The Chinese language is an iconogramic language using characters to convey meaning and ideas. The characters are no relation to its pronounciation, so you need to memorise each character itself.

Chinese characters are also used by Japan and South Korea.

Anyone who learns Chinese or Japanese will need to spend some time learning the characters compared to other languages eg. English. Reading is not so tough after a while, but a unique problem to these languages is that you tend to forget the characters if you don't use often. In phonetic languages, the pronounciation of a word helps you to derive the spelling of a word. The more consistent the spelling rules, the more likely people will not mispell them. Whereas for Chinese characters, you need to recall them from memory, either through mnemonics or frequent use. Apparently, usage of handphones and computers are causing people to forget how to write them?

Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan

South Korea has already made steps to use less Chinese characters in their daily life. Already you see the characters used sparingly in daily newspapers and news. They still have that homophone problem, but they apparently get by with spaces between words and through the context of their sentences. Japan is going the other way, and actually increased the number of characters it is using:

Gov't updates common kanji list for 1st time in 29 years

China went through its Cultural Revolution and ended simplifying their characters. So now we have two sets of Chinese characters - Traditional and Simplified.

So guy and girls how do you think will fare for the future of Chinese characters? Will they still be around in 100 years, or will they be replaced by a phonetic script? Do you think that being unable to write is a problem for science and technology?

This post has been edited by engseng: Dec 22 2010, 03:33 PM

i dont see any problem with it with more and more people learning how to write and read this language realising how important this language economically and globally. Its the same with Tamil, more are going for it. If you know English, Mandarin, Tamil, Spanish, you should be able to communicate with nearly 80-90% world population.

i dont think so. mayb tats not the case in malaysia, as more n more young chinese are moving into "banana-lisation", or english educated. but as long as CHINA still around, we wont see chinese characters gone extinct.

For a person who grew up learning chinese and live in a chinese environment, they will not find it difficult. You are judging based on your on bias opinion as a Malaysian. In our country chinese is not popular in commercial usage. It is only popular among a small chinese community. If a person went to SRJK ( C ), they can be out of touch with chinese since they dont use it in the work place. If they dont keep in touch by reading chinese papers, they will eventually lose touch with the characters.

In contrast places like Macau, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China chinese is the official language and it is used widely in commerce. These people are constantly in touch with the characters every day.

I have no comments on Korea as I do not know much about it. I think they have a writing system of their own. As for Japan they had no choice but to preserve the Kanji. Their katagana and hiragana were also borrowed from chinese phonetic alphabets system call "por for mor for" ( I am not sure about the spelling for it). The chinese had invented alphabets long ago. The reason they do not use it is because there are too many homophones.

I think chinese will be around for a long time. The reason people are learning it is because one third of the world population is there. It is a huge market. Since China open up everyone wants to tap this market and the increase popularity in learning the language followed. One decade ago people use to watch the American economy as a sign of bad days ahead. Now the americans are watching the chinese economy.

as with any language, as long as it is being used, practiced.........it will stay.

currently, there's still usage of the old characters in news or advertisements but not much in writing anymore.
i predict that there will be a change to use only simplified characters.

with china upcoming and predicted to surpass US sometime around 2060 by current trend, you better hope your kids know chinese (and hindi/tamil) along with english

+1 read by somewhere else too ...

To me simplified and traditional is almost as different as Japanese and Chinese. I can only read simplified chinese, can't make out half the words in traditional, they look so different.
/rant

Selfish me kinda hoping traditional chinese will die out, so I can read more stuff, I'm sticking to stuff from the mainland for now....

Simplified is ugly. Traditional looks nicer

Consider English. Kids who text a lot with shortened, sometimes unintelligible messages, also sometimes have some problems with formal and correct use of their language (with grammar, spelling etc). They are fortunate because they maintain constant exposure to English through school or otherwise (in the media, film, tv etc).

English has survived for quite a while, but though its Alphabet script is easy to use and remember, there are still illiterate people (whose native languages should be English) who cannot read/write.

You are quite right in that Chinese characters can be difficult to recall without constant or regular use. Being able to text and IM in Mandarin script is very handy for people who've forgotten most of the characters - which only worsens the problem. Purists see this as cultural decline, but anyone could see that it isn't a good thing. Only optimists imply that it is "an evolution of language". Like you said, once someone leaves school and uses the characters with decreasing frequency, then they are very likely to forget.

I think Chinese characters will still be here after a while. It does not appear to be a hindrance towards science and technology, because as usual, the scientists who make the discoveries and improvements and who document their (or others') work would still be able to write down (on paper, or electronically) everything.

You could take Arabic as an example. Some young Arabs complain that Arabic is very hard to write - however, nearly all are fluent in spoken Arabic. Mind you, these are those who go to schools where English is the medium of instruction. This is not a serious problem, as academics and researchers are still able to write (at least electronically). However, the same problems arise for the younger people poised to take control of the future - they can text or IM in Arabic script, and they use those channels frequently (further forgetting how to write in their "mother tongue").

It is not known how the Chinese characters writing system will end up in the distant future. Take, for example, the history of Korean Hanja. Could Chinese characters share a similar fate as the archaic Egyptian Hieroglyph?

1) Korea developed an alphabetic script called Hangeul. It is basically writing ABC except they write it in a logogramic format instead of the linear format. About 60% of their vocabulary is from Chinese and they have a homophonic problem too, but for everyday use they get by with spaces and context. This one is basically a lot to do with Korean nationalism and their politicians, who view Chinese characters as a product of Japanese imperialism. And they're still quite pissed off with the Japanese.

2) Japan actually made effort to remove it totally from their writing. They tried using katakana instead of kanji where it used, but the homophonic problem meant that kanji is needed to resolve ambiguity. Also, the Japanese actually like Chinese characters and consider them very much part of their culture unlike the Koreans.

And the zhuyin fuhao (注音符號) was only invented in the early 20th century, hiragana and katakana was already in use for centuries earlier. Even the Taiwanese and Mao Zedong tried removing Chinese characters but it didn't work out.

It is not easy to remove it without a proper replacement. There would also be a lot of resistance from people who will be force to learn a new system. It is like reinventing the wheel. Since there had been various attempt to phase it out that failed, it is here to stay for good. We should thank Shi Huang Ti for unifying chinese characters.

I think another effort should be made to romanise chinese. Imagine entire books written in pinyin. I've seen a few of these, but they are very old, and rare. And not actually using pinyin per se, but are using the latin alphabet.

There still is a problem with Chinese text input on computer. Just observe anyone doing it. They can go quite fast, but probably not as fast a in English or another that uses the alphabet on the keyboard. Input is also very interactive. You type a few characters and choose your word/phrase from options presented on screen.

1) If you were blind, you would need screen reader software that reads the options to you. And you couldn't transcribe what is spoken, the reading-back would interfere with the original dictation.

2) if you were retyping something written down, you would need to move your gaze between paper and screen. Hundreds or thousands of times. This would be very tiring. A fast typist in English keep their gaze on the paper. Don't look at the keyboard and screen at all.

3) Does it not interrupt your flow of thought if you're constantly choosing options on screen. How does an author manage this? Or do constant practice means that you can "pinch"of a section of your mind, and that becomes the autopilot that chooses the options, while your main mind continue to think of whatever you were doing.

4) Chinese being an extremely compact language, there are many "words"/characters that are pronounced the same, but written differently. There is no easy way to clearly verbally specify which character you mean. In a language like English, you just spell it out. Just watch a Chinese speaking person telling another how to write their name, and you can see there is a problem. There being no actual way to spell out the character, how do you know which character you are speaking? This becomes a negotiation. You pick one character, put it in a phrase. Then from context, the other person guesses, "oh, you mean that character". Then repeat for each character in your name.

BTW: I used English only as an example. Not saying that it is better than Chinese. But the writing system has advantages in some instances. The same advantage goes with other languages like Malay, Russian, Tagalog, etc.

Depends on the geographical location, here, the priority goes to English in business but Chinese literate is an advantage or vise versa. The future, I'd say English comes first, many Chinese who are weak in English lag behind in computer technology, they lean towards the conventional because of their language disadvantage.

I can only read but not write because it was 30 years ago I never need to write a single Chinese character not even my name. Its existence or importance is based on need, not our concern. My Malay educated friend decided to send his daughter to Chinese School because of me and my nephew & niece are more capable in languages than us.

Chinese language had been evolving since caveman era to Wang Ti era to Shiang era to Chou era to Han era... etc etc..... i'm not surprise that it would evolve again in the next century...

korean is due to nationalism. they tried to remove trace of Chinese as they still denial they are decedent of chinese.

they not only minimize the chinese character in they daily usage, they also removing trace of Chinese in other area.

good eg is renaming the 'han chen' name to seoul..

the still use some of Han's character ...

This is interesting. Can you elaborate further?

you have not been exposed to chinese typing method other than pinyin, have you? there are many other methods that are a lot faster. it requires some training, but what skill dont?

hardly write in chinese anymore after graduate from secondary school, i'm from chinese educated background, primary school learn chinese and secondary also.

but after go to college, i almost never use it anymore, most of my friends are english speaker even though they are chinese, some other friend i communicate in mandarin/cantonese, but we all write in english. now there are some chinese words i also forget already and writing speed also very slow since i dont write it often.

chinese character might seem complex at first, but is actually easy to read, but not when you are trying to read it from your monitor where font size is 12, i read some chinese language chain message in facebook and it is really a pain for me to read it without zoom-in, the words is too small, and some complex word are stick together make it even harder to see.

i personally think that chinese writing culture doesn't has much influence in our country, when we come out and work, our primary language is english, as we deal with foreign company and computer most of the time.

i dont like to read chinese characters, not only they are hard to read, but sometime they translate people's english name or special words to chinese character and i will having hard time to understand which is what i hate to read chinese websites and articles.

Handwriting recognition for Mandarin input isn't exactly the most accurate - pinyin is fast but obviously Roman Alphabet is easier for very fast typing.

As for translation using sound for Mandarin or Chinese, the same goes to Korean and Japanese...

I don't know how much further Chinese characters will be simplified to.

But Chinese characters are definitely here to stay. The rest of the world are learning Chinese to tap into the Chinese market.

I'm a banana (unfortunately) myself but I took up primary 1 & 2 Chinese at university and I enjoyed/appreciate it. It was difficult no doubt but over time I start reading and writing characters and omit the use of pinyin completely. To me, pinyin are just sounds with no meaning. Characters are the true meaning.

That is the reason attempts to use alphabets for chinese is so difficult. Chinese is the only language that has a mono syllable for a word. Since the tongue and the ear is only limited in this area, the language is full of homophones