so if i learnt all the characters i could read a chinese novel?

It depends on what you mean by "learn all the characters".  Chinese has grammar, despite people claiming otherwise.  If "learn all the characters" means that you learn a lot of vocab as well as the functions and sentence patterns around the grammatical usages of the characters, then I guess that should be enough.  Learning English meanings is not, though.

An educated native Japanese speaker who looks at a text in Chinese (i.e. not just a sign or something) will get essentially no comprehension at all.  Maybe they can pick out a word here and there, but it won't even be enough to get an overall idea of what the piece is about.

For instance, here's the first sentence of The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun:
我要給阿Ｑ做正傳，已經不止一兩年了。

My Chinese is a little rusty but among the grammatical features you would have to know here are that 要 (in this case) expresses volition, 給 marks an action done for someone else, and 了 is a complicated particle that mark completion, among other things.  It's also much harder than in Japanese to tell where the words start and end, and often grammar is more dependent on word position than any explicit markers.  For instance, a little bit later in this first chapter: 阿Ｑ不開口。  This is a pretty simple sentence that's "Ah Q didn't open his mouth", but there's nothing explicitly marking where the verbs and subjects are.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2012 August 18, 1:28 am)

Fortunately most characters in Chinese only have one reading, although two is somewhat common (especially if you take tones into account).

But no, English glosses aren't enough because you wouldn't know the sentence patterns and the way the grammatical markers are used.  That first phrase again:
我要給阿Ｑ做正傳
Just knowing the English glosses would not prepare you to parse this kind of expression, because you have to know that 給 is going to involve a subject, a recipient, and a verb.  If I'm reading this correctly, this is "I (我) want to/will (要) make (做) a true story (正伝) for (給) Ah Q (阿Ｑ)"  English glosses are definitely not enough to parse that.

(Also about the linguistics professor; linguistic specialists can be surprisingly ignorant about East Asian writing systems -- linguistics tends to focus primarily on speech, and so most linguists don't know any more about writing systems (especially East Asian ones) than your average person with no linguistic background.)

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2012 August 18, 2:03 am)

oefirouz I listened because I knew nothing about Chinese.

Thanks YDTT, that is very helpful. Thank you too Kitakisune

You are obviously right about professors, it is one of my pet hates when academics speak "authoratively" on areas they know little about/aren't qualifiedin .

Last edited by HonyakuJoshua (2012 August 21, 2:56 am)

So are you trying to argue that you can learn to read Chinese just by learning English glosses of the characters? 

I think your literal -> embellish -> rearrange is only possible because you already know what the sentence means, because you know Chinese grammar.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2012 August 21, 3:51 am)

If you're reading a book or comic where a character is irritated with another and says "給我離開!" (give me go away!), it doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to figure out what that means.  And a few more encounters with [給 sb vb] is really all it takes to figure out what that word pattern means.  No grammar explanations needed.

yudantaiteki wrote:

OP can do whatever he wants.

No I can't. Thanks for answering my question  YDTT. I will be involving reading several grammar books in my study of written Chinese.

For what it's worth I side with YDTT on this having used rote learning to get me though exams etc.

Jimmyseal I am going to work now so don't expect a quick reply, but I think it is telling the example you use is from a comic book where images give clues to meaning. I think if it were a novel grammar would be needed?

Last edited by HonyakuJoshua (2012 August 21, 5:15 am)

HonyakuJoshua wrote:

Jimmyseal I am going to work now so don't expect a quick reply, but I think it is telling the example you use is from a comic book where images give clues to meaning. I think if it were a novel grammar would be needed?

Comic books are a valuable learning tool and they do make a lot of things easier to guess from context, but the example I used can apply just as well to prose as to a comic, as long as you understand enough of the surrounding text to understand the context.

actually i wasn't familiar with the term "glosses" either. But judging by the other posts it just refers to texts in one language with another language inserted to show what the words mean. I've never used such texts, but it seems no different really from just using a dictionary or parallel translations.

Chinese is a bit unusual since it's an isolating language -- no verb inflections, no noun cases -- and a lot of the grammar seems really intuitive to a native speaker of English, for purely coincidental reasons. (I'm still quite a beginner, so maybe there's some really gnarly stuff I have yet to learn about, but it seems much more intuitive than Japanese was.)

What you can't get just from learning isolated hanzi are:
-loan words; there's no easy way to read 浪漫, 幽默, 咖啡 just by reference to the meanings of the hanzi
-compounds that are semi-idiomatic, or otherwise not easily interpreted just by knowing the meanings of individual hanzi; the difference between 不错 and 没错

I think if you know enough Japanese to have a basic sense of how compounds are former (adjective + its opposite, descriptor + noun, verb + noun, etc.) that will take you a certain distance, but there are also a lot of compounds that are idiomatic or partially idiomatic. And there are a lot of cases where you just need experience and vocabulary to get a feel for when a character is serving a grammatical function and when a character is being used for its literal meaning (a good example is 地, which means 'earth/place' just as in Japanese, but also marks adverbs much like -ly in English.)

JimmySeal wrote:

I really don't think that's the case.  In the embellish part, all I did was fill in verb tenses, articles, prepositions, plurals and infinitives, all of which are pretty obvious.

It's funny because it's the exact opposite of common sense linguistics. Function words are harder, if not impossible to deduce, whereas content words are the easily replaceable ones.

kitakitsune wrote:

Can someone explain to me why bopomofo never caught on for loan words in Chinese like katakana did in Japan?

I have no knowledge of the historical reasons, but I could hazard a guess that it didn't fit with Chinese's all-hanzi aesthetic. Japanese had strong reasons to intermingle their text with kana that extended well beyond just writing loan words.

When I was in Taiwan, I did occasionally see signs here and there that used zhuyin, probably just for effect.  And I've seen a Taiwanese TV drama where a character reads some Japanese text that he has marked up with zhuyin, so the concept of using it to read foreign words isn't completely alien to them.