I am a native speaker of English who learned Chinese as a second language, beginning at the beginning of my university studies. I was part of the norming administration for the (never officially launched) test of Chinese as a foreign language developed in the early 1980s by a consortium of United States universities, and set the bar for all other test-takers with my reading score, and did very well in my grammar score too. For most of the 1980s, I was a contract Chinese-English interpreter for the United States Information Agency.
On Professor Moser's points:
1) Agree. Professor William Boltz points out that China missed one chance, historically, to transition to a more user-friendly writing system along the lines of Japanese kana syllabaries more than 2,000 years ago.
2) Actually, there has only been mass literacy in China since alphabetical writing (either National China's zhuyin fuhao [BO PO MO FO] system or the PRC's Hanyu pinyin system) has been used for primary reading instruction. But, yes, there has never been an extension of that use of alphabetical writing into a sufficiently large number of adult texts for the systems to become pervasive in Chinese-speaking countries.
3) Historical sound change has played havoc with the originally sound-indicating aspects of traditional Chinese writing, so, yes, one can't rely on pronunciation as a guide to what to write, nor can one reliably read aloud an unfamiliar written character in most cases.
4) The next objection only applies to native speakers of English (or another Indo-European language) learning a second Indo-European language. Or else it's a mere restatement of what is above. In fact, the many Chinese people who are not native speakers of Mandarin
(a number far larger than most Western observers guess) rely heavily on cognate features of their native Sinitic languages (Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.) to muddle through in speaking and even writing Mandarin.
5) Yes, dictionary look-up in Chinese is very messy. The best approach, and the approach taken by professional editors in Chinese-speaking countries, is to learn the alphabetic writing systems well enough for alphabetic look-up. (I have seen this done.) But one still has to be able to count strokes to look up an unfamiliar written character of unknown pronunciation.
6) A peculiarity of the modern Chinese written language is the preservation of many stock phrases and cliches from the ancient written language, which has quite different grammar and some significant semantic changes in the meaning of individual characters. A well-read reader of English can bluff through some French and some Latin, but a reader of Chinese has to deal with much more ancient language.
7) This is just a restatement of point 2 above. If there were just one or two regularly used alphabets (a situation comparable to Japanese), the official ones would be used for romanization. Hanyu pinyin is in fact very elegant, having been designed by a team of linguists from the Soviet Union and the Chinese communist movement, and I find it very easy to use.
8) Yes, that's very Anglo-centric. I know various speakers of various languages (Ibo is one example) who have thrived when learning Chinese because their native language has phonologically distinctive tones, so learning tones is no problem for them. I agree with most native speakers of English that learning Chinese tones is difficult, but I can manage to speak Chinese over the telephone. The late Y. R. Chao told a funny story of traveling to Sweden one time and failing to buy a train ticket to his destination because he pronounced Malmö with the wrong tone. (Swedish has tone, also.)
> China missed one chance, historically, to transition to a more user-friendly writing system along the lines of Japanese kana syllabaries more than 2,000 years ago.
Japan missed the chance too. You need to know those Chinese characters ("kanji" in Japanese) to be able to read, which is a shame since I never had the energy to learn them.
> If there were just one or two regularly used alphabets (a situation comparable to Japanese)
To be clear, I assume you mean the two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, which are used to support/supplement the Chinese characters in writing.
Sadly they did not give up the Chinese characters long ago.
This frustrates some Japanese people too, but most of all us foreigners, of course. They say that once you know kanji/hanzi, you'll appreciate their efficiency in conveying words and meanings though, but I wouldn't know anything about that.
Kanji aren't that bad; it just takes time to memorize them, and once you get over a certain threshold (probably around a thousand characters or so), you can generally understand most directions and signposts... anywhere in Japan, Taiwan, or China. Even though they all use different writing systems, a knowledge of any of the three is pretty valuable.
I'd never go as far as to say that I appreciate kanji/hanzi for its efficiency, because there isn't any, but there is a certain poetry to them that I do like.
> Kanji aren't that bad; it just takes time to memorize them
Yep, but I just didn't have the willpower/energy/interest.
I've heard from people who know kanji well, that when you read in kanji, you'll appreciate it how you can always quickly tell what something is roughly about, even before really reading it.
That's of course because the "pictures" convey meanings, and so on. I guess that can be called a certain kind of efficiency.
On Professor Moser's points:
1) Agree. Professor William Boltz points out that China missed one chance, historically, to transition to a more user-friendly writing system along the lines of Japanese kana syllabaries more than 2,000 years ago.
https://www.eisenbrauns.com/ECOM/_2KO0LUDAZ.HTM
2) Actually, there has only been mass literacy in China since alphabetical writing (either National China's zhuyin fuhao [BO PO MO FO] system or the PRC's Hanyu pinyin system) has been used for primary reading instruction. But, yes, there has never been an extension of that use of alphabetical writing into a sufficiently large number of adult texts for the systems to become pervasive in Chinese-speaking countries.
3) Historical sound change has played havoc with the originally sound-indicating aspects of traditional Chinese writing, so, yes, one can't rely on pronunciation as a guide to what to write, nor can one reliably read aloud an unfamiliar written character in most cases.
4) The next objection only applies to native speakers of English (or another Indo-European language) learning a second Indo-European language. Or else it's a mere restatement of what is above. In fact, the many Chinese people who are not native speakers of Mandarin
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200501/03/eng20050103_1695...
(a number far larger than most Western observers guess) rely heavily on cognate features of their native Sinitic languages (Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.) to muddle through in speaking and even writing Mandarin.
5) Yes, dictionary look-up in Chinese is very messy. The best approach, and the approach taken by professional editors in Chinese-speaking countries, is to learn the alphabetic writing systems well enough for alphabetic look-up. (I have seen this done.) But one still has to be able to count strokes to look up an unfamiliar written character of unknown pronunciation.
6) A peculiarity of the modern Chinese written language is the preservation of many stock phrases and cliches from the ancient written language, which has quite different grammar and some significant semantic changes in the meaning of individual characters. A well-read reader of English can bluff through some French and some Latin, but a reader of Chinese has to deal with much more ancient language.
7) This is just a restatement of point 2 above. If there were just one or two regularly used alphabets (a situation comparable to Japanese), the official ones would be used for romanization. Hanyu pinyin is in fact very elegant, having been designed by a team of linguists from the Soviet Union and the Chinese communist movement, and I find it very easy to use.
8) Yes, that's very Anglo-centric. I know various speakers of various languages (Ibo is one example) who have thrived when learning Chinese because their native language has phonologically distinctive tones, so learning tones is no problem for them. I agree with most native speakers of English that learning Chinese tones is difficult, but I can manage to speak Chinese over the telephone. The late Y. R. Chao told a funny story of traveling to Sweden one time and failing to buy a train ticket to his destination because he pronounced Malmö with the wrong tone. (Swedish has tone, also.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_language#Sounds
9) Big deal. That's what makes Chinese fun.