If there is a way to type chinese efficiently, I guess it is not as big a deal that it cannot be written as quickly. I still maintain that it takes longer and causes more misery to learn though.

Believe it or not though, using 注音, I can type at about 85% of the speed in Chinese as I can in English (which is quite fast). Still, I have a buddy from HK who’s a sysadmin. He types Chinese with 倉頡 at over double the speed I can type English. He also claims that he never forgets how to write a character since that typing method is based on the structure of characters. I’m not sure if I believe him, but I’ve never been able to catch him with a character he that he can read but not write.

Even for native chinese students, learning the characters are a colossal chore. They have to be learned stroke by stroke (as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you) laboriously and because there are no rules (or scant rules) governing their construction, they are easily forgotten with disuse. Sometimes I wonder (pure speculation, of course) whether the kind of rote learning that is just plain necessary to master chinese characters make rote learners out of all Chinese students in other subjects as well. (Who knows. Maybe I’m just thick and other people don’t find it quite as onerous as I do.)

Of course, efficiency is not everything in a language. Otherwise we’d all be speaking esperanto, right?

I’ve met a lot of Taiwanese people who really hate the modern characters. I guess I never picked that up because I first saw both sets at about the same time, as an adult. As a result, my impressions about their comparative asthetics are different. I can see what you’re saying about calligraphers using traditional characters, though. I took a calligraphy class back in Colorado once, and it was mind boggling just how complex they could make a single latin character.

The Korean system was designed by linguists. No naturally occuring system could ever make so much sense.

I find it interesting that Chinese can be phoneticized exactly using pinyin. I guess I kind of assumed from the disasterous romanization in Taiwan that mapping Chinese pronounciations onto the roman alphabet is just a lost cause.

There would be much less homophone issues in Chinese than in Japanese. I think the gains in huge gains efficiency from switching to a phonetic system would overcome the total loss in aesthetic qualiy wheras the partial gains in efficiency in switching to the simplified system is not worth the near total loss in aesthetic quality.

I actually think that the Korean phonetic characters are pretty ingenious. I don’t know much about them, except that it was once explained to me how each character contains all the components phonetically necessary to the sound. I’m not explaining it very well…anyhow, it is unique and I’m sure it is a much more efficient system than borrowed Chinese characters.

Heh, yeah, that’s the guy… He’s a smart, funny guy, but he only bothers to leave funny comments occasionally. (And he’s way too lazy to maintain a blog.)

Chinese can also be phoneticized exactly, using pinyin. To be honest, Taiwan’s constant mis-romanization and revisions of it’s “official” romanization system bother me far more than the traditional characters. Still, I think abandoning characters as Korea has would be a loss.

<puts on flame retardant gear> Why are simplified characters a “butchery”? Weren’t they already in widespread use, albeit with inconsistent versions all over the place? I’ve seen Taiwanese people write 3 different simplifications for 龜, but I’ve never seen them write out the traditional form. Isn’t it better to standardize on 龟, which everybody will actually write?