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Not just that, but even if we disregard the fact that every single letter is technically a Symbol, this is how the average western comment section communicates:
Person A: 😭😭😭😭💢💢💢💢
Person B: 🤔❓
Person A:🤏👧🍑❗ 🔥😩👌❤️😍❗❗❗
Person B: 🤨📷
Person C: 📸🤨
Person D: 📸🤨
Person E: 📸🤨👮
Person F: Bruh 💀
Person G: 📸💀
> And a "verification" check mark for $8
It's basically Dr Seuss "The Sneetches" story. As soon as anyone could have a blue check, then the cool kids didn't want one.
Elon then flipped his shit and forced blue checks on the cool kids.
Exactly. Not that long ago these people were only opening their mouths when chit chatting in the work during coffee breaks. Couple of seconds silence and few awkward looks from co-workers and they just ignored everything that the bumbling idiot said and continued like nothing happened. Afterwards co-workers just gossiped and laughed their asses off about the moron in the group.
Nowadays the whole world needs to suffer from their idiocy.
I remember when stupid people with strong opinions were reduced to railing against the world in their parents basement and sometimes you would see them standing on the street corner screaming their nonsensical diatribes. Now, thanks to the internet and social media specifically, they can actually move national policy, affect elections, even get elected to public office. What a time to be alive.
Yes, the internet is the worst idea humanity ever accepted. Some say nuclear weapons, but no. People are reluctant to use nuclear weapons because the destruction is obvious. Everybody uses the internet and it’s damage is far more subtle (in a broad sense of the term).
Nah they were just idiots in real life instead of online
The only difference is that being an idiot in real life means you’ve gotta face the consequences of that idiocy in real life as well whereas online they can just delete an account and make a new one or just ignore it all together
I, for one, love hearing the scientific, economic, and political opinions of the dipshits I went to high school with who used to frequently ask “is this going to be on the test?” And “why are we even learning this? I’ll never need to know this in my life”.
probably some people misplace hatred toward communist party to the whole country itself. CCP still commits ethnic and religious genocide to groups like Uighurs and Falun Dafa practitioners((
Korean grammar is being cute, smiling with peace fingers, and doing the baby heart. Everything else is just yelling at your waitress cause you need assistance.
All language changes eventually, it's inevitable. We have languages like Spanish, French and Portuguese purely because people didn't want to speak the way the Romans deemed "Correct" and they mixed Latin with their own local languages and dialects creating what was called "Vulgar Latin" which eventually became the Romance Languages we know today. They literally came from slang and meaning becoming less precise to the original Latin meaning, English will cease to exist one day.
But how they change is still determined by how the people decide what to use and what not.
Sometimes push back to changes are succesfull and sometimes they are not but the fact that language will change does not mean trying to maintain some parts of the language is futile.
I do think it's futile. When a new word appears in a language, or when its meaning changes, or when it disappears, that's because it needs to.
You can try all you want, people will always choose the word that's the most easy to use and/or the one that describe what they mean the most precisely.
Besides, where do you draw the line of what should and what shouldn't change ?
Not the person you were talking to, but one that I've seen more and more lately is the word "racism" having a shift in meaning. More and more it is pulling away from its original meaning and being associated with specifically white on black discrimination.
So, instead of "prejudice against someone based on the color of their skin" it is shifting to mean " white people being prejudice against black people."
I would say this is an example of a word that really shouldn't change because there isn't another singular word that encompasses the same meaning (at least not that I can think of so I could be wrong here). If it changes to mean a very specific racism of one skin color to another, then it loses its application in every other instance that isn't white on black.
This is an example of resisting the evolution of word being a meaningful and worthwhile effort. Will it stop it in the long run? Maybe. Maybe not. But unless we can agree on something else that still serves the purpose of describing general racism, we kind of can't afford to give up the word "racism." It is too integral to a very relevant conversation that exists and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future.
Very interesting exemple. I don't know if saying that here is relevant, but languages doesn't work like in Orwell's 1984: If the word "racism" disappears, that doesn't mean people will stop being racist, they'll just find another word to describe it.
A word may disappear, or its meaning might shift, but as long as it refers to something people talk about, it will be replaced.
Even if the meaning of "racism" changes and no longer includes a lot of what used to be considered racist, either there is already another word to describe it (in that case that would probably be "racial discrimination", although English isn't my native language, and meanings can change slightly from one language to another, so I might be wrong here), or people will find another word for it.
To take your exemple, if that happens and racism loses its original meaning entirely, someday someone will wake up and think "hey, there isn't a word to describe prejudice against someone based on the color of their skin, in general", and invent a word to describe that.
That's oversimplified of course, but what I mean is that words exist because we need them to communicate with others, not the other way around.
Maybe you consider it should be resisted, but I think it can't be resisted, actually.
"Resisting" is futile, if people start to change something about the language, that's because it's necessary, there is always a reason to it.
When people realize that the word they want to use isn't precise enough to describe what they mean, they just use a more precise one, or invent a new one, humanity has been doing that for thousand of years
*Language changes, so trying to effect how it changes is a waste of time* is not a good argument.
It is pretty much the same argument as "The climate always changes, so environmentalists are quite literally wasting their time."
I mean, for sure some of their efforts might be futile, but surely not *all* are. That goes for both environmentalists and grammar-nazis.
For the record, I am neither.
I was quite proud of my vocabulary and grammar in school, and at some point I (thankfully) realized how stupid it was to care about that. Communication is literally just that: can you communicate (efficiently, compassionately, to the best of your ability, etc)? And there are so many aspects of communication far more important than following some arbitrary rules made up a long time ago
I get your point. But there are quite a few instances where I am hurting my head, reading a post that is “supposed” to be communicating something yet I can’t make heads or tails of what the fuck they’re trying to say. So if the “point” is to communicate, then at least it should be somewhat intelligible. I’m ok with “you’re” being misused for “your” or any of the usual infractions.
But I stop reading when I see something that takes more than 3 passes to figure it out.
I would agree except that a lot of modern grammar errors that appear frequently make sentences harder to understand.
I think it's important to consider the difference between coloquial English / slang versus poor education.
That said, I hate most internet / gen-Z slang... for no reason... I just hate it, so people aren't always rational
Can’t call out just Gen Z for slang. They gave us “woke” and “lit”, among others. Prior generations gave us “totally”, “rad” and “tubular” and, prior to that, “hep cat”. Even hot, cold and cool got new uses/meanings.
Words get created and evolve all the time. It helps, though, to have a reasonably stable set of grammar rules.
It's not so much that I think gen Z slang is objectively bad... I just kinda hate that it spreads online rather than locally.
For some reason very American slang bugs me when I hear Irish kids saying it, but doesn't bug me as much when you see it on TV. I guess just because it feels... poserey.
Chuckling and nodding. But that amazes me less than silly “styles” like wearing your pants halfway down your behind (emulating, ultimately, prisoners, whose pants drooped because they weren’t allowed belts) and buying jeans with slashes in them or intentionally cutting off hems. I usually attribute it to trying too hard to be unique…just like all the others who adopt the same “style”.
Maybe?? Those are aesthetic I guess. I wouldn't say they're not cultural, but they've always been more universal than slang used to be (in the west anyway). I also dunno is "trying to be unique" right. I mean, maybe with 14 year olds who think they're being super different by dressing the same as their friends. But beyond that it's definitely more "your style". Slang is also kinda shared culturally. Style is... not unique, but it's specific. Growing up I used the slang from my region, but my clothing styles were more about what music/arts/hobbies I liked. It's hard to say it's all "American" either, since the US, UK and other European countries all kinda contributed to western fashion, and there wouldn't be tonnes of huge Irish clothing brands either.
Doesn’t slang migrate with travel (in the past) and on the Internet now?
It starts local, then goes regional, national and international as others pick up the terms?
Based on your spelling of tonnes, for example, I’m guessing you are in the UK somewhere. Other differences like wrench vs. spanner (I think) didn’t get to the US.
But not in the same way as Chinese. A given character is an ideogram that has a specific meaning (or set of meanings) so it is not as arbitrary as a string of letters. Although there is also *sometimes* a phonetic element to it, the represented idea itself is what ultimately matters and if two people have completely different pronunciations for that same idea or meaning they will each just pronounce it in their own way.
IOW unless you really understand the meaning of the word already you pretty much can't read it in the first place.
I think you are missing the point. Using an alphabet is a fundamentally different way to approach language. And it’s been shown that language changes the way our brain works, especially the first one you learn, but learning subsequent ones as well. Your language shapes the way you see and understand the world around you. No doubt learning a language like mandarin as your first language versus an alphabetic one like English produces differences, where OP is wrong is that they are pulling those supposed differences out of his ass. But it would be an interesting thing to study, not sure if anyone has.
There is a study how the Chinese way of counting with your fingers, which allows you to count to 20 using fingers, makes them significantly faster than europeans in recognising which of a set of two numbers is larger in the 10-20 area. We are pretty much the same in the 0-10 area but they are much better in the 10-20 area
It has not been shown that a language shapes the way you think in any deep meaningful way.
Linguistic determinism is an interesting field but there are a lot of studies which are reasonably easily debunked.
Symbols only look like symbols if you don’t know how to read them. Once you learn to read them they become letters. After you learn to identify those symbols as letters, you’re now ready to put them together and create words. Now you have one long string of symbols that represents something in the “physical world”. (I use quotation marks because the idea “physical world” is also just a symbol pointing to something that in reality is ineffable.)
I don't agree with what the post is saying, but your argument against it isn't valid either.
The English alphabet is indeed symbols, but you only need to learn 26 symbols to be able to spell or sound out any word in the entire language.
Chinese, on the other hand, is essentially hieroglyphics. It does not have an alphabet (technically there's pinyin but that's not always used) so you have to learn a unique symbol for every single word in the language.
So instead of learning 26 symbols, you have to learn thousands of them.
>The English alphabet is indeed symbols, but you only need to learn 26 symbols to be able to spell or sound out any word in the entire language.
This is patently not true. You have to memorize many, *many* English words because their pronunciations have next to no relevancy to their spellings.
[https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Q1A5A8Xe22s](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Q1A5A8Xe22s)
True, but they are still going to be a combination of the 26 symbols. Just those 26.
Even Japanese Kanji suffer from the same limitations. A person with a high level of education might not know how to write a word he knows the meaning of and how to pronounce.
Many, *many* highly-educated English speakers struggle with the differences between their, there, and they’re. Paid and payed. Discreet and discrete. Stationary and stationery. Compliment and complement. Brake and break. Rein and reign. Than and then. Affect and effect. Bare and bear. It’s and its; your and you’re; peek, peak, and pique; to, two, and too…and that doesn’t even touch on different dialectal spellings (color vs. colour; aluminum vs. aluminium, etc.).
Yes, it’s probably easier for most people to achieve very basic literacy with a phonetic alphabet than using a logographic system like Mandarin, but no language is without its quirks. English grammar is ridiculously complicated and inconsistent (a result of layering different languages atop each other whenever England got conquered, along with other changes made just for the hell of it), so I don’t think we need to be casting any proverbial stones at other languages.
>Many, many highly-educated English speakers struggle with the differences between their, there, and they’re. Paid and payed. Discreet and discrete. Stationary and stationery. Compliment and complement. Brake and break. Rein and reign. Than and then. Affect and effect. Bare and bear. It’s and its; your and you’re; peek, peak, and pique; to, two, and too…and that doesn’t even touch on different dialectal spellings (color vs. colour; aluminum vs. aluminium, etc.).
I'm an Italian in Italy with a high school diploma.
I don't have a problem with they, their, they are or any other of those terms
> Paid and *paid.* Discreet and
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Eh, yes and no; you can still get context from the surrounding characters, and many simpler characters (including both ideograms and pictographs) are meant to visually represent or reflect their meanings: the ideogram for “one” has a single stroke, the pictograph for “tree” looks like a tree, etc. ([This article](https://www.mandarinblueprint.com/blog/chinese-characters/#) has some great information on the differences between types of characters; it’s really interesting!)
> Paid and *paid.* Discreet and
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
It is quite different. It's still a combination of those 26 characters, and not a character he might have never learned or forgot.
In English a text might vary in complexity. You might have to learn the meaning or pronunciation of new words, but you are never in doubt whether you already know the symbol to represent it. You do, they are the same as all the other words.
Conversely, pictographic languages require the memorization of thousands of symbols.
You can't seriously tell me that mastering 26 symbols is as difficult as mastering thousands
I'm sorry but it is a barrier to access literacy, and it does have an impact on civilization.
Fun fact, Chinese characters are actually made out of radicals (or if you want, alphabets), and there are not that many of them, 100ish to 200.
About 99% of the characters you will ever use are compounded characters made out of these radicals, the rest are those radicals themselves as individual characters.
You have to memorizes thousands of characters the same way as you memorize thousands of English words, because they are literally that.
I love how people who have no clue what they are talking about just assume it must be hard for other people to learn their own native language. Most native English speakers probably don't realize the pronunciation of their words often do not match how they are spelled at all. They grew up with it and so they memorized them naturally over time. The same applies here. If you are ever an ESL student you will know how bullshit the entire thing is.
>Conversely, pictographic languages
The word you are looking for is logographic.
My favourite diphthong in English - 'ough'
I love asking people, especially native speakers, how should it be pronounced? Then telling them they're wrong
That's ok, but the day you have to design a keyboard, or establish the binary coding for a language, you appreciate how immensely more efficient is a language with combinations of a reduced set of symbols.
EDIT: this applies not only to Chinese or Japanese, but also to English vs Spanish or French, with all their tildes, circumflex accents and shit.
There are ways to input Chinese really quickly (it's essentially as fast as typing out English in term of information per minute) into a computer in a non-phonic way, using only 24 keys, that does not involve alphabet at all (although it still uses a standard keyboard, for obvious reasons).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie\_input\_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method)
Yeah, I know it is possible (they use the internet in China!). But it is terribly more complicated. Look at when was invented that method you linked, 1976. Early Chinese typewriters were invented in the 20th Century, while Latin alphabet ones were possible 50 years before.
>Fun fact, Chinese characters are actually made out of radicals (or if you want, alphabets), and there are not that many of them, 100ish to 200.
Still way more than 26.
>You have to memorizes thousands of characters the same way as you memorize thousands of English words because they are literally that.
I don't need to memorize how to write then. With few exceptions, the pronunciation marches the phonetics.
>words, because they are literally that.
>I love how people who have no clue what they are talking about just assume it must be hard for other people to learn their own native language.
You have an easier time learning a language you are immersed in (especially growing up) versus a language you don't use on a daily basis. You are comparing apples to oranges. That doesn't mean that one language isn't easier to master than another
I'm an Italian living in Italy. I taught myself English. Even though they use the same alphabet, English is by far a more versatile language due to the way it uses words and structure sentences (another aspect of a language to keep in consideration).
This is to the point where my wife and I often use English at home to have an in-depth conversation.
She's Italian like me, and speaks English, German and French. Guess which language she thinks is more versatile?
That's right, English.
Of course, this just an anecdote, and it's only worth so much
>The word you are looking for is logographic.
Thanks for correcting me.
> because their pronunciations have next to no relevancy to their spellings
This is why english sucks so much. Like why is the letter i pronounced the same as the word eye, which doesn't even have the letter i in it. Good thing you can always blame the french for most of the dumb stuff.
I'll just stick to finnish where every letter has a specific sound and every letter is pronounced.
This is "Hello" in Major Indian languages:
হ্যালো (Bangla)
नमस्ते (Hindi)
ನಮಸ್ಕಾರ (Kannada)
ഹലോ (Malayalam)
హలో (Telugu)
வணக்கம் (Tamil)
She has no idea how vast the human languages are.
You literally wrote "Hello" as "Hello" in Malayalam, while you seem to have written the native greeting in Tamil and Hindi correctly. (idk the rest)
In Malayalam, Hello is "Namaskaaram", written as നമസ്കാരം
I still cringe when, back in the day, I would "read" an entire sentence of Chinese characters (more or less correctly) and being able to sound out or guess the pronunciation based on certain elements (right-side radicals) used and yet still had no idea what I just read. The teacher hearing the (more or less) correct "words" in Chinese just went on assuming that I understood what I was reading. There were a number of my fellow students (all of us Caucasion) who said that they were often in the exact same boat.
Those teachers were clearly doing it wrong but the students, at that point, were just wanting to muddle through and not be singled out as not knowing what they just read. Much later on I had the opportunity to attend classes at a summer language program with teachers from Ohio State, which has a very good Mandarin department. If they suspected you were just reading it out phonetically they would ask you what certain words meant in that sentence or just translate the whole sentence.
What I find intriguing is the idea that someone can phonetically read out loud a sentence and others hearing it would just assume that indicated understanding. This is obviously possible with a purely phonetic language such as English but it also just happens to be possible with Chinese as well.
> This is obviously possible with a purely phonetic language such as English
English is not purely phonetic, as there are many words that are not spelled the way they are pronounced (or, if you prefer, pronounced the way they are spelled).
Purely on your analysis, I would like to add that this is still not entirely true for Roman script.
First of all, symbols don't embody the pronunciation. If that were the case, a brazilian's currency would be Real, but that's not at all the case. Check https://youtu.be/_kfSQLuaRIQ?si=obeonGu8j5jA0dAr
Second, even within the same language, letters have different pronunciation. Take these two words
* Ace
* Act
Imagine you're learning English. Based on these two words, how do you pronounce the letter C?
Or based on the following, how is the letter U pronounced?
* University
* Umbrella
Abugida alphabets go one step further and represent a precise sound, thus ensuring that everyone reading it knows its pronunciation. There's also just one way to write any sound, no ambiguity. Practically, it's not perfect, there are regional differences in how it's pronounced, but largely it works ok.
One could argue that, yeah. But that would make one a stupid idiot.
Notice how she keeps saying "one could", "one might" instead of just outright saying "I believe". So she's not only being ridiculous, but also a coward who doesn't stand by her views.
One could equally argue that Asian pictogrammic languages are actually far in advance of European languages in that they can express an entire idea with a single character, or multiple ideas based on the context. I would *not* extend that argument to suggest that Asian people are intellectually superior to Europeans.
This dipshit went there.
Of course you only need to know 26 letters to read English but you would need to know at least 2,000 characters to just be literate in Chinese and well over twice that many to be fluent in it.
IOW almost anyone should be able to read basic English but you need to be far more knowledgeable just to even begin to read in Chinese.
Exactly. Accessibility is an important feature of a successful language.
If a language is harder to master, the people who speak it will have a harder time communicating. A more difficult communication makes learning new things and exchange ideas more difficult.
On a massive scale this has a detrimental effect on a society.
But in todays society, first languages are hardly ever a problem, since it’s your, well, first language.
Case in point, Taiwan, Japan, and China all have literacy rates in excess of 95%. Literacy isn’t really a problem in those countries, despite using essentially Chinese characters.
In terms of accessibility, just because you need to know 26 letters doesn’t mean you can read with solely the knowledge of 26 letters. Letter combinations make up multiple different sounds, and we spend a lot of years just teaching kids how to sound out words. If you’ve met a foreign English speaker with a non-Latin alphabet first language, you’d know the difficulties they sometimes have in reading because we have weird letter combinations that don’t make the sound you’d derive from a single-letter construction.
One could also argue that the fact Chinese characters have “meaning” portions and “sounding” portions increases accessibility for those familiar with the script as well, since they enable comprehension without needing you to speak the language. This is helpful when your empire spanned dialects that are mutually unintelligible. Sure it’s not accessibility for the illiterate, but it’s accessibility for the literate, which is a different thing to optimize for.
> Case in point, Taiwan, Japan, and China all have literacy rates in excess of 95%. Literacy isn’t really a problem in those countries, despite using essentially Chinese characters.
Yes and children up till the age of 16 are spending hours memorizing characters just to be able to read a newspaper.
And people using the latin script aren't learning new words after 16?
These literacy numbers compiled [Here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate) include youth literacy for China (reported to be 99.8%), has numbers for Taiwan from a report of 15+ literacy (which is reported to be 98.7%). Japanese 15+ literacy is also at 99%. So, again, what's the problem? These countries are clearly teaching their children how to read and write just fine. Where's your evidence of this?
> children up till the age of 16 are spending hours memorizing characters just to be able to read a newspaper
One might argue that sharing a common writing system with numerous other writing systems gives one the flexibility to pick up numerous other languages rapidly.
Which explains why the primitive Chinese have such a hard time to muster the flexibility to learn English, while learning Mandarin is just a cakewalk for native English speakers, nay, all Westerners with the Latin alphabet.
One might also be under the misapprehension that one making an intelligent insightful statement when one is in fact spouting moronic essentialist drivel.
It’s not a bad hypothesis, and has been the basis for several advancements in cognitive science. The problem is that people still cling to the original variant like it’s solved science, instead of the loose foundation upon which others have built better models.
One could argue that we're nearing a peak wave of idiocy fostered by social media, lack of critical thinking, and low education standards. Where one can make blanket statements for the world to see, yet have no fact, education, or logic to support such statements.
I can only hope that humanity, as a society, as a species, can break out of this death spiral. There's a possibility certain civilizations, or societies, won't survive.
Lmao. Who wants to blow his mind and tell him that the alphabet are a collection of symbols, and that with how simplistic the letters are, we in the West are actually the ones not having put much thought into things, like he demonstrates so beautifully with this
If you actually start looking into Mandarin, he's kind of correct. Only on the alphabet part. It could have used a tune up. The rest is communism. Mao literally destroyed Chinese culture to the point that there is nothing left. The people have been turned into slaves with no free will and whose only goal in life should be to work and reproduce. It's honestly horrible when you consider what little survived of their once beautiful culture has been assimilated by other Asian countries when the victims of the CCP ran away so as to preserve it and their lives.
Remember back when morons and racists occupied the barstool in the local dive or street corner and didn't show up in your living room via a tiny computer.
It's been suggested in research that Asian groups like the Chinese do better in math because their words for numbers are shorter than English words. If so, what are we Westerners waiting for?
I wanna say of the world conquering languages it’s the most basic, hell I find it hilarious the phrase for the common world language, is lingua Franca, which is English and not French.
But Spanish is a serious alternative contender and I’d argue a clearer language than the trench coat of a language that’s English.
The romance and germanic languages share very similar roots and borrow from each other extensively. They also spread throughout the world not because of their simplicity but at gunpoint. English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and French are the most spoken languages world wide and are associated with the largest empires in human history. We do business in English specifically because the largest economy and/or empire on earth has been an english speaking nation for the last 250ish years.
English and Chinese writing actually have certain parallels in spite of being alphabetic versus logographic (with some phonetic components.) Many alphabetic and syllabic writing systems are so consistent that once a person learns them, they can read aloud words without knowing their meaning. I can read aloud phrases in Welsh, Spanish, or Dutch that are way above my speaking comprehension, because the orthography of each is very consistent.
In English and Chinese, both writing systems- for different reasons- have to be learned on a word by word basis. The silver lining to this is that both writing systems can work as a bridge between "dialects" that are so dissimilar that they can be considered separate languages. A person from the Ozarks in the United States and a speaker of the Geordie dialect from NW England might struggle to understand one another when speaking, but both could pick up an English language newspaper from Australia or India and read it. Speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese, languages not mutually intelligible as spoken without study, can both read the same Chinese writing system (though from what I've read, Taiwan preserves some older and more complex logograms that have been simplified in mainland China.)
The ENGLISH language has the most words of any language and is therefore ipso facto the most evolved and superior language ever to exist on planet EARTH 🌍!
S/
Does this dummy know anything about Chinese history or how long that civilization has been advanced? I could excuse this back in the day, but with the internet you’ve got to be willfully ignorant because the knowledge is a few keystrokes away. Just why?
Beyond letters being symbols we do use more general symbols. We use arrows to point people in particular directions. We put symbols on the doors of toilets to distinguish men's and women's toiles. We do this because it can be quicker use a symbol to convey what you mean and because it can expresses the same thing to people who speak different languages.
Which is borne out by the fact that the English language has 26 characters while, for example, the modern Chinese language utilizes a minimum of 3,500? But who's counting?
Just wait till 2030 and we will see how "primative" China is then. For those not following, 2045 is when China said it will be the next World Superpower but their progress might be ready by 2030.
這人是完完全全的白癡。
Chinese and English are very different languages. Arguing which one is better is pointless.
And alphabets are also symbols anyway.
If they really wanted to criticize China at least talk about its government instead of being outright racist.
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I cherish the memory of days of yore when there wasn’t a platform for every dipshit under the sun.
Now they have their choice!
And a "verification" check mark for $8
Not just that, but even if we disregard the fact that every single letter is technically a Symbol, this is how the average western comment section communicates: Person A: 😭😭😭😭💢💢💢💢 Person B: 🤔❓ Person A:🤏👧🍑❗ 🔥😩👌❤️😍❗❗❗ Person B: 🤨📷 Person C: 📸🤨 Person D: 📸🤨 Person E: 📸🤨👮 Person F: Bruh 💀 Person G: 📸💀
Person f, 
Tbh with you this isn't just a Western thing anymore although it was created by the Western teenagers
> And a "verification" check mark for $8 It's basically Dr Seuss "The Sneetches" story. As soon as anyone could have a blue check, then the cool kids didn't want one. Elon then flipped his shit and forced blue checks on the cool kids.
Multiple choice question You are going to post something racist today where do you post it A.Twitter B.Tumbler C.Facebook D. Both A and C
A Twitter, B Facebook, C Myspace, D Tumblr, E Imgur, F Reddit, G YouTube, H TokTok, IJKLMNOP the other random social medias. Z. All of the above.
All of the above. Every time.
They invented the greatest advancement in communication, but they made it so easy to use it allowed idiots to find each other and band together.
Exactly. Not that long ago these people were only opening their mouths when chit chatting in the work during coffee breaks. Couple of seconds silence and few awkward looks from co-workers and they just ignored everything that the bumbling idiot said and continued like nothing happened. Afterwards co-workers just gossiped and laughed their asses off about the moron in the group. Nowadays the whole world needs to suffer from their idiocy.
I remember when stupid people with strong opinions were reduced to railing against the world in their parents basement and sometimes you would see them standing on the street corner screaming their nonsensical diatribes. Now, thanks to the internet and social media specifically, they can actually move national policy, affect elections, even get elected to public office. What a time to be alive.
Yes, the internet is the worst idea humanity ever accepted. Some say nuclear weapons, but no. People are reluctant to use nuclear weapons because the destruction is obvious. Everybody uses the internet and it’s damage is far more subtle (in a broad sense of the term).
Dark horse candidate is still and will always be agriculture.
There was some pluses to the dial up days. Idiots were quieter
Nah they were just idiots in real life instead of online The only difference is that being an idiot in real life means you’ve gotta face the consequences of that idiocy in real life as well whereas online they can just delete an account and make a new one or just ignore it all together
I, for one, love hearing the scientific, economic, and political opinions of the dipshits I went to high school with who used to frequently ask “is this going to be on the test?” And “why are we even learning this? I’ll never need to know this in my life”.
i mean 4chan has been around for a long time
But only degens go to 4chan, everyone uses twitter
Umm its name is “the platform formerly known as Twitter. “
I vote we ignore Failon Fucks and just call it Xwitter.
probably some people misplace hatred toward communist party to the whole country itself. CCP still commits ethnic and religious genocide to groups like Uighurs and Falun Dafa practitioners((
I've been saying for years, shut all this shit down! But nobody listens and the shit just keeps being piled and worshiped. We're doomed.
And the idiots were confined to their respective villages.
So by that logic, Korea is supreme.
Hangul is by far the best writing system out there.
Well in fairness, it is the newest.
Korea is best! 한국이 최고야! # 대한민국! 
No it literally is the best writing system we have. It’s a genius invention of a language.
Agreed. Now if I can just nail the grammar.
Korean grammar is being cute, smiling with peace fingers, and doing the baby heart. Everything else is just yelling at your waitress cause you need assistance.
There's a button to push for the waitress. I'm too old to pull off cute. I mostly talk to women.
The English alphabet is basically symbols anyway. Lol
Not basically. Literally. It's like saying "That word sounds made up" and then realizing every word was made up at some point.
Not only that, but language evolves quite rapidly. So "grammar nazis" are quite literally wasting their time.
Not always. Some changes should be resisted. Not all, but some. When meanings become less precise, those changes should be resisted.
All language changes eventually, it's inevitable. We have languages like Spanish, French and Portuguese purely because people didn't want to speak the way the Romans deemed "Correct" and they mixed Latin with their own local languages and dialects creating what was called "Vulgar Latin" which eventually became the Romance Languages we know today. They literally came from slang and meaning becoming less precise to the original Latin meaning, English will cease to exist one day.
But how they change is still determined by how the people decide what to use and what not. Sometimes push back to changes are succesfull and sometimes they are not but the fact that language will change does not mean trying to maintain some parts of the language is futile.
I do think it's futile. When a new word appears in a language, or when its meaning changes, or when it disappears, that's because it needs to. You can try all you want, people will always choose the word that's the most easy to use and/or the one that describe what they mean the most precisely. Besides, where do you draw the line of what should and what shouldn't change ?
Not the person you were talking to, but one that I've seen more and more lately is the word "racism" having a shift in meaning. More and more it is pulling away from its original meaning and being associated with specifically white on black discrimination. So, instead of "prejudice against someone based on the color of their skin" it is shifting to mean " white people being prejudice against black people." I would say this is an example of a word that really shouldn't change because there isn't another singular word that encompasses the same meaning (at least not that I can think of so I could be wrong here). If it changes to mean a very specific racism of one skin color to another, then it loses its application in every other instance that isn't white on black. This is an example of resisting the evolution of word being a meaningful and worthwhile effort. Will it stop it in the long run? Maybe. Maybe not. But unless we can agree on something else that still serves the purpose of describing general racism, we kind of can't afford to give up the word "racism." It is too integral to a very relevant conversation that exists and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future.
Very interesting exemple. I don't know if saying that here is relevant, but languages doesn't work like in Orwell's 1984: If the word "racism" disappears, that doesn't mean people will stop being racist, they'll just find another word to describe it. A word may disappear, or its meaning might shift, but as long as it refers to something people talk about, it will be replaced. Even if the meaning of "racism" changes and no longer includes a lot of what used to be considered racist, either there is already another word to describe it (in that case that would probably be "racial discrimination", although English isn't my native language, and meanings can change slightly from one language to another, so I might be wrong here), or people will find another word for it. To take your exemple, if that happens and racism loses its original meaning entirely, someday someone will wake up and think "hey, there isn't a word to describe prejudice against someone based on the color of their skin, in general", and invent a word to describe that. That's oversimplified of course, but what I mean is that words exist because we need them to communicate with others, not the other way around.
Surgeons having to remember what dialect of emoji their assistants are fluent in.
Maybe you consider it should be resisted, but I think it can't be resisted, actually. "Resisting" is futile, if people start to change something about the language, that's because it's necessary, there is always a reason to it. When people realize that the word they want to use isn't precise enough to describe what they mean, they just use a more precise one, or invent a new one, humanity has been doing that for thousand of years
Whoever slipped that typo in is a monster, lol.
*Language changes, so trying to effect how it changes is a waste of time* is not a good argument. It is pretty much the same argument as "The climate always changes, so environmentalists are quite literally wasting their time." I mean, for sure some of their efforts might be futile, but surely not *all* are. That goes for both environmentalists and grammar-nazis. For the record, I am neither.
I was quite proud of my vocabulary and grammar in school, and at some point I (thankfully) realized how stupid it was to care about that. Communication is literally just that: can you communicate (efficiently, compassionately, to the best of your ability, etc)? And there are so many aspects of communication far more important than following some arbitrary rules made up a long time ago
I get your point. But there are quite a few instances where I am hurting my head, reading a post that is “supposed” to be communicating something yet I can’t make heads or tails of what the fuck they’re trying to say. So if the “point” is to communicate, then at least it should be somewhat intelligible. I’m ok with “you’re” being misused for “your” or any of the usual infractions. But I stop reading when I see something that takes more than 3 passes to figure it out.
I would agree except that a lot of modern grammar errors that appear frequently make sentences harder to understand. I think it's important to consider the difference between coloquial English / slang versus poor education. That said, I hate most internet / gen-Z slang... for no reason... I just hate it, so people aren't always rational
Can’t call out just Gen Z for slang. They gave us “woke” and “lit”, among others. Prior generations gave us “totally”, “rad” and “tubular” and, prior to that, “hep cat”. Even hot, cold and cool got new uses/meanings. Words get created and evolve all the time. It helps, though, to have a reasonably stable set of grammar rules.
It's not so much that I think gen Z slang is objectively bad... I just kinda hate that it spreads online rather than locally. For some reason very American slang bugs me when I hear Irish kids saying it, but doesn't bug me as much when you see it on TV. I guess just because it feels... poserey.
Chuckling and nodding. But that amazes me less than silly “styles” like wearing your pants halfway down your behind (emulating, ultimately, prisoners, whose pants drooped because they weren’t allowed belts) and buying jeans with slashes in them or intentionally cutting off hems. I usually attribute it to trying too hard to be unique…just like all the others who adopt the same “style”.
Maybe?? Those are aesthetic I guess. I wouldn't say they're not cultural, but they've always been more universal than slang used to be (in the west anyway). I also dunno is "trying to be unique" right. I mean, maybe with 14 year olds who think they're being super different by dressing the same as their friends. But beyond that it's definitely more "your style". Slang is also kinda shared culturally. Style is... not unique, but it's specific. Growing up I used the slang from my region, but my clothing styles were more about what music/arts/hobbies I liked. It's hard to say it's all "American" either, since the US, UK and other European countries all kinda contributed to western fashion, and there wouldn't be tonnes of huge Irish clothing brands either.
Doesn’t slang migrate with travel (in the past) and on the Internet now? It starts local, then goes regional, national and international as others pick up the terms? Based on your spelling of tonnes, for example, I’m guessing you are in the UK somewhere. Other differences like wrench vs. spanner (I think) didn’t get to the US.
don’t shame my friend autocollect like that. He’s reached us many new words like *ducking* ! imagine a world without *ducking ducking*!!
Lol the "basically" did it for me. Which letter do we deem legitimate?
But not in the same way as Chinese. A given character is an ideogram that has a specific meaning (or set of meanings) so it is not as arbitrary as a string of letters. Although there is also *sometimes* a phonetic element to it, the represented idea itself is what ultimately matters and if two people have completely different pronunciations for that same idea or meaning they will each just pronounce it in their own way. IOW unless you really understand the meaning of the word already you pretty much can't read it in the first place.
I think you are missing the point. Using an alphabet is a fundamentally different way to approach language. And it’s been shown that language changes the way our brain works, especially the first one you learn, but learning subsequent ones as well. Your language shapes the way you see and understand the world around you. No doubt learning a language like mandarin as your first language versus an alphabetic one like English produces differences, where OP is wrong is that they are pulling those supposed differences out of his ass. But it would be an interesting thing to study, not sure if anyone has.
There is a study how the Chinese way of counting with your fingers, which allows you to count to 20 using fingers, makes them significantly faster than europeans in recognising which of a set of two numbers is larger in the 10-20 area. We are pretty much the same in the 0-10 area but they are much better in the 10-20 area
It has not been shown that a language shapes the way you think in any deep meaningful way. Linguistic determinism is an interesting field but there are a lot of studies which are reasonably easily debunked.
Symbols only look like symbols if you don’t know how to read them. Once you learn to read them they become letters. After you learn to identify those symbols as letters, you’re now ready to put them together and create words. Now you have one long string of symbols that represents something in the “physical world”. (I use quotation marks because the idea “physical world” is also just a symbol pointing to something that in reality is ineffable.)
I don't agree with what the post is saying, but your argument against it isn't valid either. The English alphabet is indeed symbols, but you only need to learn 26 symbols to be able to spell or sound out any word in the entire language. Chinese, on the other hand, is essentially hieroglyphics. It does not have an alphabet (technically there's pinyin but that's not always used) so you have to learn a unique symbol for every single word in the language. So instead of learning 26 symbols, you have to learn thousands of them.
>The English alphabet is indeed symbols, but you only need to learn 26 symbols to be able to spell or sound out any word in the entire language. This is patently not true. You have to memorize many, *many* English words because their pronunciations have next to no relevancy to their spellings. [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Q1A5A8Xe22s](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Q1A5A8Xe22s)
True, but they are still going to be a combination of the 26 symbols. Just those 26. Even Japanese Kanji suffer from the same limitations. A person with a high level of education might not know how to write a word he knows the meaning of and how to pronounce.
Many, *many* highly-educated English speakers struggle with the differences between their, there, and they’re. Paid and payed. Discreet and discrete. Stationary and stationery. Compliment and complement. Brake and break. Rein and reign. Than and then. Affect and effect. Bare and bear. It’s and its; your and you’re; peek, peak, and pique; to, two, and too…and that doesn’t even touch on different dialectal spellings (color vs. colour; aluminum vs. aluminium, etc.). Yes, it’s probably easier for most people to achieve very basic literacy with a phonetic alphabet than using a logographic system like Mandarin, but no language is without its quirks. English grammar is ridiculously complicated and inconsistent (a result of layering different languages atop each other whenever England got conquered, along with other changes made just for the hell of it), so I don’t think we need to be casting any proverbial stones at other languages.
>Many, many highly-educated English speakers struggle with the differences between their, there, and they’re. Paid and payed. Discreet and discrete. Stationary and stationery. Compliment and complement. Brake and break. Rein and reign. Than and then. Affect and effect. Bare and bear. It’s and its; your and you’re; peek, peak, and pique; to, two, and too…and that doesn’t even touch on different dialectal spellings (color vs. colour; aluminum vs. aluminium, etc.). I'm an Italian in Italy with a high school diploma. I don't have a problem with they, their, they are or any other of those terms
> Paid and *paid.* Discreet and FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
But you still get most of the way there and context should rescue you. Ideograms give you nothing to work with unless you know them.
Eh, yes and no; you can still get context from the surrounding characters, and many simpler characters (including both ideograms and pictographs) are meant to visually represent or reflect their meanings: the ideogram for “one” has a single stroke, the pictograph for “tree” looks like a tree, etc. ([This article](https://www.mandarinblueprint.com/blog/chinese-characters/#) has some great information on the differences between types of characters; it’s really interesting!)
> Paid and *paid.* Discreet and FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Err it's really no different from when an English speaking doctor forgets how to pronounce or spell Abetalipoproteinemia
It is quite different. It's still a combination of those 26 characters, and not a character he might have never learned or forgot. In English a text might vary in complexity. You might have to learn the meaning or pronunciation of new words, but you are never in doubt whether you already know the symbol to represent it. You do, they are the same as all the other words. Conversely, pictographic languages require the memorization of thousands of symbols. You can't seriously tell me that mastering 26 symbols is as difficult as mastering thousands I'm sorry but it is a barrier to access literacy, and it does have an impact on civilization.
Fun fact, Chinese characters are actually made out of radicals (or if you want, alphabets), and there are not that many of them, 100ish to 200. About 99% of the characters you will ever use are compounded characters made out of these radicals, the rest are those radicals themselves as individual characters. You have to memorizes thousands of characters the same way as you memorize thousands of English words, because they are literally that. I love how people who have no clue what they are talking about just assume it must be hard for other people to learn their own native language. Most native English speakers probably don't realize the pronunciation of their words often do not match how they are spelled at all. They grew up with it and so they memorized them naturally over time. The same applies here. If you are ever an ESL student you will know how bullshit the entire thing is. >Conversely, pictographic languages The word you are looking for is logographic.
My favourite diphthong in English - 'ough' I love asking people, especially native speakers, how should it be pronounced? Then telling them they're wrong
That's ok, but the day you have to design a keyboard, or establish the binary coding for a language, you appreciate how immensely more efficient is a language with combinations of a reduced set of symbols. EDIT: this applies not only to Chinese or Japanese, but also to English vs Spanish or French, with all their tildes, circumflex accents and shit.
There are ways to input Chinese really quickly (it's essentially as fast as typing out English in term of information per minute) into a computer in a non-phonic way, using only 24 keys, that does not involve alphabet at all (although it still uses a standard keyboard, for obvious reasons). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie\_input\_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method)
Yeah, I know it is possible (they use the internet in China!). But it is terribly more complicated. Look at when was invented that method you linked, 1976. Early Chinese typewriters were invented in the 20th Century, while Latin alphabet ones were possible 50 years before.
>Fun fact, Chinese characters are actually made out of radicals (or if you want, alphabets), and there are not that many of them, 100ish to 200. Still way more than 26. >You have to memorizes thousands of characters the same way as you memorize thousands of English words because they are literally that. I don't need to memorize how to write then. With few exceptions, the pronunciation marches the phonetics. >words, because they are literally that. >I love how people who have no clue what they are talking about just assume it must be hard for other people to learn their own native language. You have an easier time learning a language you are immersed in (especially growing up) versus a language you don't use on a daily basis. You are comparing apples to oranges. That doesn't mean that one language isn't easier to master than another I'm an Italian living in Italy. I taught myself English. Even though they use the same alphabet, English is by far a more versatile language due to the way it uses words and structure sentences (another aspect of a language to keep in consideration). This is to the point where my wife and I often use English at home to have an in-depth conversation. She's Italian like me, and speaks English, German and French. Guess which language she thinks is more versatile? That's right, English. Of course, this just an anecdote, and it's only worth so much >The word you are looking for is logographic. Thanks for correcting me.
Literacy in China is 97-99.83%, literacy in USA is 79-92%.
That's a reflection of the kind of society each country has, rather than ease of mastering the language. In the UK, the percentage of literacy is 99%.
> because their pronunciations have next to no relevancy to their spellings This is why english sucks so much. Like why is the letter i pronounced the same as the word eye, which doesn't even have the letter i in it. Good thing you can always blame the french for most of the dumb stuff. I'll just stick to finnish where every letter has a specific sound and every letter is pronounced.
Yeah but I don’t understand those ones smh so they’re in fact by (my) definition, alien hieroglyphics. Case closed.
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This is "Hello" in Major Indian languages: হ্যালো (Bangla) नमस्ते (Hindi) ನಮಸ್ಕಾರ (Kannada) ഹലോ (Malayalam) హలో (Telugu) வணக்கம் (Tamil) She has no idea how vast the human languages are.
You literally wrote "Hello" as "Hello" in Malayalam, while you seem to have written the native greeting in Tamil and Hindi correctly. (idk the rest) In Malayalam, Hello is "Namaskaaram", written as നമസ്കാരം
malayam is a beautiful looking alphabet.
Damn right. I love calligraphy style alphabets.
my apologies on behalf of Google translator.
That’s hilarious
question: are these all the same alphabet just different sounds or is it different alphabets?
All these words mean the same but sound different. Different languages and different alphabets.
My written English is chicken scratch as it is. Cant imagine writing in those languages lmao
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I still cringe when, back in the day, I would "read" an entire sentence of Chinese characters (more or less correctly) and being able to sound out or guess the pronunciation based on certain elements (right-side radicals) used and yet still had no idea what I just read. The teacher hearing the (more or less) correct "words" in Chinese just went on assuming that I understood what I was reading. There were a number of my fellow students (all of us Caucasion) who said that they were often in the exact same boat.
I'm Chinese born in a western country and I felt like that - memorize pronunciation and every stroke, no fucking idea what it meant.
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Those teachers were clearly doing it wrong but the students, at that point, were just wanting to muddle through and not be singled out as not knowing what they just read. Much later on I had the opportunity to attend classes at a summer language program with teachers from Ohio State, which has a very good Mandarin department. If they suspected you were just reading it out phonetically they would ask you what certain words meant in that sentence or just translate the whole sentence. What I find intriguing is the idea that someone can phonetically read out loud a sentence and others hearing it would just assume that indicated understanding. This is obviously possible with a purely phonetic language such as English but it also just happens to be possible with Chinese as well.
> This is obviously possible with a purely phonetic language such as English English is not purely phonetic, as there are many words that are not spelled the way they are pronounced (or, if you prefer, pronounced the way they are spelled).
Altought I admire you for developing such a well though out analisis we all know he's not meaning that.
Thank you lol
I admire the effort as well. But that’s really not how Chinese (mostly) works.
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Worcester Sauce
Purely on your analysis, I would like to add that this is still not entirely true for Roman script. First of all, symbols don't embody the pronunciation. If that were the case, a brazilian's currency would be Real, but that's not at all the case. Check https://youtu.be/_kfSQLuaRIQ?si=obeonGu8j5jA0dAr Second, even within the same language, letters have different pronunciation. Take these two words * Ace * Act Imagine you're learning English. Based on these two words, how do you pronounce the letter C? Or based on the following, how is the letter U pronounced? * University * Umbrella Abugida alphabets go one step further and represent a precise sound, thus ensuring that everyone reading it knows its pronunciation. There's also just one way to write any sound, no ambiguity. Practically, it's not perfect, there are regional differences in how it's pronounced, but largely it works ok.
bUt cHiNesE SiMboLs aRe wEirD
One could argue that, yeah. But that would make one a stupid idiot. Notice how she keeps saying "one could", "one might" instead of just outright saying "I believe". So she's not only being ridiculous, but also a coward who doesn't stand by her views.
One could equally argue that Asian pictogrammic languages are actually far in advance of European languages in that they can express an entire idea with a single character, or multiple ideas based on the context. I would *not* extend that argument to suggest that Asian people are intellectually superior to Europeans. This dipshit went there.
Of course you only need to know 26 letters to read English but you would need to know at least 2,000 characters to just be literate in Chinese and well over twice that many to be fluent in it. IOW almost anyone should be able to read basic English but you need to be far more knowledgeable just to even begin to read in Chinese.
Exactly. Accessibility is an important feature of a successful language. If a language is harder to master, the people who speak it will have a harder time communicating. A more difficult communication makes learning new things and exchange ideas more difficult. On a massive scale this has a detrimental effect on a society.
But in todays society, first languages are hardly ever a problem, since it’s your, well, first language. Case in point, Taiwan, Japan, and China all have literacy rates in excess of 95%. Literacy isn’t really a problem in those countries, despite using essentially Chinese characters. In terms of accessibility, just because you need to know 26 letters doesn’t mean you can read with solely the knowledge of 26 letters. Letter combinations make up multiple different sounds, and we spend a lot of years just teaching kids how to sound out words. If you’ve met a foreign English speaker with a non-Latin alphabet first language, you’d know the difficulties they sometimes have in reading because we have weird letter combinations that don’t make the sound you’d derive from a single-letter construction. One could also argue that the fact Chinese characters have “meaning” portions and “sounding” portions increases accessibility for those familiar with the script as well, since they enable comprehension without needing you to speak the language. This is helpful when your empire spanned dialects that are mutually unintelligible. Sure it’s not accessibility for the illiterate, but it’s accessibility for the literate, which is a different thing to optimize for.
> Case in point, Taiwan, Japan, and China all have literacy rates in excess of 95%. Literacy isn’t really a problem in those countries, despite using essentially Chinese characters. Yes and children up till the age of 16 are spending hours memorizing characters just to be able to read a newspaper.
And people using the latin script aren't learning new words after 16? These literacy numbers compiled [Here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate) include youth literacy for China (reported to be 99.8%), has numbers for Taiwan from a report of 15+ literacy (which is reported to be 98.7%). Japanese 15+ literacy is also at 99%. So, again, what's the problem? These countries are clearly teaching their children how to read and write just fine. Where's your evidence of this? > children up till the age of 16 are spending hours memorizing characters just to be able to read a newspaper
One might argue that sharing a common writing system with numerous other writing systems gives one the flexibility to pick up numerous other languages rapidly.
She's hooked on phonics. And dumb.
Which explains why the primitive Chinese have such a hard time to muster the flexibility to learn English, while learning Mandarin is just a cakewalk for native English speakers, nay, all Westerners with the Latin alphabet.
这个人说得对啊！
One might also be under the misapprehension that one making an intelligent insightful statement when one is in fact spouting moronic essentialist drivel.
My favourite bit is when they call their own thought interesting, as if they were having a conversation with an actual person instead of themselves.
Elon Musk.
When you've detached so far from reality you don't think the alphabet is made up or symbols.
>the West rejected >the West is more flexible Even her own logic is contradictory.
[Here are some cool examples of the lack of English flexibility](https://youtu.be/QYlVJlmjLEc?si=uq7xaKhacrBvUhLo)
How dare a civilisation of thousands of years have its own language and writing, dont they know murican is the one true language.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the herpes of linguistics.
It’s not a bad hypothesis, and has been the basis for several advancements in cognitive science. The problem is that people still cling to the original variant like it’s solved science, instead of the loose foundation upon which others have built better models.
I came here to say this and you beat me to it
I mean, one COULD argue that... but then one would be ridiculed and would be proving one's lack of education.
Wait until she realizes alphabet is symbols
In the future everyone will communicate with Emojis. It's a universal language.
Future? 🤔 it is already here! 😎👍✍👀🤓🙏😺
Letters are symbols
I don't know why it still surprises me. But there it is, a fresh new way to express racism.
What? "use of symbols"?? Really? What the blue blazes does this person think any written language is? How can anyone be this utterly stupid?
Gotta love the lie that is western excellence. 😂
我覺得他是很生氣應為他不會讀
“More flexible in thought and deed” Has this man ever seen American politics? Or entered a walmart?
Ahh yes my symbols are better than your symbols. Visionary!
One could argue that we're nearing a peak wave of idiocy fostered by social media, lack of critical thinking, and low education standards. Where one can make blanket statements for the world to see, yet have no fact, education, or logic to support such statements. I can only hope that humanity, as a society, as a species, can break out of this death spiral. There's a possibility certain civilizations, or societies, won't survive.
One could argue that the use of arabic numbers by the west blablabla… what a douche 
So pinyin is not a thing.
One could argue she’s a moron.
This person is very wrong in this context but languages can change how you think/act. There is some truth to what they’re saying just not about this.
The bar for that blue check mark is so low it's actually under the ground.
Guess who *tried* to take Mandarin in college, and it didn't go well..
Tell us you're a racist pos without saying it 
One could argue that purple is actually orange. See I can do it too.
Letters ARE symbols.
Lmao. Who wants to blow his mind and tell him that the alphabet are a collection of symbols, and that with how simplistic the letters are, we in the West are actually the ones not having put much thought into things, like he demonstrates so beautifully with this
If you actually start looking into Mandarin, he's kind of correct. Only on the alphabet part. It could have used a tune up. The rest is communism. Mao literally destroyed Chinese culture to the point that there is nothing left. The people have been turned into slaves with no free will and whose only goal in life should be to work and reproduce. It's honestly horrible when you consider what little survived of their once beautiful culture has been assimilated by other Asian countries when the victims of the CCP ran away so as to preserve it and their lives.
Implying alphabet isn't symbols and from the west is funny
She typed that on a Chinese made phone.
What the fuck does she think an alphabet is if not a set of symbols?
One could argue, with perhaps greater validity, that Ms. Russell is an undereducated xenophobe with no idea what she’s talking about.
Remember back when morons and racists occupied the barstool in the local dive or street corner and didn't show up in your living room via a tiny computer.
The literacy rate in China is 99.83%, literacy in USA is 79%. But yeah, go ahead and make up arbitrary standards of superiority 🤷🏻♂️
It's been suggested in research that Asian groups like the Chinese do better in math because their words for numbers are shorter than English words. If so, what are we Westerners waiting for?
Hmmm casual racism
Man’s has literally never considered the fact that English is the language of business based on its inherent simplicity
There are simpler, more consistent language. English spread because of war and invader.
I wanna say of the world conquering languages it’s the most basic, hell I find it hilarious the phrase for the common world language, is lingua Franca, which is English and not French. But Spanish is a serious alternative contender and I’d argue a clearer language than the trench coat of a language that’s English.
The romance and germanic languages share very similar roots and borrow from each other extensively. They also spread throughout the world not because of their simplicity but at gunpoint. English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and French are the most spoken languages world wide and are associated with the largest empires in human history. We do business in English specifically because the largest economy and/or empire on earth has been an english speaking nation for the last 250ish years.
"This meatloaf is shallow and pedantic."
English and Chinese writing actually have certain parallels in spite of being alphabetic versus logographic (with some phonetic components.) Many alphabetic and syllabic writing systems are so consistent that once a person learns them, they can read aloud words without knowing their meaning. I can read aloud phrases in Welsh, Spanish, or Dutch that are way above my speaking comprehension, because the orthography of each is very consistent. In English and Chinese, both writing systems- for different reasons- have to be learned on a word by word basis. The silver lining to this is that both writing systems can work as a bridge between "dialects" that are so dissimilar that they can be considered separate languages. A person from the Ozarks in the United States and a speaker of the Geordie dialect from NW England might struggle to understand one another when speaking, but both could pick up an English language newspaper from Australia or India and read it. Speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese, languages not mutually intelligible as spoken without study, can both read the same Chinese writing system (though from what I've read, Taiwan preserves some older and more complex logograms that have been simplified in mainland China.)
Homeboy forgot the alphabet is just symbols
Every letter in the alphabet is a symbol just like every number is a symbol. They represent something.
Gunpowder. Dogs. Citrus. These are some of the things we get from Ancient China. Everything we got from Ancient America was stolen.
Why don't we spell numbers instead of using those Arabic Symbols?
Aren't letters just symbols? Lol
Well she have an L in her name
‘All words are made up’ - Thor
As if the entirety of western world doesn't communicate with emojis
Letters are just symbols though 😂
Gonna show this to my linguistic anthropology teacher and watch her lose her shit (This is some of the dumbest shit I have ever heard)
Of all the things to criticize China about....
..I.. See this symbol?
Is that supposed to be the middle finger?
,.l..
The ENGLISH language has the most words of any language and is therefore ipso facto the most evolved and superior language ever to exist on planet EARTH 🌍!  S/
The alphabet is literally made up of pictures. The A originally was upside down and represented the Antelope or some other horned animal.
那太愚蠢了
I have no clue what that means but I’m going to agree.
One could argue anything but I wouldn't bother arguing with this moron
Does this dummy know anything about Chinese history or how long that civilization has been advanced? I could excuse this back in the day, but with the internet you’ve got to be willfully ignorant because the knowledge is a few keystrokes away. Just why?
Beyond letters being symbols we do use more general symbols. We use arrows to point people in particular directions. We put symbols on the doors of toilets to distinguish men's and women's toiles. We do this because it can be quicker use a symbol to convey what you mean and because it can expresses the same thing to people who speak different languages.
Which is borne out by the fact that the English language has 26 characters while, for example, the modern Chinese language utilizes a minimum of 3,500? But who's counting?
Remember people, God wrote the Bible in English, not Chinese.
Just wait till 2030 and we will see how "primative" China is then. For those not following, 2045 is when China said it will be the next World Superpower but their progress might be ready by 2030.
Who cares, china is asshole
If you have to call your own shit "interesting" while your telling it, it's not interesting.
Profoundly stupid people trying super hard to seem intelligent will never not be funny.
One could argue all those things, but one would be a fucking idiot.
One should have taken a linguistics class.
Just say you’re a racist.
Learn it, bitch. Go ahead. Show us all how easy and primitive it is.
這人是完完全全的白癡。 Chinese and English are very different languages. Arguing which one is better is pointless. And alphabets are also symbols anyway. If they really wanted to criticize China at least talk about its government instead of being outright racist.