I dont know whats worse, learning to spell English if you are a
Chinese speaker, or the brute force of learning the meaning of roughly
two thousand characters to become literate in Chinese if you are an
English speaker. After that they are combined into n-tuples to form
other meanings.

Jim

On Jul 21, 8:05 am, Lewis Perin > wrote:
> The Immoral Mr Teas > writes:
>
> > > Pinyin is handy. It's far much harder to associate sounds with
> > > characters when you're not given any kind of transliteration system
> > > that makes sense. ( ... below ... )
> > > I always had to learn characters the hard way by
> > > memory - without any kind of tranliteration.
>
> > The only way which worked for me (or nearly worked). Characters
> > (symbols) carry meaning and any transliteration only approximates
> > pronunciation.
>
> Sure, characters often carry some meaning, but rarely the *whole*
> meaning. And the phonetic components of characters, where they exist,
> are often an imperfect guide to pronunciation. To take just one
> example, the glyph for Bai2 (white) is the phonetic component of Pai1
> (to pat.)
>
> In a way, the problem is similar to the problem of spelling in
> English, where words' spellings crystallized at various times in the
> last several hundred years. Real-world pronunciation, though,
> continued to change, leaving us English speakers with spellings that
> are bitterly mocked by nearly everyone except native speakers with a
> gift for spelling.
>
> In Chinese characters, I think the problem is even worse. The
> characters were codified, for the most part, long before English
> spelling was, and since then both the pronunciation and the semantics
> have drifted.
>
> /Lew
> ---
> Lew Perin /