Re: How many years dedicated to characters learning in China ?


Sébastien de Mapias wrote:
(in China and elsewhere...)

Hi again,

1/ So given the extreme difference between our alphabet(s) and
the "sinogrammes" (is there a word equivalent in English ?),
how many years of school do the Chinese pupils spend learning
their writing system ?? Are there thousands of characters *only*,
or are we talking about tens of thousands of characters to retain ??

"Sinogram" is used occasionally in English. It was introduced, I
believe, by Victor Mair, who has an unaccountable aversion to the term
"character."

The usual figure is that if you know 3000 characters, you can read
virtually everything being published today (because most Chinese
"words" are two syllables/two characters). And you don't need to learn
3000 independent items; there are the 200 or so "significs" (often
called "radicals" in English), and as Dylan explained, not all of them
are commonly used; and a few hundred "phonetic" character-components,
which give you a clue to the sound (less good of a clue than was the
case 1000 years ago!).

You're not likely to encounter a character that _isn't_ a radical +
phonetic that you didn't learn in school in the first few years.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Unicode Support
    ... consider:)...but, you know, a file is still just a "stream of characters" ... "escape sequence" but accessing an ordinary ASCII character) are considered ... English, while all your identifiers are in "Romanji" Japanese or something ... NASM appears already to do so with strings and comments in ...
    (alt.lang.asm)
  • Re: Italian language in PIAZZA
    ... it would be hard to write it with the Italian ... characters speaking any kind of English. ... done is simply make Fabrizio's English a little better. ... This isn't like throwing in a little foreign language number, ...
    (rec.arts.theatre.musicals)
  • Re: Italian language in PIAZZA
    ... speaks to the audience in English, ... My trouble with the show's use of Italian is that it *doesn't* bring us ... closer to the story or characters. ...
    (rec.arts.theatre.musicals)
  • Re: David Dryden re: Levels of Functional Complexity
    ... the word "penny" in the English language system. ... specifically defined as five fully specified characters given an ... idea of penny across - such as the sequence pinny or piny or peny. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: F is evil (was: XML::LibXML UTF-8 toString() -vs- nodeValue())
    ... Your source code consists of Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8 ... American institute to write English texts. ... encoding, whatever encoding it would have been. ... It could not be any other language. ...
    (comp.lang.perl.misc)