> a Chinese character can have one pronunciation (two in very rare exceptions.)
That isn't all that exceptional, if you measure by frequency of encountering multiple pronunciations; 的 de/di, 地 de/di, 长 zhang/chang, 重 zhong/chong, and 行 xing/hang are all quite common in both pronunciations. However, as obnoxious as chinese script is, it's still a syllabary -- you can read it (as in, know what sounds the characters make) perfectly well for the most part without knowing what anything means. I have essentially no knowledge or experience of Japanese, but I am given to understand that it's roughly the norm for the sound of a character to be determined by context rather than by which character it is.
> The big red herring is the two syllabic alphabets, hiragana and katakana. Those are very easy. But they do become a nightmare from hell when you are faced with a script that has no kanji at all (like older video games.) The synonym problem, on a scale of 1 to 10, goes from a 12 to a 50.
People use this as an objection to spelling reform for Chinese too. How do you handle the synonym problem in speech? No matter how much trouble synonyms give you, kanji will never repay the time you had to invest in learning them (given a hypothetical world where you can choose to read anything in kana).
> When I look at Chinese ... the biggest negative it has over Japanese, is that it's intensely more difficult in spoken form than Japanese. It's very hard to hear and reproduce the tonal marks correctly, yet that can completely change the meaning of words.
Can, but if you have a decent grasp of the language and butcher the tones, nobody will misunderstand, for the same reason that they often don't bother to mark tones in pinyin.
> And with so many similar sounds, you end up with poems like this
That poem was written specifically for a political battle, to make the argument that characters shouldn't be reformed. There are no actual poems like that; notably, that poem, when read aloud, is not intelligible Chinese. So all it's really doing is showing that Chinese characters can indicate a superset of the language.
> 的 de/di, 地 de/di, 长 zhang/chang, 重 zhong/chong, and 行 xing/hang are all quite common in both pronunciations.
Ah, see I only know around 30 readings for Chinese characters (since I don't trust any Japanese onyomi at all.) Those are indeed some common ones to have two.
But let me show you how horrifying Japanese can be: 生 can be read as セイ, ショウ, い.きる, い.かす, い.ける, う.まれる, う.まれ, うまれ, う.む, お.う, は.える, は.やす, き, なま, なま-, な.る, な.す, む.す, -う, いき, いく, いけ, うぶ, うまい, え, おい, ぎゅう, くるみ, ごせ, さ, じょう, すぎ, そ, そう, ちる, なば, にう, にゅう, ふ, み, もう, よい, りゅう -- and there's more, if you count nanori. 生糸 is kii-to (silk thread), 生絹 is su(tsu)-shi -> suzushi (silk product), 生理 is sei-ri (physiology), 生温い is nama-nuru-i (lukewarm), 生き方 is i-ki-kata (way of life), 生得 is shou-toku (inherit), on and on. So now try and guess how to read 芝生 (lawn) ... give up? shiba-fu, of course.
> How do you handle the synonym problem in speech? No matter how much trouble synonyms give you, kanji will never repay the time you had to invest in learning them
I definitely get what you're saying here. I'm not defending hanzi/kanji, but I think it helps a lot that speech is usually in person. And in modern times. On a Game Boy game, it's on a 160x144 screen with four colors, and the king is asking you to "Go find <XYZ>", where XYZ can mean 20 different things, and could be any of those in this fantasy world. If your boss at work asked you to find XYZ, you could immediately rule out the fishing net, the broadsword, and the carburetor as being unlikely items your boss would ask you for. It's probably either the pen or the sign. Worst case if you can't guess, you can ask him which one he means, "the writing XYZ (pen) or the shop XYZ (sign)?" I definitely enjoy when the kanji in written form rules out synonyms for me, even if I can't see kanji in speech.
The usual pro-kanji argument, which I do believe holds up a bit, is that it makes reading a lot faster, and allows you to condense a lot more text into the same visual area. Great for old video games and comics, at least. The downside to me as a learner is that I find myself saying the kanji in their English meaning because I don't remember the proper pronunciation, but know what that kanji by itself means.
But yeah, it would certainly be a lot more approachable to have the languages written in pinyin or hiragana+katakana, so long as they used spaces between words (and sadly, written Japanese without kanji do not.) And technically, with digital works, you can certainly transform text like that. There are some nice Firefox plugins where you can hover over Chinese characters to see their readings.
> That poem was written specifically for a political battle
Oh, that's unfortunate. I thought they were just being silly, like English alliterations where every first letter in a sentence starts with 'A' or whatever.
I think we're agreeing back and forth on the qualities of hanzi vs kanji. As far as I've ever learned, Japanese has far and away the worst writing system in the world. I want to say a little more about the poem.
I went looking for the place I originally learned about it, and didn't find it. Wikipedia has some things to say about it, but I'm not sure how trustworthy it is. :/
Specifically, WP states that the poem was written to make the political point that ancient Chinese shouldn't be transcribed but should be written in characters forever. It makes the extremely reasonable argument that the poem's author was in fact backing a scheme to romanize modern Mandarin. However, it also says that the poem is written in ancient Chinese, which doesn't seem right to me. In written form, this poem is perfectly intelligible to modern Chinese people, whereas actual classical poems are just as intelligible as a passage from Beowulf would be to you (I'm assuming you're not trained in Old English). Then again, the only thing I know about ancient Chinese (that 是 is a demonstrative meaning "this") does appear to be true within the poem.
Regardless of the author's motivations, it's still a cool piece of text. It's been quite popular with the Chinese people I've shown it to; they especially like to try to read it aloud (although I've never heard anyone actually get through the whole thing).
That isn't all that exceptional, if you measure by frequency of encountering multiple pronunciations; 的 de/di, 地 de/di, 长 zhang/chang, 重 zhong/chong, and 行 xing/hang are all quite common in both pronunciations. However, as obnoxious as chinese script is, it's still a syllabary -- you can read it (as in, know what sounds the characters make) perfectly well for the most part without knowing what anything means. I have essentially no knowledge or experience of Japanese, but I am given to understand that it's roughly the norm for the sound of a character to be determined by context rather than by which character it is.
> The big red herring is the two syllabic alphabets, hiragana and katakana. Those are very easy. But they do become a nightmare from hell when you are faced with a script that has no kanji at all (like older video games.) The synonym problem, on a scale of 1 to 10, goes from a 12 to a 50.
People use this as an objection to spelling reform for Chinese too. How do you handle the synonym problem in speech? No matter how much trouble synonyms give you, kanji will never repay the time you had to invest in learning them (given a hypothetical world where you can choose to read anything in kana).
> When I look at Chinese ... the biggest negative it has over Japanese, is that it's intensely more difficult in spoken form than Japanese. It's very hard to hear and reproduce the tonal marks correctly, yet that can completely change the meaning of words.
Can, but if you have a decent grasp of the language and butcher the tones, nobody will misunderstand, for the same reason that they often don't bother to mark tones in pinyin.
> And with so many similar sounds, you end up with poems like this
That poem was written specifically for a political battle, to make the argument that characters shouldn't be reformed. There are no actual poems like that; notably, that poem, when read aloud, is not intelligible Chinese. So all it's really doing is showing that Chinese characters can indicate a superset of the language.