There are a lot of mistakes and misunderstanding of the Chinese Hanzi writing system in this video. The main issue here is that you and many English article writers try to analyze the Chinese hanzi from an English speaker's perspective, instead of the perspectives of those who actually use the system in daily life: 1. Chinese writing is a highly practical system, due to the fact that Mandarin and other dialects use a significant amount of homonyms. Many characters share the exact same sound. As a native Chinese speaker myself, pinyon and romanization are actually difficult and inefficient to read, because you have to figure out the context first. 2. The make-up of Hanzi character are NOT random at all! A traditional method of character categorization known as liu-shui (六书), has existed since ancient time. This categorization system highlights the six main types of characters. In fact, a significant amount characters (probably 80%+) follow the pattern of phonetic-semantic compound. 3. The order of strokes is actually a fundamental, beginner-level knowledge that every Chinese writer need to learn first. There is even a song that describes how the strokes are written correctly, which we learned in elementary school. There is a correct way and pattern of writing the characters! 3. Pinyin is NOT the only common input method; in fact, handwriting, wubi (a shape based input system) are still commonly used. Handwriting system actually recognizes cursive or quick handwriting, and it is popular among people because the users don't need to select the correct characters from a list, which actually saves time. 4. In the pinyin system, you actually require to select the correct characters or words from a long list. The reason why the computer can guessing the words is basically the same as the English auto-correct or word-suggestion AI, as you mentioned. 5. Chinese characters DO have phonetic compounds. The idea of Hanzi characters being non-phonetic is actually a misunderstanding and misinformation which has been proven to be incorrect. 6. In history, the fan-qie (反切） system was used for a very long time. The fan-qie system used common characters to indicate the pronunciation of less common characters, for both Mandarin and dialects. This historic system is actually very similar to modern pinyin, with regards to how initials and finals work. 7. From a bilingual Chinese speaking person: Yes! You can indeed remember how to write a character based on its sound, if you actually understand how Hanzi character works. As mentioned in 5, many characters follow the phonetic-semantic compound pattern, which helps users to remember how to write them or to look them up in a dictionary. Sometimes, you can even guess the sound or meaning of an unknown character based on context. 8. The reason some scholars from the Republican era tried to get rid of the Chinese system was NOT based on a careful analysis of practicality, but more influenced by ideology. This is what eventually led to the fundamentalist ideology during The Culture Revolution. I tried my best to not hate on this video, but the amount of misinformation and lack of common sense or historical knowledge presented here is huge! When you want to analyze something, please make sure you do the proper and correct homework! PS. A recommended reading: «国学常识» by 曹伯韩. Edited on Nov 21, 2022 to fix grammar mistakes.

Chinese is actually graphical for native speakers. When we recognize characters, it is actually like looking at graphs. But in turn, when we write, we will be entangled in the internal structure of the font. It's like you can recognize the painting of Mona Lisa at a glance, but you can't draw Mona Lisa in reverse.

I've had the same opinion for a long time. But recently I've started to notice that surprisingly chinese characters help me remember words. When Chinese words are written in pinyin, they all look so similar that it actually makes it harder to remember and distinguish them. But the characters all look quite unique and therefore it's much easier to learn new ones. I'm studying Chinese primarily by reading. And when I speak, I often find myself in a situation when I need to recall how to say a word, at first I remember how to write it and then I guess the pronunciation thanks to the phonetics. So my point is, without hanzi I think it would be much harder to remember all of those dozens of "ji" and "shi" and their meanings, and it would be harder to guess the meanings of compounds too.

i know and study Japanese but i just watch your content because i love languages, and i feel like one of the benefits to Kanji/Hanzi/whatever you wanna call it is that when you see a character you INSTANTLY know the meaning, like even if i didn’t know 頭痛 pronunciation i still could work out the meaning instantly just based off the kanji

One thing I’ve always wondered about Chinese is- can you do crossword puzzles and word searches, and stuff like that? I really enjoy those types of things, but I’ve always thought about how difficult that would be to employ in Chinese. Yes, the writing system is flawed but of course it’s also super interesting and I enjoy it for all the reasons you mentioned ❤

文字存在的目的是什么？ 1）以【沟通】为目的 通过使用汉字，汉字文化圈的不同语言即使发音不同，也可以理解同一个汉字的意思。 例如：“雪”，中文读xue3、日文读yuki，但只要写出“雪”，就可以成为语言之间的桥梁。 而表音类文字只代表发音，写在书面之后，不同语言之间没有任何沟通层面的提升，不知道一个东西的读音也不会知道它的意思。因此在专有名词方面，表意文字比表音文字更容易普及知识。 例如：“anemia”，如果没有人解释词义，不查字典，面对新词时英文使用者永远猜不到这个词的意思。而对应中文的“贫血”，中文使用者即使第一次见到，也可以通过单个文字的意思猜到大概含义。 2）以【记录】为目的 一方面使用汉字可以用更有效率的记录信息，在相同空间记录更多的信息。大部分书籍只要翻译成中文都会变薄。 另一个层面，因为汉字的形成是漫长而且相对稳定的，大部分汉字上千年来的含义基本没有变化，所以当研究古文时要容易得多，古代的文化思想也更容易传承。 不管当年的发音是什么样，表达的意思都一样。 而表音文字的古文，一旦语言发生变迁，古文对现代人就变得很难理解。如果一个发音写成的词脱离使用环境，甚至可能永远不被后人解读。 例如：“欲穷千里目，更上一层楼” 这句唐诗，上千年前的原文对学习汉字的人也很容易理解。但如果从同一个时期的古英语诗《贝奥武夫》里拿出来一句话，你感受一下：“Hƿæt! ƿē Gār-Dena in ġeār-dagum,þēod-cyninga, þrym ġefrūnon,” 3）以【表达】为目的 因为有着庞大的文字基础，就像绘画的时候有更多的颜料。文学创作时可以用各种不同的词汇来表达同一个含义的微妙区别，也可以随心所欲的用文字生造词，即使读出来显得陌生，看到文字也可以理解意思。让写文章，不是为了发音而创作，而是为了文字而创作。 而表音文字里的生造词只能用有限的词根组合才能让别人略微明白，如果想用与众不同的读音创造一个新名词，就成了没人明白什么意思的胡言乱语。 ------------ 另外关于视频里提到的，有电脑输入法后，人们反而提笔忘字的情况。 你认为这证明了汉字不宜学习的缺点，会随着科技进步而淘汰。 与你的想法正好相反，我认为正因为科技进步，让汉字输入不再是难题，人们不需要手工书写，反而有助于提高汉字的使用率，发挥自身的优势。

When I was studying Korean, I leaned Hangul like in a couple of hours. I could read any word in Korean but I have no idea what they meant. Then when I started to study Chinese I thought that characters would be hell, but the hell were the tones. Characters help a lot when reading because they convey meaning, and also sound, of course. But even though I don't know how to pronounce a word, sometimes I still can understand what it means. Characters may seem difficult to write by hand, but they are pretty easy to read. By the way, at least for native Spanish speakers, English phonetics usually are also hell.

There are hundreds of dialects in China, many of which are mutually unintelligible. The pronunciations of Ancient and Middle literati Chinese changed drastically over thousands of years as well and were based for a long time on different southern dialects and sound nothing like modern Mandarin Chinese. The reason that the Chinese have the longest continuous civilisation and have a body of great Chinese classics which have been able to be preserved and passed on in written form over thousands of years, and are still accessible to whoever educated in the 21st century willing to study them, regardless of which regions they are from and what dialects they speak, is because of the existence of the Chinese writing system, which comprises of unique symbols, many of which have meaning based components independent of phonetics. It ensured that the written words were not phased out or obliterated whenever pronunciation of the spoken language changed, and made it possible for modern scholars to plausibly reconstruct Ancient and Middle Chinese, despite many of the sounds having been completely lost by now. The writing system does not need to cater to hundreds of dialects, and it is not its business to do so. We don’t change our English vowel spelling every time we write because someone from a different region pronounces it differently. Chinese characters can be used to transliterate dialectical differences if needed, however. It has been done in the study and preservation of many dialects. The writing system is the unifying force of all literate Chinese people regardless of their regional or ethnic differences. If you know Chinese characters, you can communicate and partake of the Chinese written cultural heritage wherever you are from and whatever dialects/languages you speak. There have been attempts in Chinese history to get rid of the characters, but they failed, because the nature of the language would not allow it. The spoken language was in existence first, the writing system followed. Chinese words are composed of monosyllabic morphemes and the possible ways to pronounce the syllables have reduced to a relatively small number in standard Mandarin, resulting in a large number of homophones. You cannot map tens of thousands of meaningful words onto the 400 plus only available syllables without tones and characters to help distinguish them. The pinyin sound “shi” for example, depending on tones, can mean to be, to give, wet, solid, vision, room, to begin, to lose, history, to drive, oath, flea, food, to pick up, the number 10, stone, pig, arrow, scholar, time, market, to try, to know, thing, poem, teacher, style, lion, force, corpse, to explain, to devour, and many more. Good luck to the language learners trying to memorise all the different meanings with just “shi” as a reference point. Those who dismiss characters and think pinyin could simply replace characters are those who know too little about the Chinese language to be making proposals for language reform.

Small correction: A lot of the world's languages don't utilize systems we'd necessarily call alphabets. They're often abugidas or syllabaries like the scripts of India and Indochina where each consonant/vowel pair is given their own separate character or feature consonants as core symbols that are modified through differing vowel qualities. Or they're abjads like in the Islamosphere where only consonants are written and vowels are either implied are reserved as diacritical marks.

They don't code "in english", they code in a programming language. Programming languages are, pretty much in every case, heavily influenced by the english language, i.e. use many english words, but that's the same for everyone on earth. You can't code in Chinese, but you can't code in Korean or Greek or Italian either, having an alphabetic writing system doesn't help you there.

其實有個輸入法叫“筆畫輸入法”，基本上是把筆畫分成5類再按照筆畫順序輸入再選字，它大概是在按鍵為主的手機的時侯出現的中文輸入法，現在比較方便的是Gboard 可以輸入簡體輸出繁體，不然繁體的筆畫有些真的很麻煩 (=′ー`) Ps.我也是書法愛好者

English is not phonetic in the way you tried to describe I'm afraid. Some of my reasons to say this are: 1. Same word pronounced differently in many cases. For example, the sentence: I was reading during my trip to Reading, has 2 different pronunciations for "reading" and "Reading" 2. F and ph have the same pronunciation 3. There are words than when pronounced in singular and plural their pronunciation changes despite having identical writing excepting its final s. 4. Some words are pronounced differently when they are adjectivised than when they are verbs. 5. Some words - e.g. desert - mean different things depending on where the entonation goes. 6. The same letters have different pronunciation depending on which letters go around. Sometimes the exact sequence is pronounced differently in two similar words 7. Vowels can represent more than one sound. For example: 'a' has 6 different sounds 8. There are words, for example the surname Menzies, that do not represent the real letters that should be there, not the real sounds that are articulated when pronounced. Etc. As an American you maybe do not realise it, and it is understandable, but in my experience English is very chaotic in comparison to all the other languages I speak (Spanish, German and Dutch) so I would not say it is easier than Chinese in the sense that when you see a word you never saw before you always can have the pronunciation wrong regardless of the "hints" from your knowledge of previous words that are similar or contain the same letters together

I can only think of two disadvantages characters have over phonetic scripts: it is slightly more difficult to learn (not nearly as difficult as people make it out to be) and it is more difficult to look up unknown characters in a dictionary (but much easier with modern technology). I don't consider it a disadvantage that people forget how to hand write some characters, as that is only because they don't write by hand often enough. That is a flaw of modern society, not the system itself. The less people need to write by hand, the more likely they will forget how to, and thus the less of a problem it is to forget. It's basically a non-issue. Typing with pinyin, zhuyin, cangjie, wubi, etc. are all faster than typing in English, because of how well the computer is able to guess what you want to write. Unless there are some rare characters you want to type, you can oftentimes type entire sentences with just a few key strokes. The first example that just came to my head is if you want to type: Where do you want to go to eat?, that is 30 key strokes (including spaces). In Chinese pinyin, you just type 7 strokes: nyqnlcf (你要去那裏吃飯). Having to use pinyin to type doesn't make characters fundamentally flawed. That is absurd. It was just necessary to adapt to modern technology. And it has adapted well. I don't know anything about the coding thing you mentioned. I suppose that could be considered another disadvantage, but not a major one. I also don't see characters not being fully phonetic as a disadvantage. Once you've learned the character, you know how it's pronounced, so you don't need phonetics. Sure, in languages with phonetic scripts, you might be able to pronounce a word you've never seen before, but you probably won't know what it means (although you can sometimes guess, especially if you know Latin and Greek), so just knowing the pronunciation doesn't help you much. Either way, you still need to look up the word. In Chinese, you can sometimes guess the approximate meaning and pronunciation based on the components within the character, especially the more characters you already know. The advantages FAR outweigh the disadvantages. The video already mentioned that the system can be used for multiple languages, which contributed to the ability of Chinese culture to flourish for thousands of years. It is FAR easier than English in higher stages of learning. It is possible to read ancient texts without having to basically learn a foreign language (as Old English is to Modern English). It is much faster to read than phonetic scripts. And on and on. The point about simplified characters being more intuitive is frankly ridiculous. They have only one advantage over traditional characters, and that is being slightly faster to write by hand. There may be a few very isolated cases where the simplified version is more intuitive, but that is rare. There are also some where they are equally intuitive, that is, when only the sound component was changed for another with the same sound. I don't know why people always bring up the example of the character for love, as there are many better examples, but your argument about it is also ridiculous. Nobody ever said you can't know what love is if you write it in simplified. The point people are making is that the character is less meaningful without that component.

tbh leaning chinese is way easier in with characters, it would be a nightmare to learn everything in pinyin. The characters also help to guess the meaning of a word, while if it was written in pinyin I couldnt guess the meaning. ig japanese as the best of both worlds, characters and 2 phonetic kana "alphabets", I spend most of my time learning and reading in japanese and if there wasnt any kanji it would be so much harder to udnerstand. The only downside I can possible think for hanzi in chinese and kanji in japanese is rememmbering how to write them, cuz recognizing the characters isnt that dificult, but writing it from memory is way harder. unless you are a writer and you have to handwrite a lot, maybe that way you wont forget. on the writing part I agree and alphabet is really good because you just have to write what you hear so it is easy but for reading characters are great, specially when japanese and chinese are languages with a lot of homophones so you would need a way to diferenciate words if they appear out of context or even in contex if 2 words fit well you would need something to tell which one is being used.

but the meaning of each each basic character is so beautiful, this is one of the most elegant, meaningful language i ve ever learn

I like that he says English is a phonetic language which most (non native english speakers) people would disagree on. Imagine his joy if he learns a language with more consistent spelling.

not to mention japanese kanji can have so many different readings! you can know the reading of a kanji but then still make a mistake because it has some other reading you didn’t know! like 行 can be pronounced “i-” “yu-” “gyou” “kou” or “okona-“. it’s like the issue you described but compounded by the long history of chinese characters in japan 😂

can't agree, as a native user, the fact that Chinese characters pack phonetics and meaning into graphic components makes it incredibly efficient to display and read. As someone with enough exposure to the system, it's also very easy to learn or even create new words as character components naturally come with meaning to be used as roots. Not to mention it could represent meaning across completely different languages and allow people to communicate without any phonetic exchange. However yes, the system by itself is fundamentally flawed by the difficulty of initial acquisition and input, but with the supplementation of Pinyin or other input methods, it has adapted to the digital world as well if not better than other scripts. For example, while forgetting how to write is a problem, this doesn't mean you easily forget what a character means, which makes it quite effective in reading, and with the assistance of input, digital use is also incredibly convenient. Another advantage of Chinese is its use in technology and science, Chinese characters form short, compact, and easily understood roots for scientific vocabulary, so more often than not regular learners are able to somewhat guess the meaning of a new word. This is simply not the case in most other languages, which rely on the phonetic transliteration of foreign words or roots (Latin, Greek, English, French, etc...) easily creating barriers for people who had not the privilege of education or exposure. Chinese jargon is just hands down elegant, efficient, and relatively democratic. At the end of the day, I think it's a great system for its time and for today, despite the various struggles it had to experience in the middle, and it is well-geared for the future.

Thanks for the video. It’s interesting seeing so many different perspectives on this subject. I think it’s mainly the homophones that make using a typical writing system more difficult for Chinese than with other languages. Based on other languages I’m familiar with, I don’t know if any language is 100% practical, but that’s sometimes what makes each one fun and unique lol

This being said, there is at least one advantage to the Chinese writing system: at times, you can infer the general meaning of new words in dependence on its characters.

I think the good things about Chinese writing system is that it can express meaning with much less charters. So even though it is not good for writing and typing but personally I find it much faster and easier to read Chinese books. You can look at a Chinese character as a complete word rather than charters. In Chinese: 我覺得中文書寫系統的好處是可以用比較少的字表達意思，所以說雖然它寫或是打起來比較麻煩，但是我個人認為讀中文書的時候快而且簡單很多。你可以把中文字當成是一個字而不是字符。 You can see it's much shorter and faster to read.

A point I wanted to make is that while Hanzi might be challenging to write, it seems remarkably easy to READ. By this I mean recognise individual characters in a line of text. Assigning sound and meaning is a lot harder for those learning second-hand, but I strongly suspect that children exposed to written Chinese in what we think of as "preschool" / kindergarten [when semantic and syntactic basics are being internalized] become skilled readers at an early age.

As a lover of language, I actually love the Chinese writing system. Particularly for poetry and creative writing, it is fascinating to see how you can combine different characters with similar sounds to add an extra layer or two of depth to poetry not possible in other languages with phonetic writing systems. You've got the meaning of the vocab word (combination of characters), the meaning of the individual characters all on their own, and the sounds, which although pronounced the same can mean something completely different. This makes for some very unique rhyme schemes and plays on words. I've studied some Chinese song lyrics with profound depth due to creative use of the language, and the only way to understand that creativity is the combination of written and spoken Chinese.

I think you may not be looking at the complete picture. The needs and necessity are what matters for the development of a writing system. If one saw a English word, you would know the letters to later search it up. So too if one saw a chinese character, say 灭 you would most likely know the character for one (一) and the chacter for fire (火). So in terms of meaning, Han characters are best for inter community communication. You can map sounds from any language to it. The Latin characters may also be adapted to have "non-standard" pronunciations by different languages. Take "Nguyen" for example, would be completely butchered by Native English speakers. The point of reform for the language system, is not a red flag necessarily because even Countries that use the Latin alphabet have initiated a language reform because the language has shifted too much from the written form. Look at French spelling's excesses. No one would argue to reform it because it is a matter of style and prestige at this point. Language and writing is more than just communication, it is the most important aspect of culture. Now I think the simplification was understandable but may have gone further than I would have gone. I speak as someone who is fascinated by the Chinese language and writing system and not a native speaker.

I'm a Finnish native, and in my language, you literally pronounce the written words as they are represented by letters. There is maybe one instance where this isn't exactly true (the -nk- and -ng- sounds, think of the English word king for example), but otherwise, a is a, e is e, h is h regardless of what surrounds them in a word. I've always found that to be simply the most rational way to write. 😄 I enjoy learning Chinese and other languages for fun and I appreciate the culture behind them, but when I think from the practical point of view, I can't help wondering who thought it was a good idea to spell a word like this or construct a character like that - and yes, I say this with love. 😂

Actually, I tend to use much more the handwriting keyboard instead the alphabetical keyboard, and I think it's help me not forget how write mandarin and Japanese... 😬

Very interesting video! One question; Which chinese characters are used in japanese, korean and vietnamese?

I enjoyed this video. I studied calligraphy as a teenager and in college, I learned some brush calligraphy and in doing so we used Chinese and Japanese examples to copy. So, even if I don't understand Chinese at all, I appreciate the skill behind Chinese calligraphy.

Chinese characters become important when one considers the number of phonemes in Mandarin (I know nothing about other dialects) but when you only have 4 tones, you can only end syllables with -n and -ng (for the most part), you have relatively few consonants and vowels, AND you try to make all of your words one syllable, you are going to get a lot of different meaning words that sound the same. If Mandarin was written phonetically, it would be difficult to resolve ambiguities. In conversation you can respond to cues from the listener to disambiguate your meaning. In writing there are no cues, and you would have to anticipate every possible misunderstanding. People always criticize English for its spelling, and justifiably so, except that written English uses ridiculous spelling to resolve ambiguity, similar to the way Hanzi uses different characters for identical sounding words. For instance: I and eye; there, they're, and their; slay and sleigh; right and rite; and many, many more (let's not talk about red, read, reed and...read). I now think of English spelling as being like Hanzi. Don't bother trying to make sense of the spelling, just remember which spelling means what. It would be nice if there were systematic rules for combining a limited number of radicals into a very large number of full characters, but I suspect that in order for the rules to actually work they would have to be just as complex and hard to learn as the present set of often randomly constructed characters. Having said all that, I think they blew an opportunity with the simplification by trying to accommodate people who already knew the old characters. They should have taken the 200 most common characters (or whatever number you choose) and made them really simple (still not phonetic). Ninety percent of the writing in any language consists of the same two hundred or so words used very often. Learning 200 characters is a lot faster than learning the two thousand you need to be considered competent. It would suck for the already literate, but life is like that. One of the great ironies of Mandarin is that the spoken language is very easy, probably because it has been learned by large numbers of foreigners for a very long time, but the writing system means that most of those foreigners have been functionally illiterate. Learning Hanzi as an adult is a major pain, made worse when it is claimed that it is a "system" which "makes sense". Makes about as much sense as English spelling. If you look at the history of stupidly spelled words it becomes clear why they are spelled that way, as I would speculate that Hanzi characters also make sense if one considers the history, but from the standpoint of using them today, right now...no. Hanzi is not an organized system and the closest you can get to the meaning of a character by looking at the radicals is an idea that it might be about something having to do with something. Which is not particularly useful. Rant, rant, rant. Rant.

A huge disadvantage of phonetic writing is that a language's phonetic system is constantly changing and varies by dialect - so unless you reform it (and have multiple dialectic varieties), you end up with words like 'ENOUGH'. You mentioned Chinese people forgetting Hanzi - how many English speakers constantly mispell words?

Replying to your note in the description you could code something like variable declarations, method names, comments and so on in another language different than English. I don't how it works for other people but since the programming languages are in English I type everything in English because otherwise imo looks messy and also for sharing it's better. My native language is Spanish.

Fantastic video as usual. I love some of the comments below, very enlightening.

American-born, moved to and lived in Taiwan for 2 years now. While my literacy has improved tremendously, after all the efforts to fully immerse myself in Chinese characters, I entirely agree with the argument in this video and can never put down my disapproval of Chinese characters and its complexities beyond just acquisition. Honestly the title alone earned my subscription . And the 愛 character side note cracked me the fuck up

While we're on the subject of characters. I never understood why the pinyin keyboard doesn't actually allow me to actually write the tones when searching for a character or when it's trying to guess a full sentence I'm writing. Let me freaking scroll all the "shì" rather than all the "shi" !!! 😣 I would likely also provide a better auto complete as well. Unless it's a feature that I missed, but I haven't seen that anywhere so far. On the french mobile keyboard I can just hold "e" to see "é", "è" and "ê", and on PC i've keys for "é" and "è", and double key combo for "ê" Why can't Chinese Pinyin do that as well ?

So interesting. What impresses me the most is how this video anticipates all of my counter-arguments and answers them. Wow.

OMG ur videos are soso inspiring, the content u filmed is always making me reconsider the language I m using every day, thx a lot

I disagree that you can't guess the sound at all， and also the meaning. Because the Chinese character is composed of two parts : the key which is the semantical world to which the character belongs which gives an idea of the meaning and the phonetic part which gives an idea of the sound. So for example if you see a character you don't know with a tree key and a "ba" sound phonetic part， you can guess it's a kind of plant and also that it is probably spelled ba or bo or fa.

actually an alphabet does not help you much when your language has silent letters --- even silent first letters or when there are many letters for a simple sound ... so for German d,t,th sound the same , f,ph,v sound the same, k,c,ch,q sound the same and we got lots of silent letters and they are even increasing in number

You've made a great video. These are true for me when I was learning Chinese as well. One important fact: post-Roman European states actually use Latin as a written language but spoke it in their own dialect, kind of like Chinese languages right now. The idea of using Latin alphabet to write using each vernacular (localized) language only came around after the Protestant Reformation.

Just a curious question to those who were Chinese-educated or had some exposure: For highly technical domains with very long compound-words (eg. EDTA, 2,4-DNPH) do Chinese ppl invent their own new words/characters or simply use the English/international names/abbreviations? (Or some kind of both?) ie. Will anyone actually write 乙二胺四乙酸酯, 二硝基苯基肼 (from Google translate)? looks like it will take forever, and (probably) no feasible Chinese abbreviation? Or they might name it sth else after someone/something?

It is not so difficult to draw individual Chinese characters as to paint Mona Lisa. Because all characters are different possible combinations of 27 different shapes of strokes. The real challenge (or fascination) is to memorize many characters and still distinguish them from each other so quickly.

To your point about forgetting the characters, my gf is from Taiwan and she forgets the characters all the time. It's very funny when I'm doing my beginner/ intermediate review lessons and I have to tell her what a character means. 😂

@7:50 Is the best part for those of us using Chinese characters for other East Asian languages--Traditional Mandarin (Taiwan), Japanese, Cantonese, etc. (I dabble in whichever are available on language apps such as Duo, Memrise and Clozemaster.)

建设你多了解一下中文和英文的差别！你就会发现中文远比英文高效的多得多❗️👍 中文采用的是两级构词法！而英文是一级构词法！就像低维度的人无法理解高维度的人一样！😅 为什么我不喜欢👎用英文评论？❗️主要原因就是英文和中文输入相比太慢了😅

If you used any other language as a basis for your comparison, some of those that actually use phonetic writing systems, your arguments would be valid. The problem is that even when learning English you need a secondary (pronunciation respelling) system when learning new vocabulary because you are usually clueless about the pronunciation. In languages such as German, Spanish or Slavic languages you just need to know the basic pronunciation rules and that's it, you know how to read everything... no need to spend years to learn the English spelling chaos. For me learning Chinese script is often more intuitive than learning often illogical "right order and the combination of letters" you need to know to write down some English word. Both English and Chinese are my second languages, so I'm not subjective in that regard.

Can you talk about the old Chinese keyboard in which the keys were actually characters? Or the Chinese input systems in general?

the way understand it, you input the pinyin, the computer shows you all characters that are covered by the pinyin, and you select one, right? so, before the computers got good graphics, how did the chinese use computers to process text? I am not curious... in the 70s and 80s

Nah. I disagree. Not a speaker of chinese myself, I just know how to say "I read a book" in mandarin haha. Spanish and English speaker here. I think that judging a writing system based on how it suits technology or "modernity" is an oversimplified way to put it. It's like saying that playing the piano is totally impractical and inefficient because we have synthesizers or Sibelius nowadays, or that painting by hand is a silly and time-consuming way to create art because we have Adobe Illustrator nowadays. A language's speaking form and writing form, in my opinion, serve much more purposes than just "practicality". There's a point in the video where the speaker says that Chinese needed to resort to a romanization process so it would be easier to know how to pronounce it. Well, at some point our languages also required the creation of a phonetic alphabet so it would be easier to standardize their pronunciation. Languages evolve, and I think the fact that a language doesn't suit computers doesn't make it terrible, because maybe there are other purposes that it may serve more efficiently than our languages do, purposes we're totally unaware of because of our cultural bias.

你好! Do you think it's worth to learn Cangjie? Right now I use the Microsoft pinyin input method but that feels like cheating, I just have to type the pinyin and the hanzi comes out. Cangjie however is much harder and I wonder if you think if and when I should start learning it.

I would like to see and I've put some thought into a mapping of Han characters to English, for a number of reasons. I've seen some projects going about it before but I don't think they had the exact direction I had in mind. It would be fun if nothing else.

I didn't really understand, is the pinyin used on keyboard, converted into "full/simplified" chinese, or is it stored in these pinyin symbols ? How are books printed ? When it uses the full character set, people must know them all. So "modern" people are kind of able to passivly read these "older" characters, but they are not used to write it any more ? Is that put the right way ?

agree, but you shouldn't conflate alphabetic systems and phonetic scripts, they are different. and a script being hard or even impossible to implement in technology, sometimes it really is the fault of technology, like for example vertical scripts.

Absolutely agree. And because Japan adopted them, and I now live in Tokyo, I’m suffering and struggling trying to remember thousands of characters. Even though I can speak Japanese, my reading level is only at an elementary school level - and it’s a little difficult to live as a borderline illiterate 30 year old 😆 Always love your videos!

Thanks for this video. One question I have is whether a person using simplified characters would be accepted readily in Taiwan. During my first visit there back in 1981, I showed my "Concise Chinese-English Dictionary" to a girl, and she said it uses "Mao Zedong's writing". I recall reading that way back during the Revolution, Mao questioned whether the language should be converted to a phonetic basis, and Stalin suggested keeping it in the form of characters, to preserve an important aspect of China's culture, so Mao didn't make this change.

Excellent video with an equally excellent comment section. ☺

2:46，As mentioned in the top comment, Wubi input method. The modern pinyin input method is based on big data and AI analysis to enable efficient input. Wubi input is based on the shape of the characters. If you understand the beauty of the Wubi input method, you can use one second to input a phrase that requires four to five seconds to input in pinyin. For example, the pinyin input of "People's Republic of China（中华人民共和国）" is "zhonghuarenmingongheguo" , It takes about four seconds. This is the first option that can be directly input after AI calculation. If there is no big data AI, it will take more than five seconds to search word by word, and it may take more than ten seconds. And Wubi input "People's Republic of China（中华人民共和国）" is "kwwl", nothing more. It's just that Pinyin is a simpler, international and systematic input method that more suitable for foreigners. Because Wubi's stroke system has been classified in various ways in China since ancient times, and Wubi is specially developed for Western-style 26-letter keyboards, which retains Chinese tradition and Revolutionary inventions integrated into the mainstream of the world.

seeing none of the comments agree on this channel makes me ultra-relieved. as a native speaker from taiwan, the chinese character system COULDN'T be more perfect, not only because we use traditional characters without simplifying the essential parts, but also it allows us to at least recognize the pronunciation even tho we've never seen the character before.

I have just started to learn mandarin and happened to find your videos, and what a great surprise to see excelent videos about mandarin! Thank you! Besides Japanese, I think Mandarin os one of the most beautiful languages ever! So hard to pronounce though! Well, not as hard as arabic hahaha!

Lovely video. And you have a lot of good points wty and Idk haha I'm learning Thai and I'm still struggling with reading it hahaha and it's more easy than Chinese but a little more complicated than Korean so meh~ I'm not sure if the latin writing system it's better or korean..., but all of them is always worth to learn hahah. I love you 🥺.

Chinese characters is a glyph / pictorial based writing system which is basically designed for communicating the meaning. By looking at the character you can guess the meaning even if u don't recognise the character. In the traditional characters, if you recognise the parts of the character you can even guess the sound as they do form a pattern of how to sound. Simplified characters, however, have mess up the reading pattern part though. Alphabet based writing system like English is designed for easy reading of the word but it doesn't convey the meaning at all. Korean newspaper sometimes include Hanja (Chinese characters) instead of Hangeul (sound based) alone because the context isn't very clear which word/phrase the article is trying to say as the words have the same reading. Take for example Japanese writing system which has both elements of alphabetical system (hiragana/katakana) as well as Chinese characters (kanji). If you read an article based solely on hiragana alone, you will find that it is much harder to understand the meaning of the article. However with the appropriate use of kanji used in place of the hiragana, the understanding becomes much faster and easier. In conclusion alphabetical system is focused on reading, while pictoral based system is focused on understanding.

I love the efficiency of Chinese characters. I think if you keep learning Chinese you may change your mind on some of the points you talked about here. Good luck.

can china adopt altered korean writing system for communication and use hanzi for arts?

I think that the fact that the number of syllables in use is limited to around 1400 for each tone, and the fact that when put toghether the possible combinations are also much lower than in European languages makes the characters neccesary. If we add to that the fact that polyphony is ingrained in the system then character triple association (sound, form, meaning) and its correspondent memorisation goes even trickier, what is a pain. One unrelated note to my previous paragraph: not every region in China used the same writing system, there is one region that uses European writing, another using arabic...up to a total of 6 different writing systems. All of them appear in the country money notes, as a recognition of that multiculturalism. Nowadays, with the linguistic unification tried at schools as a vehicle to form a common communication language, your comment makes more sense thought, and I even get your point regarding past times where not so many people was able to write the language, and where most of them that did write used the same character system (but those 6 writing systems already existed then).

I agree. It is beautiful, but if you could use pinyin all the time, learning Chinese wouldn’t be much harder than learning many other languages. I began learning Chinese a year ago, planning to use only pinyin. Then I got interested in the calligraphy and learning from songs. I’ve made my own alphabetic dictionary based on pinyin. I learnt how to input a Chinese keyboard from your video, and to type in Chinese.

(1) Why would one have to reform one own language for the convenience of foreigners (mainly Westerners) to learn? A language is primarily used to communicate between native speakers of the language. It does not exist to serve foreigners. You cite the 'character amnesia' among young Chinese (which I think can be attributed to overly relying on pinyin input on smartphones and computers) but average native speakers of phonocentric languages (like Germanic, Romance, or Slavic) also have a spelling problem to which autocorrection helps to mitigate. Many languages that adopt Roman-Latin scripts also have problems to transcribe their pronunciation into Roman-Latin scripts. These written languages cannot accurately represent the pronuciation. Modern German is an exception because the written German is standardised very recently. You praised Hanguel as one of the best writting system but Hanguel does not even represent Korean pronunication accurately either. Many consonants change their pronunications when they are in different place in the word or a sentence but the character is the same. The Best? (2) Your video is just repeating phonocentrism over other form of langauges. Maybe because you are an American and a native English speaker. Why would photocentrism be better and logocentric langauge like Chinese is 'terrible'. It is not clear to me. I find that each language has its own advantage within its own context. I understand that you have to make money, so saying that 'Chinese writting is terrible' attracts more clicks than saying ' Chinese writing is difficult but there is a reason for that'. Your video is not 'an objective judgement' as you said but a very subjective one from the perspective of a phonocentrist. (3) Chinese writing is difficult to learn than phonocentric langauges but from the perspective of learning a language as a whole it does not make much different. I say this as I speak 5 languages (Thai, Lao, English, Chinese, French) and I can read Italian and Spanish. I am learning Korean and Japanese and I know a few Thai and Chinese dialects (Putonghua, Teochew, and Cantonese). In phonocentric languages, you can easily learn how to read the alphabets and most of them can take less than 1 hour but you do not know what does it mean. The alphabets transcribe the sound but they have no meaning of their own. In logocentric langauge like Chinese, you can easily learn to understand the characters but you do not know how they are pronunced. 'MOUNTAIN has no meaning on its own (and it does not even tell you how to pronunce it it can be pronunced Mo-Un-Ta-In and many other possible ways), 山 does look a lot like a mountain but we do not know how to pronunce it. (4) I originally have many things to say but I find it unproductive. I recommend you to read a book called 'Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916-1958'.

I am learning on Busuu and with Chinese friends, in coversation using mix chinese/english to build vocab - Chinglish...I have along way to go and want ot get HSK1 next year but won't take test until very sure, Idon't want to scrape thru, better to wait and nail it.

Faguo sweatshirt ... And yes, your videos are great because they are amusing and relatable and we all know the Chinese aspect of understanding Hanzi but hearing the English point of view from you is why we watch this video.

Loved the video as always - couple of random thoughts: Hangul: Illustrates your point completely. Hanja was too difficult for ordinary folk to learn. It needed a custom-made phonetic writing system in order to bring literacy to the masses, and it work incredibly well. As a writing system built around mouth shapes it will be fascinating to see whether it updates its spelling as and when Korean goes through a major pronunciation shift, or whether Hangul is set for life and people will just carry on using the old spelling because that's what they're used to. Hanzi & History: One of the main advantages Hanzi has over a phonetic writing system is exactly that: it is not tied to speech. You pointed out that it means other languages could use it (Korean, Vietnamese etc) which allowed inter-country diplomacy, but it also allows Chinese speakers to connect to their past thanks to the fact it is not rendered obsolete through language evolution (such as vowel shifts). Unlike in Chinese, if an English speaker wants to read something written by Chaucer then you'd need to translate it from Old English; it is literally unreadable unless you speak 1500s English. Plenty of poetry, plays, philosophy, culture, etc is rendered null by modern English speakers speaking what is effectively a different language. (Side note: a video on how Chinese pronunciation has changed over the centuries would be awesome) Hanzi & meaning: In phonetic languages you can usually guess the pronunciation of an unfamilliar word, but you cannot guess the meaning unless it is in context. Chinese has an (admittedly unreliable) chance of inferring meaning based on the radicals used to write it. This is nice, but probably of less use than the phonetic thing, and I guess which you prefer is an individual choice. A language like Esperanto would be idea as it's the best of both: written phonetically, and constructed deliberately so a reader can immediately tell if it's a verb, noun, etc... and roughly guess the subject matter (ie. somthing with 'bon' likely means it is good, or well, a word that ends in '-ilo' means it is a type of tool) Writing: The below link might interest you - it's a lecture by Tom Mullaney on Chinese typewriters. At the timestamp he talks about (afaik) the world's first predictive text, in the 1950s. It seems to be a precursor to Wubi as it works on stroke order, but it's a fascinating watch. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gbl1oqt906-8iZ8.html

English uses IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) in dictionaries because you can't 100% know how a word is said. My native language, Finnish, is pronounced like it is written. But because of long conjugations, the words are super long and a bit hard to read. I don't think there is a perfect writing system.

An advantage of this system is the elimination ambiguous words that sound almost the same but harder to clarify by context easily in written form. And also provide a pretty reliable ethymological connections between words, that is harder to notice in some languages. Now, are this advantages worth it to memorize this thousands of characters? Hard to say, however what we know is that it's basically impossible to get rid of them even if you try to.

Love that you have explained the major difference between Chinese character and English. There are six rules or maybe conclusions about Chinese character from the ancestor. 象形者，畫成其物，隨體詰詘，日、月是也。 指事者，視而可識，察而見意，上、下是也。 會意者，比類合誼，以見指撝，武、信是也。 形聲者，以事為名，取譬相成，江、河是也。 轉注者，建類一首，同意相受。考、老是也。 假借者，本無其字，依聲託事。令、長是也。 I think it may be better to start learning Traditional Chinese by these six rules or conclusions. I don't know how much of these six rules remained in Simplified Chinese.

Yes it's terrible but it has other perks. One is information density. I studied German and Chinese for a while and I can tell you, seeing those long German words is such a headache. I feel like the spaces occupied by each letter is such a wasted space. It's similar to English but to a lesser extent. It's also one of the reasons why Japanese people still writes Kanji despite already having a widespread phonetic character set Hiragana and Katakana. Moreover, it's not like native speakers see words letter by letter. Our brains make shortcuts while reading a certain text. Thats why when you see the word "stuednt" your brain translates it immediately to "student." The text as a whole also gives meaning, not just the letters. I think the problem with Chinese is native speakers dont usually use a fallback when they forget how to write something. Japanese people aren't afraid to use Hiragana/Katakana when they forgot how to write something in Kanji. Chinese people on the other hand, strictly want to write in Hanzi whenever they can.

Let me add that I knew some guys from HongKong that when they type the chinese characters in their phones, they don't use a phonetic system. They have no idea about pinyin, since mandarin is their second language. So they type the characters using the strokes of them in a weird and complicated manner that was hard for me to understand, but much easier for them.

The video is great! As usual; but the comments section is greater today... waiting with popcorns to read new snippets of info on chinese writing system.

Interesting video!

English is actually quite bad as a writing system as pronunciation is not accurately or consistently represented by the written characters. Spanish is way superior in that regard

A friend of mine took introductory Mandarin in college and dropped it because it was so difficult and took more work than all his other science and math classes combined. Calculus was a breeze compared to Chinese, so he says. By the way he's not native Spanish speaker and he learned English without too much undue trouble.

English is awful phonetically. When I studied I had to mentally disconnect reading it phonetically and just memorize sound to word because nearly all similarly spelled words are pronounced differently. Just look at rough and dough only differ in 1 letter yet does not even rhyme. To drive the point home, the following makes sense but in written it looks like crazy talk. Read and lead rhymes, read and lead also rhymes, but neither read and read nor lead and lead rhymes. What I love about Chinese characters is that it's like learning logos and street signs. You can see the puma or adidas logo and your brain recognize it faster than it would take you to read the word. I agree that it is slower to learn than lets say French or Spanish but I still love that instant understanding when I see a character I know. That feeling is priceless!

啊但是作为母语者，在听到非母语者说汉字很难之前，我个人一直没有感觉到汉字哪里不方便欸（即使是学了英语之后）（小声） 可能是从小就学的优势？对汉字的各个部位组成和作用的印象更深更系统一些？(´･ω･`)

I both agree and disagree, but I also think the writing system is less important than the education system. As an American, I definitely struggle with Chinese characters. I do think that the need to learn so many characters has slowed my learning of Chinese. However, now that I know Chinese characters I am frequently shocked that I can follow along with Cantonese and occasionally even Japanese language shows if the subtitles are in characters (not Chinese language, just using the Chinese characters). This matches your earlier point that the flexibility of the characters allows communication even between different languages. I also disagree with your arguments that Chinese "relies" on pinyin to function in the modern world. Pinyin is helpful, but there are other methods of writing characters, as you point out. Furthermore, even English needs a second writing system for proper pronunciation (there are multiple - IPA is the most famous, but very few people actually use it. The simplified pronunciation guides you can find in dictionaries are better examples). Linguists almost always resort to IPA, or some other notation system, when recording a new language, as very few languages are truly phonetic (and the few languages that are tend to be languages for which the writing system was invented or reformed just a few decades ago, linguistic drift over just a few hundred years means any writing system must either go through frequent reform or become non-phonetic). The high literacy rates in China, Japan, and Taiwan further show that even a very difficult to learn writing system can be learned by almost everyone in the population, provided there is good access to education. I also disagree that history is the only reason to learn traditional characters. Taiwan and Singapore exist, and they use traditional characters almost all the time.

I feel like sticking to a character writing system after seeing alphabets in action is like some remote tribe being shown the wheel and they walk away saying "Nah dude, I'm fine, I think I'll pass on that."

something i've wondered is how come vietnamese and korean have basically dropped out of using the characters, while japanese and chinese haven't and couldn't ? granted, they still sometimes use the characters in vietnam and south korea in addition to / instead of chu quoc ngu and hangeul, and you can write japanese purely in kana, but japanese and chinese are still basically reliant on them while you can just forget about them in vietnamese and korean

what's your opinion on Georgian script?

I can only imagine what will happen when ABChinese encounters Japanese writing...

I am not learning Chinese but Japanese. I have enjoyed learning them and I find them very unique. But I would be lying if I said they where ideal, but not without merit. The benefit is that I can guess the meanings of words which is especially useful as a learner if you get over the initial hurdle, also it's very compact good for garbage websites like Twitter that limit how much you can say. I wish you could have the best of both words but just isn't possible to my knowledge. My favorite writing system from functionality level would be Hangul(also very compact due to how it works, but still phonetic), but from looks I quite like Hiragana, Katakana and Cyrillic

听 聽 心 口 耳 （I don't know how to represent the tiny simple in the simplified version of country) one of them was kept and changed but the others were not 近 jin rhymes with the particle pronounce the same 今 or 斤 what does mouth or all the meanings of that character have to do with listening

The first argument is just "Chinese characters don't fit into technology designed for alphabetic writing systems"

I'm only beginning to learn Mandarin, but I think it's beneficial in some ways. Mostly because there are plenty of words that have the same sound AND tone, that are different concepts altogether. In that sense, maybe it was bound to end up the way it did. Because when shí can be a sound that can mean 12 different things, (not considering 3 other tones and a neutral tone that also have other meanings), it's probably beneficial that in writing, one can distinguish between the idea as opposed to just the sound. It might actually make learning it incredibly difficult.

Chinese was created for a tiny elite with heaps of time on their hands, not for ordinary people's literacy. Hence, the system is a nightmare to promote literacy.

@ 4:03. What about Cangjie?

I wasn't completely on board with your argument until the example of 爱 , that was quotable!!!

Also note that the system we've settled on for inputting Chinese characters into a computer (pinyin) removes one of the biggest supposed advantages of Chinese characters, namely that they're pronunciation-agnostic and can be understood across dialects/languages. Now you _do_ have to know how a character is pronounced in Standard Mandarin if you want to type it. Seems like people don't actually care very much about that benefit in practice.

I just love the fact that in the chinese writing system you at least get some clues to the meaning of the word, even if you don't know it. while in an alfabetical writing system, you're just able to pronounce an unknown word but are left clueless to it's meaning. I actually enjoy learning the chinese writing system, as it's a journey on it's own. learning to write my own language was quite boring and repetitive (dutch, which is probably the language where the spelling stays the closest to how you pronounce it, spellingrules are often revised to reflect changes in the spoken language). It did go fast indeed. but the learning how to pronounce words correctly and how to spell them (all the exceptions to the rules), takes much longer then in chinese in my experience. Chinese is such an easy language in that respect. so there are always pro's and cons.

In addition, speakers of the other Chinese spoken languages are actually writing in Standard Chinese which is the literal form of Mandarin. For example, the phrase _Is it or isn't theirs?_ is spoken in Cantonese as 係唔係佢哋嘅？, but written in Standard Chinese as 是不是他們的？

You should really also do a video on why Hangeul is the best writing system (for the language jt was designed and not others) and explain why Hanja have Almost completely fallen out of use in everyday life.

I'm sorry if i come off as overly angry I understand you're not trying to argue that "using these characters is stupid", but rather that as an evolutionary trait, it's not *the most favouritable* But i heavily disagree on a lot of things, and i get very invested into it I admit i don't want to review my message in order to fix the tone, and i understand if i upset you, i apologize in advance. I wrote this part after the fact. I hope we can have a discussion, since i'm sure i got something wrong, and probably misinterpreted your points. "you know there's something wrong with the writing system when it relies on a secondary notation system" How is that a bad thing? That's only for sounds, you don't need a secondary notation system for writing it. You give up quick readability for tighter messages It's like saying "eugh english is OBJECTIVELY bad because some words are not written as they sound" I mean, sure, it may be gruesome to learn, but is it OBJECTIVELY bad? what makes a system objectively bad? Would an alphabet be objectively better..? in that case, how come english is still not great? Would vietnamese, with its long strings of hats and NO DISTINCTION WHATSOEVER FOR ITS WORDS aside from you having to memorise what those few sounds mean be better? "you wouldn't reform a language if it had nothing wrong" well first language is different from writing system, and you'd have to define what IS wrong We haven't reformed english writing for example but that doesn't mean it's good, nor bad, it's just a language like every other "I want to make sure i'm reviewing the system based on how intuitive it is" ...it's intuitive to its speakers, which is the target of a language it's like saying that japanese is "really bad" because it does not conform to how a westener's mind works And the point on "even native speakers forget em" is eh at best yes, they do forget SOME but the most commonly used ones remain It's like saying that we shouldn't have complex words because most people forget them like ??? yeah most people forget very niche words, AND EVEN HOW TO SPELL THEM SOMETIMES "alphabets are superior because they can be inputed into computers directly" ...i don't really get why that'd be a bad thing Given chinese characters give twice the writing space on twitter just because you need to spell them out phonetically (through either pyinyin or bopomofo, which by the way, is like pinyin but developed by chinese people themselves, and works even better than the latin script) doesn't mean that they're inferior With chinese you have to input 3 sounds max to make a word, with latin, or cyrillic you have tons of time wasted inputting more gryphs on the screen. They're not better, nor worse, just different "chinese doesn't follow the pattern of speech where one sound follows the other" uhm ...yes it does..? You just have to learn the characters? but they're written one after the other. It's like saying the alphabet doesn't follow a pattern of speech because you have to stop and draw them out before they actually mean anything like ??? You draw squiggles on the paper that carry meaning and sounds, the more complex the squiggle, the more you have to write, but the more meaning you can encode into it "the make up of the block is completely random" just because it doesn't make sense to you, does not mean it's random. They were drawn with a very specific image in mind. They're simplified drawings with pieces that were built together to carry meaning: 歩く (aruku - to walk) Kanji ノ 小 止 Radicals This is japanese, i'm using it just because i know it better, but the thought behind it is still the same. those characters all add up to create the kanji for "walking" (which by the way is assisted by the く to let you understand we're actually talking about the verb) I don't know the meaning of the radicals (the smallest pieces that make up a single kanji), and i'm sure either the kanji, or its radicals were simplified over time, but they were put together FOR A REASON. "and there are not nearly enough rules to systematically input them in a computer" 对不提，这个句子是什么？( I *think* this is how you write "sorry, what is this", but to avoid confusion: i'm saying "why do these character appear on my screen if that's true") “Actual chinese people are forgetting how to write the characters because they use their smartphones too much” This is a good point, especially since he shows people actually struggling to write basic words (like toothpaste, hugging, ecc”) This point I can agree with “italian missionaries had to put down the sounds because there is no phonetic alphabet” Again, for its speakers, this is not a problem. It's like saying you have to use “romaji” for japanese therefore it's a bad system. Or you have to take notes in a different alphabet (cyrillic to latin) therefore bad from the perspective of the missionaries, sure, it was bad, but for the SPEAKERS THEMSELVES. It's not. So not objective. “a word in english shows you how to read it” Ghoti = Fish GH from tough O from women TI from mantion Look up how many phonemes are in the english alphabet. We have like 17 different phonemes for the vowels. And we only have 5 symbols for them. And what about non-english speakers? We have to write down the english letters with the IPA in order to actually know how to pronounce them! Just because you speak the language, it doesn't mean it's easy for us! Knight = nait “yu kent rimembuhr hau chu rait ey word es isili bikuhs its not fuhnetik” fair fair “chinese characters were adopted by both korean and japanese because they were very iconic” sort of. Japanese afaik adopted it because of exchanges with china. A society doesn't adopt a script “just because it looks cool” it has to be practical. Korea didn't actually exist until recently (Iirc corretly, it was once part of japan) so it makes sense that they'd actually use the same writing script. HOWEVER. The script is mainly used for names (book titles, important places). Korea uses mainly the Hangul script. “even if chinese has different dialects, they all use the same script!” even if italian, english, french, and german are very different, they all use the same script! It's almost like changing it is useless since it'd isolate your country from the others! Again. It's not because the script itself is good or adaptable, it's mainly because it was used by people that often spoke with eachother (besides, i'm sure some minor characters actually changed between cultures) Italy had a lot of fonts, english had 1 or 2 more symbols, german had 5, but they all relied on a VERY similar script. “it's very adaptable and survived in history” The chinese writing script just survived because people didn't feel the need to modify literally everything about a writing script that was already working, and china to this day remains a REALLY BIG powerhouse. Also Vietnam is a thing besides., Take mongolian as another example. The script was actually modified a lot, and now mongol uses cyrillic does that make the writing script itself bad? No. They just adopted a different one. “cinese characters are not customized to mandarin, or cantonese” Depends what you mean, cantonese often uses older versions of some characters, whilist mandarin uses the simiplified version of everything. German technically doesn't have a customized script either, i'd argue even the ß has no intrinsic customized value. It's just a symbol that represents a sound, and it just so happened to be the one germans used for the ss sound (which can be still written as either „ss” or „ß“)

8:02 I imagine reading Chinese like having an English text where every second or every third syllable is cut out and just a black square is left ... however when you are a native speaker you come close when guessing most of time ... I'd like to make or see the same experiment with Chinese readers too and see if it would make any differences

❓I often hear that chinese stroke order is very important, but I have never found the answer to a simple question "why?" Can anyone enlighten me on that? 🙏

If not because of the political conflict back then, I think Zhuyin will be more widely uses as simpler writing system. Just like what Hiragana and Katakana are for Japanese.

There's a reason Korea transitioned from Hanja/Chinese script to Hangeul. Pragmatics and to assist education for the populace. The points he made still stand today.