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The ancients were so wise
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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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chapotraphouse
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not worth the massive L of having to memorize thousands of symbols to read anything worthwhile instead of maybe ~80, and we could get that number down too.
I spent 7 years learning Japanese and 1 year learning Italian and I'm better at Spanish than Japanese. I have never taken Spanish.
smh latin dialects acting like they're separate languages
There is also the fact that it doesn't seem possible in such languages to have a good estimation for the pronunciation of newly-encountered 'words' (lexemes? I don't remember linguistics well enough to be precise and accurate here) without looking it up or asking about it.
Learners are told to sound out new characters, because often enough they sound close enough to their components.
水 and 冰 do not sound similar at all in Putonghua, and the same goes for other characters that I have dealt with so far. Not sure how it can be otherwise, considering the initial-terminal rules for pronunciation in Putonghua.
The advice is meant for the majority of phonetic-semantic characters, which is 80% of the language. It requires a good base, of course, so it'd be applied in middle-school level and up.
Your example is equivalent to saying you don't know how to pronounce "baa" because you know the letter "a" but not the "b". If you know 冫 then you know 冰.
Okay, so,what's the rule for picking the right components? Sounds like this is the case of 'baa' being pronounced like 'aa', so the knowledge of how to pronounce 'b' doesn't help, and even if you knew the pronunciation of 'aa', you would still need to make a guess.
I was just looking at this rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C7%92u_bi%C4%81n_d%C3%BA_bi%C4%81n
Usually you'd rely on educated guesswork like this - and in many cases the character isn't pronounced exactly the same because of drift (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Sound_change), but Chinese isn't as precise as many people make it out to be: "When one encounters such a two-part character and does not know its exact pronunciation, one may take one of the parts as the phonetic indicator. For example, reading 詣 (pinyin: yì) as zhǐ because its "side" 旨 is pronounced as such. Some of this kind of "folk reading" have become acceptable over time – listed in dictionaries as alternative pronunciations, or simply become the common reading. For example, people read the character 町 ting in 西門町 (Ximending) as if it were 丁 ding".
Apologies, but do we agree that this is much less reliable and clear than what relevant languages (some more than others - Russian, for example, is much less ambiguous in this regard) have?
yes