LogFAQs > #960963432

myzz7 posted...

isn't the alphabet just symbols symbolizing ideas / objects / actions and stuff? not phonetics? that takes a life time to learn and would be fucking just inefficient in general.

Actually the majority of characters are phono-semantic compounds. They have a semantic component or symbolizing what they mean (usually this is the radical or ) and a phonetic component or telling you how to say it (usually another separate character that is pronounced the same or similarly).

Sounds pretty cool right? Well everything I just said is only true for Classical Chinese, a long dead language we aren't even fully sure of the pronunciation of and Mandarin is using characters not for their meaning for a variety of functions not present in classical Chinese (such as and ) and the phonetic component is often barely or not even remotely connected to the Mandarin pronunciation. The phonetic component actually more often predicts the Chinese derived readings of characters () in modern Japanese than it does Mandarin.

So yes characters are pretty difficult to learn, but overall I prefer them to English spelling. And between Japanese and Chinese I just kind of prefer Chinese characters overall as a writing system. They convery information very efficiently.