http://www.ltaaa.com/essence-view-id-1750.html
Why Chinese is One of the Advanced Languages in the World
2013-07-01 Surrender is a Habit 43879 131 37
Article Introduction
First of all, we need to admit that the title is just a gimmick. I always see people arguing whether Chinese is advanced or backward. Although I am not a professional, I will use some concepts in communication and storage to talk about why Chinese is a very advanced language. It should be noted that although the following arguments are based on actual experimental data, the calculations are very rough, and the scale of the experiments is not large. In other words, although Chinese has an advantage here, if we change a batch of experimental participants, it may be the other way around. There are really no particularly comprehensive tests at present. So you can just take a look at the following numbers and don't take them too seriously. In fact, the efficiency of the world's major languages has reached a bottleneck of the current human brain, and the differences are not large overall. My main purpose is to fight against reverse nationalists.
Text Content
First of all, we need to admit that the title is just a gimmick. I always see people arguing whether Chinese is advanced or backward. Although I am not a professional, I will use some concepts in communication and storage to talk about why Chinese is a very advanced language. It should be noted that although the following arguments are based on actual experimental data, the calculations are very rough, and the scale of the experiments is not large. In other words, although Chinese has an advantage here, if we change a batch of experimental participants, it may be the other way around. There are really no particularly comprehensive tests at present. So you can just take a look at the following numbers and don't take them too seriously. In fact, the efficiency of the world's major languages has reached a bottleneck of the current human brain, and the differences are not large overall. My main purpose is to fight against reverse nationalists.
I. Criteria for Evaluating Language Level
Spoken language, when analyzed today, is actually a communication protocol. That is to say, language actually transforms people's thoughts into sound waves with different frequencies and waveforms through the pronunciation organs, and then another individual's auditory organs and related brain tissues transform them back into thoughts. A communication protocol is a rule, a rule that stipulates how to transform thoughts/information into signals that are easy to transmit. In computers, communication protocols basically have these two evaluation criteria: transmission efficiency and noise resistance. The so-called transmission efficiency means how much information can be transmitted according to this communication protocol in a unit time. The so-called noise resistance means how much noise this communication method can still ensure that most of the information is transmitted correctly.
Transmission efficiency has two aspects, one is coding efficiency and the other is transmission speed. Coding efficiency means how short a string of signals this communication protocol can use to express an information. Transmission speed means how fast a section of signal can be transmitted.
To evaluate whether a spoken language is advanced, we need to analyze the above questions.
Characters are a way of data storage. The requirements for the storage format are different from those of the communication protocol. The storage format requires small storage space and fast reading and writing speed. Compared with the reading speed, the writing speed is secondary. This is because on average, one writing corresponds to many readings, and the time people spend reading characters is generally far longer than writing. Especially in modern society, handwriting is getting less and less, and computer input, printing, and typesetting have greatly accelerated the speed of recording characters. However, the reading speed has not been improved much. Therefore, in modern society, the reading speed occupies a more important position in defining the level of characters.
It should be noted that in the following discussion, "syllable" all adopts the definition of Western linguistics. Roughly speaking, a group of consecutive vowels and the consonants before and after them together form a syllable. For example, To, Bliss, Strength are monosyllabic, and Chinese Ba, Chuang are also monosyllabic. Although the pronunciation length of monosyllabic words is not completely the same, at least they are comparable.
II. Classification of Languages
There are roughly two types of languages in the world, one is called analytic language (or isolated language), and the other is called synthetic language (which is further divided into agglutinative language, inflectional language and other subtypes). Simply put, synthetic language can express different meanings by changing the morphology of words. Analytic language simply expresses different meanings by the relationship between words.
Let's take a simple example:
Chinese (analytic language): I told him yesterday.
English (synthetic language): I told him yesterday.
In English, you can first see the changes of told and him. Among them, changing tell to told means the action happened in the past, and changing he to him means the object. In Chinese, yesterday is used to directly indicate the time. If the time is not indicated, words like "already", "past" and so on are needed to indicate the past, but the morphology of the word is not changed. Chinese also reflects who is the subject and who is the object through their respective positions.
In fact, English is very close to analytic language among synthetic languages. For example, the future tense in English has no difference in word form from the general tense. In many other languages, different tenses are expressed by different word forms. For example, English has clear regulations on the position of each word. In many other synthetic languages, such as Latin, the position of words can be not fixed. In other words, such a sentence can be said: Him yesterday told I. Then, through the nominative case word form and objective case word form in the word form, it is judged who told whom.
This is very bad, because there is always a difference in order when reading. The reading order we hope is: first read the part that our brain needs to process first. Analytic language has this advantage by nature. Many synthetic languages have also established similar rules in the process of gradual development, such as French, one of the descendants of Latin.
Ancient classical Chinese was also a kind of synthetic language. But due to the limitation of Chinese characters, the word form changes of ancient Chinese only exist in spoken language. For example, the causative use in classical Chinese, such as "King Wen used a hundred miles of land to make the princes his ministers" in "The Book of Songs", the word "minister" (to make submissive) needed to add the sound "s-" before the pronunciation of the Chinese character to mark it in ancient times. This is a typical word form change of synthetic language.
Some people think that modern Chinese still has a certain synthetic language color. They think that adding particles such as "le", "de" is actually the deformation of words. This view can only be a matter of opinion.
From the overall development trend, the spoken languages all over the world are developing from synthetic language to analytic language. Although it cannot be said that analytic language is necessarily better than synthetic language. But this trend shows that a certain characteristic of analytic language is in line with the development of history. This advantage is data compression.
III. Data Compression: The Superiority of Analytic Language
When computers entered a new era, people began to study how to store video files on computers. The initial plan was extremely simple, that is, to store each frame of image all. But this is undoubtedly inefficient. Because there is too much redundant information here. For example, in a night scene, many places on the screen are black. Why record the color of each point repeatedly? So the next idea is to no longer store the complete information of each frame of image, but store the differences between the next frame of image and the previous frame of image. All parts with the same color in the two images are skipped.
Analytic language happens to have such an effect. For example, when a person is talking about what happened yesterday in Chinese, he only needs to mention "the following things all happened yesterday" at the beginning, and then there is no need to mention the tense again. In English, however, you need to repeatedly use the tense to indicate that this thing happened in the past. When communicating, you need to always consider time, nominative/objective case, quantity, active/passive. This has an impact on communication. Of course, after proficiently using this language, the time to consider these will be greatly reduced, but even proficient synthetic language users will still make mistakes in this regard. With the help of context, these changes can all be omitted. The time deformation can be completed by adding a time adverbial in the first sentence, and the sentences describing the same time period afterwards no longer need to consider the description time. This is the data compression ability of analytic language.
Of course, this does not mean that analytic language is necessarily better than synthetic language. In the absence of context, a synthetic language can convey more information in a relatively simple form. But as the amount of communication in human society increases, the context of one communication becomes rich, and many information communication methods that are very efficient under the conditions of words and single sentences also seem to be more and more redundant. Therefore, the world's major languages have all moved closer to analytic language.
In addition, some people think that analytic language is inferior to synthetic language. They say "synthetic language only uses a few letters to form a prefix to express a specific meaning, but Chinese can't do it". This is not seeing that in the actual communication in today's world, the context is always very rich. This way of deformation is very valuable under a single sentence, but it has no meaning in actual communication.
Regarding the表意 efficiency, that is, information density, of each language, a 2011 experiment was conducted by the University of Lyon in France.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.htmlhttp://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_2011_Language.pdf
In this experiment, the researchers found 59 users of different languages, including English, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Italian and Spanish. They provided 20 passages of text, which were all translated into their respective languages. Then these people were asked to read at normal speed respectively. The researchers recorded the whole process.
Then the researchers calculated the number of all syllables, calculated the number of meanings (basic units of表意) expressed in the reading, and then drew conclusions. Of course, this experiment cannot completely and accurately show the differences of each language, but it can still be used for qualitative analysis.
Among them, the information density of Chinese is 0.94, ranking first. The information density of English is 0.91, ranking second. It is also worth noting that French (0.74), German (0.79), Italian (0.72), and Spanish (0.63), which are farther from analytic language, have lower information density than English. The information density of Japanese is 0.49, and some people think this is because the表意 method of Japanese is different from other languages.
The information density here is obtained by calculating the number of meanings contained in each syllable. Since the number of meanings is counted from the original text - English version. And after translation, the number of meanings may increase or decrease. In order to prevent the distortion in the translation process from causing the data standard to be inconsistent. The texts of each language were separately translated into Vietnamese, and then divided by the number of meanings contained in each syllable in their respective Vietnamese texts to finally obtain a more fair data.
This makes me can't help but think that after the information density of modern Chinese with large-scale water injection is still so high, then how high has the information density of classical Chinese reached? It's a pity that there is no such research. However, according to the weighted average of the frequency of use, the average number of words in modern Chinese is about 1.5. In classical Chinese, many of them are expressed by monosyllabic words. To make a compromise, I guess that the information density of classical Chinese reaching 1.25 times that of modern Chinese should be no problem. This was a terrifying number in ancient times. Because Latin is not simpler than the main modern European languages. Limited by the space for recording text in ancient times, Chinese was obviously more advantageous in terms of text recording. This may be the reason why the text records in ancient China were very rich.
Some people question that sometimes a very long syllable has a very simple meaning, while a very short word has a very complex meaning. This situation certainly exists. I need to explain that the advantages and disadvantages of all complex things are a statistical concept. "High" is not absolutely high under any conditions, but high in most cases. If a language uses an average of one more syllable than another language in plain communication, then obviously its表意 efficiency is very low.
Some people also say that syllables cannot be used as the unit for measuring information density, because different syllables have very different pronunciation lengths. This question is very good. In fact, I will talk about the pronunciation length of English and Chinese in the next section. The average pronunciation length of English monosyllables is longer than that of Chinese. Therefore, in terms of the information density of spoken language, Chinese has a greater advantage.
It is worth noting that because Chinese characters are separated from pronunciation, understanding and reading cannot be carried out simultaneously, so reading in Chinese will be slower. In the experiment of the University of Lyon, Chinese readers read 5.18 syllables per second. Significantly slower than other languages (English 6.19, French 7.18, German 5.97, Italian 6.99, Japanese 7.84, Spanish 7.82). Therefore, in reading, the efficiency of Chinese to transmit information is relatively low. The converted reading information transmission efficiency is English 1.08, French 0.99, German 0.90, Italian 0.98, Japanese 0.74, Chinese 0.94, Spanish 0.98.
Of course, the above research by the University of Lyon has also been criticized by some people. Some people think it is too rough, and some places are not self-consistent. For example, according to the data in the text, the表意 efficiency of Japanese is obviously low, but the author also says that in fact, the amount of information expressed by each language in one minute is almost the same.
IV. Advantage of Transmission: Tone
The transmission of spoken language information is completed through sound. Sound is generally divided into four parts: timbre, pitch, duration, and intensity. For a syllable of language, timbre refers to the combination of consonants and vowels in it. The other three are easy to understand.
Generally, modern languages do not regulate intensity very much, because this is really impossible to be unified among each person, and is affected by the distance of the speaker, mood, physical state, etc. It should be noted here that the "stress" in English is actually a change in pitch.
The remaining three elements are all widely used in languages.
Take Chinese as an example. Timbre is easy to understand, which is the pronunciation excluding tone. And tone itself is divided into two items: pitch and duration.
The four tones of Mandarin Chinese are four different pitch change modes. The first tone is to maintain pitch. The second tone is a change from low to high pitch. The third tone is a change from high to low and then to high pitch. The fourth tone is a change from high to low pitch. Although we said in Chinese class that neutral tone has no tone, in essence, neutral tone is to shorten the duration. Neutral tone is generally a fourth tone or first tone with shortened duration (sometimes the pitch is very low). However, neutral tone is very short and difficult to hear clearly, so it is only used for specific purposes in Mandarin (modal particles, plural markers, etc.).
The stress in English is actually a difference in pitch. So strictly speaking, English has tone. However, English has only two tones: high and low. But in English, tone is only used for some syllables. Except for indicating questions, emphasis and other situations, English words do not change tone usually. Except for a small number of English words (such as Record), English words do not use tone to distinguish different meanings. English does use the duration element (such as Sheep and Ship). Since English generally only uses timbre and duration to distinguish meanings, it is generally considered to be a language without tone.
First of all, from the perspective of coding efficiency, we can say that Chinese is one of the languages with the highest coding efficiency in the world. Chinese is one of the few languages in the world that use pitch to distinguish different words. Therefore, from the perspective of coding, the表意 ability of Chinese pronunciation is one dimension higher than that of general languages. That is to say, using a single syllable, Chinese can theoretically express up to 4 times the different types of information that general foreign languages can express.
Why do foreigners find it so hard to learn Chinese, while Chinese people find it not so hard to learn English? It's because Chinese people have already mastered the pitch change in pronunciation, and now they are learning the two fixed pitches. In learning Chinese, one of the most difficult problems for many foreigners is tone, because they are only used to two fixed pitches and have not heard or practiced changing pitches continuously when pronouncing.
Some people propose that tone itself will affect the pronunciation speed. This is of course existing. For example, the second tone requires the pitch to rise gradually. To show this, it is necessary to show two pitches when pronouncing, which is naturally more troublesome than a single pitch. But the advantage of tone is that it can produce a variety of different pronunciations on the basis of the same group of consonants and vowels combinations, so there is no need to use more consonants to distinguish two words with similar pronunciations (such as English life and light). In English syllables, the pronunciation of consonant-vowel group mode syllables is indeed slightly faster than that of Chinese. But other modes, such as consonant-consonant-vowel group-consonant (Blight), or consonant-vowel group-consonant, are often slower than Chinese pronunciation. And for consonant-vowel group mode syllables, because English lacks tone, the number is far less than that of Chinese. On average, the pronunciation of a single syllable in English should be slower than that in Chinese.
For the conclusion that "the pronunciation of a single syllable in English should be slower than that in Chinese", some people may not be very convinced. Let's take a very simple example. The basic mathematical ability of ordinary Chinese people is often higher than that of Europeans and Americans. This is not simply a matter of education. More importantly, this is the result of the naming of numbers in Chinese.
All numbers in Chinese are monosyllabic. Among them, 6 and 9 have two vowels (or according to international academic standards, three vowels), and the pronunciation is slightly slower; 0 has a retroflex nasal sound, and the pronunciation may be slightly slower. There are also a few with retroflex sounds, which may be slightly slower.
All numbers in English, except 7, are all monosyllabic. Among them, they cover "consonant-vowel" structure (such as 4), "consonant-consonant-vowel" structure (such as 3), "consonant-vowel-consonant" structure (such as 5), "consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant" structure (such as 6), vowel-consonant structure (such as 8), diphthong structure (such as 0, note that 0 is pronounced "ou" in general numbers, not zero, which is really too laborious), etc. It can be said that these numbers in English roughly include various monosyllabic word syllable structures in English. Of course, there is no most magical consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant structure here, but that is as rare as the unit vowel structure.
So on average, how much slower are English numbers than Chinese numbers?
First of all, we need to know that people's short-term memory of numbers is actually the memory of the pronunciation of numbers. In other words, the number of digits you can remember is determined by the total length of the pronunciation of numbers. Research shows (see
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/26140/0000216.pdf?sequence=1) that the short-term digital memory ability of Chinese people has been higher than that of Americans since childhood. This document shows that the average number of digital memory length of American college students is 7.2 digits, and that of Chinese college students is 9.2 digits. The number of short-term digital memory digits of American college students is 78.26% of that of Chinese students. In other words, the average pronunciation length of English numbers is 27.78% higher than that of Chinese numbers. Removing the influence of English number 7 (bisyllabic) on the average length (10%), then on average, the pronunciation length of monosyllabic English is about 17.78% higher than that of Chinese.
Furthermore, the numbers in China are completely monosyllabic, so the entire number table can be constructed in an absolute logical way. Ninety-six is nine tens plus one six. English is "ninety" (a special word different from nine and ten) plus one six. French is four twenties plus sixteen. The most concise and logical structure in Chinese is extremely rare in the world. The multiplication table of nine times nine is constructed on this basis. For children in other countries, it can be said that it is several times more difficult to recite this table than Chinese children. This advantage in language improves the basic mathematical ability of Chinese people.
By the way, some people say that ancient Chinese had more tones. Did Chinese develop back? This is of course wrong. Some tones are affected by the speaker's mood and other conditions, and there are more uncertain factors in identification. This problem will be explained in detail in the section on noise resistance.
V. Advantage in Information Theory
From the perspective of information theory, coding is very learned. For example, we know that when computers transmit information, they are actually transmitting 0s and 1s. So what if the frequencies of various information we transmit are not the same? The answer is that the more frequent the occurrence, the shorter the coding. This can improve the overall efficiency.
For example, we only need to transmit four kinds of information. According to the general idea, naturally, these four kinds of information are respectively represented by 00, 01, 10, 11. Each information needs to be represented by a two-bit binary number, that is, 100 pieces of information need to send 200 binary numbers. But if one of the information has a probability of 91%, and the other three are 3% respectively. Then another coding method can be used: 1, 01, 001, 000. On average, this transmission method needs to send 91 + 2*3 + 3*3 + 3*3 = 115 binary numbers to transmit 100 pieces of information. Obviously, it is more efficient than the previous one.
The world's major languages have evolved for thousands of years, and the length distribution of their vocabulary is relatively in line with the requirements of information theory. You will find that the more common words in each language are generally shorter. In English, I, you, he, she, we are all monosyllabic words.
The monosyllabic words in English are very rich. In fact, there are more than those in Chinese. This is because English can add consonants before and after a consonant-vowel combination to realize various different monosyllabic pronunciations. After permutation and combination, the monosyllabic word library in English is a relatively large word library. But this has a cost, that is, low noise resistance. This problem will be explained in the next section.
According to the Western syllable definition, the use of monosyllabic words in English is more frequent than that in Chinese. According to statistical analysis. The average word length of Chinese users is about 1.5 words up and down. (There is a chapter "Eye Movements in Reading Chinese and English Text" in the book "Reading Chinese Script: A Cognitive Analysis"), and the average number of syllables per word for adult English users is about 1.4 (see
http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/phonology/pubs/PUB30.pdf, which is also supported by another study: analyzing 10 hours of speech and listening recordings, the average number of syllables per word is 1.38).
Therefore, in terms of the number of syllables, the average Chinese word is 7.14% longer than the English word. However, considering that one syllable in English is actually much longer than that in Chinese (even if the 17.78% obtained in the previous section is halved, there is still 8.89%). Coupled with the fact that the information content per syllable in Chinese is roughly 3.30% higher than that in English (see the data in the third section). From the perspective of information theory, the information transmission efficiency of Chinese is basically higher than that of English. (Yes, I know that the calculation of information theory also needs more data, and the average value is not enough. But I really can't find it, so I can only make a rough estimate.)
This is also verified by another experiment (see
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3111932/)
This paper found 8 Chinese users and 8 English users. Then let them form a group of two. One person in a group describes the picture (describer), and the other person draws according to the description (drawer). Finally, the accuracy of the picture is compared. At the same time, observe the language of the describer.
The final result is that the Chinese describer obviously started describing earlier than the English describer. The time difference between the describer starting to describe and the drawer starting to draw is lower for Chinese users than for English users. The drawing time is lower for Chinese drawers than for English drawers. The overall time is significantly lower for the Chinese group than for the English group. So all of the Chinese group are faster than the English group. And the more complex the drawing, the faster the Chinese group is.
Drawing results, 144 paintings. The Chinese group made an average of 8.1 mistakes each time, among which the describer made an average of 3.7 mistakes each time, and the drawer made 4.4 mistakes. The English group made an average of 13.25 mistakes each time, among which the describer made an average of 8.5 mistakes each time, and the drawer made 4.75 mistakes. The gap between the two is still within the statistical error. So it is not significant. (Hmm? Who just said that Chinese is not as accurate as English?)
After that, in order to consider the skill differences of the drawers. Let each drawer draw directly according to the original picture. The result is that the Chinese group is slower than the English group.
During the drawing, the Chinese group used significantly fewer syllables than the English users. The speech rates of the two groups (syllables per second) were close (this conclusion is consistent with the previous analysis of speech speed).
Although this is a preliminary experiment, it can still be seen that Chinese has advantages in communication: using fewer words, shorter time, and roughly the same (if not higher) description accuracy. This experiment also shows... The artistic level of our people still needs to be improved...
As for the main other European languages, according to the data mentioned in the third section, their pronunciation frequencies are higher than those in English, and their information density is lower than that in English. I think it is unlikely that those languages will surpass Chinese in this regard.
VI. Word Formation Logic
Because the monosyllabic word resources in English are relatively rich, but the average pronunciation length is longer. So you will notice that the proportion of monosyllabic words in English is higher than that in Chinese, and the proportion of polysyllabic words is smaller than that in Chinese. Many words that are very logically related have lost their connection in pronunciation because they have to squeeze into the limited monosyllabic word library. This leads to the fact that the commonly used words in English often lack the logic of word formation.
For example, we can easily say "rooster", "hen", "chick", "egg". In English, it becomes "Cock", "Hen", "Chick", "Egg", with no connection at all. If common words want to establish a connection, then English must increase the syllable number of these words, then the average word length will increase, and from the perspective of information theory, the information transmission efficiency will be lower. So English can only compromise on the logic of word formation.
In contrast, Chinese is much more relaxed. Even at the current information efficiency, Chinese can still ensure that most word constructions have logic. Therefore, compared with English vocabulary, Chinese vocabulary is relatively easy to remember. This has a result that the commonly used vocabulary of Chinese is far more than that of English.
The vocabulary and new word recognition ability of English users can be seen in the following paper from 1995:
http://jlr.sagepub.com/content/27/2/201.full.pdf
Among them, the average self-reported vocabulary of college students is 16141. After multiple-choice tests, it is found that they can identify 71% of the vocabulary on average. That is to say, the average college student's vocabulary is estimated to be 11460 words. The average self-reported vocabulary of the elderly is 21252. After multiple-choice tests, it is found that they can identify 80% of them on average. That is to say, the vocabulary of the elderly is roughly 17002. The probability of correctly understanding an unknown word is 30% for college students and 39% for the elderly.
No relevant research in China has been found. However, here is the "Draft of the Common Words List of Modern Chinese" of the Commercial Press:
http://wenku.baidu.com/view/51636fec551810a6f5248676.html
You can go in and see your own vocabulary. I feel that college students can reach 50,000 without any problem. And this is definitely not the entire vocabulary of a person...
There may be words you haven't seen in it. You can see how many you can't guess the correct meaning... I think except for very few, there is really no difficulty...
Digital Memory
This section is based on the following paper from the University of Michigan:
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/26140/0000216.pdf?sequence=1
This article summarizes three statistical results.
The first one: Kindergarten, first grade, second grade. Chinese children can generally remember about two more digits than American and Japanese children.
The second one: 6-7-year-old children, reciting numbers forward, backward, and in groups, mainly to deny the hypothesis that "Asian children are born to be better at mathematics than Americans". It is found that Chinese children have worse memory for numbers when reciting backward than American children.
The third one: Comparison between Chinese and American college students. It is found that students from both countries can remember numbers with the same pronunciation length. On average, Chinese students are two digits higher than American students (9.2 vs. 7.2).
Foreigners Learning Chinese
Finally, let's have some sketches. Here are some experiences of foreigners learning Chinese.
http://benross.net/wordpress/journey-across-the-great-hump-of-china-debunking-the-myth-that-chinese-is-the-world%E2%80%99s-most-difficult-language/2009/10/29/
http://www.fluentin3months.com/chinese/
Disadvantages:
First experience: Can't hear the tone when entering.
This is completely understandable. They have never lived in this environment and are not sensitive to tone. Chinese children don't have this problem.
Second experience: Chinese characters are really hard to remember.
But their summary is that once you learn hundreds of them, it becomes easier later. This seems to be recognized.
Advantages:
First experience, no tenses and deformations.
So much so that an American said that overall this is easier than learning Spanish: In Spanish, "is" has the following deformations in the general tense: estar, estoy, estás, está , estamos, estáis, están, ser, soy, eres, es, somoms, sois, son
After changing the learned words, you can't understand them if you change the form.
By the way, I saw a log last week specifically about what tense should be used in different parts of the paper... Chinese has never had this problem.
Second experience, easy to infer the meaning of new words.
This originated from an old American chatting with a Chinese person online. The Chinese asked the American what he was doing. The American said he was going to take the GRE and was reciting words. The Chinese was shocked and asked why you are an American and still need to recite words. Indeed, everyone thinks back, how many times have you checked Chinese new words since entering college? Do you need to recite Chinese words when taking the postgraduate entrance examination?
Benzene Benzene
Toluene Toluene
Xylene Xylene
Of course, these also have relatively unified names: Benzene, Methyl-benzene, Dimethyl-benzene. But the Americans dislike them being too long, so they are used less.
No wonder Americans need to check words after entering college...
If you tell a Chinese person peritonitis, everyone basically knows where the problem is. Tell an American Peritonitis. Generally, Americans can at most estimate that this is a kind of disease, but they don't know where it is.
For example, "syllable" everyone can see what it means at a glance. There may be some differences in the specific definition in the academic circle. This word doesn't need to be memorized at all when you see it. The English word Syllable, it is impossible to guess its meaning from the form. This word can be traced back to the Greek word "syllabē", and the Greek word comes from the Greek word syllambanein, which means to gather, gather. It's really hard for English users.
But to be fair, Britain has long been a backward country in Europe, so there are really too many loanwords in English (French, German, Latin), and the logical structure of words is really not very good. This is not necessarily a common problem of phonetic writing.
This reminds me of the anti-intellectualism in the United States. This may be related to the fact that the people often can't understand professional terms.
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Last edited by zzz19760225 on 2017-5-23 at 07:17 ]
