Efficiency of Chinese characters

Efficiency of Chinese characters

By Vladimir Skultety, M.A., B.A.

There have been several debates related to the efficiency of Chinese characters. There are a lot of those who say that Chinese characters are inefficient because there are simply too many of them and the amount of time necessary to learn them makes them terribly time consuming compared to the 35 or so letters of a Latin alphabet. 

I tried to take one step further away from the problem and look objectively at negative and positive aspects of this whole issue, but either way I look at it, I still think that characters are at least as efficient and in some respects even much more efficient than the western alphabetic scripts. I have to admit that this article will be a little biased, because I do like Chinese characters very much, but I will try to stay as objective as possible. Of course this article here does not even pretend to be a serious study as there is way too little actual research data in it, but I tried to sample it based on my experience so even though it is nowhere near 100% accuracy, it represents best how I feel about the problem, proves some points and hopefully will allow the reader to think a little differently about the efficiency of Chinese characters.

Introduction:

For most westerners, Chinese characters seem to be too complicated, but they are very simple and logical for native Chinese speakers. Chinese characters basically represent a very complicated and not always accurate alphabet with the addition of semantic elements. For us westerners even for those who have learned to speak a little Chinese, it looks as if there were an infinite number of characters and radical combinations. The fact is that this is not true. Take the word 膽囊 (gallbladder) or 犧牲 (to sacrifice) for instance. The characters of these two words look very complicated and for someone who's not very used to reading Chinese it might seem that they are very easy to confuse and look very similar to any other 4 characters. The fact is, that there is no other combination of two characters that comes even remotely close to resembling these two words so if a Chinese person sees them, he or she will most probably remember how to recognize and write these two words after seeing them only once. These words are phono-semantic compounds (they have been artificially constructed by scholars to represent the meaning and sound of a morpheme and are thus composed of two elements: the element representing the meaning of the morpheme and the element representing the sound of the morpheme), not pictograms (characters that resemble real objects), were not constructed based on pictures they should resemble and still can be remembered very fast – if you speak Mandarin fluently. If you look at pictograms like 日 (sun), 月 (moon), 木 (tree) or even 龜 (turtle) these are even easier to remember. There are super complicated characters like 鬱 or 籲 but they are so unique that again nothing comes even remotely close to them in shape so a Chinese person learns how to recognize them after only seeing them once or twice. Needless to say, that most of Chinese words are dissyllabic and even if a Chinese person would hesitate after only seeing the 鬱 character, as it rarely appears alone, if he or she were to see 憂鬱, which is really absolutely unique in combination and shape, he or she would know immediately what it means. It’s really like seeing the Eiffel tower for the first time, you see it once and remember it.

This is of course only true for character recognition. Writing Characters correctly is another story. It is true that a lot of my Taiwanese friends sometimes do not remember how to write this or that character correctly, or do not know how to read something, but how often does it happen that a westerner cannot remember how to correctly spell a word in his or her language? It also often happens, especially in English with medical terms, that a person does not know how to correctly pronounce a word or is not sure where the stress is falling. It is also true, that you just do not need to know all the characters or know how to write them, just like you do not necessarily know how to spell correctly all the words in English for instance.

Negatives:

There’s a lot of them. I don’t like numbers but it is true, that you need to know at least 2500 – 3000 characters to read something.  (Edit 5.5.2012 - strangely enough, after my small study I found that that you would actually only need about 2180 characters to read the newspaper)

It’s much more difficult to remember characters compared to the simple 35 or so letters of an alphabetic script – for us, learners of the language.

They are easy to forget

They are easy to confuse – for the learners

You not only need to learn how to recognize them, you need to learn how to write them by hand which doubles your effort

They are unpractical when you need to look up something in a list (dictionary, telephone list)

Positives:

They save up space and time. A character is much shorter than a typical western language word. Moreover, since each character is a morpheme (bearer of information) you often can see signs with only one or two characters that would sometimes require a whole sentence in English for instance.

They are beautiful, especially the traditional ones

They are an integral part of the Chinese culture

They make the language less susceptible to change

They allow people across China with different dialects to communicate

They enhance the memory and intelligence of Chinese kids

Handwriting comparison

People often argue, that handwriting Chinese characters is time consuming because there are too many strokes you need to do with the pen but I can think of 50 examples just of the top of my head, where there are actually much less strokes in characters than there are in equivalent English words:

	Language	Number of strokes by pen
漢字	Chinese Traditional	13 + 6 = 19
汉字	Chinese Simplified	5 + 6  = 11
Chinese characters	English	9 + 11 = 20
Čínske znaky	Slovak	10 + 8 = 18
Китайское письмо	Russian	16 + 10 = 25
Chinesische Schriftzeichen	German	13 + 18 = 31
Caractères chinois	French	12 + 9 = 21
Kínai írás	Hungarian	10 + 6 = 16

I know this is not the most representative example and you could give 100 other examples where western languages would be more effective, but my example proves one point. Not in one single language were there less strokes in the word meaning "Chinese characters" than in Simplified Chinese and only in two of them there were less strokes per word than in Traditional Chinese. I know that one could argue that this is simply because the word Chinese characters is long in every language, but it does consist of exactly two words just as the Chinese one and there are tons of other examples where this premise holds true.

Typing comparison

Typing on a computer is a slightly different matter so let me try to compare the amount of keyboard hits of some words. While typing in Chinese I am also including those hits that are required to change a character in case another one has the same sound. When I type in Pinyin I do not type in the tone as probably most Chinese do and I let the computer guess it. This makes the correction rate higher meaning I have to correct the characters manually every now and then costing me additional keyboard hits, but the more you type the better the computer gets at guessing which words you need so the amount of error is lower and lower:

Sentence	Total number of keyboard hits
漢子	7
Chinese characters	18
我是歐洲人	16
I am European	13
妳今天要去哪裡?	22
Where do you want to go today?	30
你在幹嘛?	13
What are you doing?	19
我真的覺得那個電影很好看	34
I really think that that was a great movie	42

Again, the examples I chose might not be the most representative ones, but to be fair I really chose the first thing that came across my mind without giving it too much thought as to which sentence would be shorter.

Writing length comparison

Although this is a little more complex, because in comparing the following articles language structure has a bigger impact on the length of articles rather than the writing system itself, my experience generally is, that a text written in Mandarin is a lot shorter than the same text written in English:

人人生而自由，在尊严和权利上一律平等。他们赋有理性和良心，并应以兄弟关系的精神相对待。

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

	Chinese Simplified	English
Total number of words	24	29
Total number of keyboard hits	125	169
Total number of strokes with pen	262	190 (roughly)

Public signs and announcements comparison

The language of public signs and announcements is absolutely fascinating and a little different than the usual language and this is where Chinese really hits hard with its efficiency. A very nice example is the following sentence seen in the Taipei Subway:

	讓坐給老弱婦孺	Yield your seat to the elderly, the disabled, pregnant women and passengers with children.
Total number of words	7	14
Total number of keyboard hits	20	89
Total number of strokes with pen	85	89

讓坐給 means yield your seat to, 老 is old, 弱 is weak, 婦 is women and 孺 is children. Chinese is an isolating language marks morphemes clearly through Chinese characters. If you’d write the same sentence in English which incidentally also happens to be an isolating language like this: Let sit to old weak women child – you might get your point across, but it would not be clear whether you should yield your seat to old weak women and children or the old, the weak, women and children not to mention that this would not be proper English. Doing the same in flective languages like Slovak or agglutinating Hungarian would be completely impossible.

When it comes to the total number of strokes by pen, there is only a slight difference, but would be much greater if the characters were simplified. To be fair, since the sign was written in Traditional characters originally I kept it that way.

Also, try to compare the amount of information you can jam into the same screen. I compared Xinhua and BBC main pages:

Reading speed

Even though I cannot compare this too well, since my Mandarin reading speed is too slow, I have the impression my Taiwanese friends read much faster in Mandarin than I do in Slovak/English. I think the structure of written Mandarin, length of Mandarin syllables and the fact that most Chinese do not echo words in their heads when they read, which is something I do, influences this to a great extent but the small size of a Chinese character does influence this too as your eyes have to travel a shorter distance on the page.

  

Conclusion

Even thought the examples I gave weren’t very representative and only reflect my impression about the efficiency of Chinese characters when compared to western alphabetic scripts, I hope they proved at least some points. Chinese writing is often much more effective than western alphabetic scripts. It looks very complicated and complex to the learners of the language and it really is. On the other hand, If you already speak Mandarin fluently – which Chinese speaking children do, learning how to read and write characters is a process that can be easily compared in length and effort to western kids learning how to write, read and spell western words. Chinese characters for the Chinese languages are used 99.999999% by native speakers of Chinese languages and 0.000001% or even less by learners of Chinese languages. As I tried to point out those 99.999999% already spoke fluent Chinese when learning how to read and write and the process is much much much easier for them than it is for us the 0.000001%. It is also them and not us who use characters daily and in the end should be them and not us who is most entitled to say whether Characters are or aren't efficient and should or shouldn’t be replaced by something else.