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 Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2011 9:26 pm
While I'm not that great at Kanji, I'm pretty decent at writing/reading hiragana and katakana. I think hiragana and katakana are just so cute! ^o^..... why cute? @u@ idk... that's just what I think. X33
Last year I memorized the Cyrillic alphabet. >w< I ....don't have it memorized anymore though. ;u; it was cool back when I could write things with it though. *should study it again*
Those are really the only other writing systems (besides like...English Latin or whatever it's called. XD ) that I'm most familiar with, but I think all writing systems are full of win! They can be sooo pretty~! It'd be neat to know how to read/write them all.
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Posted: Sun May 08, 2011 8:21 am
I think that all Chinese looks especially cool... It's so complicated. But I think a little complicated for me. I'm fine with Japanese, though. No problem with memorizing kanji.
As for the system I don't like, that would Cyrillic alphabet. It confuses the hell out of me for some reason. How can "p" be read as "r"?
On the other hand, my native language which is Polish is probably pretty bothersome to foreigns studying it, I believe, as it has some letters that other tongues don't have. Someone already mentioned it before: there's ą, ę, ł, ż, ź and so on...
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Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 6:31 pm
Actually, despite what a lot of people say about Chinese not being phonetic/impossible, that isn't entirely true. While obviously, characters can't just be read as in an alphabet, knowing some characters and their pronunciations can really help in reading characters for the first time.
For example:
云 - this character means cloud, and is pronounced yun1
运 - this character means something along the lines of movement, but it pronounced yun4
Notice they have the same pinyin, with different tones. This is because a lot of the time, the character consists of two basic parts: the radical, which gives you an idea of what the character means, and another part which can give you (sometimes) an idea as to how to say the word.
It's really cool though, and it's part of what makes Chinese one of my favorite writing systems.
But I know a fair number of writing systems, since there was a time when I would just study the script and not the language or anything. @.@
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Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 9:30 pm
Well, here is my (biased, and frequently uneducated) opinion.
While eliminating an alphabet/writing system in favor of romanized characters is unquestionably not fine, I think that romanizing a script as an option DOES improve international relations. Here in the Pacific NW, most schools offer Spanish, French, and Japanese as foreign languages, and we're usually required to take two years, more recommended by most colleges. I chose to take Japanese because of my then-interest in video games and my budding interest in anime and manga. As you can guess, the Japanese program is very small while there's oodles and oodles of Spanish students. The most common reason? Generally, people default to Spanish because of the difficulty of French and because they immediately interpret Japanese as difficult because of the kana/kanji system, mistaking it for the Chinese system without a phonetic alphabet. They don't realize that, after some adjustments at the beginning, learning Japanese is about as hard as becoming proficient in most other languages. Therefore, I think that romanization of alphabets/writing systems is a good way to expose non-native speakers to a standardized, easier-to-learn version of the language. In addition, being able to switch into romanized characters is convenient for communication, because many computers are unable to access foreign scripts. Regardless of which alphabet was used, it's good to have a standard that most people can read phonetically and transmit with ease.
It isn't important to have a unique alphabet for all languages/families of languages/etc. First, many languages have oral traditions and were never written down, so it's rather beside the point to create something new in this day and age. As it is, oral languages in need of preservation would do well to be written in a romanized standard so that they are more accessible. Next, many languages have alphabets related to or descended from other languages, which mark a historical record of both the language, the people, and the culture involved.
Don't think there's any particular script I'd pick as my favorite - I only know about the big ones. Definetely have a soft spot for Chinese characters/kanji, since I've been studying Japanese for 3 years, but I really admire S and SW Asian scripts, Arabic scripts, etc. They're rather artistic, and all look very calligraphic even in everyday forms. Makes me wonder what the Greeks were thinking when they started these Latin scripts, since they seem rather dull to me, even though I appreciate, use, and love them every day.
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