Talk:Written Chinese

Menchi, please don't forget to add in this entry that, in areas where the Cantonese language serves as a formal, or official language, "Modern Standard Written Chinese", though based on Beijing Mandarin, still efficiently serves as the literary, and does so without leading to "Cantonese-Mandarin bilingualism" in the normal sense. In other words, "Modern Standard Written Chinese" is not only the written standard for Mandarin dialects, but also Cantonese and many other major Sinitic languages, perhaps with the exception of extremely divergent ones like Minnan and Dungan.

Chinese written characters are used in Minnan. Curiously Dungan isn't very linguistically divergent from Mandarin (much less so than Cantonese), it's just convention that they don't use characters.

The written language is an important unifying factor for speakers of Sinitic languages world-wide, despite the fact that these socially, regionally and culturally diverse groups sometimes can hardly communicate with each other colloquially.

Actually no. Written Chinese is not much harder to learn than any other language. I've known several adults that have mastered it.

The language does not have to be learned entirely as wrote; rather, the underlying logic and structure are apparent to the initiated. Given its depth and sophistication, it is considered challenging for native speakers to master, and difficult or impossible for foreigners who learn it in adulthood.

It depends on what one means by mastering the language. If mastering the language means being able to use all the different forms of written Chinese, then I don't think that there is a single human being that has mastered it. I would dare say that it is only an extremely small number of native Chinese speakers that could write a coherent eight-legged essay in wen-yan (5-10% at most).

On the other have if you mean mastering the language, being able to have a working functional knowledge of Chinese (i.e. being able to write a letter, read a newspaper etc), I know a lot of adult learners that have been able to get to that level of Chinese. My experience has been that the writing system is much less of a barrier to English speakers than the pronounciation. I know a few native English speakers who can't speak the language very well, but read and write classical Chinese much better than most Chinese.

One other thing, I also know quite a number of Chinese who only learned how to read Chinese after becoming adults. Keep in mind that mass literacy programs were only introduced in the 1950's, and it's not uncommon for someone (especially females) to grow up without learning to read and write the language. -- Roadrunner

My experience with adult learners of Chinese is that the written language is not particularly difficult. What is almost impossible for them to get write if they were originally English speakers are the tones.

I think one reason people say Chinese is "more difficult" is that pronunciation and the shape for most characters are not related.

In an alphabet language, people's ability to write is governed by their ability to spell (some memory and some inference to pronunciation). In Chinese, their ability to write is governed almost entirely by their memory of the character shapes.

This also hinders the ability to read. In an alphabet language, an illiterate speaker needs to learn pronunciation in order to be able to read. In Chinese, an illiterate speaker needs to memorize shapes of sufficient characters in order to be able to read. Of course, both speakers will need practice. --voidvector

An idea: How about making all Chinese characters used in Wikipedia articles link to the proper unicode.org pages? For example, the beginning of the article about Wushu could look like this:

Wushu (武術 - wu3 shu4).

Or would this type of external linking be wrong?

- Wintran 12:58 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

Should add more on Chinese poems, Chinese constraint writings, etc. --Wshun

Chinese poems are, without a doubt, an integral part of Chinese written language, but it deserves it own page on Chinese poetry. You don't need to be comprehensive at the 1st try, of course. Just cover what interests you.

I have no idea what "constraint writings" refer to. Please add it.

--Menchi 02:02 27 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Oh! Sorry, that should be constrained writing. Wshun

Input requested at Talk:Chinese_language#Rewrite needed. --Jia ng 13:54, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Written Standards

The article mentions "formal written Cantonese" in doing a comparison to "colloquial written Cantonese." To my knowledge, "formal written Cantonese" is standard written Chinese. However, when reading it, Cantonese people will pronounce the characters using Cantonese rather than Mandarin. I don't think it's necessary to make "formal written Cantonese" a distinction. --Umofomia 09:33, Feb 11, 2005 (UTC)

Actually I decided to make an edit that clarifies the situation much better. --Umofomia 09:56, Feb 11, 2005 (UTC)

On a similar note, what is the difference, if any, between the terms "古文" (gǔwén) and 文言 (wén yán), and why does the page say 文言? In my experience, studying classical Chinese, the term was always the former. siafu 04:51, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think both terms are used pretty much synonymously, however in my experience, the latter term 文言 has been more common, especially when talking about it in the context of being a written standard. 古文 may be more common when talking about it in the context of literature. These are just my observations though. --Umofomia 05:42, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Direction?

I read this page to find out which direction chinese is written in. The page says nothing about this, but I went on to find some sort of answer in Chinese character. I'm thinking something short should be said about it in this text also, but since I know nothing about written chinese I don't know what to make of this:

On a larger scale, Chinese text is traditionally written from top to bottom and then right to left, but it is more common today to see the same orientation as Western languages: going from left to right and then top to bottom.

I'd try to write something to that effect myself on this page, but I don't know how to interpret the above. What is the larger scale where chinese is written top-bottom,right-left? Other countries than the PRC? The Internet? Maybe someone with better knowledge about this could write something about it on this page, and maybe change the Chinese character page to be more clear? I may try writing something myself, and welcome peer review of that in that case. – Foolip 19:37, 12 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Punctuation

I don't see anything on punctuation here, which is an important aspect of written language, and differs a little between Chinese and English. I know I few things, but does anyone know of an online source with full information on ，、。【】〈〉etc? — Chameleon 14:16, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I wrote them at Punctuation#East Asian punctuation. --Menchi 14:20, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Great. I've linked to that now. — Chameleon 14:27, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Chinese written "language"?

As mentioned in Talk:List_of_official_languages_by_state#Official_Written_Languages, I am trully wondering why this article is being refered to as a language, along with the associated confusion over whether Vernacular Chinese is a "language" or not in its own right (Classical Chinese appears to suffer from less self-identity problems). Is it agreed amongst linguists that the Chinese writing system is a language? If so, what is it called in Chinese, because I dont seem to know this despite having writtern in Chinese since decades ago?--Huaiwei 21:20, 7 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Should be 書面語 or 書面中文. See {{漢語}}. — Insta ntnood 21:46, 7 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Written Chinese spoken as acrolect?

The article says " Standard written Chinese spoken aloud using Cantonese pronunciation (usually with some colloquial words substituted in) serves as an acrolect used in newscasts and other formal contexts. ". In fact the situation is not very true for Cantonese. Newscasts are seldom in written language being spoken, although the range of vocabularies used is affected by the written language. It's used in public announcements tho, say, in underground stations, but people would just consider it as plain reading from the written text, not speaking. As far as I know this is more true for Min Nan, that newscasts in Min Nan on CCTV are written Chinese spoken with Min Nan pronunciations. — Insta ntnood 21:46, 7 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]