I talking good english you

[Peegee]

I have a passive obsession for things I have no skill in. I like math and sciences, and for the purposes of this thread, I also like english theory. When people reference grammar rules that I haven't heard of (and I'm 28 and went through school), my interest piques.

I'm genetically Chinese, and personally believe Chinese to be one of the most inefficient (written) languages ever. There is absolutely no way of knowing what a written word means if you haven't seen it before. You need a person who knows the word (either a more learned person or a scholar) to teach you that word. Also since most words are new words, and not combinations of other words, you have to learn several thousand different pictures (and about 50 000 words) to know the language.

Which is not to say english is any better. Maybe it's just me. In fact I'm going to blame it on me. I have no idea how I managed to learn english because there are aspects of it that make me feel like I only adopted english by mimicry. Yesterday I had to look up the word 'Euchre' because its spelling is not immediately obvious to me. Thank God I knew the word started with the letters 'euc'. There are lots of other examples, and probably tens of thousands of english words I've never even heard of (and this claim ignores archaic english words).

If you have any background in linguistics, any insight into english's development would be great. And also, am I just being silly when i say that chinese is woefully complicated? There's talk that China will become an economic super power and we may need to learn to read and write in that language. I dread that day.

[rubah]

english = german + 500 years + french + 500 years or something along those lines.

[Peegee]

english = german + 500 years + french + 500 years or something along those lines.

This means nothing to me since I love the french and the germans. Are you saying that english is epic win?

[rubah]

what do you mean it means nothing to you :O

[Peegee]

I'm not sure what saying 'german + french' + 500 years implies. I mean I get that english has german and french elements, but that's it?

[rubah]

those are the two largest influences, yes.

[Jojee]

I like math and sciences

That's because you're azn

And Chinese is 100x harder than English, fo sho. ^_^

[Breine]

If you already know one European language other European languages are usually easier to learn. They're all similar in one way or another, which is pretty neat I guess. Of course, this doesn't include Finnish, which is just super-complicated!

Also, learning Chinese would be coolio! Even if it's a very large and complicated language. There's a big difference between useful everyday speak and knowing a language completely, with all the unused and extremely rare words included, which isn't really that useful unless you study linguistics.

[aquatius]

I'm learning Japanese and I've found I have a knack for it. I'm going to study Chinese at uni, but with Japanese it will be slightly easier and it sounds like an interesting, albeit overcomplicated language.

[Krelian]

I'm no expert in English language history, but rubah's super short version sounds good

Chinese is complicated. But not only because of its writing system, but also because it's a tonal language. I'm pretty sure most people here weren't brought up learning such a language and most probaly didn't grow up with Chinese characters either. The grammar is sometimes giving me a headache too, mostly because it is just so damn different from European languages. Some aspects are really simple, though.

[Levian]

I don't really care for English grammar. It doesn't interest me, and I can easily fail at the easiest grammar such as writing "we was", which would be the correct way to say it in Norwegian. I always aced grammar and spelling in Norwegian. I like to think I'm quite good at spelling English words though, even if I don't always know what they mean.

[rubah]

I don't really care for English grammar. It doesn't interest me, and I can easily fail at the easiest grammar such as writing "we was", which would be the correct way to say it in Norwegian. I always aced grammar and spelling in Norwegian. I like to think I'm quite good at spelling English words though, even if I don't always know what they mean.

I'm pretty good at spelling french words, but I put the spaces in the wrong spots so I don't actually recognize the words.

[Clouded Sky]

Yes, Chinese is a difficult language, but that's not to say it is not withouth benefits! You have to look at the ideas of reform that have been proposed and you know peopel are going to both love and hate the idea of keeping a character system. Pinyin was introduced to make the language easier to read, yes, but the difficulty, then, lies in comprehension.

What's interesting is that with Chinese characters, there is a lot of evidence that say they access a direct semantic pathway in the brain, or actually go straight to their meaning. I've also found a lot of evidence to a phonological route as well, so I can't say they're all semantic. I've got a bit of personal experience here as well because I've been looking at the usefulness of Japanese kanji, which are mostly imported Chinese characters. Sometimes they have phonetic clues, sometimes semantic, sometimes both, sometimes neither. However, Japanese is a slightly easier language to read (imo) because of kana particles serving functional roles in a sentence while kanji carry the more weighty "meaning."

It's a lot more difficult with Chinese because you don't have that phonetic alphabet. In English, there's an MLE, or Missing Letter Effect. It's a bit more complicated than this, but basically it says that you miss letters in function words because you're able to read them as a whole unit as oposed to single letters. (For example, if I told you to count all the e's in this paragraph you'd probably miss a few unless you examined it pretty closely, and these would occur most often in "the" as your brain would read it "the" and not "t-h-e." Anyway, that's one of the advantages to the English language system, the efficiency with these words, and I think that parallels Japanese funtion particles pretty well.

The real problem with English is the inanely large number of possible sylables. So many of the same letters can be put together in similar ways to make completely different sounds, and while you might get some benefit from visual representation of knight and night, in spoken language everything is based on context.

This brings us back to why Chinese does have a few upsides. The actual gauntlet of possible phenomes is pretty small, and you can differentiate them with tones. If this were written phonetically (and remember, writing systems always come AFTER a language has been put to use.) it would be an entirely unusable system. Therefore you can disambiguate with a large selection of characters.

The downside to this is having to learn all of them.

In 2007 Charles A. Perfetti published a study about students learning Chinese as a second language. Using a stimulus onset asynchrony test (they sit the kids at a computer, have them stare at a screen, flash a priming character that is either phnoetically, semantically, orthgraphically, or not, related to a target character that will be shown next. This happens very quickly and they time the student on how fast they can correctly name a character.) What they found was after one term of study students were getting the most faciliation out of orthographically similar primes, but after two terms they got faciliation from both semantic and phonetic primes, and interference from orthgraphic. You can corroborate this with other studies to come to a final conclusion that these characters really are useful once they are learned.

An adult reader can use these characters to quickly access a lexical threshold that results in faster comprehension than a purely-phonetic language. It's just a lot harder to learn them initally, and I think that's why everyone says Chinese is just so hard to learn. There's a lot of memorization, but down the road it just makes you that much more efficient.

So no, I don't think there is any reason to change Chinese, but as far as it becoming a world standard, I think English has too much of a lead. English can be confusing and imperfect, but it has its reasons to stick around as well.

[Kirobaito]

Rubah basically has it correct. West Germanic tribal languages + Latin = Anglo Saxon + 500 years = Old English + French = Middle English + 500 years = Modern English.

Basically, West Germanic tribal languages took words from Latin to form an Anglo-Saxon language. They invaded Britain and there the language consolidated within itself to become Old English (which 'Beowulf' is written in). The Normans conquered Britain in 1066 and brought their French (called Anglo-Norman). Over the years it combined with Old English to create Middle English ('Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', Chaucer). In the 15th and 16th century, slight changes due to emigration from the Black Death resulted in a switch in vowel pronunciation which brought Early Modern English (Shakespeare). That underwent little changes until we get what we have today.

[Polaris]

I know Portuguese, French, Spanish; German and English.... trsut me German is not like English, not a bit! Everytime I speak German I give 3 mistakes in declinations, one in Akkusativ and the other in genitiv and probably the verb's preposition won't be correct! German is a language that takes time, lots of time and above all, dedication! French is good and Spanish as well but that's because I am portuguese and it's easy for me! If you'd learn Latin you'd understand a lot about the essence of words.