why Vietnamese could switch to Latin alphabet and still works fine. Its more complicated phonology allows it a lot more syllables, enough to distinguish between most Chinese loan words as well as its native ones For a demonstration, here's the first few lines of that famous poem read aloud in Mandarin Chinese: 《施氏食獅史》"Shīshì shí shī shǐ" 石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。 (Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.) 氏時時適市視獅。 (Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.) 十時，適十獅適市。 (Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.) 是時，適施氏適市。 (Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.) Completely not understandable to a native Mandarin speaker. Every syllable is just "shi" with various tones. The same poem in a Vietnamese pronunciation would be: "Thi Thị thực sư sử" Thạch thất thi sĩ Thi Thị, thị sư, thệ thực thập sư. Thị thì thì thích thị thị sư. Thập thì, thích thập sư thích thị. Thị thì, thích Thi Thị thích thị. Still not understandable to a Vietnamese speaker, because Classical Chinese is a foreign language to us. But at least we have way more diverse syllables, and we can actually make out some words that are still used in modern Vietnamese, like (poet) or (stone cave).
i've never studied the grammar, chinese has neither case nor strict conjugation or mood for that matter; the simple grammar of Chinese is part of why you need lots of characters. Maybe Viet grammar is much more complex? Vietnamese was once represented using hanzi but then the French took over and ruined it all lol
@@karlriina6950 Vietnamese grammar is actually extremely simple, perhaps even more so than Standard Chinese / Mandarin. But there are lots more sounds and tones available. Vietnamese, Cantonese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Thai are all significantly more phonetically diverse than Mandarin.
Actually I have spoken to many Vietnamese people and while using Quoc Ngu GENERALLY doesn't create confusion on a daily basis, even if each syllable is written separately as opposed to Pinyin, but a lot has been lost. Vietnamese also has many homophones and unless one is educated, they can't tell them apart with Quoc Ngu.
As a native Chinese speaker these combinations just come so naturally lol , but your explanation is really clear and interesting! I think one of the reason why spoken Chinese is understandable is that many formal expressions are not common in everyday conversation. For example, words like 晦明 or 晦冥 will hardly appear in spoken Chinese because they are too formal and poetic. But on the other hand we can understand these words when written because the characters that form them carry meaning, so when they are combined it's simple to see what they mean. (and I guess that's why in traditional Chinese (written) poetry there are so many ways to name one single thing, yet few of them actually are used in everyday speaking.)
To everyone saying it is "unrealistic" to memorize thousands of characters, firstly, over a billion people are able to do it every day. Secondly, when you read english, do you sound out every single word letter by letter? No. In fact, sometimes people are able to read a word in english but are unable to spell it. Our minds are logographic by nature, we remember how the word "looks" instead of how the word is spelled.
From the oldest of times till now, maybe only scholars and highborns did learns all those thousands of characters. I'm willing to bet you can find a few hundred, maybe even thousands, of characters that almost no native Chinese speakers know about. This also stands true for pretty much every language. You can find thousands of obscure words in English, and maybe only scrabble players are going to know them. learning a language that uses the latin alphabet is also much easier to learn, just because you have to memorize around 26 letters, and that's literally it. Now you can read out loud every word in that language (with varying degrees of pronunciation accuracy), people can invent new written words, and you don't have to go and ask the person that invented that word how is it said out loud. Of course you also need to know the meanings of those words, but that's just learning the language, not how to write and read it.
What's unrealistic is writing that more complicated bunch of slimmed-down set of characters by heart w/o knowing their components or doing it regularly. Recognizing them is also limited by how they are displayed, e.g. on a low-res or smudgy screen or with really cursed… eh cursive handwriting you won't be able to distinguish more complicated characters other than by context. That's partly the reason why they are rarely used other than their usually overloaded meaning. This is a common example (simplified): 魑魅魍魉 or 饕餮 Humans are usually quite good a pattern recognition, therefore knowing what a character means or even how it's pronounced to the tone might be simpler than learning a (in English often quite illogical) spelling and transferring both pronunciation and meaning into that. Therefore yes, learning Korean might be harder than learning Mandarin even if you already know Hangul but not the logograph-derivatives. Getting a sense of every possible Hangul for me was a matter of half an hour w/o learning them by heart, but I could quite easily produce an 'illegal' Chinese character by accident.
@@whohan779 recognition for natives is actually really easy if the stroke order is "given" through the cursive. A brush will naturally thicken at the start of a line and tail at the end, so if you know how to write a character you can recognize that messy character much easier, especially in traditional art. Complicated characters with 20+ strokes look hard to memorize, but after a while it basically becomes muscle memory. There is an idiom of which the origins I forget, that states you need to encounter a character on 7 separate ocassions before you can memorize it, which is pretty accuratr to most learner's abilities. In fact, since most complicated characters are just made up of combinations of radicals, it's actually arguably easier to memorize them. For example, 麼 as in 什麼 is just a dotted cliff , two 木, and a 幺.
I'm currently studying mandarin and I'm at HSK2. Reading thousands of 汉字 doesn't seem difficult, it's just a matter of time to learn and memorize them. But one question is: can people memorize how to write all of them?
I think “long time no see” might be a very literal translation of hao jiu bu jian that somehow became a popular phrase in English. But it’s unusually concise for English. On another note, Chinese pun jokes are on another level
I was just considering this phrase today, actually! I knew it couldn't possibly be a native saying, so the only other source is a bad translation of a phrase in another language, or native speakers mocking a bad translation 😬
DUDE! Your explanation of what you called the "complementary morphemes" explains SO MUCH. I've been studying and writing Japanese for years now, and I've always wondered why they do this thing where they pair up two similar meaning on-yomi (readings derived from Chinese). You can have a word like 上昇 "jōshō" which is literally just two different characters with the same nuance of "up/rising" or a word like 恐怖 "kyōfu" which is two characters with the similar nuance of "fear/scary." NOW I UNDERSTAND! I of course knew this must be influenced by Chinese, but I just didn't know why this pattern of two-character compounds came about. Your explanation is so illuminating, thank you! And I love how you stomp out the idea that Chinese should only use pinyin. I've had to deal with people saying the same shit for Japanese. The worst is when people think Japanese should be romanized, when they already have two native sets of phonetic syllabic symbols, but then to think they should get rid of Kanji (Chinese characters), is just so ignorant and asinine. You talk about those 1200 or so possible syllables in Chinese, well Japanese borrowed all those (or their ancient versions rather), and then stripped them of the tone distinctions, then reduced many of the consonant distinctions found in the original Chinese, so that the number of possible on-yomi in Japanese is MUCH lower, I would say. Long-short vowel distinction, and the "ku" or "tsu" endings might bolster the possible combinations to be somewhat comparable again, but the point is they have the same problem as Chinese, if not worse. I'm really not sure how modern Korean got away with eliminating Chinese characters. A video exploring that might be super interesting. Maybe they made a grave mistake.
Tones are not completely stripped off though. The "Ku" "Tsu" "Chi" suffix sound is how Japanese people translated "Rusheng" (checked tone), a short , the last tone of the ancient chinese 4 tones that's lost in Mandarin and northern chinese dialects but still present in many southern dialects like Wu and Cantonese. Examples include 1 "ichi" 6 "loku" and Iron "tetsu". Also the prolonged vowels in on-yomi is how double-vowel Chinese characters are translated into Japanese.
As a native speaker I could say it was no mistake. We can "build" up 40 Hangul characters to make 11,172 syllables - that's just enough to get rid of Chinese characters.
@@눈에눈이들어가니눈물 Until you need to know exactly someone's name is eh? Not sure if you guys are still able to read the older scripts without extra training though, surely some of them uses more chinese characters right? But I guess that's somewhat beside the point. You guys did it and it seemed to have worked OK. So did the Vietnamese (involuntarily) and they seem fine with that.
@@ruizheli1974 Good points. Maybe the total number of possible on-yomi is comparable, not considerably less than the number of possible morphemes in Chinese then. Either way, it shows why you can't get rid of Kanji for Japanese either. I think you might be slightly mistaken about the relationship between く つ and ち endings in on-yomi and tone in their Chinese counterparts. I might be mistaken myself, but I don't think they're related to the tones. They come from older versions of Chinese that had /k/ /t/ /k/ phonemes as codas, like Cantonese still does. 一 いち → compare middle Chinese /ʔiɪt̚/ 六 ろく → compare middle Chinese /lɨuk̚/ 鉄 てつ → compare middle Chinese /tʰet̚/
@@눈에눈이들어가니눈물 You can ,make a lot of syllables with Hungul, but you still need to deal with limited set of Chinese derived morphemes don't you? I don't know much Korean yet, but I assume you guys use as much Chinese derived vocabulary as the Japanese. In Japanese, if you don't know the Kanji, it's very hard to understand what on-yomi is being used, because there are huge amounts of homophones. As you can see, this predicament is inherited from Chinese. とう could be 糖 or 党 or 塔 or 当 or 棟 or 唐 or 等 or 投 or 頭 or 島 or 籐 or many, many others. I would guess that Korea has the same problem. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've always felt it sad that modern Korean forsook the Chinese characters. Japanese is the hardest language to learn because of them, but they are so fascinating and beautiful, so much artistry possible in their complexity, so much culture around them. But I should add, hangul is a linguistic masterpiece of a writing system worthy of huge praise. I like the idea of hangul & hanja together, like Japanese does with kanji & kana, but this should not detract from the genius that is hangul.
Your video is truly remarkable and insightful. The phenomenon you have named “complementary morpheme” is actually called 同義互訓 in Chinese, which literally translates to “same meaning, mutually defines”. Phrases consisting of two characters often explain each other, and it helps us understand ancient Chinese texts. This terminology is rather advanced as most ordinary users of Chinese have never heard of it. It is only taught at a University level to students who major in studying ancient texts. Also, this phenomenon is much rarer in ancient texts, as phrases often only consist of 1 character. However, in modern Chinese, vocabulary items often consists of two characters(which explains why the subscript 子 is required after 桌) This is apparent in Mandarin(I prefer this name as it comes from the Man people) but in other dialects such as my mother tongue, Cantonese, it’s much less common, i.e. we would simply use 檯 to express “table”. The subscript 子 doesn’t appear anywhere in Cantonese. I recall this being a great research topic in Linguistics from my professor, leading to some profound understanding to the language itself. Discussion is much appreciated!
Some dialects convey better understanding of the sense than Mandarin, I agree, when we learn the ancient poems. However, I can only distinguish 6 tones out of seven in Cantonese 😂
When first studying in China, it bothered me to find "repeat words" for the same concept that could only be used in certain combinations (with few discernable patterns). My western brain was disturbed to learn 墙 as... "wall," 壁 as....also "wall," and 墙壁 as........definitely "wall." Asking someone to explain the difference was largely useless, and it took months to "get a feel" as to why one cannot say "墙画" 🚫 (壁画)✔
@@youtubeismycity Manchu is the English term, but in Chinese, they are called the Man zu, Man being their name and zu meaning tribe/ethnicity. Manchu ethnicity would hence technically mean “Man ethnicity ethnicity”
The thing with Japanese too is that the ~120 "syllables" is really ~120 **mora**. And that is an important distinction to make too because if you take into account the fact that Japanese allows multi-mora long syllables, the true number of "syllables" is actually a lot higher. For example, syllables like "kan" and "tou" are 2 mora each, and aren't counted towards that 120 number. So Japanese does technically have several hundred possible syllables.
That drives me mad too, I’ve read somewhere that the language has at least 400-500 possible syllables if you take all the mora combinations into account. Japanese also has a rich system of onomatopoeia, which results in syllables like “kyun” or “nyan,” though I’m not sure if any of those sounds would really occur outside of those onomatopoeic words.
There are about 1150 "syllables" in japanese if you count all moras + long vowels + -/i/ + -/N/ or -/Q/. If you don't count sokuon-final syllables there are 767. Then again, that counts syllables such as myain and nyōn that are rare to nonexistant.
The word Mandarin is useful because it's not the same as standard Chinese. There are varieties of Mandarin that are non-standard. Basically, Mandarin is the one Han language that the whole country adopted.
Same goes that Putonghua and Beijing dialect isn't the same. In some way I'd say Putonghua is an artificial language specifically designed to be an easy to adopt speech system for the writing system of Chinese that is already standardized, and serve the only purpose to make communication throughout the whole country easier.
@@FlameRat_YehLon It may be misinformation that the intonation for Putonghua originated purely from Beijing dialect. At least from the sources that I've come across, much of the enunciation that made Putonghua sound more "crisp" than Beijing dialect originated from a place in Hebei called 滦平. There are also like a bazillion accents/dialects in Hebei that can vary every few kilometres though, so it's interesting how the "experts/scholars" supposedly just scoured about? and settled with a particular dialect. Edit: Oops, feels like there needs to be more primary research/reliable sources to confirm that statement. The topic's a bit controversial on the Chinese side and there are too many unconfirmed sources floating about (despite the relative recency of the change). One older source I found which compared the similarities in phonetic systems proclaimed that the research was done "for the sake of promoting and enhancing the development of Chengde’s regional economy and culture." and there's a lot of confirmation bias piled up in the current discourse. Also, Putonghua doesn't really strike me as a completely "synthetic" language, because socio-culturally it's quite similar to northern dialects. Sorry for getting pedantic.
@@FlameRat_YehLon Except westerners consistently use "Mandarin" to mean Putonghua. They mean "the Chinese most mainlanders speak and understand" It's just not a good name. Why are we using malay-portuguese loanwords to describe the Chinese language?
@@appa609 Wait... Is that the real meaning? Always thought Mandarin was the transcription of 满大人 aka Manchu official... Though I guess that's not a good name even out of historical reasons anyway, even my assumption would point towards that Mandarin is supposed to mean some Northern Chinese dialect rather than the formalized Putonghua.
@@FlameRat_YehLon During the Qing Dynasty, Mandarin came to mean the official language (read: literally, the language of the officials) and so it has stuck to the modern day.
I appreciate the attention you put into pronouncing the tones! The only major error I noticed was that the e in the -eng final at 4:01 is pronounced as /ə/, not /ε/.
@@ruizheli1974 I like pinyin personally, though it indeed isn't intuitive. You do need to be familiar with the system. Unfortunately, there aren't really many ways to represent a schwa without doubling up vowels. Because [ɛŋ] is not valid, I think using -eng for [əŋ] is fine. Otherwise you'd have to do something like what jyutping does for Cantonese, with double a for [a] and single a for [ɐ] (their schwa stand-in).
@@kori228 OK here's why Pinyin uses i & e to represent multiple vowel sounds - because these vowels sounds used to be the same sound, and that's how they were marked in much older dictionaries with the Fanqie system. A person who knows Pinyin will have somewhat less trouble using these older dictionary books. Jyutping is not a parallel system as Pinyin. it's designed for romanization of Cantonese. Mainland Chinese kids learn Pinyin in kindergarten so they are more prepared to learn chinese characters later, whereas Jyutping is an optional course in middle school in Hong Kong.
@@ruizheli1974 For i, yeah I know. For e, I doubt that, stuff like 神 and 文 don't share the same fanqie reading. And again, even if that's true, again, how you improve it? It already seems sensible enough as is while trying to keep it compact with the right distinctions. I brought up Jyutping as an alternative romanization design methodology, not saying that Jyutping romanizes Mandarin. You say you don't like Pinyin to romanize Mandarin, well what do you use? Wade-Giles? That still has the same double "e" issue. Those are the only two in-use romanizations. If you're using your own system, then detail it here, I'm sure you make compromises just as pinyin does, just in different places. Pinyin has its downsides, but it's the best we could come up with. You think you could do better?
As a Chinese I found this video helped me understand English better. When I was a little kid I can read Chinese books effortlessly with knowing only 2000 characters, but when I started to learn English, I found that I can read nothing with knowing only 2000 words.
@@lucius8453 Not true. The reason that 2000 characters in Chinese get you further than 2000 words in English is that Chinese characters combine to make words, so 2000 characters probably corresponds to something like 10000 words. There is basically no language in which you can read literature knowing only 2000 words.
I agree with the person who wrote the other comment (and suspect they are to thank for me being shown this video), this video is damn great and deserves far more attention than it's got!
The thing about "literay words" is so real. I have never seen "晦冥" and would never recognize it when I hear it, but I'll have no problem reading it. This technique is in fact a common literay device on the Chinese Internet these days, swapping out characters in a common word to mean the opposite thing. 治愈 "healing" -> 致郁 "depressing" is an early example and almost cliche today. 罗马贵族 literally "Roman aristocrat" -> 骡马跪族 roughly "toiling masses" is another I remember from a recent video.
Curiously, Nuosu, another Sino-Tibetan language with pretty much the same situation as Chinese (but one less tone, more initials, and less finals) is written using a syllabary of about 1100 syllables. Which is quite inconvenient and leads to the exact same ambiguity as writing only in Pinyin would.
@@karlriina6950 they do not have any semantic components, nor do they have spaces. The syllabary characters were invented in the 1950s and based off an earlier character-based script like Chinese.
Interesting. Sounds like the case of a language that hasn't become widespread enough in the written form to develop the necessary tools for unambiguous communication. I guess it's mostly an oral language?
@@osasunaitor it has 8 million speakers and an extensive written tradition dating back to the 1400s. They used to use their own logographic script but literacy in it was comparatively low and it was replaced with the current syllabary in the 1950s
you are absolutely right. For colloquial language, it’s ok do without the characters, but when we start to use advanced literary words, as in written language, characters become indispensable. Sometimes I find it helpful to watch a movie in Chinese with Chinese subtitles, otherwise I might mishear words.
If you ever watch those Chinese dramas in which the character speaks in ancient shortened characters, you might sometimes misunderstand what they mean.
In formal written Chinese, a lot of compound terms become monosyllabic, like 但是=但，已經=已，什麼時候=何時，因為=因, etc. which become very easy to miss, especially if the speaker is speaking quickly. This of course, saves space, but also gives you fewer complements to go off of
You are a linguistic gift to the world -- thank you so very much for your presentstions! Sincerely your student (Pand also a sociology Phd and a speaker of five languages and currently studying chineese but so very stumped as to why it is the way it is)
If you get into chinese you will go from frustration and confusion to a deep love and it's not masochism. Chinese changes how you think (improved memory) and how you see the world (enormous vocabulary shift).
To some degree the Chinese language itself is the cultural canon of Chinese culture because the breath of Chinese literature is so deep and wide with its endless self references. There are idioms that reference famous works like Hongloumeng which in turn reference other works which reference other works and the whole thing ends up binding together the vast expanse of Chinese cultural and history in one self reinforcing almost living body of language. Hence why imperial examinations used to focus so heavily on poetry and the classics. Studying literature is studying culture, history, sociology, strategy, morality, and philosophy all at once.
Since you mentioned Japanese in the video, you could make a video on the same argument but applied to Japanese being written only in hiragana and to compare it with Korean and Hangul because that's what most people who are proreform bring up. I'd like to hear your opinion on it! I don't know how difficult it is to read Korean and if they have as many similar sounding words (I guess they still do) but I can say for certain that when I read a Japanese sentence that's only in hiragana it becomes a lot more difficult for me to understand the meaning.
I can read Korean, it's incredibly easy to learn how to read it. It has consonant and vowel symbols just like English but they don't have 5 different possible pronunciations. Each "character" is actually a syllable which combines a beginning consonant, a connecting vowel, and (sometimes) an ending consonant. This rule is absolute and never changes. A vowel cannot be first (there's a silent beginning consonant for words that start on a vowel sound) and there cannot be only consonants. For example take the word 조금 (jo-guem) (it means, "a little bit" and will ALWAYS mean "a little bit"), it can be easily written in english characters because 조 (jo) is one syllable made up of the consonant ㅈ and the vowel ㅗ, and then the next syllable 금 (geum) is made up of the beginning consonant ㄱ, the vowel ㅡ, and the ending consonant ᆷ. If you know a little bit of Japanese, the Korean grammatical system is basically the same with the Subject - Object - Verb sentence order, and particle attachments placed onto words to indicate the role the word has in a sentence. Japanese uses Hiragana and Kanji to distinguish S-O-V, Korean just uses spaces. (There are obviously some complications to Korean that make it difficult for English speakers to learn and there's some words that have more than 1 meaning just like in English, but when comparing it to Japanese, it is WAYYY easier to learn) I can see why Korean is used by pro-reformers as it's literally an example of what happens when a country modernizes their language to increase literacy rates. Korean was developed with the intention of being easier to learn.
@@NinjaKittkatt I didn't know that Korean doesn't have that many homonyms so now it makes more sense. I never got why Japanese doesn't just use spaces imo but I still wonder if that maybe wouldn't cut it for Japanese. The people who are against any reform usually bring the argument that there are many Kanji compounds which would be written the same way in hiragana (such as 更新 = update、行進=march 、交信=communication - pronounced koushin) and that hiragana doesn't account for pitch accent at all which can make a huge difference. Take for example 箸 and 橋, meaning chopsticks and bridge. Both are written as はし(hashi) in hiragana but one has a low high tone while the other one has a high low one. This maybe isn't the best example because it's kind of hard to mix those words up in context but there are other words where mixups could definitely happen if you had a text in hiragana and you were trying to read it out to someone without knowing the pitch accent of the word. I guess another aesthetic inconvenience might be that hiragana aren't as compact as Hangul so sentences would become very long but I'd say that's not an argument against phonetic writing but rather just hiragana. You could maybe let me know if there's ever any mixup that can happen in Korean and if there are any pitch accent differences because I don't know.
@@aggressive_pizza1279 You can literally learn how to read Korean in about 2 hours, it's that easy of an alphabet. Korean doesn't have pitch accents like Chinese and Japanese have, but it does have syllable stresses like English. Particularly with the ending consonants. Ending consonants is where most of Korean's complications come from. They have set rules, but they also break set rules. Typically when you have a syllable with an ending consonant followed by a syllable with the empty consonant, the previous ending consonant is supposed to take the place of the empty space phonetically. So for example, take the word 별빛 (byeol-beat, it means starlight) the ending consonant for the last syllable (빛) is the ㅊ consonant. ㅊ when it's an ending consonant is pronounced with a soft T sound, but when it's a starting consonant like the word 처럼 (cheo-reom, meaning "it's like") ㅊ is pronounced as a "ch" sound. So when you use 별빛 in a sentence, it's a noun so you would attach 이 (minor subject particle attachment, similar to Japanese's methods). ㅇ is the "no sound beginning consonant" and ㅣis the vowel "E", so 이 is just "E", BUT when you attach it to 별빛, like 별빛이 (indicating starlight is what you're going to be talking about), the ending consonant ㅊ from 빛 VERBALLY takes the place of the empty ㅇ. Making the pronunciation of 별빛이 NOT "byeol-beat-E" but actually "byeol-be-CHee" because the ㅊ is now considered to be in it's beginning consonant form, not it's ending consonant form. This rule is supposed to be absolute, as it's standard that a syllable with an ending constant is always connected to a particle that starts with the empty ㅇ consonant. However, the verbal pronunciations don't always match the way it would be "textbook correct". Verbal pronunciations can shift to either add stresses or remove stresses based on whatever makes the language more comfortable to speak, and the rules for it are arbitrary (just like English). So the only really hard thing about Korean is understanding the nuanced pronunciation rules. Korean is like a mid-way point between Western languages and Eastern languages.
@@aggressive_pizza1279 Ehhhhh while Korean language doesn't have homophones, they still have tons of homonyms(found more often in Chinese loanwords). take 수상 for example: 受賞(to be awarded), 首相(prime minister), 殊常(suspicious), 水上(floating on water), 樹相(dendritic)... and so on. Still, those are dsitinguishable through context and other methods. I think the reason why Korean was able to drop Hanja(Chinese characters) is due to the more various phonotactics in Korean language. Take a look on this sentence for example: 貴社の 記者 今夜の 汽車で 歸社す(Your company's reporter will return by train tonight) is read like 'Kisha no kisha kon'ya no kisha de kisha su'. 貴社, 記者, 汽車, 歸社 is all pronounced 'Kisha'. in Korean, those terms are pronounced: 귀사(gwisa), 기자(gija), 기차(gicha), 귀사(gwisa) respectively. not perfect, but distinguishable enough to drop Hanja.
@@skygazer5375 Exactly. For the most part Korean can get by without hanja since the homonyms are usually obvious from context and the spacing rules helps readability; however in more advanced texts it's not uncommon to see hanja written in parenthesis to clarify meaning. As Korean conversation, we sometimes have to clarify which word we mean in speech, usually by saying the native Korean word after a hanja-derived one for that reason. It's not exactly correct to say that hangul 'characters' contain meaning like Chinese characters do, though unlike Hiragana/Katakana there is usually more ways to write the same sounding words (ex. 말이 and 마리 are both pronounced the same) which gives Korean SOME ways to distinguish morphemes in writing. The Korean writing system is a really good solution between being easy and relative consistency, while avoiding excessive ambiguity in most cases. Hangeul fits the Korean language like a glove, but due to reasons others have mentioned will not work for other languages nearly as well. Japanese will for sure struggle much more with ambiguity issues if a hangul-like system was adopted without modification.
@@deezem5294 Arguably even more skill is needed to memorize all 58 strokes (or just the ideographs, that would make it easier) as well as the stroke order, with supercalifragilisticexpialidocious you only need to remember a string of 34 letters and it's basically written how it's pronounced in English
@@anonymizationoverload9831Not to downplay how incredible it is that the kid wrote biang down, but biang isn't that much different from super... either. In hanzi there's patterns of strokes that commonly appear in other characters, like the "sun" and "moon" character appearing in "night and day". Biang has 11 of these patterns so if you know how to write them, where to place them, you're set. Another example is that the kanji for electricity contains the kanji of rain, and the kanji of electrical appliances commonly contains the kanji of electricity. It's not just random strokes, each stroke creates a pattern and each pattern has meanings.
That "complementary morpheme" mechanism is called 双音词羡余, or duplicate two-character word. Basically all the disambiguating mechanisms are just using two-character words which tend to be less ambiguous. Also, the pronunciation of yü should contain a glide onset, and be a bit more fronted. It should be /ɥy/, while you're doing /ʉ/.
That's the problem. You can't say anything you write. You just lost a huge part of your vocabulary. And mandarin just makes it worse because it simplified so many words that used to have unique sounds in older Chinese down to that 1200 or less syllables.
I’m a native Chinese speaker, yet this video still taught me a good lesson on linguistics, and gave me new insights on how I am using this language properly as I’ve always been. Great work!
This is one of those rare videos on RUclips that are so well-researched and well put-together and yet are criminally underrated. From the amount of work you have put into pronouncing words right and thinking of examples to prove your point to how you have broken down complex linguistic phenomena to make them easily understood, this video is truly a masterpiece for language and linguistics enthusiasts.
it’s pretty cool watching this video as a native speaker as i have never considered about how these things worked until it’s been pointed out by you, thanks for the video!
@@milosm9280 I'm a mandarin speaker and can tell you that this video is an over-complication of simple concepts. I feel like video watchers who doesn't speak Chinese would've assumed that when 2 chinese people talk we constantly have to ask each other "which character do you mean?"
@@shadowbluejay501 Which shouldn't come as a surprise. This video tried to explain how spoken language got away with too many homophones by saying: "First of all there are many set phrases". Congratulations you just explained the concept of "words".
The fact that each sound in chinese have so many words associated is why most Chinese poems strictly follow 5/7 words per line, 4/8 lines, rhymes while still being able to tell a paragraph long story. All of the words are without conjunctions, or any of the supporting words that allows people to understand the word by voice, and many of them aren't commonly used at all. This becomes so complex that most people even Chinese won't be able to understand a poem if they didn't specialize in language. in their highschool studies
that's mostly right but glaringly wrong in one regard: Tang poems are definitely comprehensible to children and are indeed commonly used to teach Chinese children chinese. ALL Chinese people really do know "Eternal Goose" or for a deeper example "Climbing Stork Tower". Chinese poetry is amazing and entirely comprehensible even with a fairly low level of Chinese. With a dictionary you can read Chinese poems during your third semester of college level Chinese, i.e. around hsk3/hsk4.
If by "most" you mean Tang poetry, sure there's 5 or 7 characters per line. But Chinese poetry is incredibly diverse with the oldest forms being free form (no set number of characters per line) and four-character poems (usually four lines). Free form has returned in the modern day as well. There's also six and eight character poems and couplets, which can be any length.
@@weirdofromhalo yeah, there are other forms, i didn't figure to correct that since indeed the most famous ones are 4 lines 5 syllables but there is also iirc a 9 syllable line version, also variants on tone and rhyme similar to AABB, ABAB ABBA etc.
@@weirdofromhalo你说的那种古老的诗，是4000~3000年前的作品了，里面很多词汇和文字已经不再使用。 对现代人而言，不经过专门学习，只能理解1000~2000年前的作品。 The kind of ancient poetry you mentioned was written 4,000 to 3,000 years ago, and many words and characters in it are no longer used. For modern people, without special study, they can only understand works from 1000 to 2000 years ago.
When I read《Orality and Literacy》the writer said "Chinese characters will certainly be replaced with Latin alphabets" and I wondered why they aren't yet. This video solved that question immediately! Thanks a lot.
Chinese government actually tried to replace Chinese characters with Latin alphabets. However, even simplifying the Chinese characters for the second time failed. (Second round of simplified Chinese characters)
It was predicted that computers would kill off kanji in Japanese, but the problem of Asian character sets was solved and kanji is now more common - it's easy to pick the correct one from a list.
@@Anonymous-df8it that means you have to remember the relationship between the number and meaning for EACH syllabus, making Chinese far more complex than now. The Chinese character is good because its shap usually indicates its meaning, you can easily understand a new word by just looking at its shape
This really was a great explanation of why the logographic system stuck with, and works very well, for Chinese. Because yeah, their system works for them. I honestly think that the argument of just using pinyin does in part stem from western chauvinism. The idea that because it looks complicated to them, it must be inefficient or not not work, of which Chinese characters disproves.
I think the very clunky transition logographic writing made into the technology era has given people a false perception that it’s inherently not fit for the future in some way, leading them to subsequently ignore all the advantageous aspects of it. It may be less efficient for handwriting which is increasingly less important but it can be read faster with the same rate of comprehension/retention and is more space efficient on a page. some of it is just the chauvinism of westerners not being able to comprehend that a non Roman script works well for a billion people. The notion of not properly having an alphabet is jarring if you didn’t grow up with it.
Part of it could be chauvinism, but the other part is that even though both systems clearly *work*, one is orders of magnitude less work than the other. In the same way, I can get to a city 200km away by car or by walking, and both ways work just fine. But everyone takes the car for a reason.
@@Komatik_ Taking your example, it’s just a matter of what you prioritize. By taking the car (Alphabetic languages), you can get to the destination faster as long as you have a working road (learnt the alphabet). On the other hand, walking (logographic languages) may be slower, but you can see the view (culture behind the logograms) on the way, thus making the journey more meaningful. And with practice, you can walk quicker and be green☺ (the compact efficiency of expression, aka saying what you want in less ‘words’ than English). Personally, I think alphabetic languages require just as much memorizing, just in different ways. I mean, grammatical tenses, genders (like French) and pronunciation exceptions (eg. silent sounds) are just as arbitrary as the way some Chinese words are sounded/written.
@@craftourartout I think the point they were getting to went way over your head. Chinese characters have stuck around for far more than just their cultural heritage, they are actually the best system for the language. They are the car.
Sounds like woke ass white people blaming again. Pinyin was developed by the communist party. It was a possible solution to help the masses become literate. China had a
The complementary morphemes are actually called 同义复合词in Chinese, which means two characters with basically the same meaning forming a new phrase, setting up a mark for recognition. Like 语言，语 and 言 both means talk, but it would be confusing to say just one of them without context. 构建，架设，桥梁，道路，环境 are all similar examples. It is very unlikely to confuse these phrases with other meanings, and it has been a method used since at least 2000 years ago.
For anyone wondering, at 4:28 the Japanese text in the bubble means "your mum" (anāta no okāsan) I was expecting some sort of rickroll but that's enough for me
I really like your definition of complementary morphemes, because it helps to explain why just remembering individual characters is basically useless if you're planning to actually learn Chinese. Those individual characters you know won't have any use if you don't know any 词语.
chinese languages works fine when people talk to eachother and sound was all we have, which word you're using can be figured out most of the times by context. the reason to have text as it is today is because all the chinese languages needed a shared medium to communicate with eachother, i think you kind of hit on this in the beginning, and a purely syllabic and phonetic language (one chinese character per syllable) i think was planned for the 3rd round of simplification if im not mistaken
I am surprised that people didnt develop more possible sounds to make communication easier. Especially because most language was spoken back in the day.
@@Currywurst-zo8oo There used to be more medials, initials, and finals in Mandarin, but they all eventually merged or got lost. There's a cool video showing the Old Mandarin, Middle Mandarin, and Modern Chinese pronunciations.
It only works on a very basic, conversational level. You start introducing more complex, academic topics or dear good, science words, and it becomes a confusing mess. That's why the literary words stay literary. You can't use them in every day speech and expect people to recognize them. Other languages don't have this problem.
The complementary syllable thing is probably more pronounced in some of the phrases that only half of the phrase carries some meaning and the other half is just there without adding anything. For example, in the word 蜘蛛 (spider), only the 蛛 carries meaning and the 蜘 carries nothing except to make the word understandable when spoken out. Also, the difficulties in telling apart spoken words makes some great wordplays, and some even went far enough to become more or less a meme. For example, 治愈 (curing) and 致郁 (letting down) shares the same pronunciation, with 致郁 being the lesser used phrase, and is now often intentionally used to joke about something is "disguised as being lovely (aka curing) but is actually rather sad (and can let your mood down)". This usage got popular after Madoka Magika got popular.
reduplication of syllables in contemporary Chinese is the norm especially for nouns. In classical chinese in contrast reduplication was infrequent (and grammatical markers were different) Despite this one who reads contemporary chinese can readily understand texts which are several thousand years old.
@@karlriina6950 Classical Chinese, or 文言文 just to make sure we are talking about the same thing, isn't meant to represent how people actually speak, but rather to convey the meaning as efficient as possible, and you have to learn how to write in such way. While contemporary Chinese or 白话文 represents oral speaks closer, which is probably to lower the barrier of learning or reading. Therefore there's no doubt classial Chinese can be understood thousands of years later, they are meant to be as clear as possible if the reader is fairly knowledgeful about what those words means. The issue though, is that because it's not the same as oral speech, many of the original words got wrong by people dictationing them wrong over the years, and that's made even worse when dialects changes over the years and it's harder and harder to guess whether there's an dictation error or not.
Hanzi characters are not only building blocks for the language, but it also has the symbol quality. This is why there are so many hanzi character symbols that can actually convey the meaning like 🉑 ㊙️ ㊗️ 🈵 🈲. Whereas in English, these symbols can only be made based on abbreviations 🆘 or pictorial symbols ♐️ that are within their own independent system.
These common words in Cantonese: 劍 gim, 見 gin3, 健 gin6, 漸 zim, 箭 zin3, 賤 zin6, 鑒 gam, 諫 gan, 艦 lam. are very distinctive and easy sounds to pronounce, but in standard Mandarin they are all identical "jiàn", which takes more effort to say yet creates so much ambiguity you have to link it with another hanzi to interpret its meaning.
Same with Min and I believe a couple other older dialects. Some words pronounced the same in Mandarin used to be different, as time went on Mandarin merged the sounds together and reduced the number of possible morphemes, which increased the number of homophones. Comparatively those dialects are easier to read with a Latin alphabet than Mandarin.
I've seen expalantion of how Cantonese has 9 tones, and it basically matches perfectly with music. In mandarin you have ambiguity when it comes to lyrics because 5 tones is not enough to match to all music note transitions. However Cantonese has way more, so it can fit perfectly, removing any ambiguity. This makes writing lyrics for Cantonese songs so much cooler. Probably my fav dialect now
@@cheeseonhead is language. Written form is different. You can pronounce English in French pronunciation, but it would makes no sense. Same goes for WRitten Vernacular Cantonese
Old Chinese had much more phonotactics with the “checked tones”(p,t,k at the end of words) and consonent clusters as initials (kl, sr, nr, gn … at the start of words), making it much richer in morphemes, and therefore less in need of noun sumffixes and complimentary morphemes.
What do you mean by Old Chinese? Do you mean Old Mandarin? Because our best analysis of Old Chinese is that it was atonal and had multiple syllables per word.
old Chinese I think he's referring to Cantonese which due to mandarin being a foreign dialect due to foreign rule by Mongols and Manchus and Cantonese is a older dialect due to people constantly fleeing to the south when stuff goes bad, so the language has more of its roots still intact hence in hong kong we use Cantonese to teach the old poems because Cantonese sounds better and more fluent than mandarin
@@gaeboi8182 Mandarin is *not* a foreign dialect. It descends from Middle Chinese just like Cantonese does. Cantonese has changed and lost lots of features of Middle Chinese, just like Mandarin has. And both languages about about the same age. The oldest extant Chinese languages are Hokkien (闽南话) and Teochew (潮州话).
These words make a lot more sense when you put them into context during conversations. But I do find misunderstanding happens more frequently compared to English or French as a trilingual person.
I find that often times context alone is enough to interpret what pinyin means. But I can def think of cases where the meaning is a little blurred. Excellent vid!
Terrible video! I don't read Chinese by Latinized words! PinYin is just a way to standardise the northern dialect and for the foreigners to understand the way it sounds. It doesn't affect how people write and how people speak when they start drifting apart.
Of course context alone is enough - most of the time context is not even needed. How else would chinese people speak to each other without writing things down then. The video is down right stupid and lacks common sense. It only explains the chinese phonetic system in an overly complicated way without sufficiently answering the question it proposed.
@@ruizheli1974 I don't get the point of counting syllables in Chinese. We combine characters to become word/words, not syllables. English put 2or3or4or more syllables together to create a word. So Chinese is putting 2or3or4or more small characters to form another character. This is how the comparison should be done. We don't consider syllables as the block of a word.
@@locacharliewong Because these people only want to learn the "Cool part" of chinese. They want to know how to write and how to write only. They don't care about talking to another chinese guy. Notice how everything they say about chinese is kind of anchored down to the "meaning of a single character". This is only useful if they want to learn Wenyan only. That whole explaination of "set phrases" and "complimentary Morphemes" is infuriating. I don't need to know why "zhuozi" "yizi" are easily understood as tables and chairs, whereas "zhuo" or "yi" standalone is much harder to comprehend, because guess what? It's what we call a "WORD". A "WORD" developed by mostly illiterate people which only became acceptable as written language not so long ago. Fahking surprise huh.
By the way, the complimentary phrase mechanism is very much used in indian languages too - putting together two cosely related words (tall-hefty to describe a big person, etc). but, it is done for emphasis. Or to form more descriptive, or new compound words. This is the 'samas' mechanism - ligating words to form new words
Technically ber, per, mer do actually exist when pronounced in the broader northern dialects of Mandarin (in which Beijing is a pronunciation basis for the standard form). Its a system of erhua where you kind of fuse the ending with the er sound like the phrase 没门 which should be "mei men" will get pronounced as "mei mer".
@@鹤绒 if you wanted to be even more technical, you would write it with the 儿. But along with words like 一点 and 一会, in the North, you'd pronounce it with the 儿 regardless of you explicitly writing it or not.
@@aoikemono6414 not actually true. Not every character pronounced men, dian, hui adds an er to it. Thats why there's a difference. For Qian Men, the historic city gate in Beijing, does not add an er because it's a place name gate. But an actual front door (also qianmen)would have er added to it. There is actually a whole set of rules.
The "complementary morphemes" phenomenon is also exists in Vietnamese. It's so often that Vietnamese learners ask why we hame so many words that have two syllables with the same meaning. Also, although Vietnamese is considered monosyllabic, there are many compound words of two or three smaller words because of the same reason.
Even as someone whose mother tongue is Chinese, this is so frustrating to explain the "complementary morphemes". You did the impossible, dude. Great job!
Great video I am learning chinese and this was super interesting, and this give me hope for me on learning chinese. You see, one thing they say about why is hard to speak and listen chinese are the tones and they are right, but this make me realice you just cant combine a tone with whatever you want and so there are very limited sounds you will actually say and also listen so once you get used to that 1500 sounds you could speak and recognice basically everything. This also made me understand why chinese people present themselves sometimes saying with what characters their names are written
for those wondering why 冥 means dark, just look at the oracle inscription then you can see it’s a picture of the delivery moment of a baby from the nurse’s perspective, that the bottom part 六 is actually the nurse’s two hands, and the top part 冖 is the opening uterus and the middle part 日 of course is the baby’s head coming out
@@julianvincent2119 yes it is a six 六 under a sun 日, however it is written in 隶书 clerical script, which is a calligraphy developed during 秦 and 汉 dynasty, that are a thousand years later from 商 dynasty when the oracle inscription originated. You have to check the oracle inscription to get what it is really about.
this video deserves more likes unlike the other video about Chinese language, this video actually help ppl to understand why this language works like that and how
I imagine the phonotactics of the Sino-Tibetan languages changed over time. Modern Tibetan still has consonant clusters and Hakka and Cantonese can have word final consonants etc.
Don't imagine. We Chinese do not create new words that way. No matter how many words we newly create, we do not create by adding alphabets, but writing a new character with strokes. Nothing relates to the sound nor syllables. This is the wrong path. This video is stepping on the wrong foot from the start of the dancing to the end.
@@locacharliewong Chinese adds Latin letters to words such as X光，拉K，AA制，B站，just to list a few, some speakers even add whole words in the middle of Chinese sentences 比如“哦瑪嘎”
Oh definitely, especailly if you consider how long ago the sinitic branch and the tibetan branch diverged and went on their separate ways with limited linguistic contact. With Hakka and Cantonese it's actually not too different of a story, low levels of linguistic contact means that they naturally drift/evolve, and at different rates towards different directions. It is said that consonant clusters were present in proto-Sino-Tibetan, and that word final consonants were a common feature in most branches of sinitic languages about 1000 years ago, and things like Hakka, Hokkien, and Cantonese preserved these word final consonants, which are also associated with a different tone (maybe not actually a tone in the true tonal aspect, but has more to do with the duration), the checked tone. And when we go into Hokkien it's another mess because it has an extensive literary vs colloquial reading system, meaning that a lot of characters can be read multiple ways, kind of like Japanese Kanji(which I don't know enough about so I might as well be wrong), but according to linguists they come from different periods, kind of like different layers of rocks from different geological periods.
@@locacharliewong Until the 20th century, the majority were illiterate, so to completely throw the importance of sound out the window is a bit ridiculous. Writing was invented to show speech, not the other way round
@@cpkingadam5 So, if the sound of a Chinese character is so important, is there any sound shifts in any Chinese language makes the Chinese character write in a different format? I agree that Chinese spoken languages have been sound shifting for many years, also with their written style. May you name some good examples? Just like Academy Français and so did the German did changes becoz of their pronunciation changes.
As a mandarin speakers sometimes we just ask what they are referring to when words are phonically the same and both fits in both context (with different meanings) but these rarely comes up unless its a name or something. Also we are all multilingual so we replace some words with English or Cantonese (or Cantonese words or phrase that did not exist in Mandarin spoken in the mandarin dialect) so they are more distinct.
Something I wanted to say too as a Chinese: even though there are already tones, accent on certain words can still help us understand each other. For example when you say 杀鱼 as in killing a fish you say 鱼 with an accent but when you say 鲨鱼 as in a shark you put the accent on the 鲨。I remember making this mistake when I was young.
As someone who's been learning Chinese on and off for a few years, I feel like this low number of syllables makes listening more difficult. :/ But also, I am guessing the fact that it has way fewer syllables should mean Chinese has more potential for poetry, am I right? Because I'm thinking like, fewer syllables must mean more potential for rhyming? Even more so if different tones don't affect rhyming, come to think of it, are the same syllables with different tones considered to rhyme in Chinese?
It makes poetry easier and simultaneously more difficult. Easier in the sense that, as you've pointed out, more characters making the same sound so more potential for rhyming, also like the video pointed out, there are sometimes multiple characters carrying the same meaning but sound different so more chances for you to swap in a character with the sound you need. However on the other hand, because the spelling is very uniform (one character per syllable no more no less, and once written, each character takes up the same amount of space), that's made it possible to enforce rules on character count and their relative positions, and indeed strict rules were enforced on that regard: most common are 5-character or 7-character poems (5/7 character per line), ofc the last character of each line must rthyme that's the minimum, but for more skilled writers there are stricter rules to follow, tone pattern (平仄 ping ze) for example, requires not just the last but every character in a line to have a sound that compliments the corresponding character in the following line. 国破山河在 (仄仄平平仄) 城春草木深 (平平仄仄平) Sounds aside, you can map the word class or even meaning of characters too (so for example, first line 3rd character being a noun dictates that the 3rd character of the second line must also be a noun, and you can push this further by having, e.g. colour matching colours, numbers matching numbers, flowers matching birds, fire matching water/ice (things of the same class or from the polar opposite), using the same example from above: 国-城 (nation - city) 山河-草木 (mountains and rivers - plants and woods)
I'm not Chinese but many Vietnamese poets we learn about in school wrote in Chinese as well. When I learned about poetry in English, I found it lacking the perfect rhymes or rhythm that makes poetry in tonal languages almost melodic. In fact in Vietnamese, there's a style of poetry reading that's similar to singing.
Admiration from a native Chinese speaker within the mandarin Chinese region. Your pronunciation made almost no difference from the native speaker except for some intonation(which I cannot refers to from several words). Pretty impressive in terms of what a foreigner generally can do.
What I gather from this is that while technically every syllable in Chinese has its own meaning, in practice it works like every other language where only full words have meaning, and the syllables making up those words don't really. Also, I love that you make sure to pronounce everything correctly. I don't know how good of a job you're doing, because I don't speak Chinese, but as a native German speaker, I get very annoyed when English speakers don't even try to pronounce German words how they're supposed to be, so I'm grateful for your efforts.
This is interesting. I feel like English speakers are often “forgiven” when they couldn’t pronounce other languages right. A lot of them don’t even feel bad about it. It might have some political/economic/historical implications lol. Back to Chinese: for most Chinese characters, they alone have one or few(related) universal meanings. The confusion only happens when a syllable is given without any context or set phrases.
I am also grateful. For all the Mandarin phonemes, he was either spot on or very/quite close, which was surprising to me since he does not speak the language even though I probably shouldn't be bc he studies linguistics and can/should be able to replicate phonemes fairly well.
@@twinkybirky1291 Your comment reminded me that learners/non-native speakers of English are often forgiven for not replicating the accent perfectly (or having thick accents which can be hard to comprehend if you aren't used to their way of talking). Probably has to do with social politics because those speakers are oftentimes minorities and laughing at the way they speak can be seen as discriminatory. However, if, for instance, an English speaker tries to seriously learn another less-commonly spoken language and can't mimic the accent very well, it's acceptable to laugh and think it's "funny" (not necessarily in a mocking way, but it can definitely be demoralizing for the learner and discourage them from continuing to learn the language) or "let's just talk in English instead." To clarify, I do agree with your premise that English speakers who aren't actively learning the language are "forgiven" with not pronouncing things right. I also know that there are lots of English speakers that do laugh at those with heavy accents/odd pronunciation (though that's generally seen as immature/mean and looked down on, even if being mean or disrespectful was not the intent).
@@twinkybirky1291 Just my opinion, but I think it's common sense to "forgive" someone, English speaker or not, when they pronounce your language wrongly...
Amazing job explaining! I really feel this is totally what I wanna say but I just can't explain it on English because it isn't my mother language, so I just can't express everything what I want to say, really helpful!
That's great and all, but every other language has homonyms, too, and sometimes very confusing ones, such as "outstanding" in English: "The teacher told John that his assignment was outstanding! John was surprised at this praise, since he was pretty sure he forgot to hand in the assignment." Non-visual context _has_ to be enough in a spoken language, and if it's not, then the language is just bad due to these ambiguities, and will likely evolve to rectify that, given enough time.
Hmm that's an example of sarcasm. Both "outstanding"s are identical words, having the same meaning but used in ironic and unironic ways. They are not homonyms, which share the same pronunciation or spelling but different meanings. (they're, their, there)
@@michaelhong2565 I think he means that outstanding is used in the neutral sense like a latin _vox media_ where it just means that it stands out. The positive form of "outstanding" comes from the same hyperbole that made words like "awesome" (which meant what is now meant by the much uglier "awe-inspiring") just mean "really good".
@@michaelhong2565 No, "outstanding" can mean either "very good" (e.g. "what an outstanding performance!") or "not done yet" (e.g. "your rent payment is outstanding"). The teacher was telling John that his homework hadn't been done, but John misunderstood and thought the teacher was complimenting his work.
Your example of "blanicking" reminds me of one of the most recently created characters which has a unique pronunciation "duāng", which is a combination that didn't exist or was very very rare in the past. It fits the Chinese phonetactics and although I can't type the character because it's not yet encoded in the computer character libraries, the character for this is also a new combination of existing elements in a way that fits conventional patterns. One important method people use to distinguish words with same or similar pronunciations is to add some redundancy wherever there may be confusion, or use a synonym that has a different pronunciation. A fluent Chinese speaker is usually aware of this and would add the complementary information when necessary. e.x. “这篇报道非常yǒulì” could either mean "This article is very beneficial." OR "This article is very powerful." So to avoid this confusion a speaker would say “这篇报道对弱势群体非常有利 This article is very beneficial towards minority groups” OR “这篇报道非常有影响力 This article has very powerful impact/influence.” It is actually quite simple, because the same situation exist for English as well. In my example I used the word "article", but this could either mean "a piece of published writing" OR "a small item" in this context. So to avoid confusion, often people would complement this by saying "This news article..." or by substituting for "This item..." Written Chinese does not have this problem, which is why formal and professional writing is usually substantially more concise. Generally if you write something in professional format it would be shorter than the verbal expression and much shorter than English. 书面语言不具备同样的问题，因此专业性文字往往简短许多。一般情况下书面表述比口语更为简短，且显著短于英语。(These two sentences express the exact same idea)
We don't use article like that. Article by itself always refers to a written article. Article as an item is usually qualified. "article of clothing". You don't just say article by itself. Not in modern usage. Many dictionaries are dated and devoid of the proper or common usage for words and their nuances.
Fantastically interesting video! I've thought upon this frequently during my studies of Chinese, and this linguistic analysis as really helped bring 明 to the 冥 of this subject :) hehe
For "i" in pinyin, there are actually 2 pronunciations based on the consonant. You should represent them in 2 different columns in 3:48. Usually it has an 'ee' sound, represented as [i] in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), but if put behind 'c', 'z', and 's', its sound changes to something between an 'ee' and an 'oo', represented as [ɹ̩] in IPA. If put behind "ch", "zh", "sh" and "r", it sounds very slightly different, represented as [ɻ̍] in IPA.
You're right. Pinyin is developed so it have very little conflict with the old "Fanqie" system, which had been the only phonetic system in every dictionary till the end of Qing Dynasty. Great tool for Chinese learners but not a great romanization IMO.
@@ruizheli1974 I think pinyin is a pretty good romanization in that it's compact. Terrible for learners, but very quick and condensed once you know the system and what syllables are possible.
@@kori228 No it's not. It's meant to be the equivalent of bopomofo. As a study tool it's pretty good, respects the old Fanqie system, almost all chinese kids learn that before learning how to write. On the other hand when used as a romanization system then the result is that 1). you have vowels like i & e pronounced differently depending on which consonant it follows; 2). When a character is romanized from Pinyin the tones are not represented. 2 Chinese provinces are both "Shanxi" without tone signals - That's just the start of the problems.
@@ruizheli1974 The argument about tone is not a fair argument, because by nature latin romanization *_can't_* account for tone without diacritics or numbers. Your example of "Shanxi" is not the proper romanization, it excludes the tone marks vs , which is not a fault of pinyin, but rather because most languages don't use diacritics and don't have easy access to them so it's often excluded. For i and e, I pose this question back to you, how would you improve it? For i, you could maybe do syllabic z, so 次 would be tsz, but not everyone pronounces it as a syllabic consonant. And the retroflexes get really bizarre, 吃 would have to be maybe . These are effectively the same vowel, just with a slight articulation change, kinda makes sense to write them the same. And what about e? The schwa pronunciation in 等 would be closest to , but that's already used for an actual like 當. You could double up and use for 當 and use single for 等, but people are still reading it wrong anyway. It's worse in open syllables when you have say 大 daa vs 德 da. People are going to confuse with vowel length, not vowel quality.
0:55 I don't know any Chinese, but I know some Japanese and there are some interesting parallels here. You've got the same issue with romanization, of course, but I noticed "language" is quite similar. In Japanese, 語 is used as a suffix for "language". Like 日本語 meaning "Japanese" or 中国語 meaning "Chinese". If we assume 語 is actually the same character as the one Chinese uses, just the Japanese version, then the word for "language" actually uses the same two characters... but the other way around. In Japanese, "language" is 言語. Edit: Actually, pairing things to clarify a meaning is also something that is done in Japanese. It's nowhere near as common as this video makes me believe it is in Chinese, but it definitely happens. The word 魔 for example, is pronounced "ma" and means "demon" or "devil". But "ma" is rather common and if you just say "ma" on its own, you wouldn't be understood. So instead, you use 悪魔, pronounced "akuma". Combining the characters for "evil" and "demon", you know what kind of "ma" you are talking about. In written language, and sometimes in spoken language, 魔 can be used on its own too, but 悪魔 is used more commonly to avoid ambiguity.
Actually Chinese have 言語 too, just used much less than 語言. Sometimes words can be switched around and still means the same thing or sometimes switch around and it means different things! Confusing, I know lol
@@AliceSiuASK Oooh, interesting. I can't think of an example in Japanese where you can switch around the characters and it still means the same thing, but I can think of a few where the meaning changes. 王女 (oujo; princess) and 女王 (joou; queen) for example. What I find hilarious, though, is when a compound is a valid word in both languages, but means something entirely different. For example, the word for "letter" in Japanese is 手紙 (tegami). And apparently this means "toilet paper" in Chinese. There is also a, in my opinion, funny parallel where one of the words for the female reproductive organ in German means "insect" in Japanese (虫). And such a word in Japanese means something like "fault" in German (das Manko) For a while I only knew about one direction and thought this was mildly amusing... but then I realised it goes both ways.
Yes, most Chinese words are 2-syllable exactly for that reason. Now, imagine removing Chinese characters and replacing them with Pinyin. This would force Chinese to make most words even longer, 3 to 4 syllable would become the norm.
A really good video! I just wish maybe the zhuyin system would have been presented along with the phonetic limitation you prevented. Zhuyin is an older transcription system used in China in the past (but still used by Taiwan instead of Pinyin) What's neat about zhuyin is that the letters are phonetically bound Ang is one letter Ei is one letter So writing already presents the limitations. ALSO the letters are aligned on a keyboard so that you have all the initial sounds on the left side of the keyboard Vowels that can be connected with other vowels like w, ü, i in the middle, and then final vowels and nasals at the right side, like ei, eng, an and a
Don't worry, it's not as bad as it sounds 😅 Sure, on the surface it seems like one syllable can have a bajillion different meanings, but when you hear it in a sentence or a set phrase it will probably have only one possible meaning.
Don’t worry, you will find your way. It’s just explaining Chinese with English system makes it seemed more complicated because Chinese doesn’t have an systemic way to analyze the language.
Learning Chinese and I came across this when I was listening to audio pronunciation, you really have to take note of the tones but even that isn't even enough at times, that being said I will see the characters SC and I'll be able to recognize it's meaning. I'm still a beginner so I have more to learn. Also wow I didn't know that about Japanese tbh, thank you for the video!
For any non chinese speakers: Speaking Chinese is not as hard as you think. I feel like after some people watch this video, they will think that Chinese people get so confused when making conversations and always have to ask "which characters is it?" or "which tone is it?" in conversations, but that's not true. We can understand each other just fine ^^
The truth being you are subconsciously guessing and tones vary so much between different parts of China, it becomes almost useless. That's why the neutral tone exists. In fast speech, you don't even hear tones. They rely heavily on compound words and context.
Yep , as a native Chinese speaker, it really isn't that hard, context solves everything since more often than not , characters that has the same pronunciation have very different meanings , and assuming it to mean other than the intended meaning is just unnatural in the conversation.
@@aoikemono6414 Of course you still hear tones in fast speech (?? In fact when I play this "single tone" game with my brother we often can't understand each other
Japanese has the same characteristics and it's the reason why I love it so much, the world of wordplay is infinite, you can write "mom and dad" as "leaf, bee, ground", it's also very visual and contextual, ALL names have meanings and the names of places are usually literal, Hiroshima for example, it's literally translated to "round mountain", or Tokyo "capital city", or aomori, "blue forest" (cuz in Japan there wasn't a word for green long ago so they bundled green and blue into the same word)
Again with the misconception about 青. No, it originally meant green/dark coloration. It became blue in the _modern day_ because 緑 became the common word for green. You'll still see ao/aoi/青 used to mean green in all kinds of words related to nature.
Thanks for covering the issue of Chinese having very few morphemes. I didn't know it was as low as 1,200. Here's another aspect of written Chinese I'd like to learn more about. Seeing as Chinese has very few morphemes, many words are expressed as compounds, right? I gather that typically a Chinese word is two morphemes -- two syllables, and two characters when written. And written Chinese doesn't use spaces. So what difficulties are there in parsing a written Chinese sentence, over and above those with other languages?
I am a native Chinese and I don't really think written Chinese sentences are difficult to parse. I think I think it is actually easier to parse a written Chinese sentence than a written English sentence. the things is that Chinese characters are so fucking distinct, so they just literally pop out when I read the sentence. I can understand the general meaning of a sentence just by looking at the vocabularies without carefully reading through a sentence people can even read a sentence without it being in the correct order.(just a theory :another thing is that there are very few grammatical particles in Chinese, so the vocabs pop even more and you don't have to spend your brain power to analyze the grammar)
Those are just phonetically distinct morphemes. It has plenty more that aren't but do become distinct when used in a compound like the majority of words are. Also, no. It's easier to parse hence why it doesn't need spaces.
1. with modern chinese - Parsing's not a big issue because it'stypicallyselfevident (plus there are much less potential gaps in a Chinese sentence). Although you can always write a couple dirty jokes with sentences that can be parsed in more than 1 way. 2. with traditional written Chinese (Wenyan) - Parsing can be a huge disaster for inexperienced readers because the traditional style is as concise as it can be. Some very old books doesn't use stop mark at the end of a sentence. In some historical dictionaries or more recently printed version of old scripts, a common practice is to underline names of people, place or books to avoid confusion.
As a student of Chinese of just a few months, I can tell that Chinese is not difficult to parse once you've mastered the most common words, so that you don't even have to read them when you read in mind and you just focus on the important nouns, verbs and adjectives.
This was very interesting. I studied Mandarin for some time and found it interesting that I seldom run into new sounds after the first few months, but often run into new characters. Isn't there a paradox of sorts in how this situation came to be? I normally think of writing as being a later development to the oral language, but what does this mean for how the spoken language and written languages evolved? Seems like this implies they've diverged a lot? Eg. A single character has a lot of meaning but a single syllable does not. I'm left more puzzled than I started ;) thanks.
I am in no way an expert but china probably has one of the longest history of co-evolution of written and spoken language, so that they probably had way longer time to morph into a common language. Still, it probably was mostly a privilege of the rich to read and write (like everywhere in human history), so the common language probably evolved in a very small, homogenous circle leading to a high stability and rather little variation. Moreover, this also circumvents the fact that china has an almost uncountably large amount of distinct local dialects which sometimes have hugely different grammar and vocabulary amongst themselves. Mandarin was created (from the basis of mostly the Beijing/Peking dialect) to have a common language everybody could (and should in the movements for national unity) speak, similarly to RP English.
If you study Mandarin, why don't you think of every Chinese single stroke as an alphabet? But a consonant and vowel to create a word? This video is nonsense! Measuring exact feet square by using meter-scale ruler.
@@locacharliewong for interpreting a single character your suggestion makes sense, and that is how I think people are taught. However it's still true that the language is full of homophones, and that doesn't change if you interpret the characters the way you suggest. In many languages with regular spellings homophones are written the same way.
@@rimoll Those were the days when I was using Nokia 3310 phones, I DID NOT type in Chinese characters by PinYin. I typed in STROKES! And that is how Chinese people think of how to write a word/character. We do not care about how it sounds nor syllables, PinYin whatever. The sound of each character was never in the very first mind in every Chinese until President Mao says we have to latinize the word and president Zhang somehow creates a similar thing for standardizing the Mandarin dialect. On the other hand, if you ask any Taiwanese or Malay Chinese who originally came from "Southern Hokkien" and speak "Southern Hokkien language", they will tell you at least there are great differences to say the exact same basic common wordings with using the same Chinese characters, just becoz they are the diasporas of two different cities within the same region. We just don't put the correct way of saying one character at the top priority. We don't modify our character/words by the means of reflecting how we speak the words nowadays, like Germany and France.
This is one of the main concerns when it comes to typing in pinyin. Sometimes we Chinese also rely on context clues when it comes to spoken language. It's very easy to understand what the person you are conversing with meant if you listen to their whole sentence.
Another thing about modern Chinese is that a lot of words come from Japanese, like 社会，电话，which only have the meaning as a combined word instead of individual. But they still somehow fit into the original character meanings. Like a “smart translation”.
Just some thoughts about the 'compementary morphemes'. It reminds me of learning this in uni when majoring Chinese language and literature. Think we were learning the course 现代汉语 Contemporary Chinese. This is part of how modern compound words合成词 are structured. 联合式合成词 coordinative compound words can be made with not only synonymous morphemes 同义联合, e.g. 语言，群众，依靠, but also with antonymous morphemes, e.g. 早晚，出没，始终. There are also words consist of two similar meaning morphemes 类义联合, e.g. 眉目，领袖，and two related morphemes but focusing on one of them 偏义联合, e.g. 国家，窗户.
I'm an author, and I needed to have a Chinese character in the book with the last name that meant 'Pine Tree' and I was confused when I later double checked it and it was the word for 'Squirrel'. I thought I had messed up, but no, same word but with different context.
In this context let's say if a Chinese parent wants to name his kid after pine trees he will just name the kid "Song" instead of "Songshu". "Songshu" is common spoken language but a bit of an overkill as a name.
These two words are different tones in Chinese, so there is no problem at all. However, when English transcriptions are often omitted tones lead to ambiguity. Pine tree （松树）is SōngShù while Squirrel （松鼠）is SōngShǔ. ǔ and ù are very different in pronounciation.
In addition, from the Chinese point of view, the vast majority of Chinese surnames are monosyllabic, there are only an extremely rare number of two-character surnames, and these surnames tend to have very ancient origins. So from a Chinese point of view, whether a person's last name is pine tree or squirrel is very weird. My advice is that if you want someone's last name to mean pine tree, please give them the surname "松"（Song) instead of "Songshu"(松树）.
First of all, surname "松"（Song) do exist in real person, though they are rare. Second, the syllable "松"（Song) itself means pine tree (in writing), and in spoken language Pine tree （松树/SōngShù) and Squirrel （松鼠/SōngShǔ) are merely explantion to the word, as 树/Shù means tree and 鼠/Shǔ means mouse. (In Chinese, squirrels are called "rats on squirrels".) If you have any other questions about Chinese, we can also communicate through email, my channel has my email address.
This is a problem for Chinese learner in the beginning where a pair of pronunciation can have different meaning, but generally speaking we only use perhaps 2-3 of them since the rest is just too "old" to use and there are other better word to use in modern language. For example, no one uses 晦冥 or 晦明 or even the pair of their pronunciation "huì míng" in modern chinese. We just use "暗" and "亮" to represent darkness and brightness. You might see them on the book but def not in daily usage, similar concepts like the word "thou" in old English.
Regarding why we need characters in Chinese language, I have another important reason. Characters is the writing system we've been using all along, and I, possible the majority of Chinese-speaking people, think characters are beautiful. Pinyin is just something we adopted from English alphabet in assist of the learning process of Chinese; however, it should never replace the original language itself.
@@I_would_like_to_buy_an_E The same as me seeing katakana in Japanese loan words... I don't know why Japanese nowadays give up their traditional way to make up new words with Kanji... Many Chinese words came from Japan in the last century.
@@samgyeopsal569 But he failed to romanize Chinese characters. There is also a famous person in China who said that if Chinese characters are not eliminated, China will surely perish, but China has not perished because of the continued use of Chinese characters.
As a Chinese learner for 8 years, and my native Chinese teachers saying that I have excellent pronounciation, I can thoroughly confirm that your pronounciation isn't bad at all.
Thank you for the great video! Just want to point out that the word "huiming" is actually rarely used in modern Chinese. However, your point still holds, since there definitely exist many other ambiguous words having different meanings but sharing the same sound.
You said “phonotactics” and I literally salivated. I think I missed my calling I should have studied linguistics in college. I love having words to describe elements of speech that I’d always noticed but have never been able to vocalise
I have changed the title from "Why Chinese Needs All Those Characters" to "Chinese Doesn't Have Many Syllables (And Why That's Interesting)". This current title was in fact the original title, but after a little while I (quite absent-mindedly) decided to switch the title to "Why Chinese Needs All Those Characters" for - and I'll be honest here - clickbait purposes, and because I thought retrospectively that this video could function as a good argument for keeping the characters.
A lot of people have pointed out that this isn't a complete argument - and this is true, because it wasn't originally meant to be a complete argument, and it was disingenuous of me to refer to the video as such. I don't denounce the points I make in the video - but the points I brought up were originally more to do with the problems with transliterations, rather than a full argument for keeping Chinese characters. Mind you, I DO believe in keeping the Chinese characters alive for a variety of reasons, but I completely conceed that a full argument for this is NOT given in this video.
I also changed the title because, understandably, 99% of comments are focused on my argument about pinyin, either defending it or attacking it, which is all well and good - but really the majority of this video has nothing to do with Chinese characters or transliterations, but rather with 1. explaining what phonotactics are and 2. the interesting ways in which Chinese deals with homonyms. And honestly, those are the parts of the video I'd much rather have engagement on, because they are what I myself find interesting and where most of the effort for this video went.
Unrelated question: With the importance of tonemes, what would it be like to write songs in Chinese? Changing the tones would surely change some of the lyric's meaning, would it not?
@@Lime-rr6zf AFAIK some varieties of Chinese, including Mandarin, don't worry about tones in song because context tends to iron out the kinks, but some like Cantonese do actually incorporate tones into their music, or at least have historically done so, I'm not so sure about pop music in Cantonese and such varieties
It feels weird that Chinese can't be written in Pinyin or Japanese solely in Hiragana/Katakana. I know Japanese so I am aware of how difficult it can be to read without Kanji because of all the homophones, but why is it also not a problem with speaking? Using the same Pinyin for homophones does make things hard to read but why doesn't saying them the same way cause the same issue in talking? If it works for the spoken word, then surely phonetic writing should work as well. After all, they're just sounds in the form of shapes.
I'm not familiar with any of the Polynesian languages but they have far smaller syllable inventories so they should need something like Chinese characters but they seem to be doing fine with the Latin alphabet.
@@အုပ်စိုးပိုင် Generally, you can get by just fine writing Japanese in just hiragana. The thing is, it's still *easier to read* when kanji are used in tandem. Japan's literacy rate is ~99%, so people already are used to the system, and within that framework, it's easier to read kanji+hiragana (+katakana) than to read hiragana alone. If you've ever tried it you know what I mean.
Their is a video " word generating power of sanskrit" in YT.....can make a video on that topic video is about 4-5 min. By a channel name sanskrit Tutorial
Only to clarify, Japanese still very much *needs* all those characters as well because of the same reason. Using hiragana or katakana alone just isn’t enough to let you know if せんこう is a major of study 専攻 something with precedence 先行 a submarine travel 潜航 an incense stick 線香 or your dead dad 先考
Yeah, Japanese needs them because of on-yomi words from Chinese. They inherited the same problem as Chinese, and maybe made it even worse because of their lower number of consonants, and lack of complex tones.
That just makes me wonder how Korean gets away with it. Kanji is only really difficult when you don't know it, once you know it, it can even be good for foreigners because you can guess new words. But really how often are you going to see those words out of context, surely if you're talking about a Buddhist Temple it's unlikely you are talking about submarine travel etc. What is it Korean can do that Japanese can't?
@@jimmythechimp2 I have no clue. I speak Japanese fluently, and tried learning Korean, but found it impossible because of this exact same reason. I just couldn’t get any vocab into my head without Kanji. It all sounded very similar, and I had no visual cues to help me learn. Grammar was super easy coming from Japanese though, so that was good.
"Your dead dad" jeez
@@jimmythechimp2 Korean has the same problem, not as bad as what’s in Japanese but a lot professional writings and laws, still use Chinese characters to help people telling things apart. Many Korean schools have Chinese classes.
This is EXACTLY what I’ve been trying to explain for so long. My friends ask me why can’t we just write in pinyin wǒ shì zhōngguórén can be read and we can understand it but when it comes to things like búyào lí can be read as don’t leave or no pears and often causes confusion if context is not given. 不要离 means don’t leave and 不要梨 means no pears. But overall you did an outstanding job in explaining the need of hanzi 🙏🙏🙏.
Yeah, languages who have used or continued to use Hanzi(Hanja, Kanji, etc.) are mostly languages which are context-based(especially Chinese and Japanese), that is also one of the reasons why Japanese hasn't abandoned Kanji/Hanzi; In Japanese, Hashi/はし could be 端, 箸, or 橋, The characters really helped in differentiating the contextual meaning of similar sounding words. Hanzi is really interesting as a writing system.
Not only that, but hanzi, especially the traditional set, is easily the most beautiful writing system in the world. Each character is like a work of art. It would be a huge pity if this was lost.
I’d add kai to the end when it’s leaving and zi when it’s a pear
But if you understand it when spoken, why not when written phonetically?
@@roonilwazlib4433 i think there's more context when you speak. When people write, most words are 1 syllable and when you speak, most words are 2 syllables.
**for language nerds**
I teach Mandarin, and my students are surprised when I explain how much faster it is to type in Chinese (thanks to built-in text prediction). If you're lazy enough, you can type just the initial sound of each syllable, and the software will help choose/predict the most likely character combination, for multiple words simultaneously.
In this way, I can write out: "他们想吃香蕉" ("they would like to eat bananas" by just pressing T-M-X-C-X-J (6 strokes),
Or "我也看过那个电影" ("I've also seen that movie [before]" with W-Y-K-G-N-G-D-Y (8 strokes).
Honestly, it can be annoying when I have to type on a basic English keyboard again and can't write out a concept like "cultural differences" with 4 quick presses (文化差异，W-H-C-Y).
That's why even college students are forgetting how to write their own language. 🤣
Yeah, but you'll develop problem with your wrist real fast typing Chinese because you'll have to pick 1,2,3,4, very frequently while in English, you won't have to.
Even you don't use the initials, you can use 9-keyboard instead of finding each alphabet. Much quicker than using a full keyboard
I'm a native Chinese speaker and I never type like that. I type the full pinyin for all characters in a phrase except the last one so I never have to choose words using the numpad.
But you can use swipe typing in English. “Cultural differences” (took me only two swipes). Now how about that?
in most of chinese history, the spoken language has been largely irrelevant due to having to manage a huge empire that will inevitably span across many language, dialect, cultural zones. the first emperor did NOT unify the spoken language but instead unified the WRITTEN language. since everybody already used logograms already so it worked. The PURPOSE of written language is to convey MEANING, not sound.
I agree 100%
Exactlyyy
That explains a hell of a lot
Exact reason why there are so many dialects. The "standard Chinese" or mandarin was originally a dialect of the North. It was dubbed the official spoken language as China modernized from it's Imperial Dynasties.
What about 诗歌?
And that's why Vietnamese could switch to Latin alphabet and still works fine. Its more complicated phonology allows it a lot more syllables, enough to distinguish between most Chinese loan words as well as its native ones
For a demonstration, here's the first few lines of that famous poem read aloud in Mandarin Chinese:
《施氏食獅史》"Shīshì shí shī shǐ"
石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。
(Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.)
氏時時適市視獅。
(Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.)
十時，適十獅適市。
(Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.)
是時，適施氏適市。
(Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.)
Completely not understandable to a native Mandarin speaker. Every syllable is just "shi" with various tones.
The same poem in a Vietnamese pronunciation would be:
"Thi Thị thực sư sử"
Thạch thất thi sĩ Thi Thị, thị sư, thệ thực thập sư.
Thị thì thì thích thị thị sư.
Thập thì, thích thập sư thích thị.
Thị thì, thích Thi Thị thích thị.
Still not understandable to a Vietnamese speaker, because Classical Chinese is a foreign language to us. But at least we have way more diverse syllables, and we can actually make out some words that are still used in modern Vietnamese, like (poet) or (stone cave).
i've never studied the grammar, chinese has neither case nor strict conjugation or mood for that matter; the simple grammar of Chinese is part of why you need lots of characters.
Maybe Viet grammar is much more complex?
Vietnamese was once represented using hanzi but then the French took over and ruined it all lol
@@karlriina6950 Vietnamese is a very analytical language, also I really don't think it's that hard to read a phonetic transcription
@@karlriina6950 Vietnamese grammar is actually extremely simple, perhaps even more so than Standard Chinese / Mandarin. But there are lots more sounds and tones available.
Vietnamese, Cantonese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Thai are all significantly more phonetically diverse than Mandarin.
Actually I have spoken to many Vietnamese people and while using Quoc Ngu GENERALLY doesn't create confusion on a daily basis, even if each syllable is written separately as opposed to Pinyin, but a lot has been lost. Vietnamese also has many homophones and unless one is educated, they can't tell them apart with Quoc Ngu.
Same with Korean I guess. They have way more letter combination available so they were able to move away from Hanja
As a native Chinese speaker these combinations just come so naturally lol , but your explanation is really clear and interesting!
I think one of the reason why spoken Chinese is understandable is that many formal expressions are not common in everyday conversation. For example, words like 晦明 or 晦冥 will hardly appear in spoken Chinese because they are too formal and poetic. But on the other hand we can understand these words when written because the characters that form them carry meaning, so when they are combined it's simple to see what they mean. (and I guess that's why in traditional Chinese (written) poetry there are so many ways to name one single thing, yet few of them actually are used in everyday speaking.)
To everyone saying it is "unrealistic" to memorize thousands of characters,
firstly, over a billion people are able to do it every day.
Secondly, when you read english, do you sound out every single word letter by letter? No. In fact, sometimes people are able to read a word in english but are unable to spell it. Our minds are logographic by nature, we remember how the word "looks" instead of how the word is spelled.
From the oldest of times till now, maybe only scholars and highborns did learns all those thousands of characters. I'm willing to bet you can find a few hundred, maybe even thousands, of characters that almost no native Chinese speakers know about.
This also stands true for pretty much every language. You can find thousands of obscure words in English, and maybe only scrabble players are going to know them.
learning a language that uses the latin alphabet is also much easier to learn, just because you have to memorize around 26 letters, and that's literally it. Now you can read out loud every word in that language (with varying degrees of pronunciation accuracy), people can invent new written words, and you don't have to go and ask the person that invented that word how is it said out loud. Of course you also need to know the meanings of those words, but that's just learning the language, not how to write and read it.
What's unrealistic is writing that more complicated bunch of slimmed-down set of characters by heart w/o knowing their components or doing it regularly. Recognizing them is also limited by how they are displayed, e.g. on a low-res or smudgy screen or with really cursed… eh cursive handwriting you won't be able to distinguish more complicated characters other than by context. That's partly the reason why they are rarely used other than their usually overloaded meaning.
This is a common example (simplified): 魑魅魍魉 or 饕餮
Humans are usually quite good a pattern recognition, therefore knowing what a character means or even how it's pronounced to the tone might be simpler than learning a (in English often quite illogical) spelling and transferring both pronunciation and meaning into that. Therefore yes, learning Korean might be harder than learning Mandarin even if you already know Hangul but not the logograph-derivatives. Getting a sense of every possible Hangul for me was a matter of half an hour w/o learning them by heart, but I could quite easily produce an 'illegal' Chinese character by accident.
@@whohan779 recognition for natives is actually really easy if the stroke order is "given" through the cursive. A brush will naturally thicken at the start of a line and tail at the end, so if you know how to write a character you can recognize that messy character much easier, especially in traditional art. Complicated characters with 20+ strokes look hard to memorize, but after a while it basically becomes muscle memory. There is an idiom of which the origins I forget, that states you need to encounter a character on 7 separate ocassions before you can memorize it, which is pretty accuratr to most learner's abilities. In fact, since most complicated characters are just made up of combinations of radicals, it's actually arguably easier to memorize them. For example, 麼 as in 什麼 is just a dotted cliff , two 木, and a 幺.
I'm currently studying mandarin and I'm at HSK2. Reading thousands of 汉字 doesn't seem difficult, it's just a matter of time to learn and memorize them. But one question is: can people memorize how to write all of them?
I can't memorize any mandarin character
But sometimes I recognize somethings people talk
It's going to be fun but a hard one for sure.
I think “long time no see” might be a very literal translation of hao jiu bu jian that somehow became a popular phrase in English. But it’s unusually concise for English.
On another note, Chinese pun jokes are on another level
Yes and don't forget something like "horse horse tiger tiger" or "people mountain people sea"
Because English become more and more analytic. So you can understand this phrase easily.
just adding on since you mentioned pun jokes, but word play is also a big part of japanese since both languages use chinese characters
@🌷 everything adopted from another language in English is "racist". That's the only possible reason.
I was just considering this phrase today, actually! I knew it couldn't possibly be a native saying, so the only other source is a bad translation of a phrase in another language, or native speakers mocking a bad translation 😬
DUDE! Your explanation of what you called the "complementary morphemes" explains SO MUCH. I've been studying and writing Japanese for years now, and I've always wondered why they do this thing where they pair up two similar meaning on-yomi (readings derived from Chinese). You can have a word like 上昇 "jōshō" which is literally just two different characters with the same nuance of "up/rising" or a word like 恐怖 "kyōfu" which is two characters with the similar nuance of "fear/scary."
NOW I UNDERSTAND! I of course knew this must be influenced by Chinese, but I just didn't know why this pattern of two-character compounds came about. Your explanation is so illuminating, thank you!
And I love how you stomp out the idea that Chinese should only use pinyin. I've had to deal with people saying the same shit for Japanese. The worst is when people think Japanese should be romanized, when they already have two native sets of phonetic syllabic symbols, but then to think they should get rid of Kanji (Chinese characters), is just so ignorant and asinine.
You talk about those 1200 or so possible syllables in Chinese, well Japanese borrowed all those (or their ancient versions rather), and then stripped them of the tone distinctions, then reduced many of the consonant distinctions found in the original Chinese, so that the number of possible on-yomi in Japanese is MUCH lower, I would say. Long-short vowel distinction, and the "ku" or "tsu" endings might bolster the possible combinations to be somewhat comparable again, but the point is they have the same problem as Chinese, if not worse.
I'm really not sure how modern Korean got away with eliminating Chinese characters. A video exploring that might be super interesting. Maybe they made a grave mistake.
Tones are not completely stripped off though. The "Ku" "Tsu" "Chi" suffix sound is how Japanese people translated "Rusheng" (checked tone), a short , the last tone of the ancient chinese 4 tones that's lost in Mandarin and northern chinese dialects but still present in many southern dialects like Wu and Cantonese. Examples include 1 "ichi" 6 "loku" and Iron "tetsu".
Also the prolonged vowels in on-yomi is how double-vowel Chinese characters are translated into Japanese.
As a native speaker I could say it was no mistake. We can "build" up 40 Hangul characters to make 11,172 syllables - that's just enough to get rid of Chinese characters.
@@눈에눈이들어가니눈물 Until you need to know exactly someone's name is eh?
Not sure if you guys are still able to read the older scripts without extra training though, surely some of them uses more chinese characters right? But I guess that's somewhat beside the point. You guys did it and it seemed to have worked OK. So did the Vietnamese (involuntarily) and they seem fine with that.
@@ruizheli1974 Good points. Maybe the total number of possible on-yomi is comparable, not considerably less than the number of possible morphemes in Chinese then. Either way, it shows why you can't get rid of Kanji for Japanese either.
I think you might be slightly mistaken about the relationship between く つ and ち endings in on-yomi and tone in their Chinese counterparts. I might be mistaken myself, but I don't think they're related to the tones. They come from older versions of Chinese that had /k/ /t/ /k/ phonemes as codas, like Cantonese still does.
一 いち → compare middle Chinese /ʔiɪt̚/
六 ろく → compare middle Chinese /lɨuk̚/
鉄 てつ → compare middle Chinese /tʰet̚/
@@눈에눈이들어가니눈물 You can ,make a lot of syllables with Hungul, but you still need to deal with limited set of Chinese derived morphemes don't you? I don't know much Korean yet, but I assume you guys use as much Chinese derived vocabulary as the Japanese.
In Japanese, if you don't know the Kanji, it's very hard to understand what on-yomi is being used, because there are huge amounts of homophones. As you can see, this predicament is inherited from Chinese.
とう could be 糖 or 党 or 塔 or 当 or 棟 or 唐 or 等 or 投 or 頭 or 島 or 籐 or many, many others.
I would guess that Korea has the same problem. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've always felt it sad that modern Korean forsook the Chinese characters. Japanese is the hardest language to learn because of them, but they are so fascinating and beautiful, so much artistry possible in their complexity, so much culture around them.
But I should add, hangul is a linguistic masterpiece of a writing system worthy of huge praise. I like the idea of hangul & hanja together, like Japanese does with kanji & kana, but this should not detract from the genius that is hangul.
Your video is truly remarkable and insightful. The phenomenon you have named “complementary morpheme” is actually called 同義互訓 in Chinese, which literally translates to “same meaning, mutually defines”. Phrases consisting of two characters often explain each other, and it helps us understand ancient Chinese texts. This terminology is rather advanced as most ordinary users of Chinese have never heard of it. It is only taught at a University level to students who major in studying ancient texts. Also, this phenomenon is much rarer in ancient texts, as phrases often only consist of 1 character. However, in modern Chinese, vocabulary items often consists of two characters(which explains why the subscript 子 is required after 桌) This is apparent in Mandarin(I prefer this name as it comes from the Man people) but in other dialects such as my mother tongue, Cantonese, it’s much less common, i.e. we would simply use 檯 to express “table”. The subscript 子 doesn’t appear anywhere in Cantonese. I recall this being a great research topic in Linguistics from my professor, leading to some profound understanding to the language itself. Discussion is much appreciated!
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Some dialects convey better understanding of the sense than Mandarin, I agree, when we learn the ancient poems. However, I can only distinguish 6 tones out of seven in Cantonese 😂
Mandarin came from the Man people?
When first studying in China, it bothered me to find "repeat words" for the same concept that could only be used in certain combinations (with few discernable patterns). My western brain was disturbed to learn 墙 as... "wall," 壁 as....also "wall," and 墙壁 as........definitely "wall." Asking someone to explain the difference was largely useless, and it took months to "get a feel" as to why one cannot say "墙画" 🚫 (壁画)✔
@@youtubeismycity Manchu is the English term, but in Chinese, they are called the Man zu, Man being their name and zu meaning tribe/ethnicity.
Manchu ethnicity would hence technically mean “Man ethnicity ethnicity”
The thing with Japanese too is that the ~120 "syllables" is really ~120 **mora**. And that is an important distinction to make too because if you take into account the fact that Japanese allows multi-mora long syllables, the true number of "syllables" is actually a lot higher. For example, syllables like "kan" and "tou" are 2 mora each, and aren't counted towards that 120 number. So Japanese does technically have several hundred possible syllables.
Thank you. Treating mora as syllables drives me nuts.
That drives me mad too, I’ve read somewhere that the language has at least 400-500 possible syllables if you take all the mora combinations into account. Japanese also has a rich system of onomatopoeia, which results in syllables like “kyun” or “nyan,” though I’m not sure if any of those sounds would really occur outside of those onomatopoeic words.
There are about 1150 "syllables" in japanese if you count all moras + long vowels + -/i/ + -/N/ or -/Q/. If you don't count sokuon-final syllables there are 767. Then again, that counts syllables such as myain and nyōn that are rare to nonexistant.
The word Mandarin is useful because it's not the same as standard Chinese. There are varieties of Mandarin that are non-standard. Basically, Mandarin is the one Han language that the whole country adopted.
Same goes that Putonghua and Beijing dialect isn't the same. In some way I'd say Putonghua is an artificial language specifically designed to be an easy to adopt speech system for the writing system of Chinese that is already standardized, and serve the only purpose to make communication throughout the whole country easier.
@@FlameRat_YehLon
It may be misinformation that the intonation for Putonghua originated purely from Beijing dialect. At least from the sources that I've come across, much of the enunciation that made Putonghua sound more "crisp" than Beijing dialect originated from a place in Hebei called 滦平. There are also like a bazillion accents/dialects in Hebei that can vary every few kilometres though, so it's interesting how the "experts/scholars" supposedly just scoured about? and settled with a particular dialect.
Edit: Oops, feels like there needs to be more primary research/reliable sources to confirm that statement. The topic's a bit controversial on the Chinese side and there are too many unconfirmed sources floating about (despite the relative recency of the change). One older source I found which compared the similarities in phonetic systems proclaimed that the research was done "for the sake of promoting and enhancing the development of Chengde’s regional economy and culture." and there's a lot of confirmation bias piled up in the current discourse.
Also, Putonghua doesn't really strike me as a completely "synthetic" language, because socio-culturally it's quite similar to northern dialects.
Sorry for getting pedantic.
@@FlameRat_YehLon Except westerners consistently use "Mandarin" to mean Putonghua. They mean "the Chinese most mainlanders speak and understand"
It's just not a good name. Why are we using malay-portuguese loanwords to describe the Chinese language?
@@appa609 Wait... Is that the real meaning? Always thought Mandarin was the transcription of 满大人 aka Manchu official...
Though I guess that's not a good name even out of historical reasons anyway, even my assumption would point towards that Mandarin is supposed to mean some Northern Chinese dialect rather than the formalized Putonghua.
@@FlameRat_YehLon During the Qing Dynasty, Mandarin came to mean the official language (read: literally, the language of the officials) and so it has stuck to the modern day.
I appreciate the attention you put into pronouncing the tones! The only major error I noticed was that the e in the -eng final at 4:01 is pronounced as /ə/, not /ε/.
It's still very awkward sounding. BTW the error you pointed out is exactly why I don't like using Pinyin to romanize Chinese.
True for Mandarin, might be inaccurate for other dialects though
@@ruizheli1974 I like pinyin personally, though it indeed isn't intuitive. You do need to be familiar with the system. Unfortunately, there aren't really many ways to represent a schwa without doubling up vowels. Because [ɛŋ] is not valid, I think using -eng for [əŋ] is fine. Otherwise you'd have to do something like what jyutping does for Cantonese, with double a for [a] and single a for [ɐ] (their schwa stand-in).
@@kori228 OK here's why Pinyin uses i & e to represent multiple vowel sounds - because these vowels sounds used to be the same sound, and that's how they were marked in much older dictionaries with the Fanqie system. A person who knows Pinyin will have somewhat less trouble using these older dictionary books.
Jyutping is not a parallel system as Pinyin. it's designed for romanization of Cantonese. Mainland Chinese kids learn Pinyin in kindergarten so they are more prepared to learn chinese characters later, whereas Jyutping is an optional course in middle school in Hong Kong.
@@ruizheli1974 For i, yeah I know. For e, I doubt that, stuff like 神 and 文 don't share the same fanqie reading. And again, even if that's true, again, how you improve it? It already seems sensible enough as is while trying to keep it compact with the right distinctions. I brought up Jyutping as an alternative romanization design methodology, not saying that Jyutping romanizes Mandarin.
You say you don't like Pinyin to romanize Mandarin, well what do you use? Wade-Giles? That still has the same double "e" issue. Those are the only two in-use romanizations. If you're using your own system, then detail it here, I'm sure you make compromises just as pinyin does, just in different places. Pinyin has its downsides, but it's the best we could come up with. You think you could do better?
As a Chinese I found this video helped me understand English better. When I was a little kid I can read Chinese books effortlessly with knowing only 2000 characters, but when I started to learn English, I found that I can read nothing with knowing only 2000 words.
Purely a problem that is unique to English for it is one of the most illogical and incoherent European languages
@@lucius8453 Not true. The reason that 2000 characters in Chinese get you further than 2000 words in English is that Chinese characters combine to make words, so 2000 characters probably corresponds to something like 10000 words.
There is basically no language in which you can read literature knowing only 2000 words.
@@regarrzo literally any Slavic will get you through with 1000 root words or even less than
@@lucius8453 citation needed. This is an absurd claim
黑化肥发黑会挥发
can anyone speak quickly?uwu
The "Yo mama" hoje in japanese was 100% Gold, great video. Also, you have an awesome pronounciation of tones for an english speaker
I agree with the person who wrote the other comment (and suspect they are to thank for me being shown this video), this video is damn great and deserves far more attention than it's got!
The thing about "literay words" is so real. I have never seen "晦冥" and would never recognize it when I hear it, but I'll have no problem reading it.
This technique is in fact a common literay device on the Chinese Internet these days, swapping out characters in a common word to mean the opposite thing. 治愈 "healing" -> 致郁 "depressing" is an early example and almost cliche today. 罗马贵族 literally "Roman aristocrat" -> 骡马跪族 roughly "toiling masses" is another I remember from a recent video.
毕竟汉语从来是以字为准而不是音,读什么还不是各地自己发挥的 XD
Oh God, all the word switching puns🤣
哈哈哈哈哈通辽宇宙来的吧
晦冥是什麼…
and it led to the meme
Curiously, Nuosu, another Sino-Tibetan language with pretty much the same situation as Chinese (but one less tone, more initials, and less finals) is written using a syllabary of about 1100 syllables. Which is quite inconvenient and leads to the exact same ambiguity as writing only in Pinyin would.
do they at least have semantic components to disambiguate the sound-alikes?
from your note I get the impressin it does not.
@@karlriina6950 they do not have any semantic components, nor do they have spaces. The syllabary characters were invented in the 1950s and based off an earlier character-based script like Chinese.
Interesting. Sounds like the case of a language that hasn't become widespread enough in the written form to develop the necessary tools for unambiguous communication. I guess it's mostly an oral language?
@@osasunaitor it has 8 million speakers and an extensive written tradition dating back to the 1400s. They used to use their own logographic script but literacy in it was comparatively low and it was replaced with the current syllabary in the 1950s
@@stan_albatross4885 oh, okay thanks. It's mindblowing how even relatively obscure language in China still has millions of speakers
you are absolutely right. For colloquial language, it’s ok do without the characters, but when we start to use advanced literary words, as in written language, characters become indispensable. Sometimes I find it helpful to watch a movie in Chinese with Chinese subtitles, otherwise I might mishear words.
If you ever watch those Chinese dramas in which the character speaks in ancient shortened characters, you might sometimes misunderstand what they mean.
In formal written Chinese, a lot of compound terms become monosyllabic, like 但是=但，已經=已，什麼時候=何時，因為=因, etc. which become very easy to miss, especially if the speaker is speaking quickly. This of course, saves space, but also gives you fewer complements to go off of
Fwiw I think I've been there in watching English movies with English subtitles too...
You are a linguistic gift to the world -- thank you so very much for your presentstions! Sincerely your student (Pand also a sociology Phd and a speaker of five languages and currently studying chineese but so very stumped as to why it is the way it is)
Apparently the big revelation of Chinese is that the character system that first intimidates you the most turns out to be the easiest thing about it
If you get into chinese you will go from frustration and confusion to a deep love and it's not masochism. Chinese changes how you think (improved memory) and how you see the world (enormous vocabulary shift).
To some degree the Chinese language itself is the cultural canon of Chinese culture because the breath of Chinese literature is so deep and wide with its endless self references. There are idioms that reference famous works like Hongloumeng which in turn reference other works which reference other works and the whole thing ends up binding together the vast expanse of Chinese cultural and history in one self reinforcing almost living body of language. Hence why imperial examinations used to focus so heavily on poetry and the classics. Studying literature is studying culture, history, sociology, strategy, morality, and philosophy all at once.
@@darkjemdude ^跪举火把...
@@karlriina6950没必要加这么没文化的话。不是野人。
learning chinese like knowing cars, despite many models and brands, once u know it, it is as easy as eating toufu.
Since you mentioned Japanese in the video, you could make a video on the same argument but applied to Japanese being written only in hiragana and to compare it with Korean and Hangul because that's what most people who are proreform bring up. I'd like to hear your opinion on it!
I don't know how difficult it is to read Korean and if they have as many similar sounding words (I guess they still do) but I can say for certain that when I read a Japanese sentence that's only in hiragana it becomes a lot more difficult for me to understand the meaning.
I can read Korean, it's incredibly easy to learn how to read it. It has consonant and vowel symbols just like English but they don't have 5 different possible pronunciations. Each "character" is actually a syllable which combines a beginning consonant, a connecting vowel, and (sometimes) an ending consonant. This rule is absolute and never changes. A vowel cannot be first (there's a silent beginning consonant for words that start on a vowel sound) and there cannot be only consonants. For example take the word 조금 (jo-guem) (it means, "a little bit" and will ALWAYS mean "a little bit"), it can be easily written in english characters because 조 (jo) is one syllable made up of the consonant ㅈ and the vowel ㅗ, and then the next syllable 금 (geum) is made up of the beginning consonant ㄱ, the vowel ㅡ, and the ending consonant ᆷ.
If you know a little bit of Japanese, the Korean grammatical system is basically the same with the Subject - Object - Verb sentence order, and particle attachments placed onto words to indicate the role the word has in a sentence. Japanese uses Hiragana and Kanji to distinguish S-O-V, Korean just uses spaces. (There are obviously some complications to Korean that make it difficult for English speakers to learn and there's some words that have more than 1 meaning just like in English, but when comparing it to Japanese, it is WAYYY easier to learn)
I can see why Korean is used by pro-reformers as it's literally an example of what happens when a country modernizes their language to increase literacy rates. Korean was developed with the intention of being easier to learn.
@@NinjaKittkatt I didn't know that Korean doesn't have that many homonyms so now it makes more sense. I never got why Japanese doesn't just use spaces imo but I still wonder if that maybe wouldn't cut it for Japanese.
The people who are against any reform usually bring the argument that there are many Kanji compounds which would be written the same way in hiragana (such as 更新 = update、行進=march 、交信=communication - pronounced koushin) and that hiragana doesn't account for pitch accent at all which can make a huge difference.
Take for example 箸 and 橋, meaning chopsticks and bridge. Both are written as はし(hashi) in hiragana but one has a low high tone while the other one has a high low one. This maybe isn't the best example because it's kind of hard to mix those words up in context but there are other words where mixups could definitely happen if you had a text in hiragana and you were trying to read it out to someone without knowing the pitch accent of the word.
I guess another aesthetic inconvenience might be that hiragana aren't as compact as Hangul so sentences would become very long but I'd say that's not an argument against phonetic writing but rather just hiragana.
You could maybe let me know if there's ever any mixup that can happen in Korean and if there are any pitch accent differences because I don't know.
@@aggressive_pizza1279
You can literally learn how to read Korean in about 2 hours, it's that easy of an alphabet.
Korean doesn't have pitch accents like Chinese and Japanese have, but it does have syllable stresses like English. Particularly with the ending consonants. Ending consonants is where most of Korean's complications come from. They have set rules, but they also break set rules.
Typically when you have a syllable with an ending consonant followed by a syllable with the empty consonant, the previous ending consonant is supposed to take the place of the empty space phonetically.
So for example, take the word 별빛 (byeol-beat, it means starlight) the ending consonant for the last syllable (빛) is the ㅊ consonant. ㅊ when it's an ending consonant is pronounced with a soft T sound, but when it's a starting consonant like the word 처럼 (cheo-reom, meaning "it's like") ㅊ is pronounced as a "ch" sound.
So when you use 별빛 in a sentence, it's a noun so you would attach 이 (minor subject particle attachment, similar to Japanese's methods). ㅇ is the "no sound beginning consonant" and ㅣis the vowel "E", so 이 is just "E", BUT when you attach it to 별빛, like 별빛이 (indicating starlight is what you're going to be talking about), the ending consonant ㅊ from 빛 VERBALLY takes the place of the empty ㅇ. Making the pronunciation of 별빛이 NOT "byeol-beat-E" but actually "byeol-be-CHee" because the ㅊ is now considered to be in it's beginning consonant form, not it's ending consonant form.
This rule is supposed to be absolute, as it's standard that a syllable with an ending constant is always connected to a particle that starts with the empty ㅇ consonant.
However, the verbal pronunciations don't always match the way it would be "textbook correct". Verbal pronunciations can shift to either add stresses or remove stresses based on whatever makes the language more comfortable to speak, and the rules for it are arbitrary (just like English).
So the only really hard thing about Korean is understanding the nuanced pronunciation rules. Korean is like a mid-way point between Western languages and Eastern languages.
@@aggressive_pizza1279 Ehhhhh while Korean language doesn't have homophones, they still have tons of homonyms(found more often in Chinese loanwords). take 수상 for example: 受賞(to be awarded), 首相(prime minister), 殊常(suspicious), 水上(floating on water), 樹相(dendritic)... and so on. Still, those are dsitinguishable through context and other methods.
I think the reason why Korean was able to drop Hanja(Chinese characters) is due to the more various phonotactics in Korean language. Take a look on this sentence for example: 貴社の 記者 今夜の 汽車で 歸社す(Your company's reporter will return by train tonight) is read like 'Kisha no kisha kon'ya no kisha de kisha su'.
貴社, 記者, 汽車, 歸社 is all pronounced 'Kisha'.
in Korean, those terms are pronounced: 귀사(gwisa), 기자(gija), 기차(gicha), 귀사(gwisa) respectively.
not perfect, but distinguishable enough to drop Hanja.
@@skygazer5375 Exactly. For the most part Korean can get by without hanja since the homonyms are usually obvious from context and the spacing rules helps readability; however in more advanced texts it's not uncommon to see hanja written in parenthesis to clarify meaning. As Korean conversation, we sometimes have to clarify which word we mean in speech, usually by saying the native Korean word after a hanja-derived one for that reason. It's not exactly correct to say that hangul 'characters' contain meaning like Chinese characters do, though unlike Hiragana/Katakana there is usually more ways to write the same sounding words (ex. 말이 and 마리 are both pronounced the same) which gives Korean SOME ways to distinguish morphemes in writing. The Korean writing system is a really good solution between being easy and relative consistency, while avoiding excessive ambiguity in most cases. Hangeul fits the Korean language like a glove, but due to reasons others have mentioned will not work for other languages nearly as well. Japanese will for sure struggle much more with ambiguity issues if a hangul-like system was adopted without modification.
3:35 The syllable "biang" does exist in mandarin, as a type of noodle with a famously elaborate character representation.
I had a talent show at school once, and one kid just decided to write out the characters for biang biang mian.
@@2cv693 thats equivalent to writing supercalifragilisticexpialidocious 💀
@@deezem5294 Arguably even more skill is needed to memorize all 58 strokes (or just the ideographs, that would make it easier) as well as the stroke order, with supercalifragilisticexpialidocious you only need to remember a string of 34 letters and it's basically written how it's pronounced in English
@@anonymizationoverload9831Not to downplay how incredible it is that the kid wrote biang down, but biang isn't that much different from super... either. In hanzi there's patterns of strokes that commonly appear in other characters, like the "sun" and "moon" character appearing in "night and day". Biang has 11 of these patterns so if you know how to write them, where to place them, you're set.
Another example is that the kanji for electricity contains the kanji of rain, and the kanji of electrical appliances commonly contains the kanji of electricity. It's not just random strokes, each stroke creates a pattern and each pattern has meanings.
That "complementary morpheme" mechanism is called 双音词羡余, or duplicate two-character word. Basically all the disambiguating mechanisms are just using two-character words which tend to be less ambiguous.
Also, the pronunciation of yü should contain a glide onset, and be a bit more fronted. It should be /ɥy/, while you're doing /ʉ/.
冥Ming as dark is usually a written word.晦明 and 晦冥 are written words. Nobody says them in daily life.
冥冥之中 is a pretty normal word.
but ur right, not frequently in daily life.
冥想as well
if he defined the word 冥 as 暝, the problem solved
That's the problem. You can't say anything you write. You just lost a huge part of your vocabulary. And mandarin just makes it worse because it simplified so many words that used to have unique sounds in older Chinese down to that 1200 or less syllables.
@@aoikemono6414 I don't think it makes sense
I’m a native Chinese speaker, yet this video still taught me a good lesson on linguistics, and gave me new insights on how I am using this language properly as I’ve always been. Great work!
This is one of those rare videos on RUclips that are so well-researched and well put-together and yet are criminally underrated.
From the amount of work you have put into pronouncing words right and thinking of examples to prove your point to how you have broken down complex linguistic phenomena to make them easily understood, this video is truly a masterpiece for language and linguistics enthusiasts.
As a person who knows Chinese, this never really come to my mind
Interesting insight.
Should definitely talk about Cantonese where there are 9 tones
it’s pretty cool watching this video as a native speaker as i have never considered about how these things worked until it’s been pointed out by you, thanks for the video!
Just a little pinot, in Chinese, the "noun suffix" sometimes should be the "prefix",such as “老虎” which “虎” refers tiger,"老" is the noun prefix.
Native mandarin speaker here. Thank you for making sense of this thing that nobody had been able to explain to me all these years.
im not a mandarin speaker and this just made me confused
@@milosm9280 I'm a mandarin speaker and can tell you that this video is an over-complication of simple concepts. I feel like video watchers who doesn't speak Chinese would've assumed that when 2 chinese people talk we constantly have to ask each other "which character do you mean?"
@@ruizheli1974 Your right we don't have to do that. We can tell perfectly fine what the other means.
@@shadowbluejay501 Which shouldn't come as a surprise. This video tried to explain how spoken language got away with too many homophones by saying: "First of all there are many set phrases". Congratulations you just explained the concept of "words".
@@ruizheli1974 It's not always obvious to non-native speakers though, so even if it sounds simple to you I think his explanation still has merit
I am happy to see more people interest Chinese❤thank you so much. I appreciate your video.
The fact that each sound in chinese have so many words associated is why most Chinese poems strictly follow 5/7 words per line, 4/8 lines, rhymes while still being able to tell a paragraph long story. All of the words are without conjunctions, or any of the supporting words that allows people to understand the word by voice, and many of them aren't commonly used at all. This becomes so complex that most people even Chinese won't be able to understand a poem if they didn't specialize in language. in their highschool studies
that's mostly right but glaringly wrong in one regard: Tang poems are definitely comprehensible to children and are indeed commonly used to teach Chinese children chinese. ALL Chinese people really do know "Eternal Goose" or for a deeper example "Climbing Stork Tower".
Chinese poetry is amazing and entirely comprehensible even with a fairly low level of Chinese. With a dictionary you can read Chinese poems during your third semester of college level Chinese, i.e. around hsk3/hsk4.
If by "most" you mean Tang poetry, sure there's 5 or 7 characters per line. But Chinese poetry is incredibly diverse with the oldest forms being free form (no set number of characters per line) and four-character poems (usually four lines). Free form has returned in the modern day as well.
There's also six and eight character poems and couplets, which can be any length.
@@weirdofromhalo yeah, there are other forms, i didn't figure to correct that since indeed the most famous ones are 4 lines 5 syllables but there is also iirc a 9 syllable line version, also variants on tone and rhyme similar to AABB, ABAB ABBA etc.
but with tones, not just rhymes.
@@weirdofromhalo你说的那种古老的诗，是4000~3000年前的作品了，里面很多词汇和文字已经不再使用。
对现代人而言，不经过专门学习，只能理解1000~2000年前的作品。
The kind of ancient poetry you mentioned was written 4,000 to 3,000 years ago, and many words and characters in it are no longer used.
For modern people, without special study, they can only understand works from 1000 to 2000 years ago.
When I read《Orality and Literacy》the writer said "Chinese characters will certainly be replaced with Latin alphabets" and I wondered why they aren't yet. This video solved that question immediately! Thanks a lot.
Chinese government actually tried to replace Chinese characters with Latin alphabets. However, even simplifying the Chinese characters for the second time failed. (Second round of simplified Chinese characters)
Why not Pinyin with a number following it, indicating the meaning? That would work!
just because it can, doesn't mean it should. because it doesn't necessarily improve the language.
It was predicted that computers would kill off kanji in Japanese, but the problem of Asian character sets was solved and kanji is now more common - it's easy to pick the correct one from a list.
@@Anonymous-df8it that means you have to remember the relationship between the number and meaning for EACH syllabus, making Chinese far more complex than now. The Chinese character is good because its shap usually indicates its meaning, you can easily understand a new word by just looking at its shape
This really was a great explanation of why the logographic system stuck with, and works very well, for Chinese. Because yeah, their system works for them. I honestly think that the argument of just using pinyin does in part stem from western chauvinism. The idea that because it looks complicated to them, it must be inefficient or not not work, of which Chinese characters disproves.
I think the very clunky transition logographic writing made into the technology era has given people a false perception that it’s inherently not fit for the future in some way, leading them to subsequently ignore all the advantageous aspects of it. It may be less efficient for handwriting which is increasingly less important but it can be read faster with the same rate of comprehension/retention and is more space efficient on a page.
some of it is just the chauvinism of westerners not being able to comprehend that a non Roman script works well for a billion people. The notion of not properly having an alphabet is jarring if you didn’t grow up with it.
Part of it could be chauvinism, but the other part is that even though both systems clearly *work*, one is orders of magnitude less work than the other. In the same way, I can get to a city 200km away by car or by walking, and both ways work just fine. But everyone takes the car for a reason.
@@Komatik_ Taking your example, it’s just a matter of what you prioritize.
By taking the car (Alphabetic languages), you can get to the destination faster as long as you have a working road (learnt the alphabet). On the other hand, walking (logographic languages) may be slower, but you can see the view (culture behind the logograms) on the way, thus making the journey more meaningful. And with practice, you can walk quicker and be green☺ (the compact efficiency of expression, aka saying what you want in less ‘words’ than English).
Personally, I think alphabetic languages require just as much memorizing, just in different ways. I mean, grammatical tenses, genders (like French) and pronunciation exceptions (eg. silent sounds) are just as arbitrary as the way some Chinese words are sounded/written.
@@craftourartout I think the point they were getting to went way over your head. Chinese characters have stuck around for far more than just their cultural heritage, they are actually the best system for the language. They are the car.
Sounds like woke ass white people blaming again. Pinyin was developed by the communist party. It was a possible solution to help the masses become literate. China had a
The complementary morphemes are actually called 同义复合词in Chinese, which means two characters with basically the same meaning forming a new phrase, setting up a mark for recognition. Like 语言，语 and 言 both means talk, but it would be confusing to say just one of them without context. 构建，架设，桥梁，道路，环境 are all similar examples. It is very unlikely to confuse these phrases with other meanings, and it has been a method used since at least 2000 years ago.
Another category called聯綿詞, like 蝴蝶, 徘徊 etc. It means a phase with more than one character and each character couldn't be separated.
For anyone wondering, at 4:28 the Japanese text in the bubble means "your mum" (anāta no okāsan)
I was expecting some sort of rickroll but that's enough for me
Definitely got it
I really like your definition of complementary morphemes, because it helps to explain why just remembering individual characters is basically useless if you're planning to actually learn Chinese. Those individual characters you know won't have any use if you don't know any 词语.
給各位正在學習中文的讀者
如果你在學中文的時候常常感到困惑
不用擔心，這很正常。因為就是母語者小時候也常常感到挫折....
然後學校的解決方式通常就是同一個字寫10遍、一個詞寫20遍、一篇文章默寫五遍Orz
这样的方法并不好，可以让孩子看看汉字的由来，再写，多种方法，要是一遍遍抄，容易没兴趣。
是的。要记住词组，也是自己组词然后写好多好多次
@@夜明沙 方法不好但有效。我还没见过哪个中国孩子因此对母语厌倦的
抄几次可以，我记得小时候都是写三次，不对的继续写，写好多次那种实在反人类
一個字寫 10 遍是有，但一個詞寫 20 遍也未免太誇張⋯⋯
（至少我自己除了被罰寫，沒遇過這種；而且那唯一被罰寫的經驗還是因為全班連坐）
不需要這樣故意強調亞洲教育的填鴨就是 😢
更不要說日本人也在用漢字，還有超複雜的書寫系統
（雖然當你會日語就會理解日文這樣寫的理由了）
（而且正體中文的使用者需要學的字數甚至比簡體中文多一些）
chinese languages works fine when people talk to eachother and sound was all we have, which word you're using can be figured out most of the times by context. the reason to have text as it is today is because all the chinese languages needed a shared medium to communicate with eachother, i think you kind of hit on this in the beginning, and a purely syllabic and phonetic language (one chinese character per syllable) i think was planned for the 3rd round of simplification if im not mistaken
I am surprised that people didnt develop more possible sounds to make communication easier. Especially because most language was spoken back in the day.
@@Currywurst-zo8oo There used to be more medials, initials, and finals in Mandarin, but they all eventually merged or got lost. There's a cool video showing the Old Mandarin, Middle Mandarin, and Modern Chinese pronunciations.
It only works on a very basic, conversational level. You start introducing more complex, academic topics or dear good, science words, and it becomes a confusing mess. That's why the literary words stay literary. You can't use them in every day speech and expect people to recognize them. Other languages don't have this problem.
Where can this video be found?
The complementary syllable thing is probably more pronounced in some of the phrases that only half of the phrase carries some meaning and the other half is just there without adding anything. For example, in the word 蜘蛛 (spider), only the 蛛 carries meaning and the 蜘 carries nothing except to make the word understandable when spoken out.
Also, the difficulties in telling apart spoken words makes some great wordplays, and some even went far enough to become more or less a meme. For example, 治愈 (curing) and 致郁 (letting down) shares the same pronunciation, with 致郁 being the lesser used phrase, and is now often intentionally used to joke about something is "disguised as being lovely (aka curing) but is actually rather sad (and can let your mood down)". This usage got popular after Madoka Magika got popular.
reduplication of syllables in contemporary Chinese is the norm especially for nouns.
In classical chinese in contrast reduplication was infrequent (and grammatical markers were different)
Despite this one who reads contemporary chinese can readily understand texts which are several thousand years old.
有一说蜘蛛在上古音中为单音节词，演化至今，逐渐拆成了双音节词。我倒是觉得意译成＂织网的珠子＂或者＂智慧的杀手＂，利用形声字体系解释更便于理解，虽然很有可能是望文生义。
@@karlriina6950 Classical Chinese, or 文言文 just to make sure we are talking about the same thing, isn't meant to represent how people actually speak, but rather to convey the meaning as efficient as possible, and you have to learn how to write in such way. While contemporary Chinese or 白话文 represents oral speaks closer, which is probably to lower the barrier of learning or reading.
Therefore there's no doubt classial Chinese can be understood thousands of years later, they are meant to be as clear as possible if the reader is fairly knowledgeful about what those words means. The issue though, is that because it's not the same as oral speech, many of the original words got wrong by people dictationing them wrong over the years, and that's made even worse when dialects changes over the years and it's harder and harder to guess whether there's an dictation error or not.
@@bo-hongli6210 我猜测的是，虽然文言会写某个发音为“蛛”的字来代表这种生物，但是念出来听不懂，所以口头上说的时候加多个字来描述，描述的内容就有可能是你猜的意译，只是后来流行写白话文了才直接照原样写。至于蜘蛛这两个字恐怕是听写的时候生造的，当然这也只是我的猜测。
Holly hecc i wonder the equivalent NND Madoka Magica meme of that Chinese word
Hanzi characters are not only building blocks for the language, but it also has the symbol quality. This is why there are so many hanzi character symbols that can actually convey the meaning like 🉑 ㊙️ ㊗️ 🈵 🈲. Whereas in English, these symbols can only be made based on abbreviations 🆘 or pictorial symbols ♐️ that are within their own independent system.
These common words in Cantonese: 劍 gim, 見 gin3, 健 gin6, 漸 zim, 箭 zin3, 賤 zin6, 鑒 gam, 諫 gan, 艦 lam. are very distinctive and easy sounds to pronounce, but in standard Mandarin they are all identical "jiàn", which takes more effort to say yet creates so much ambiguity you have to link it with another hanzi to interpret its meaning.
omg, im learning mandarin chinese so i still dont know anything about cantonese (which i wanna learn about in the future !!); do you use a 6th tone?
Same with Min and I believe a couple other older dialects. Some words pronounced the same in Mandarin used to be different, as time went on Mandarin merged the sounds together and reduced the number of possible morphemes, which increased the number of homophones. Comparatively those dialects are easier to read with a Latin alphabet than Mandarin.
I've seen expalantion of how Cantonese has 9 tones, and it basically matches perfectly with music. In mandarin you have ambiguity when it comes to lyrics because 5 tones is not enough to match to all music note transitions. However Cantonese has way more, so it can fit perfectly, removing any ambiguity. This makes writing lyrics for Cantonese songs so much cooler. Probably my fav dialect now
@@cheeseonhead is language. Written form is different. You can pronounce English in French pronunciation, but it would makes no sense. Same goes for WRitten Vernacular Cantonese
Cantonese or Hokkien should be the standard Chinese instead of Mandarin
Old Chinese had much more phonotactics with the “checked tones”(p,t,k at the end of words) and consonent clusters as initials (kl, sr, nr, gn … at the start of words), making it much richer in morphemes, and therefore less in need of noun sumffixes and complimentary morphemes.
What do you mean by Old Chinese? Do you mean Old Mandarin? Because our best analysis of Old Chinese is that it was atonal and had multiple syllables per word.
@@weirdofromhalo didn't tones come in some time during the Han Dynasty? So classical Chinese?
@@ANTSEMUT1 Our best guess is they came in around the Northern and Southern Kingdoms period, so just before the Sui and Tang.
old Chinese I think he's referring to Cantonese which due to mandarin being a foreign dialect due to foreign rule by Mongols and Manchus and Cantonese is a older dialect due to people constantly fleeing to the south when stuff goes bad, so the language has more of its roots still intact hence in hong kong we use Cantonese to teach the old poems because Cantonese sounds better and more fluent than mandarin
@@gaeboi8182 Mandarin is *not* a foreign dialect. It descends from Middle Chinese just like Cantonese does. Cantonese has changed and lost lots of features of Middle Chinese, just like Mandarin has. And both languages about about the same age. The oldest extant Chinese languages are Hokkien (闽南话) and Teochew (潮州话).
This was fascinating! It's so much fun to listen to a linguist talk about a language that I am proficient in. Learned a lot. Thanks!
These words make a lot more sense when you put them into context during conversations. But I do find misunderstanding happens more frequently compared to English or French as a trilingual person.
I find that often times context alone is enough to interpret what pinyin means. But I can def think of cases where the meaning is a little blurred. Excellent vid!
Terrible video! I don't read Chinese by Latinized words! PinYin is just a way to standardise the northern dialect and for the foreigners to understand the way it sounds. It doesn't affect how people write and how people speak when they start drifting apart.
@@locacharliewong you are correct. I don't quite understand the purpose of your comment tho.
Of course context alone is enough - most of the time context is not even needed. How else would chinese people speak to each other without writing things down then. The video is down right stupid and lacks common sense. It only explains the chinese phonetic system in an overly complicated way without sufficiently answering the question it proposed.
@@ruizheli1974 I don't get the point of counting syllables in Chinese. We combine characters to become word/words, not syllables. English put 2or3or4or more syllables together to create a word. So Chinese is putting 2or3or4or more small characters to form another character. This is how the comparison should be done. We don't consider syllables as the block of a word.
@@locacharliewong Because these people only want to learn the "Cool part" of chinese. They want to know how to write and how to write only. They don't care about talking to another chinese guy.
Notice how everything they say about chinese is kind of anchored down to the "meaning of a single character". This is only useful if they want to learn Wenyan only.
That whole explaination of "set phrases" and "complimentary Morphemes" is infuriating. I don't need to know why "zhuozi" "yizi" are easily understood as tables and chairs, whereas "zhuo" or "yi" standalone is much harder to comprehend, because guess what? It's what we call a "WORD". A "WORD" developed by mostly illiterate people which only became acceptable as written language not so long ago. Fahking surprise huh.
By the way, the complimentary phrase mechanism is very much used in indian languages too - putting together two cosely related words (tall-hefty to describe a big person, etc). but, it is done for emphasis. Or to form more descriptive, or new compound words. This is the 'samas' mechanism - ligating words to form new words
Technically ber, per, mer do actually exist when pronounced in the broader northern dialects of Mandarin (in which Beijing is a pronunciation basis for the standard form). Its a system of erhua where you kind of fuse the ending with the er sound like the phrase 没门 which should be "mei men" will get pronounced as "mei mer".
that would be 没门儿
@@鹤绒 if you wanted to be even more technical, you would write it with the 儿. But along with words like 一点 and 一会, in the North, you'd pronounce it with the 儿 regardless of you explicitly writing it or not.
@@PeterLiuIsBeast I see 🤧mayb cuz I'm southern so 没门 looks more literal without儿 in text
Unfortunately it serves no meaning besides making you sound like a pirate. If only dian and dianr were actually different words.
@@aoikemono6414 not actually true. Not every character pronounced men, dian, hui adds an er to it. Thats why there's a difference. For Qian Men, the historic city gate in Beijing, does not add an er because it's a place name gate. But an actual front door (also qianmen)would have er added to it. There is actually a whole set of rules.
Should have mentioned the guy that wrote a whole story using characters that corresponded to the sound "shi" of any tone.
As a Chinese Native speaker, that's pretty interesting to see how to analyze these thing we had used to it. I like it!
Starting off with Japanese: OK this is fine, as long as I can avoid Kanji.
Some time later: Dammit Kanji is actually the thing making this *easier*.
The "complementary morphemes" phenomenon is also exists in Vietnamese. It's so often that Vietnamese learners ask why we hame so many words that have two syllables with the same meaning.
Also, although Vietnamese is considered monosyllabic, there are many compound words of two or three smaller words because of the same reason.
Even as someone whose mother tongue is Chinese, this is so frustrating to explain the "complementary morphemes". You did the impossible, dude. Great job!
2:06 of course ''knah'' is an English word! It's the dialectal/obsolete spelling of ''nah''!
I have been working as a Chinese teacher for several years. Couldn't explain this as clearly and concisely as you did. Thanks!
is your city in lockdown?
THIS IS AN AMAZING VIDEO THANK YOU
象形文字是排列组和，你可以把她想象成一个拼图或积木。她能激发多面体会，形，音，感。。字母文字是音节的排列组和，激发的体会会相对单一。
Great video I am learning chinese and this was super interesting, and this give me hope for me on learning chinese. You see, one thing they say about why is hard to speak and listen chinese are the tones and they are right, but this make me realice you just cant combine a tone with whatever you want and so there are very limited sounds you will actually say and also listen so once you get used to that 1500 sounds you could speak and recognice basically everything. This also made me understand why chinese people present themselves sometimes saying with what characters their names are written
for those wondering why 冥 means dark, just look at the oracle inscription then you can see it’s a picture of the delivery moment of a baby from the nurse’s perspective, that the bottom part 六 is actually the nurse’s two hands, and the top part 冖 is the opening uterus and the middle part 日 of course is the baby’s head coming out
If i didn't know that one i'd say it looks like a six under a sun under a roof (i know a bit of kanji but not nearly a considerable amount)
@@julianvincent2119 yes it is a six 六 under a sun 日, however it is written in 隶书 clerical script, which is a calligraphy developed during 秦 and 汉 dynasty, that are a thousand years later from 商 dynasty when the oracle inscription originated. You have to check the oracle inscription to get what it is really about.
Picking on error! At 6:35 "颜" is not "grind". I think you meant "研".
But still a great video!
this video deserves more likes
unlike the other video about Chinese language, this video actually help ppl to understand why this language works like that and how
I imagine the phonotactics of the Sino-Tibetan languages changed over time. Modern Tibetan still has consonant clusters and Hakka and Cantonese can have word final consonants etc.
Don't imagine. We Chinese do not create new words that way. No matter how many words we newly create, we do not create by adding alphabets, but writing a new character with strokes. Nothing relates to the sound nor syllables. This is the wrong path. This video is stepping on the wrong foot from the start of the dancing to the end.
@@locacharliewong Chinese adds Latin letters to words such as X光，拉K，AA制，B站，just to list a few, some speakers even add whole words in the middle of Chinese sentences
比如“哦瑪嘎”
Oh definitely, especailly if you consider how long ago the sinitic branch and the tibetan branch diverged and went on their separate ways with limited linguistic contact. With Hakka and Cantonese it's actually not too different of a story, low levels of linguistic contact means that they naturally drift/evolve, and at different rates towards different directions. It is said that consonant clusters were present in proto-Sino-Tibetan, and that word final consonants were a common feature in most branches of sinitic languages about 1000 years ago, and things like Hakka, Hokkien, and Cantonese preserved these word final consonants, which are also associated with a different tone (maybe not actually a tone in the true tonal aspect, but has more to do with the duration), the checked tone. And when we go into Hokkien it's another mess because it has an extensive literary vs colloquial reading system, meaning that a lot of characters can be read multiple ways, kind of like Japanese Kanji(which I don't know enough about so I might as well be wrong), but according to linguists they come from different periods, kind of like different layers of rocks from different geological periods.
@@locacharliewong Until the 20th century, the majority were illiterate, so to completely throw the importance of sound out the window is a bit ridiculous. Writing was invented to show speech, not the other way round
@@cpkingadam5 So, if the sound of a Chinese character is so important, is there any sound shifts in any Chinese language makes the Chinese character write in a different format? I agree that Chinese spoken languages have been sound shifting for many years, also with their written style. May you name some good examples?
Just like Academy Français and so did the German did changes becoz of their pronunciation changes.
Oh you lovely humble bastard...
0:07 *Apologizes for bad pronunciation*, *Pronounces 普通话 perfectly immediately after*
efforts appreciated.
As a mandarin speakers sometimes we just ask what they are referring to when words are phonically the same and both fits in both context (with different meanings) but these rarely comes up unless its a name or something. Also we are all multilingual so we replace some words with English or Cantonese (or Cantonese words or phrase that did not exist in Mandarin spoken in the mandarin dialect) so they are more distinct.
Something I wanted to say too as a Chinese: even though there are already tones, accent on certain words can still help us understand each other. For example when you say 杀鱼 as in killing a fish you say 鱼 with an accent but when you say 鲨鱼 as in a shark you put the accent on the 鲨。I remember making this mistake when I was young.
I'm native mandarin speaker. But I never heard about this.
As someone who's been learning Chinese on and off for a few years, I feel like this low number of syllables makes listening more difficult. :/ But also, I am guessing the fact that it has way fewer syllables should mean Chinese has more potential for poetry, am I right? Because I'm thinking like, fewer syllables must mean more potential for rhyming? Even more so if different tones don't affect rhyming, come to think of it, are the same syllables with different tones considered to rhyme in Chinese?
Well, yea as long as the meaning is different, I don't see why not.
The poetry thing, yes, yes and yes! ：en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingshui_Yun
It makes poetry easier and simultaneously more difficult.
Easier in the sense that, as you've pointed out, more characters making the same sound so more potential for rhyming, also like the video pointed out, there are sometimes multiple characters carrying the same meaning but sound different so more chances for you to swap in a character with the sound you need.
However on the other hand, because the spelling is very uniform (one character per syllable no more no less, and once written, each character takes up the same amount of space), that's made it possible to enforce rules on character count and their relative positions, and indeed strict rules were enforced on that regard:
most common are 5-character or 7-character poems (5/7 character per line), ofc the last character of each line must rthyme that's the minimum, but for more skilled writers there are stricter rules to follow, tone pattern (平仄 ping ze) for example, requires not just the last but every character in a line to have a sound that compliments the corresponding character in the following line.
国破山河在 (仄仄平平仄)
城春草木深 (平平仄仄平)
Sounds aside, you can map the word class or even meaning of characters too (so for example, first line 3rd character being a noun dictates that the 3rd character of the second line must also be a noun, and you can push this further by having, e.g. colour matching colours, numbers matching numbers, flowers matching birds, fire matching water/ice (things of the same class or from the polar opposite), using the same example from above:
国-城 (nation - city) 山河-草木 (mountains and rivers - plants and woods)
Much more potential for puns as well that any budding French poet would weep in awe
I'm not Chinese but many Vietnamese poets we learn about in school wrote in Chinese as well. When I learned about poetry in English, I found it lacking the perfect rhymes or rhythm that makes poetry in tonal languages almost melodic. In fact in Vietnamese, there's a style of poetry reading that's similar to singing.
This is excellent and an explanation that I have been looking for for a long time. It also clarified some issues for me, too.
Admiration from a native Chinese speaker within the mandarin Chinese region. Your pronunciation made almost no difference from the native speaker except for some intonation(which I cannot refers to from several words). Pretty impressive in terms of what a foreigner generally can do.
语言学这方面他应该懂得还挺多的吧
Lol only Chinese people can speak Chinese properly! Spoken like a true monoculture society.
What I gather from this is that while technically every syllable in Chinese has its own meaning, in practice it works like every other language where only full words have meaning, and the syllables making up those words don't really.
Also, I love that you make sure to pronounce everything correctly. I don't know how good of a job you're doing, because I don't speak Chinese, but as a native German speaker, I get very annoyed when English speakers don't even try to pronounce German words how they're supposed to be, so I'm grateful for your efforts.
This is interesting. I feel like English speakers are often “forgiven” when they couldn’t pronounce other languages right. A lot of them don’t even feel bad about it. It might have some political/economic/historical implications lol.
Back to Chinese: for most Chinese characters, they alone have one or few(related) universal meanings. The confusion only happens when a syllable is given without any context or set phrases.
I am also grateful. For all the Mandarin phonemes, he was either spot on or very/quite close, which was surprising to me since he does not speak the language even though I probably shouldn't be bc he studies linguistics and can/should be able to replicate phonemes fairly well.
@@twinkybirky1291 Your comment reminded me that learners/non-native speakers of English are often forgiven for not replicating the accent perfectly (or having thick accents which can be hard to comprehend if you aren't used to their way of talking). Probably has to do with social politics because those speakers are oftentimes minorities and laughing at the way they speak can be seen as discriminatory. However, if, for instance, an English speaker tries to seriously learn another less-commonly spoken language and can't mimic the accent very well, it's acceptable to laugh and think it's "funny" (not necessarily in a mocking way, but it can definitely be demoralizing for the learner and discourage them from continuing to learn the language) or "let's just talk in English instead."
To clarify, I do agree with your premise that English speakers who aren't actively learning the language are "forgiven" with not pronouncing things right. I also know that there are lots of English speakers that do laugh at those with heavy accents/odd pronunciation (though that's generally seen as immature/mean and looked down on, even if being mean or disrespectful was not the intent).
@@twinkybirky1291 Just my opinion, but I think it's common sense to "forgive" someone, English speaker or not, when they pronounce your language wrongly...
Amazing job explaining! I really feel this is totally what I wanna say but I just can't explain it on English because it isn't my mother language, so I just can't express everything what I want to say, really helpful!
其實你可以直接用你的母語寫，RUclips自會提供選項翻譯到我們的語言
That's great and all, but every other language has homonyms, too, and sometimes very confusing ones, such as "outstanding" in English: "The teacher told John that his assignment was outstanding! John was surprised at this praise, since he was pretty sure he forgot to hand in the assignment." Non-visual context _has_ to be enough in a spoken language, and if it's not, then the language is just bad due to these ambiguities, and will likely evolve to rectify that, given enough time.
Hmm that's an example of sarcasm. Both "outstanding"s are identical words, having the same meaning but used in ironic and unironic ways. They are not homonyms, which share the same pronunciation or spelling but different meanings. (they're, their, there)
@@michaelhong2565 I think he means that outstanding is used in the neutral sense like a latin _vox media_ where it just means that it stands out. The positive form of "outstanding" comes from the same hyperbole that made words like "awesome" (which meant what is now meant by the much uglier "awe-inspiring") just mean "really good".
@@michaelhong2565 No, "outstanding" can mean either "very good" (e.g. "what an outstanding performance!") or "not done yet" (e.g. "your rent payment is outstanding"). The teacher was telling John that his homework hadn't been done, but John misunderstood and thought the teacher was complimenting his work.
I misunderstood. Thanks for the info
I don’t think you’re appreciating the reality of how many more there are in Chinese than in most other languages.
Your example of "blanicking" reminds me of one of the most recently created characters which has a unique pronunciation "duāng", which is a combination that didn't exist or was very very rare in the past. It fits the Chinese phonetactics and although I can't type the character because it's not yet encoded in the computer character libraries, the character for this is also a new combination of existing elements in a way that fits conventional patterns.
One important method people use to distinguish words with same or similar pronunciations is to add some redundancy wherever there may be confusion, or use a synonym that has a different pronunciation. A fluent Chinese speaker is usually aware of this and would add the complementary information when necessary. e.x. “这篇报道非常yǒulì” could either mean "This article is very beneficial." OR "This article is very powerful." So to avoid this confusion a speaker would say “这篇报道对弱势群体非常有利 This article is very beneficial towards minority groups” OR “这篇报道非常有影响力 This article has very powerful impact/influence.”
It is actually quite simple, because the same situation exist for English as well. In my example I used the word "article", but this could either mean "a piece of published writing" OR "a small item" in this context. So to avoid confusion, often people would complement this by saying "This news article..." or by substituting for "This item..."
Written Chinese does not have this problem, which is why formal and professional writing is usually substantially more concise. Generally if you write something in professional format it would be shorter than the verbal expression and much shorter than English. 书面语言不具备同样的问题，因此专业性文字往往简短许多。一般情况下书面表述比口语更为简短，且显著短于英语。(These two sentences express the exact same idea)
Regarding your first paragraph, another example could be the biangbiang noodle in Sichuan. Biang is not a thing.
@@masterimbecile It is lol, it's an actual character but it's too compact so you can't really type it out. It's THE most complex character on record.
原来如此
We don't use article like that. Article by itself always refers to a written article. Article as an item is usually qualified. "article of clothing". You don't just say article by itself. Not in modern usage. Many dictionaries are dated and devoid of the proper or common usage for words and their nuances.
0:13 you just DESTROYED that word (and i never knew it existed)
Fantastically interesting video! I've thought upon this frequently during my studies of Chinese, and this linguistic analysis as really helped bring 明 to the 冥 of this subject :) hehe
For "i" in pinyin, there are actually 2 pronunciations based on the consonant. You should represent them in 2 different columns in 3:48.
Usually it has an 'ee' sound, represented as [i] in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), but if put behind 'c', 'z', and 's', its sound changes to something between an 'ee' and an 'oo', represented as [ɹ̩] in IPA. If put behind "ch", "zh", "sh" and "r", it sounds very slightly different, represented as [ɻ̍] in IPA.
You're right. Pinyin is developed so it have very little conflict with the old "Fanqie" system, which had been the only phonetic system in every dictionary till the end of Qing Dynasty. Great tool for Chinese learners but not a great romanization IMO.
first time I've seen that transcription. Another common transcription is syllabic fricatives [z̩ ʐ̩], so [t͡sʰz̩]
@@ruizheli1974 I think pinyin is a pretty good romanization in that it's compact. Terrible for learners, but very quick and condensed once you know the system and what syllables are possible.
@@kori228 No it's not. It's meant to be the equivalent of bopomofo. As a study tool it's pretty good, respects the old Fanqie system, almost all chinese kids learn that before learning how to write. On the other hand when used as a romanization system then the result is that 1). you have vowels like i & e pronounced differently depending on which consonant it follows; 2). When a character is romanized from Pinyin the tones are not represented. 2 Chinese provinces are both "Shanxi" without tone signals - That's just the start of the problems.
@@ruizheli1974 The argument about tone is not a fair argument, because by nature latin romanization *_can't_* account for tone without diacritics or numbers. Your example of "Shanxi" is not the proper romanization, it excludes the tone marks vs , which is not a fault of pinyin, but rather because most languages don't use diacritics and don't have easy access to them so it's often excluded.
For i and e, I pose this question back to you, how would you improve it? For i, you could maybe do syllabic z, so 次 would be tsz, but not everyone pronounces it as a syllabic consonant. And the retroflexes get really bizarre, 吃 would have to be maybe . These are effectively the same vowel, just with a slight articulation change, kinda makes sense to write them the same.
And what about e? The schwa pronunciation in 等 would be closest to , but that's already used for an actual like 當. You could double up and use for 當 and use single for 等, but people are still reading it wrong anyway. It's worse in open syllables when you have say 大 daa vs 德 da. People are going to confuse with vowel length, not vowel quality.
0:55 I don't know any Chinese, but I know some Japanese and there are some interesting parallels here. You've got the same issue with romanization, of course, but I noticed "language" is quite similar.
In Japanese, 語 is used as a suffix for "language". Like 日本語 meaning "Japanese" or 中国語 meaning "Chinese".
If we assume 語 is actually the same character as the one Chinese uses, just the Japanese version, then the word for "language" actually uses the same two characters... but the other way around. In Japanese, "language" is 言語.
Edit: Actually, pairing things to clarify a meaning is also something that is done in Japanese. It's nowhere near as common as this video makes me believe it is in Chinese, but it definitely happens. The word 魔 for example, is pronounced "ma" and means "demon" or "devil". But "ma" is rather common and if you just say "ma" on its own, you wouldn't be understood. So instead, you use 悪魔, pronounced "akuma". Combining the characters for "evil" and "demon", you know what kind of "ma" you are talking about. In written language, and sometimes in spoken language, 魔 can be used on its own too, but 悪魔 is used more commonly to avoid ambiguity.
Actually Chinese have 言語 too, just used much less than 語言. Sometimes words can be switched around and still means the same thing or sometimes switch around and it means different things! Confusing, I know lol
@@AliceSiuASK Oooh, interesting. I can't think of an example in Japanese where you can switch around the characters and it still means the same thing, but I can think of a few where the meaning changes.
王女 (oujo; princess) and 女王 (joou; queen) for example.
What I find hilarious, though, is when a compound is a valid word in both languages, but means something entirely different. For example, the word for "letter" in Japanese is 手紙 (tegami). And apparently this means "toilet paper" in Chinese.
There is also a, in my opinion, funny parallel where one of the words for the female reproductive organ in German means "insect" in Japanese (虫). And such a word in Japanese means something like "fault" in German (das Manko)
For a while I only knew about one direction and thought this was mildly amusing... but then I realised it goes both ways.
Yes, most Chinese words are 2-syllable exactly for that reason. Now, imagine removing Chinese characters and replacing them with Pinyin. This would force Chinese to make most words even longer, 3 to 4 syllable would become the norm.
@@Yotanido Yeah, 手纸 is literally translated into "hand paper" 😂
@@Yotanidoand 勉强 has entirely different meanings in japanese and chinese
A really good video! I just wish maybe the zhuyin system would have been presented along with the phonetic limitation you prevented.
Zhuyin is an older transcription system used in China in the past (but still used by Taiwan instead of Pinyin)
What's neat about zhuyin is that the letters are phonetically bound
Ang is one letter
Ei is one letter
So writing already presents the limitations.
ALSO the letters are aligned on a keyboard so that you have all the initial sounds on the left side of the keyboard
Vowels that can be connected with other vowels like w, ü, i in the middle, and then final vowels and nasals at the right side, like ei, eng, an and a
I started crying at point 2 😪
I am learning Japanese, and I thought that I'll learn Chinese after this, but this just scared the hell out of me.
Don't worry, it's not as bad as it sounds 😅 Sure, on the surface it seems like one syllable can have a bajillion different meanings, but when you hear it in a sentence or a set phrase it will probably have only one possible meaning.
Don’t worry, you will find your way. It’s just explaining Chinese with English system makes it seemed more complicated because Chinese doesn’t have an systemic way to analyze the language.
Learning Chinese and I came across this when I was listening to audio pronunciation, you really have to take note of the tones but even that isn't even enough at times, that being said I will see the characters SC and I'll be able to recognize it's meaning. I'm still a beginner so I have more to learn. Also wow I didn't know that about Japanese tbh, thank you for the video!
For any non chinese speakers: Speaking Chinese is not as hard as you think. I feel like after some people watch this video, they will think that Chinese people get so confused when making conversations and always have to ask "which characters is it?" or "which tone is it?" in conversations, but that's not true. We can understand each other just fine ^^
The truth being you are subconsciously guessing and tones vary so much between different parts of China, it becomes almost useless. That's why the neutral tone exists. In fast speech, you don't even hear tones. They rely heavily on compound words and context.
Yep , as a native Chinese speaker, it really isn't that hard, context solves everything since more often than not , characters that has the same pronunciation have very different meanings , and assuming it to mean other than the intended meaning is just unnatural in the conversation.
@@ilovemalaysia Unless one isn't good at context recognition
@@aoikemono6414 Of course you still hear tones in fast speech (??
In fact when I play this "single tone" game with my brother we often can't understand each other
@@aoikemono6414 And nobody can speak in neutral tone. It can only be used at the end of a phrase / sentence.
留洋回来的英语老师给小朋友上第一节课就从语法开始讲belike:
This was absolutely fascinating, amazed at your knowledge.
Japanese has the same characteristics and it's the reason why I love it so much, the world of wordplay is infinite, you can write "mom and dad" as "leaf, bee, ground", it's also very visual and contextual, ALL names have meanings and the names of places are usually literal, Hiroshima for example, it's literally translated to "round mountain", or Tokyo "capital city", or aomori, "blue forest" (cuz in Japan there wasn't a word for green long ago so they bundled green and blue into the same word)
Isn’t hiroshima “wide/broad island”?
And Tokyo should be “east capital”. Kyoto 京都 is “capital city”
Again with the misconception about 青. No, it originally meant green/dark coloration. It became blue in the _modern day_ because 緑 became the common word for green. You'll still see ao/aoi/青 used to mean green in all kinds of words related to nature.
@@weirdofromhalo Ah so thats why as a chinese speaker i got confused when they said 青 means blue
@@ihatenfts501 因为中国传统的绘画中，石绿（孔雀石）是绿色，石青（青金石）是蓝色。而后来一种更便宜的替代方案--靛蓝，代替了矿物颜料，而它是深蓝色，所以“青”就被改变为浅蓝色或蓝绿色。
Thanks for covering the issue of Chinese having very few morphemes. I didn't know it was as low as 1,200.
Here's another aspect of written Chinese I'd like to learn more about. Seeing as Chinese has very few morphemes, many words are expressed as compounds, right? I gather that typically a Chinese word is two morphemes -- two syllables, and two characters when written. And written Chinese doesn't use spaces. So what difficulties are there in parsing a written Chinese sentence, over and above those with other languages?
I am a native Chinese and I don't really think written Chinese sentences are difficult to parse. I think I think it is actually easier to parse a written Chinese sentence than a written English sentence. the things is that Chinese characters are so fucking distinct, so they just literally pop out when I read the sentence. I can understand the general meaning of a sentence just by looking at the vocabularies without carefully reading through a sentence people can even read a sentence without it being in the correct order.(just a theory :another thing is that there are very few grammatical particles in Chinese, so the vocabs pop even more and you don't have to spend your brain power to analyze the grammar)
Those are just phonetically distinct morphemes. It has plenty more that aren't but do become distinct when used in a compound like the majority of words are. Also, no. It's easier to parse hence why it doesn't need spaces.
Assumingthefactthatyouhaveadecentknowledgeofenglishthissentencewrittenin"scriptocontinua"shouldnotbetoohardtoparse. Ifwealsoaccountforthefactthatmostwordsareoneortwocharactersitonlymakesitlesseffortbecauseyou'renotscanningovermanyletters.
1. with modern chinese - Parsing's not a big issue because it'stypicallyselfevident (plus there are much less potential gaps in a Chinese sentence). Although you can always write a couple dirty jokes with sentences that can be parsed in more than 1 way.
2. with traditional written Chinese (Wenyan) - Parsing can be a huge disaster for inexperienced readers because the traditional style is as concise as it can be. Some very old books doesn't use stop mark at the end of a sentence. In some historical dictionaries or more recently printed version of old scripts, a common practice is to underline names of people, place or books to avoid confusion.
As a student of Chinese of just a few months, I can tell that Chinese is not difficult to parse once you've mastered the most common words, so that you don't even have to read them when you read in mind and you just focus on the important nouns, verbs and adjectives.
我的母语是普通话，听你从另一个少见又专业的角度，分析这门语言，感到很有意思。我在学英语时，一开始最困惑的是口语的连音省略，普通话中几乎没有这种情况。当时我常以为是自己耳朵不好。后来看了一些视频，才了解到很多语言词汇连在一起说的时候，声音会发生变化。每个人都天然地接受自己的母语，并没有思考里面的特征和逻辑。
This was very interesting. I studied Mandarin for some time and found it interesting that I seldom run into new sounds after the first few months, but often run into new characters.
Isn't there a paradox of sorts in how this situation came to be? I normally think of writing as being a later development to the oral language, but what does this mean for how the spoken language and written languages evolved? Seems like this implies they've diverged a lot? Eg. A single character has a lot of meaning but a single syllable does not. I'm left more puzzled than I started ;) thanks.
I am in no way an expert but china probably has one of the longest history of co-evolution of written and spoken language, so that they probably had way longer time to morph into a common language. Still, it probably was mostly a privilege of the rich to read and write (like everywhere in human history), so the common language probably evolved in a very small, homogenous circle leading to a high stability and rather little variation.
Moreover, this also circumvents the fact that china has an almost uncountably large amount of distinct local dialects which sometimes have hugely different grammar and vocabulary amongst themselves. Mandarin was created (from the basis of mostly the Beijing/Peking dialect) to have a common language everybody could (and should in the movements for national unity) speak, similarly to RP English.
If you study Mandarin, why don't you think of every Chinese single stroke as an alphabet? But a consonant and vowel to create a word? This video is nonsense! Measuring exact feet square by using meter-scale ruler.
@@waterunderthebridge7950 Or more time to diverge into two parallel systems?
@@locacharliewong for interpreting a single character your suggestion makes sense, and that is how I think people are taught. However it's still true that the language is full of homophones, and that doesn't change if you interpret the characters the way you suggest. In many languages with regular spellings homophones are written the same way.
@@rimoll Those were the days when I was using Nokia 3310 phones, I DID NOT type in Chinese characters by PinYin. I typed in STROKES! And that is how Chinese people think of how to write a word/character. We do not care about how it sounds nor syllables, PinYin whatever. The sound of each character was never in the very first mind in every Chinese until President Mao says we have to latinize the word and president Zhang somehow creates a similar thing for standardizing the Mandarin dialect.
On the other hand, if you ask any Taiwanese or Malay Chinese who originally came from "Southern Hokkien" and speak "Southern Hokkien language", they will tell you at least there are great differences to say the exact same basic common wordings with using the same Chinese characters, just becoz they are the diasporas of two different cities within the same region. We just don't put the correct way of saying one character at the top priority. We don't modify our character/words by the means of reflecting how we speak the words nowadays, like Germany and France.
This is one of the main concerns when it comes to typing in pinyin. Sometimes we Chinese also rely on context clues when it comes to spoken language. It's very easy to understand what the person you are conversing with meant if you listen to their whole sentence.
讲的很好👍简单来说，就是中文文字是基于象形字慢慢演变出来的，每个文字有他不同的涵义，不同的文字结合起来又是不同的意思；这与基于拉丁语的语言逻辑是完全不同的（毕竟拼音也才存在几十年而已）xd。
This is so infuriating when you learn Chinese. " Oh, this is the 69th " shi " we learnt, hooray !"
yeah... i think there are 130 shi in the hsk
chinesezerotohero did a video reviewing ALL
ｓｈｉ characters in hsk...
Another thing about modern Chinese is that a lot of words come from Japanese, like 社会，电话，which only have the meaning as a combined word instead of individual. But they still somehow fit into the original character meanings. Like a “smart translation”.
It's like opening Word[.doc] with WPS 🤣
Just some thoughts about the 'compementary morphemes'. It reminds me of learning this in uni when majoring Chinese language and literature. Think we were learning the course 现代汉语 Contemporary Chinese. This is part of how modern compound words合成词 are structured. 联合式合成词 coordinative compound words can be made with not only synonymous morphemes 同义联合, e.g. 语言，群众，依靠, but also with antonymous morphemes, e.g. 早晚，出没，始终. There are also words consist of two similar meaning morphemes 类义联合, e.g. 眉目，领袖，and two related morphemes but focusing on one of them 偏义联合, e.g. 国家，窗户.
I'm an author, and I needed to have a Chinese character in the book with the last name that meant 'Pine Tree' and I was confused when I later double checked it and it was the word for 'Squirrel'. I thought I had messed up, but no, same word but with different context.
In this context let's say if a Chinese parent wants to name his kid after pine trees he will just name the kid "Song" instead of "Songshu". "Songshu" is common spoken language but a bit of an overkill as a name.
These two words are different tones in Chinese, so there is no problem at all. However, when English transcriptions are often omitted tones lead to ambiguity. Pine tree （松树）is SōngShù while Squirrel （松鼠）is SōngShǔ. ǔ and ù are very different in pronounciation.
In addition, from the Chinese point of view, the vast majority of Chinese surnames are monosyllabic, there are only an extremely rare number of two-character surnames, and these surnames tend to have very ancient origins. So from a Chinese point of view, whether a person's last name is pine tree or squirrel is very weird.
My advice is that if you want someone's last name to mean pine tree, please give them the surname "松"（Song) instead of "Songshu"(松树）.
First of all, surname "松"（Song) do exist in real person, though they are rare. Second, the syllable "松"（Song) itself means pine tree (in writing), and in spoken language Pine tree （松树/SōngShù) and Squirrel （松鼠/SōngShǔ) are merely explantion to the word, as 树/Shù means tree and 鼠/Shǔ means mouse. (In Chinese, squirrels are called "rats on squirrels".) If you have any other questions about Chinese, we can also communicate through email, my channel has my email address.
松鼠 squirrel (literally: TREE RAT!)
松树 pine tree (tree+pine)
They do sound alike but have different hanzi.
This is a problem for Chinese learner in the beginning where a pair of pronunciation can have different meaning, but generally speaking we only use perhaps 2-3 of them since the rest is just too "old" to use and there are other better word to use in modern language. For example, no one uses 晦冥 or 晦明 or even the pair of their pronunciation "huì míng" in modern chinese. We just use "暗" and "亮" to represent darkness and brightness. You might see them on the book but def not in daily usage, similar concepts like the word "thou" in old English.
说得太对了
It's Time to learn 文言文👁👄👁
The amount of puns you can theoretically pull is incredible with this language.
Regarding why we need characters in Chinese language, I have another important reason. Characters is the writing system we've been using all along, and I, possible the majority of Chinese-speaking people, think characters are beautiful. Pinyin is just something we adopted from English alphabet in assist of the learning process of Chinese; however, it should never replace the original language itself.
Mao Zedong preferred Pinyin, before that, there was a time when characters were taught in Zhuyin.
@@I_would_like_to_buy_an_E The same as me seeing katakana in Japanese loan words... I don't know why Japanese nowadays give up their traditional way to make up new words with Kanji... Many Chinese words came from Japan in the last century.
@@samgyeopsal569 But he failed to romanize Chinese characters. There is also a famous person in China who said that if Chinese characters are not eliminated, China will surely perish, but China has not perished because of the continued use of Chinese characters.
As a Chinese learner for 8 years, and my native Chinese teachers saying that I have excellent pronounciation, I can thoroughly confirm that your pronounciation isn't bad at all.
The only thing he pronunced wrong in this video was the "e" in "keng"
Thank you for the great video! Just want to point out that the word "huiming" is actually rarely used in modern Chinese. However, your point still holds, since there definitely exist many other ambiguous words having different meanings but sharing the same sound.
You said “phonotactics” and I literally salivated. I think I missed my calling I should have studied linguistics in college. I love having words to describe elements of speech that I’d always noticed but have never been able to vocalise