<story><title>If English was written like Chinese (1999)</title><url>https://zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cynicalpeace</author><text>I studied Chinese for 2 years in University and hitchhiked mainland China in 2019.&lt;p&gt;A common misconception is that Chinese &amp;quot;makes more sense&amp;quot; because many characters look like what they mean. So you can guess what a new character means just by looking at it.&lt;p&gt;A downside is that for many Chinese characters it becomes impossible to know how to pronounce a new word. I&amp;#x27;ve seen adult native speakers ask how to pronounce a new word many times. Oftentimes there are hints in the characters (the &amp;quot;phonetics&amp;quot; mentioned by the writer), but usually not enough to guess correctly.&lt;p&gt;English is also bad at this, ironically.&lt;p&gt;Spanish is really good at this, if not the best. When you come across a new word, it&amp;#x27;s 99.99% of the time pronounced how its written.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gomox</author><text>&amp;gt; I studied Chinese for 2 years in University and hitchhiked mainland China in 2019.&lt;p&gt;You owe us at least one fun story from mainland China in 2019.</text></comment>
<story><title>If English was written like Chinese (1999)</title><url>https://zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cynicalpeace</author><text>I studied Chinese for 2 years in University and hitchhiked mainland China in 2019.&lt;p&gt;A common misconception is that Chinese &amp;quot;makes more sense&amp;quot; because many characters look like what they mean. So you can guess what a new character means just by looking at it.&lt;p&gt;A downside is that for many Chinese characters it becomes impossible to know how to pronounce a new word. I&amp;#x27;ve seen adult native speakers ask how to pronounce a new word many times. Oftentimes there are hints in the characters (the &amp;quot;phonetics&amp;quot; mentioned by the writer), but usually not enough to guess correctly.&lt;p&gt;English is also bad at this, ironically.&lt;p&gt;Spanish is really good at this, if not the best. When you come across a new word, it&amp;#x27;s 99.99% of the time pronounced how its written.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>localfirst</author><text>this was a big reason why Korean alphabet was invented because the literacy was so poor for the reasons you mentioned.&lt;p&gt;Lot of terms&amp;#x2F;loanwords from Chinese language can be found in all neighbouring countries but you&amp;#x27;d have to be part of the artistocracy to get the schooling.&lt;p&gt;Japan still uses it but North Korea banned it out of the gate. South Korea slowly phased out use of traditional chinese characters. It was common to see Chinese characters up until late 00s but definitely used a lot more sparingly.</text></comment>