That one guy that says "Sometimes I wonder, why I even went to school" is a big mood. EDIT: how would I know the translation is wrong? I don't speak Chinese 😂
Chinese Language has 92,000 characters. 14,000 characters are taught in 10 years of schooling. Only around 3,000 characters are needed in daily life conversation or to read a newspaper.
I'm Japanese and I think I only know 15,000-18,000 characters By this point,I should learn it all I was raised knowing 3 languages tho. And I'll never know all of those characters Imma dumbass and lazy as hell
@@mijou9564 I'm Indian curently living in Russia with Russian Citizenship. I learnt this information about Chinese language through reading articles, books and My Chinese Classmates in My University. PS: Yes I am native born Indian
We use pinyin too much lol. One example of the differences between simplify and traditional writing is the word 'spirit' Simplify wiriting 灵 Traditional writing 靈
Yeah. But don't be misleaded. Bad news is you still need to write those characters for hundreds of times if you want to learn Chinese well. Because we've all done that from primary school.
Don't worry , you only need to learn few hundres of charactors, than you can understand thounds of chinsese words, you can read news ,use chinese websites, texting with chinese ect
This video only shows that few people are great at writing Chinese BY HAND. Even though they can't remember how to write by hand, they can EASILY read and pronounce the characters if they see them. As a learner, unless you have a specific need for it, you don't have to memorize how to write all characters by hand, only the basic ones. (The characters in this video aren't basic).
Learn Traditional Characters and Look at Remembering the Hanzi, by James Heisig. With Traditional characters every segment has meaning and it actually makes sense a lot of times how things are constructed.
Isn't that more motivation for you? You don't even need to learn how to write Thumb, Toothpaste, Sneeze, etc in Chinese to be as good as an average Chinese person.
@Jason Lee Well, 1 more advantage that can be offer by Chinese characters is to combine a few words into a single character, all I'd say is Chinese characters has better practical expandability compare with alphabet base characters, but same thing will be happening on Chinese characters if you squeeze too many features into a single character and make it unreadable and not understandable
The situation is even worse for us who write traditional Chinese. I’m in my 30’s. I didn’t really realise the issue until I wanted to send a postcard to my friend while traveling. I suddenly found myself struggling a bit. From then on, I started to write Chinese for 15 mins every day (e.g. copy from a newspaper article) and my muscle memory has returned. It has also become some sort of therapy for me when I can sit down quietly and focus on doing one thing only. 多寫多練習，別無他法！
I salute you. After almost 20 years living in an English-speaking country, I struggle to even write a full paragraph in Chinese now...and to think I used to write for the school newspaper and have won prizes in writing competitions in my younger days...
@@artofvale_1122 omg same Im taking French in school and learning Mandarin on my phone. Second year this year for French and got an app for Mandarin like last month. I know more Mandarin than French but some phrases are the similar to Cantonese so I memorized those and ones used in daily life.
@@goosgoos4571 But unfortunately I can remember how to write it but I don't know how to say it correctly. I think it was "muzhi" but I don't know is it second tone or maybe first tone?
For those wondering why people can recognise characters but can't write them. Imagine trying to draw the symbol for nuclear hazards or bio waste, you'd have difficulty drawing it perfect but when you see it you can recognise it immediately.
Yes, it would be like an English speaker understanding the meaning of the words 'inundated' or 'fallacious,' but never actually employing them himself. Of course, these examples would become less and less applicable the more educated the person is.
@@cribird9263 I'm pretty sure taiwan and other mando speaking countries use the traditional writing system but both are extremely difficult and I gave up years ago trying to learn it.
It's actually probably not that bad bc these days when we type Mandarin into a computer/keyboard, we type the pinyin, which is how the characters sound when you say them out loud, and the computer offers you options of words with the pinyin you typed in, so as long as you know how the words sound, you should be able to write as you please.
@@julietdong8246 what if you are reading a book and you face a word you haven't ever seen. You don't know how to pronounce it and have no idea about its meaning. You want to search it in an online dictionary but you can't type it or even pronounce it( that pinyin thing can't help). What do you do in this situation? (and no one is around to ask)
As an adult in China, most of the time all you really need to do is to be able to recognize the characters, which is a lot easier than memorizing each little detail of every character, because a lot is electronic nowadays. Students though, they have to know these for their classes.
I feel so validated by this, i’m american but i studied chinese for seven years but I forgot how to write so many characters because I usually just type now.
I think it’s just they found the elder generation of Chinese people, that just happened to recover from the cultural revolution so that the education of them compare to the secondaries nowadays are much lower , idk , no offence. I’m Chinese as well
As a native speaker, I was testing myself while watching this video as well. I have to say this test is intentionally choosing words which are quite common and hard to write in the same time. I won't be surprised that 80% Chinese people cannot write the second character in "喷嚏" (Sneeze), cuz 1. it's really a complicated character. 2. We don't write it very often. 3. This character only occur in this single word, which give it less chance to be written in daily life. Everyone can still read it. Anyway, if you are learning Chinese, don't be discouraged by this video. Think in another way, you don't need to remember every character to learn Chinese, even native speaker can't.
That's really strange ,even though the characters are hard to learn but I never thought that even native find it difficult , I am learning Chinese ,can u give any advice to improve it ?
@@Maya14526 Cuz chinese would not be just about memorising the combination of characters but more on the strokes within a character, and it is really hard to remember the characters because sometimes you just don't write those vocabs often or the components within the character are hard to be memorised. Anyways keep it up, chinese literature is really a lot of fun and you might feel insightful studying our language!:) by the way I use traditional Chinese because I am a Macanese, I think it's really beautiful so I hope you might get to know it as well hehe
@@jamespark9583 Well, I'm Asian. And in high school, I excel in math, physics, chemistry, and economy, yet my geography, history, and politics are awful, since they're too abstract for me and I'm not gifted with words.
As a Chinese learner, this makes me feel so much better! I’ve taken chinese classes at the advanced and superior level, but still forgot how to write a ton of characters 😩😩
Don't focus too much on learning to write the characters. Instead, focus on being able to recognize the characters just like how Chinese people have to daily be able to recognize the characters.
@@shashankgupta7460 hi! Yeah that’s what I usually would do, but unfortunately I have to memorize how to write the characters for all of the vocabulary in my chinese class so if I didn’t know how to write them I probably wouldn’t pass😅
for those of you confused about typing: chinese has developed a way to represent the pronounciation as pinyin (literally "put sounds together") like if I wanted to type out "你好" which means "hello" I wouldn't need to actually write it out on my computer these two words are pronounced "ni hao", and so I type "n i h a o" and there's a bunch of options for "ni" and a bunch of options for "hao" and I choose the one that I want to type out because almost every single chinese word has a homophone. so basically even if you don't know the exact strokes (like the people here and me sometimes fdjalafd I failed my own languge) as long as you know how to pronounce it and had a basic memory of what it looks like you can type ------------------------ the traditional vs simplified thing **taiwan, hongkong, and macau mainly uses traditional today while the mainland uses simplified** because traditional chinese is hella hard people decided to simplify the characters to make it easier for people to learn for example, 運動 => 运动 （exercise) 高興=>高兴 (happy) 義=>义 (justice) 參與=> 参与 (participate) + almost half of the rest of the words although the mainland doesn't use traditional as much (on the left) many can still figure out what it's trying to say based on the knowledge of the simplified version. for example, me myself only knows how to write the simplified version but since the traditional looks very similar I can still type it out, but I won't be able to hand write traditional characters there are also characters that doesn't have a simplified version: 吃=> 吃 (eat) 玩=> 玩 (play) 一二三四五六七八九十百千 (one two three four five six seven eight nine ten hundred thousand) yeah ok
Thank you for sharing this! ive been learning Chinese for 1 year now and its interesting to find out natives have the same troubles of remembering charters but not pinyin like i do
Same I'm trying to learn right now but for me its communication. I already know Cantonese but I never learned Mandarin. I know how to speak Cantonese don't know characters, learning Mandarin I know a couple characters but I don't remember what they mean.
I find that Chinese words have very deep meaning. Like the word "好" (hao) or good. It is a character made of a woman and a child symbol. So that's what the Chinese consider as good: a love of a mother to her child. So even though Chinese words are hard, I really love the meaning. You cant get that from any other language.
Absolutely! It is very hard to explain this to someone who does not have any knowledge of the language or any other one that uses this writing system such as Japanese. However, characters do lose a lot of meaning by simplifying them. I dislike them.
@Emily Being able to read and recognize Chinese characters is a lot easier than remembering how to write them from the top of your head. We see a lot more characters than we have to write. Especially when you consider the fact that with smartphones & technology, we don't even need to handwrite a lot of characters anymore. We input the pronunciation and pick the correct character from the suggestions.
It's not practical at all, the youngests type so much instead of writing that they forget how to write it. Is it possible that they start using pinyin at some point?
@@isag.s.174 Not really possible that they only use PinYin. A lot of words with the same sound have different character and with different meaning. If switch to only pinyin it would be chaos
Its much easier to read than to write Chinese. Your brain automatically recognize the characters when you see it, but it's much harder to picture it in your head. Its basically a photographic memory test. Plus no one is writing anymore, everyone is typing the characters using pinyin.
10,000 characters??? I can only imagine a Chinese version of Sesame Streets whom after 5 years, are still not yet done singing all of the Chinese characters.. 😂😂😂
He never actually says that in the video. Subs are completely made up or was cut from the video. He just says “crap, wrongly written, this shouldn’t be...”
@@ML-po6vy high in Chinese is a super simple word, as it’s one of the first words taught meaning it’s many people’s first word remembered. It’s taught during kindergarten so it’s pretty simple to remember
That's not comparable. in this case, computer wins, becoz there are only two basic letters, 0 and 1. Out of those 80000 char, 3000 are sufficient for day-to-day needs. Each chinese character has a basic meaning, just like Latin roots while each individual letter does not have a basic meaning.
LookingForDreams Chinese also has words which are often formed by two to four Chinese characters so other than characters you need to memorize lots of Chinese words as well while learning the language.
if you ask any student in middle or high school, they could easily ace the test since they’re writing every day. When you graduate and stop handwriting essays and start typing, you quickly forget everything.
PhD mathematicians will also struggle in even telling what 8×7 is. Though, not saying that they are useless; for a mathematician they only need to know what every terms in mathematics mean and rest of the work is the job of a calculator or a simple programme.
@@sealand000 my first language is spanish so the autocorrector changes the word and when i change it back to how it was, i just skim through so the c got past me. Anything else to mark? (:
Its much easier to read than to write Chinese. Your brain automatically recognize the characters when you see it, but it's much harder to picture it in your head. It's bascially a photographic memory test.
@Lyle Adrian The problem is not the size of one's vocabulary but being able to write with the vocabulary you have. The non-phonetic nature of Chinese makes it harder to transcribe verbal vocabulary into its written form for words whose symbols/spelling one does not know how to write/spell.
That’s the big difference with Chinese and alphabetic languages like English or Korean, it’s insanely difficult to master or even learn hence why King Sejong invented the Korean language due to his subjects being unable to learn Chinese. Personally as a Chinese-American I can speak fluently, read semi-fluently, but can barely write. It’s not easy. 😅
I heard that the main reason he invented it was because there were too many illiterate in his kingdom because it's hard to write korean using characters. They already have their own language, they are just using the chinese characters to write korean. He isn't illiterate so he knows how hard it is to learn korean using the chinese characters so he changed it.
On the other hand, Korean, just like Japanese, has tons of homophones, and written in Hangeul they’re impossible to distinguish if you don’t pay attention to the context. That’s also one of the main reasons why in Japanese kanji are still used despite having kana.
So true. And at least Japanese have hiragana and katakana, which lets them get by knowing "just" 2-3000 characters. You can't destroy a country's tradition and history, but China should definitely do something about this.
Even though u can't write those characters but still you're native,and you know the most amazing language in the world , can you help me with the language ,actually I am a learning Chinese, and I feel that without a native ,Chinese is very hard ,can you please help me ,👩
I think mandarin is hard only because of its writing system and pronunciation, but I find its grammatical structure simpler and easier than Spanish and English (the two languages I speak fluently). Greetings from 墨西哥🇲🇽！
OMG CHINESE CAN'T WRITE THEIR OWN LANGUAGE, guys come on, ...english is too a language different speaking from writing and russian is difficult to write, greek grammar is the most complex, come on guys ..hurry up op op
@@marcopolesine1584and tbh huge reason they can’t write it is that nowadays they just use computers to type out words instead of writing them down, so they just have to know how to recognise the characters
Ok. I am chinese malaysian. Honestly, i never passed my chinese language in high school. My english was the best during that time. I often mix some english words when i speak chinese and it's really embarrasing.
You must be a Singaporean Chinese. White on the inside but still yellow outside. Speaking as a Singaporean who doesn't confuse the two languages since Eng and Chinese are as different as it is chalk and charcoal.
The Addicted Man my friend was the opposite. Cause his handwriting was messy sometimes he write Chinese in English composition，teacher never found out.
@@mrnobody3180 eh but malaysia teaches good chinese. I am singaporean chinese and i often score 30s percent for my overall chinese exams of the whole year
yeah after seeing this I'm glad I chose to learn Korean instead...I learned hangul in a few days, but no one can ever learn all of the chinese characters haha
Because Korean is not like Chinese; they have entirely different grammatical structures. There was no choice BUT to adapt the writing system. It’s not because of anything inherent to Hanzi; it’s because the monosyllabic characters didn’t fit with Korean words and grammar. And it’s not as though Korean is considered much easier to learn than Chinese, even with a simple alphabetic script.
These characters are not hard, in fact, they are very common words, but many modern Chinese in their age of 20-40 forget how to write them because they are used to type the words on their mobile devices or computers instead of writing them on paper.
Just to show you guys how much more complicated some traditional characters are than their simplified equivalents: 1. Turtle 烏龜（乌龟）2. Melancholy 憂鬱（忧郁）3. Taiwan 臺灣（台湾）4. Experience 體驗（体验）5. Switch 開關（开关）⋯⋯There’s much more examples like these. Of course there’s also examples of traditional characters not so much more complicated than their simplified forms. For example, 1. Fish 魚（鱼）2. Door 門（门）3. Red 紅（红）4. Blue 藍（蓝）5. Yellow 黃（黄）⋯⋯As you can see, actually most of the simplified characters and their traditional roots look alike (at least to us Chinese lol), so usually people educated in simplified Chinese can also read BUT NOT write traditional Chinese, and vice versa for people educated in traditional Chinese. Some people though, like myself, can both read and write both simplified and traditional characters because I guess although I’m a mainlander from Guangzhou (educated in simplified Chinese), I grew up with a lot of TV shows from Hong Kong (in traditional Chinese). Hope this is helpful to some of you that are interested in Chinese. :)
Fun fact: Due to the difficulty of Chinese characters, the Koreans removed Chinese characters (called "Hanja", which made up about 30% to 50% of Korean written language back then) from the Korean written system to make it easier to learn. Whereas the Japanese kept the Chinese characters (called "Kanji", which also makes up about 30% to 50% of Japanese written language now) to this day.
@@lastninjaitachi it sounds ironic but when you get to a more complex sentence in japanese, especially for academia, using hiragana and katakana only make a sentence much harder to read than including kanji.
I have some language partners, what tortures me the most during language exchange sessions is sometimes I could not even make a good explanation of why I'd construct a Chinese sentence like that....it's just the way we say it..lol
No don't give up! If these people were writing more simple/common words, they would probably write them all correctly. Plus, even though it's nice to be able to write the characters too, it's not completely necessary to do so in everyday life. Reading is what you'll do more often and it's much easier to memorize how to read characters than how to write them. 😊 ~:~
@@yanmiao7945 I would probably be the one asking those questions all the time. 😂 I'm always asking my teachers stuff like "Why do we have to use 把 structure here? Why do we have to use 了 here and not there?" etc. and they're often just like, "I don't know why; that's just how you have to say it." 😒😂 ~:~
Hangeul is super easy to learn and write , but super hard to read and use in daily life bcoz it doesn't have any meanings, and thank god we didn't use Chinese Pinyin to replace Chinese charactor , even though Chinese Pinyin is way more easy to learn and write than Hangeul, and only requires few hours to learn, but we don't use it much in daily bases, bcoz it's just like hangeul have no meanings , you have to read the whole sentence to understand it
金泰宇 every langauge has its pros and cons. I agree our language is hard to learn although letter is simple. And many korean words are containing Chinese meaning, so learning Chinese might be good for who want to learn Korean and Japanese.
金泰宇 If people are super smart to memmorize well, Chinese is more efficient like just two words can show whole sentence in Korean or English. I think China should simplify their characters for their citizens.
Rishi This one in ten people are Chinese, we have the most populated country in the world (currently at 1.4 billion). So, I think it’s safe to assume that it’s not going to be dead for a long time.
hhhh I am an IB Diploma Chinese A Higher Lever student. One of our test is to write two analysis essays on two given reading materials in 105 mins as a whole. And the min words for each essay is 1200. I always realize I haven’t written in Chinese by hand for a long while before the tests cuz all my other subjects are in English and I always only type in pinyin online everyday, but its still fine to finish the tests cuz you can always change your expression if you find some words hard to write.
Lmao I'm Chinese so I'm good I remember this post in tumblr like " japanese is such a kind language if you can't write in kanji you can write hiragana and everyone will understand Meanwhile in Chinese a little change and my mom becomes a horse " Which is true,, Fun fact when I get overly pissed I start screaming in Chinese it's just a habit lmao
For people who dont understand the joke,, the romanized chinese word for mom & horse is actually the same "ma", but has different way to pronounce and different character, though the character is a similar
Well, in Vietnamese, you can always write a word perfectly right no matter how hard it is to pronounce or if you've never heard that word before :) Also, you can pronounce a word 100% correctly by looking at its written form as well even if you have no idea what the word means :) and I feel grateful for that :) Anw, I'm studying Chinese, and from my point of view it is such an amazing language. Chinese intonation is really comfortable to listen to, and Chinese characters are so interesting to learn that I never get bored of them. In fact I enjoy writing the most among the 4 skills. Being a Vietnamese also makes it much easier for me to learn Chinese, since both languages have many things in common (especially a large part of Vietnamese vocabulary was borrowed from Chinese which we call “Han-Viet” words, and these words must account for like 60% of our total vocabulary I believe)
Chinese is an interesting language with a very beautiful script. This script teaches people be to modest and patient. There is no end in learning Chinese. Fun fact. Before the introduction of alphabetic script, Greek was written with a script that had ideographic characters, similar in faction with the Chinese characters. For details, please check about Linear script B.
As a Korean(i really loved studying Chinese when i was in high school and then, I met a great wall of Hanzi) Hanzi 😭 Pronounciation 😰(most difficult part) Grammars 😍 (it's totally different with Korean but easy to understand) When I learn Japanese, Grammars 😄 Pronounciation 😙 (slightly difficult for tsu and j sound but mostly ok) Kanji 😭 Fyi, for English, Grammars 😅(not that hard, but i don't think i can ever be perfect on this...) Pronounciation 😌 alphabet 😍 Newly created words and phrasal verbs i can't even guess the meaning 😢
JY Jang I have selective photographic memory so it's easy for me to learn any and all languages. I just kinda watch chinese movies, read chinese online news, and memorize the entire dictionary.
well I think the guy has a point, could you imagine people not being able to comunicate because the difficulty of their language?. That´s why it constantly changes. by the way, Sorry if my english is not good I hope you understand :P
@@vz1115 Yes, that's actually why Hangeul was created. Chinese characters were never meant to be used by everyone, it was a writing system that was evidently meant to be used by a specialised class of scribes that studied it devoutly whereas Hangeul had the exact opposite philosophy. Saying that Chinese characters are bad at communicating is both right and wrong, wrong because it most definitely works and history speaks for itself, but also right because it most definitely wasn't meant to be used in a day to day basis by the laymen
@@SpiderDibs Because it kind of is. There is a debate amongst linguists if English is a descendant of Anglo-saxon or if it's a creole and personally, I'd opt more for the creole theory. And there are two points where this has happened : first was during the Danelaw where a big part of Northern England was under Danish rule and the area was heavily settled by Danes as well and you can see that the language there evolved in strange ways, it's not so much that it simply borrowed heavily from the nords, but even grammar was impacted to an extent which is not usual. The second and most obvious case of creolisation (I ...... think that's a word at least) is during the Norman rule. It's still a debated topic but it is very possible that modern English is a very indirect descendant of Anglo-saxon and not it's natural evolution (unlike modern french and german which are direct descendants and you can see the difference in the fact that french and germans have a way easier time picking up a text from the middle age and reading it than English do with Anglo-saxon
Meme Generator There are different ways of typing chinese actually. Mostly used is the pinyin, which is typing in the sounds and show the words for u to choose. Another is typing in the strokes
Meme Generator Here in Taiwan we type differently, we have a system called "bopomofo", for example the word for China (中國)is: ㄓㄨㄥ(中) ㄍㄨㄛˊ(國), but I don't know how Hong Konger type Chinese since they don't speak Mandarin much, so they definitely can't use pinyin to type.
As a native Chinese I have to say that writing Chinese is not that hard if you keep practicing it - pick any random high school student on the street and they would be able to write relatively well (because ofc they have to write essays at school lol) The problem is that people tend to forget the writing system when they go off to uni or leave school. Typing is totally different with writing in Chinese.
Girl: I don't know them all, only the commonly used ones Me:Hahaha so you know about 50-100?(I know there are a hell lotta characters but not the exact count) Girl: I know only about 3000. Me: .......................
Honestly, its not really that much. You take those 3000 characters and combine different parts and they create new characters, some might be so uncommon that nobody thinks about them. 😂
I love how the one that was like "I know them all!" was the first to ask for help xD Love your videos, guys. They are really fun and at the same time educational. Keep up the good work!
When she said she knew them all, I was wondering what she meant because even an expert in Chinese language wouldn't know them all. There are over 80,000 characters, but only about 3,500 are used in every day language.
When I first started studying Mandarin, we had the option of both traditional and simplified characters (our textbooks had both for every exercise/example/etc.) So I - being a complete masochist - decided to learn the traditional set. Fast forward 2 years, and my college changed the syllabus to a different set of textbooks, in which we *only* learned the simplified characters. *cue an angry panda throwing things off a desk. And then throwing the desk. And then throwing the human behind the desk. *
I have kind of the same problem. I studied Japanese for 5 years before I started Chinese (using simplified), and Japanese uses traditional aside from a few characters. So when I started learning simplified Chinese I had to relearn a bunch of the characters I already knew from Japanese but in their simplified forms. Sometimes I have a problem where I know a character in both simplified and traditional but I don't realize that they're just different versions of the same character until much later. 😂 ~:~
I am a Taiwanese , we write in traditional characters. But it's very strange that we can recognize simplified characters without learning. If you master the traditional characters, you can recognize simplified by instinct
@@pnguo6970 Fair point. But for a European, we need to create a whole new section in our brains for understanding pictographs to begin with. LOL (Sorry, my current computer doesn't have Mandarin language set right now.)
Learning to write has one advantage: it helps you to memorize the form, and thus you are more likely to recognize the character when it comes up. The same principle can be applied to memorize English words. As a bi-lingual, I find this particular learning experience quite similar: learning how to write/spell is always helpful for the memory. (Note: Chinese characters are not equivalent to letters, and the characters are equivalent to English words.) I don't think people need to worry about the future of hanzi, because the characters are actually highly functional and practical linguistic tools. For daily users/readers, the existence of hanzi are NOT solely for aesthetic purpose. The current practice of digital input actually shows how the Chinese culture (language) is integrated with modern technology. The integration between traditions and contemporary lifestyle has actually been a recurring phenomenon that has appeared throughout Chinese history (most of the time). Many interviewees didn't seem to think this question through, but the question itself wasn't easy to answer in short. Also, the statement at around 6:05 is NOT fully correct. Many of the simplified characters were actually derived from historical, alternative forms of traditional characters. Many commonly used simplified characters had already existed throughout history, although their usages were not widespread or mainstream until modern eras.
They somehow think this is a good exercise. Old people think this can prevent Alzheimer. I still don’t know why, but it’s actually really fun to do that .Just don’t do that on a crowded street, in a park perhaps.
Its like how english has a dictionary that is half a ruler thick, no one will ever know every single word in that book and half the time people need to ask others for the right word to something.
@LIFE IS WORTH LIVING Well if you ask someone on China street about how to write '' schizophrenia" in Chinese, I am sure that he/her know how to write 100%, but you try it on US street. This is just because some of the Chinese characters are difficult to remember even they are basic things, but some of them are simple to remember, even if they are only used under certain condition by certain people.
LIFE IS WORTH LIVING but if you live in another country for 5 years and barely write in that language is hard to remember, especially for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Becuz those characters are already really complex.
It's not about knowing words or not - it's about how to write the word! In english, if you know basic pronounciation rules, you can write down ANY word, even if it 's not correctly spelled as english uses a PHONETIC writing system. you DON"T have to know the meaning of the word to write it down! That's the KEY advantage of phonetic writing system
Yeah, but it's not just the words. They know the words. They just don't know how to spell them, because they don't know all the "letters" of their alphabet.
I'm currently learning chinese. Wish me luck to get a scholarship from a big school here in the philippines. My scores from my chinese language exams varies from 18-20 out of 20
Well duh, ask my 12th grade self all the hard math questions and I can answer them all, asking me a simple equation now and I got no idea. It's called being at school.
I am a Chinese American who came to the U.S when I was like 9. Now im 26. I can read a lot of the common Chinese characters (maybe 2000-3000 words).. But if you ask me to write Chinese on the spot, I can probably write like 10 words.
I will admit this video restored my confidence in my ability to learn Chinese, ive only been learning for about 28 days and to see that Chinese themselves have difficulties id say I'm doing well so far
When I was younger, I took Chinese School (I'm a Chinese-American), and every week the teacher would give us the vocab words to study, and the next week, she would read them out loud and we would have to write down the characters for each of the words. Let me just tell you this, I failed the test pretty much every week.
Another way is they should try typing Chinese but using hand-writing mode sometimes in a while, to practice the strokes more often~ I agree the Traditional chinese writings could convey very deep meaning and are just simply beautiful
For those who are not aware, when typing characters on a computer/smart phone, most of us use Pin Yin, a way to convert letters to characters based on the pronunciation instead of strokes.
It's also much easier to read than to write Chinese. Your brain automatically recognize the characters when you see it, but it's much harder to picture it in your head. Its basically a photographic memory test.
There’s input methods like Canjie or Wubi which are typed based on how characters are written, not how they are pronounced. Apparently Cangjie is common in HK where it’s likely that people are less likely to forget how to write, but because any graphical input methods are more difficult to learn than phonetic ones, people don’t bother learning them and end up getting character amnesia.
@@jinnimoo yes just like CNN it's a neural network and do image recognization. When you read it, you actually do not need to see every detail of the charactor.
I’m even worse- I can listen and understand intermediate phrases but when I need to use them in my own verbal sentences I forget them, never mind knowing how to write them
Joseph Stalin They are already latinized in the form of Pinyin. Every mainland Chinese can read and write pinyin so that itself is already a seperate language that is useable.
Raynold Regan Pinyin is only for typing and an aid for Westerners to learn Chinese - it is just a phonetic representation of Chinese using the Latin alphabet, meaning it is not a separate language. Every language has such a Latin transliteration to allow Westerners to learn its pronunciations. But pinyin has no presence in Chinese books and it is never going to be adopted as the written form of the language for reasons which I mentioned, plus there are other ways of typing Chinese apart from Pinyin.
Joseph Stalin I mean it's a working writing system that every Chinese outside Taiwan can read and write. People can use pinyin only to communicate if they really need to.
Raynold Regan For Chinese ppl reading pinyin is actually harder than reading characters, because characters are unique and recognisable, whereas reading pinyin is like reading English for them - hard with repetitive foreign letters.
Then create a different phonetic script if Latin doesn't suit you. Koreans did it in 1443. There were some attempts to get rid of Kanji throughout japanese history, but they failed because the linguists claimed the chinese heritage. Again the elites boycotting progress.
The Chinese just forgetting how to write the words are such a mood. I've literally been eating and breathing Chinese for the past 15 years, every since I've popped out from my mum's womb. And I'm literally failing the subject
I liked this because it makes me feel better about my own lack of ability to remember the characters I study. Also, I was happy to see that among the interviewees, young and old alike, they felt the situation should be reversed through more awareness and more actual writing. That is equally true even in western languages, I believe.
I grew up in Europe in a Chinese family. I learnt Chinese as a kid but mostly speaking so I can barely read and write. If I want to write Chinese symbols on my phone, I also use pinyin because I know how to say it. And then I choose whatever symbol seems right with my very limited knowledge (I can maybe recognize max. 200 symbols compared to ca. 5000 that you need for daily life). And then I put my sentence in Google translate to double check whether it made sense what I wrote. Works pretty well actually although I can neither write nor READ :D
I'm a Korean student studying Chinese. Korean people don't have to memorize such a difficult characters, but our language has more complex grammers and orthographies than Chinese. I also want to watch "Can Korean Write Chinse Characters?" Many of Korean vocabularies consist of Hanja(汉字, 한자, Chinsese Character). So knowing Hanja helps you understand deeper meaning of vocas. But like Chinese, young Koreans recently forgot Hanja. I want to know Koreans' awareness of Hanja.
It is a big mistake for Korea to abandon hanja. Hunminjeongeum is like Pinyin, it marks the pronunciation but not the meaning. Ambiguities can occur if the hanja is not written. For example, 방화 하다 can mean 防火 to prevent fire, or 放火 to set fire, which are antonyms! The constitution of korea is written in hanja mixed script, which makes it very easy to read and the meaning is very clear
Simplifying the language was necessary so that the people could communicate more efficiently. This also allowed the country to develop more rapidly as a whole.
“The General Standard Chinese Characters Library" （通用规范汉字表中的一级字表为“常用字”） shows that the most commonly used characters have 3500. But in daily life, 2500 capacity is enough for reading newspapers. From an article I found in a Chinese uni: usually a Chinese senior high school student can recognize 3500-4000 characters.
Yep. I have studied chinese for years and probably can read/type (not write tho!) around 1,000 characters. I can grasp what an article is talking about, but I can never fully get it :( I can read basic things tho.
That one guy that says "Sometimes I wonder, why I even went to school" is a big mood.
EDIT: how would I know the translation is wrong? I don't speak Chinese 😂
That’s the best!
Mayu the translation is not good...
MOOD
Ikr!
He kind of said that his years of attending school had went to waste. The translation is quite off tbh.
Chinese Language has 92,000 characters.
14,000 characters are taught in 10 years of schooling.
Only around 3,000 characters are needed in daily life conversation or to read a newspaper.
I'm Japanese and I think I only know 15,000-18,000 characters
By this point,I should learn it all
I was raised knowing 3 languages tho.
And I'll never know all of those characters
Imma dumbass and lazy as hell
why do they have to make it so complicated lol
@@mijou9564 I'm Indian curently living in Russia with Russian Citizenship. I learnt this information about Chinese language through reading articles, books and My Chinese Classmates in My University.
PS: Yes I am native born Indian
@@dot6441 to make it more efficient
Lol
We use pinyin too much lol.
One example of the differences between simplify and traditional writing is the word 'spirit'
Simplify wiriting 灵
Traditional writing 靈
Okay that's hard
I'm blind now
亸
Holy crap
Szeting Ma WOW!! 😮 big damn difference!
Me teaching myself Chinese using TH-cam 👁️👄👁️
What a motivational video full of positive vibes
when you know the native speaker fk up on writing some of the characters lol
RIP😂😂
Yeah. But don't be misleaded. Bad news is you still need to write those characters for hundreds of times if you want to learn Chinese well. Because we've all done that from primary school.
too much typing on PC and phones that nobody actually writes nowaday
@Wong Vanessa bless you i am from Hong Kong also and I have Chinese writing test tomorrow 😀
Whenyou realize that drawing a thumb is probly easier than writing the word thumb in chinese...
拇指，感谢Google翻译
Lol
拇指. not really hard lol
👍, done
How do they learn in school then wtf 😂
Omg how am I supposed to get motivation to learn Chinese now?
Don't worry , you only need to learn few hundres of charactors, than you can understand thounds of chinsese words, you can read news ,use chinese websites, texting with chinese ect
This video only shows that few people are great at writing Chinese BY HAND. Even though they can't remember how to write by hand, they can EASILY read and pronounce the characters if they see them. As a learner, unless you have a specific need for it, you don't have to memorize how to write all characters by hand, only the basic ones. (The characters in this video aren't basic).
Learn Traditional Characters and Look at Remembering the Hanzi, by James Heisig. With Traditional characters every segment has meaning and it actually makes sense a lot of times how things are constructed.
Isn't that more motivation for you? You don't even need to learn how to write Thumb, Toothpaste, Sneeze, etc in Chinese to be as good as an average Chinese person.
Baekhyun, Seulgi & Jungkook Just work hard like the chinese.
* creators of Chinese language : how many characters should Chinese have ?
*Chinese language: yes
Actually there endless since there is simplified and traditional. Joke aside
@Jason Lee idk , Chinese is creative. They can construct a word with other originally Chinese character and make new meaning of it.
Creator's friend: how many characters?
Creator: all of em
92,000 characters
@Jason Lee Well, 1 more advantage that can be offer by Chinese characters is to combine a few words into a single character, all I'd say is Chinese characters has better practical expandability compare with alphabet base characters, but same thing will be happening on Chinese characters if you squeeze too many features into a single character and make it unreadable and not understandable
The situation is even worse for us who write traditional Chinese. I’m in my 30’s. I didn’t really realise the issue until I wanted to send a postcard to my friend while traveling. I suddenly found myself struggling a bit. From then on, I started to write Chinese for 15 mins every day (e.g. copy from a newspaper article) and my muscle memory has returned. It has also become some sort of therapy for me when I can sit down quietly and focus on doing one thing only. 多寫多練習，別無他法！
I salute you. After almost 20 years living in an English-speaking country, I struggle to even write a full paragraph in Chinese now...and to think I used to write for the school newspaper and have won prizes in writing competitions in my younger days...
Yes, that is a very good piece of advice!
所以简体字是很有必要的~~
可想而知，在當年文盲率高達90%時，中國人學習中文有多麼艱難，直到後來，簡體中文，拼音，新華字典的出現讓這個現象得到了很好的改善
@@陈丰-i8j, 简体字 is difficult to understand the meaning of letters. | Миру мир!
Haha the guy killed me when he said "at this point I'm just drawing pictures." He and I could be friends 😁
kecola Well, the translation was not quite accurate. What he actually means is “I’m writing it with no clues”(我乱写的）
I totally agree with you, and in my point of view, that guy looked the most smartest! haha
actually chinese the characters they used now originated and evolved from pictures way back in ancient china..
actually latin the characters we used now originated and evolved from pictures way back in ancient Mediterranean civilizations..
I could be friend with the translator then.
Me: *literally started learning chinese 2 days ago*
TH-cam: give up already
Edit (3months later): 谢谢你们, actually I've improved a lot
I started to learn it 2 days ago lol 你好
Me too wha-
artofvale_ is that ni Hao?? I already gave up after 1 week lmao.
@@heavlenly yes it is. Try to restart i did more Chinese in 4 days than French in 4 years lol
@@artofvale_1122 omg same Im taking French in school and learning Mandarin on my phone. Second year this year for French and got an app for Mandarin like last month. I know more Mandarin than French but some phrases are the similar to Cantonese so I memorized those and ones used in daily life.
Girl: I know all of the characters
Random reporter: Pls write down "thumb"
Girl: Eh?
LUL
you have big guts to make fun of her. i assume you know how to write the chinese characters for thumb
@@goosgoos4571 sure i do snowflake LUL
@@goosgoos4571 lol obviously I can remember after having seen it in the video five seconds ago : 拇指
@@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh good for you 👏🏻
@@goosgoos4571 But unfortunately I can remember how to write it but I don't know how to say it correctly. I think it was "muzhi" but I don't know is it second tone or maybe first tone?
For those wondering why people can recognise characters but can't write them. Imagine trying to draw the symbol for nuclear hazards or bio waste, you'd have difficulty drawing it perfect but when you see it you can recognise it immediately.
True. Same with flags, faces, animals, etc.
Yes, it would be like an English speaker understanding the meaning of the words 'inundated' or 'fallacious,' but never actually employing them himself. Of course, these examples would become less and less applicable the more educated the person is.
Thank you, I scrolled down to find why Chinese can't write their own language.
Being a Chinese novelist must be the hardest job in the world 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
Bahar S Chinese has a simplified and traditional version, the simplified is easier and everyone uses it so they are probably fine idk.
@@cribird9263 I'm pretty sure taiwan and other mando speaking countries use the traditional writing system but both are extremely difficult and I gave up years ago trying to learn it.
It's actually probably not that bad bc these days when we type Mandarin into a computer/keyboard, we type the pinyin, which is how the characters sound when you say them out loud, and the computer offers you options of words with the pinyin you typed in, so as long as you know how the words sound, you should be able to write as you please.
@@julietdong8246 what if you are reading a book and you face a word you haven't ever seen. You don't know how to pronounce it and have no idea about its meaning. You want to search it in an online dictionary but you can't type it or even pronounce it( that pinyin thing can't help). What do you do in this situation? (and no one is around to ask)
@@bahars305 you can write it online or on an app
LANGUAGE: Chinese
DIFFICULTY LEVEL :Chinese
LMAO
🤣
Thats the next level to Nintendo difficulty
LOL
Lmao🤣🤣🤣
do you notice , 2:41 the guy at behind walk backwards
Lol
sort of exercise...?
Glitch in the chinese matrix...Need to update their npc codes.
it sounds like he's pulling something
that is what we often do
As an adult in China, most of the time all you really need to do is to be able to recognize the characters, which is a lot easier than memorizing each little detail of every character, because a lot is electronic nowadays. Students though, they have to know these for their classes.
are they very similar to each other or is it easy to recognize between them?
@@hannalowercase5928 for the natives it is easy to recognize.
@@hannalowercase5928 年 车 牛, one means year, one means car and the other one means ox…
Recognizing characters is completely effortless for native speakers.
@@u2baccount67 because we read them everyday but not write them everyday
I’m native speaker of Chinese. I honestly say I agree with this social experiment. I forgot how to write Chinese.
Im german and im forgetting the language. sometimes my sentence structure is just...hopeless (and tbh idont even know how to say it correctly) '-'
@@chihannabi3815 wtf German is nothing get outa here🤣
I feel so validated by this, i’m american but i studied chinese for seven years but I forgot how to write so many characters because I usually just type now.
memorizing will never be as efficient or fun as having a conversation over food and drinks in a Chinese dialect.
I think it’s just they found the elder generation of Chinese people, that just happened to recover from the cultural revolution so that the education of them compare to the secondaries nowadays are much lower , idk , no offence. I’m Chinese as well
As a native speaker, I was testing myself while watching this video as well. I have to say this test is intentionally choosing words which are quite common and hard to write in the same time. I won't be surprised that 80% Chinese people cannot write the second character in "喷嚏" (Sneeze), cuz 1. it's really a complicated character. 2. We don't write it very often. 3. This character only occur in this single word, which give it less chance to be written in daily life. Everyone can still read it. Anyway, if you are learning Chinese, don't be discouraged by this video. Think in another way, you don't need to remember every character to learn Chinese, even native speaker can't.
That's really strange ,even though the characters are hard to learn but I never thought that even native find it difficult ,
I am learning Chinese ,can u give any advice to improve it ?
@@Maya14526 Cuz chinese would not be just about memorising the combination of characters but more on the strokes within a character, and it is really hard to remember the characters because sometimes you just don't write those vocabs often or the components within the character are hard to be memorised. Anyways keep it up, chinese literature is really a lot of fun and you might feel insightful studying our language!:) by the way I use traditional Chinese because I am a Macanese, I think it's really beautiful so I hope you might get to know it as well hehe
well damn
真实，说实话喷嚏我也不会哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈，加上现在基本上是网络时代，全靠拼音。
@@soniachen5739 我坚持用手写手机输入
Me: forgets math after leaving school for a while.
In China: forgot written language
and forgot math.
hahhhh
It makes me thinking that studying law is probably harder than math in China.
@@zitronentee You think math is easy? Too young and too simple, sometimes naive!
@@jamespark9583 Well, I'm Asian. And in high school, I excel in math, physics, chemistry, and economy, yet my geography, history, and politics are awful, since they're too abstract for me and I'm not gifted with words.
King James 哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈
As a Chinese learner, this makes me feel so much better! I’ve taken chinese classes at the advanced and superior level, but still forgot how to write a ton of characters 😩😩
Don't focus too much on learning to write the characters. Instead, focus on being able to recognize the characters just like how Chinese people have to daily be able to recognize the characters.
@@shashankgupta7460 hi! Yeah that’s what I usually would do, but unfortunately I have to memorize how to write the characters for all of the vocabulary in my chinese class so if I didn’t know how to write them I probably wouldn’t pass😅
remembering new words in Mandarin? is easy, chinese characters most of the time provide clues
@@indonesianaspie5279 I know haha I majored in Chinese and tutor for my school’s chinese program.
i am native speaker and i thought i was dumb cuz i couldnt remember all the words but i guess im not alone...
for those of you confused about typing:
chinese has developed a way to represent the pronounciation as pinyin (literally "put sounds together")
like if I wanted to type out "你好" which means "hello" I wouldn't need to actually write it out on my computer
these two words are pronounced "ni hao", and so I type "n i h a o" and there's a bunch of options for "ni" and a bunch of options for "hao" and I choose the one that I want to type out because almost every single chinese word has a homophone.
so basically even if you don't know the exact strokes (like the people here and me sometimes fdjalafd I failed my own languge) as long as you know how to pronounce it and had a basic memory of what it looks like you can type
------------------------
the traditional vs simplified thing
**taiwan, hongkong, and macau mainly uses traditional today while the mainland uses simplified**
because traditional chinese is hella hard people decided to simplify the characters to make it easier for people to learn
for example,
運動 => 运动 （exercise)
高興=>高兴 (happy)
義=>义 (justice)
參與=> 参与 (participate)
+ almost half of the rest of the words
although the mainland doesn't use traditional as much (on the left) many can still figure out what it's trying to say based on the knowledge of the simplified version. for example, me myself only knows how to write the simplified version but since the traditional looks very similar I can still type it out, but I won't be able to hand write traditional characters
there are also characters that doesn't have a simplified version:
吃=> 吃 (eat)
玩=> 玩 (play)
一二三四五六七八九十百千 (one two three four five six seven eight nine ten hundred thousand)
yeah ok
Thank you for sharing this! ive been learning Chinese for 1 year now and its interesting to find out natives have the same troubles of remembering charters but not pinyin like i do
Oh cool counting numbers in Chinese are similar to japanese
@@peepeepoopoo9109 yeah because the jpn culture is heavily influenced by the chn culture
@@peepeepoopoo9109 if anything, it should be japanese is similar to chinese
@@infires3042 yeah I guess it depends on the perspective
traditional Chinese is harder to write...
like
忧郁 is simplified Chinese
憂鬱 is traditional Chinese
they all mean melancholy.....
福泽谕吉 Do chinese learn both of them, or learn simplified one?
I can read both of them ，but can only write the simplified one
흐에에엑 mainland Chinese use simplified Chinese and can read traditional Chinese, Taiwan,Hongkong,Macao use traditional Chinese
Alex Wu Oh i didnt know. Thank u for telling me. Then why those places dont use simplified one? It might be more super efficient.
Alex Wu so when mainland Chinese write simplified one, people in Hongkong cant understand if they do not know about it, right?
Me **Already learning chinese**
Random chinese person: There are about 80000 characters
Me: *The* *What*
I dont even know 3000 words of my native language...
不会写也没有关系
什么？
Same I'm trying to learn right now but for me its communication. I already know Cantonese but I never learned Mandarin. I know how to speak Cantonese don't know characters, learning Mandarin I know a couple characters but I don't remember what they mean.
Well English has 171,000 words, but we only use 2000-3000 in daily conversation. It's the same concept for Chinese.
Me : lets learn Hanzi and Kanji
Also my brain : の
之
lol
like your sense of humour
😂
hanzi and kanji...
actually it's same😅
I find that Chinese words have very deep meaning. Like the word "好" (hao) or good. It is a character made of a woman and a child symbol. So that's what the Chinese consider as good: a love of a mother to her child. So even though Chinese words are hard, I really love the meaning. You cant get that from any other language.
I think it means having a twins with different gender.
Absolutely! It is very hard to explain this to someone who does not have any knowledge of the language or any other one that uses this writing system such as Japanese. However, characters do lose a lot of meaning by simplifying them. I dislike them.
Fernando Cázares
Japanese kanji adapted mandarin. It literally says 汉字.
Taiqi Xu 子是不分男女的 child
RonLarhz Cantonese and mandarin*
girl: "i think i know all the characters"
after toothpaste: "WHATS THE TOP ONE"
hhhhh she is boasting
Lmao
@Emily Being able to read and recognize Chinese characters is a lot easier than remembering how to write them from the top of your head. We see a lot more characters than we have to write. Especially when you consider the fact that with smartphones & technology, we don't even need to handwrite a lot of characters anymore. We input the pronunciation and pick the correct character from the suggestions.
哈哈 她吹牛
@@Shirley36 Do you speak mandarin?
You know a language is hard when even native speakers struggle with it 😂
Ghool
Ikr 😨
Polish people say heeey 🤷
It's not practical at all, the youngests type so much instead of writing that they forget how to write it. Is it possible that they start using pinyin at some point?
@@isag.s.174 Not really possible that they only use PinYin. A lot of words with the same sound have different character and with different meaning. If switch to only pinyin it would be chaos
@@liuziying108 exactly
Asian Mom: Such a disgrace, cant even memorize 9000 words.
You get disowned
No our mom's are not like that.
@@veryconfused9768 i am asian and i know that
@@ronald3639 same
we have a joke: having an english vacabulary of 3000 at age of 5 is enough in the UK, but not enough at Beijing
Most of us can recognise and read the words but writing is like a whole new level
Its much easier to read than to write Chinese. Your brain automatically recognize the characters when you see it, but it's much harder to picture it in your head. Its basically a photographic memory test. Plus no one is writing anymore, everyone is typing the characters using pinyin.
Ni pioaoliang haa 😃💐💐💐😍
Yes
exactly, you can read it but when you write it it's like whattt
Wait but how you guys make tests/exams in school when you can’t write yout own language? Or do you use simplified characters?
10,000 characters??? I can only imagine a Chinese version of Sesame Streets whom after 5 years, are still not yet done singing all of the Chinese characters.. 😂😂😂
Mheann Bucalan LMAO!!!
@@slamdunk406 Now I know why there's no Chinese version of Sesame Street 😂😂😂
Mheann Bucalan Today’s show was brought to you by the character “齉” LMAO 😂
A lot of the are really rare and you don't have to know them. Even in very old literature, or maybe the usage of the word wasn't popular.
A lot of characters sound the same though
2:35 "At this point, I'm just drawing pictures"
BIG MOOD
as a chinese, i felt that too sometimes
Chinese characters were pictograms once upon a time, so they're not wrong.
He never actually says that in the video. Subs are completely made up or was cut from the video. He just says “crap, wrongly written, this shouldn’t be...”
Gross🤣😂😁
The second character in "toothpaste" literally has 10 horizontal lines. Dude, how do they write them neatly?
The only way is practice 😁
It’s pretty easy once you get like 10 years of experience on it
we've been writing them since kindergarten 😭
It's actually not that hard, write "high" first then put a "moon" under it
膏 = 高 + 月
Emmmm just realise "high" in Chinese also kind of hard...
@@ML-po6vy high in Chinese is a super simple word, as it’s one of the first words taught meaning it’s many people’s first word remembered. It’s taught during kindergarten so it’s pretty simple to remember
Chinese: * 80,00 characters *
English: *laughs in 26 letters *
😂
pxstel_boba• You win this time 😂
But English has more words than Chinese characters.
That's not comparable. in this case, computer wins, becoz there are only two basic letters, 0 and 1.
Out of those 80000 char, 3000 are sufficient for day-to-day needs. Each chinese character has a basic meaning, just like Latin roots while each individual letter does not have a basic meaning.
LookingForDreams Chinese also has words which are often formed by two to four Chinese characters so other than characters you need to memorize lots of Chinese words as well while learning the language.
if you ask any student in middle or high school, they could easily ace the test since they’re writing every day. When you graduate and stop handwriting essays and start typing, you quickly forget everything.
That's right.And people guaduated can still recognize and type out most of the common characters though they can't write it.
PhD mathematicians will also struggle in even telling what 8×7 is.
Though, not saying that they are useless; for a mathematician they only need to know what every terms in mathematics mean and rest of the work is the job of a calculator or a simple programme.
@@shashankgupta7460 56?
@@lpi3 I said they will struggle. I didn't say that they won't be able to give the answer. And how do I know that you didn't use calculator 😂
@@shashankgupta7460 you underestimate phd in math
When people mock them for not being able to write toothpaste or thumb, yet fail to differenciate though and thought or even your and you're 😬
"differentiate "
@@sealand000 my first language is spanish so the autocorrector changes the word and when i change it back to how it was, i just skim through so the c got past me. Anything else to mark? (:
@@sealand000 shut up
Its much easier to read than to write Chinese. Your brain automatically recognize the characters when you see it, but it's much harder to picture it in your head. It's bascially a photographic memory test.
@Lyle Adrian The problem is not the size of one's vocabulary but being able to write with the vocabulary you have. The non-phonetic nature of Chinese makes it harder to transcribe verbal vocabulary into its written form for words whose symbols/spelling one does not know how to write/spell.
As a teacher in Japan, many students relying on smartphone no longer write characters. I think it's same as in China.
这才是正确答案
That’s the big difference with Chinese and alphabetic languages like English or Korean, it’s insanely difficult to master or even learn hence why King Sejong invented the Korean language due to his subjects being unable to learn Chinese. Personally as a Chinese-American I can speak fluently, read semi-fluently, but can barely write. It’s not easy. 😅
I heard that the main reason he invented it was because there were too many illiterate in his kingdom because it's hard to write korean using characters. They already have their own language, they are just using the chinese characters to write korean. He isn't illiterate so he knows how hard it is to learn korean using the chinese characters so he changed it.
Extremely grateful for 한글
On the other hand, Korean, just like Japanese, has tons of homophones, and written in Hangeul they’re impossible to distinguish if you don’t pay attention to the context. That’s also one of the main reasons why in Japanese kanji are still used despite having kana.
I forgot how to spell many English words after I have my own phone and laptop.
So true. And at least Japanese have hiragana and katakana, which lets them get by knowing "just" 2-3000 characters. You can't destroy a country's tradition and history, but China should definitely do something about this.
Okay , as a Chinese myself 😓 after watching this video I just find out that I can't write many characters either...
Even though u can't write those characters but still you're native,and you know the most amazing language in the world , can you help me with the language ,actually I am a learning Chinese, and I feel that without a native ,Chinese is very hard ,can you please help me ,👩
@@Maya14526 I'd like to help you ,but I don't know how to help you 😂
@@Melodyqtt do you use whatsapp ?that will be most useful
@@Maya14526okay , you can leave your ins id here I will find u
@@Maya14526 I think I can help!I have whatsapp and Im a native speaker
I can write Chinese
Chinese .
ᴍᴇ 2
you typed it
_hilarious and original_
Oh yeah?你的汉字不对。我的汉字很好了！不会看这个？太坏了！
@@maxiapalucci2511 ベリナイス！日本語話せますか?
I think mandarin is hard only because of its writing system and pronunciation, but I find its grammatical structure simpler and easier than Spanish and English (the two languages I speak fluently). Greetings from 墨西哥🇲🇽！
totally agree, i find it easy reading Spanish, but the grammer kills me, all the conjugations just blows my mind.
OMG CHINESE CAN'T WRITE THEIR OWN LANGUAGE, guys come on, ...english is too a language different speaking from writing and russian is difficult to write, greek grammar is the most complex, come on guys ..hurry up op op
@@marcopolesine1584and tbh huge reason they can’t write it is that nowadays they just use computers to type out words instead of writing them down, so they just have to know how to recognise the characters
Native English speakers struggle with English. A good example: "your" and "you're."
your right xD
@@jaanu2222 LOL
@@jaanu2222 lmao
Their, they're, and there
Lmfao it’s so easy too 💀
Ok.
I am chinese malaysian. Honestly, i never passed my chinese language in high school. My english was the best during that time. I often mix some english words when i speak chinese and it's really embarrasing.
You must be a Singaporean Chinese. White on the inside but still yellow outside. Speaking as a Singaporean who doesn't confuse the two languages since Eng and Chinese are as different as it is chalk and charcoal.
@@sarahmahalingami7792 i am malaysian chinese 😂
The Addicted Man my friend was the opposite. Cause his handwriting was messy sometimes he write Chinese in English composition，teacher never found out.
@@mrnobody3180 eh but malaysia teaches good chinese. I am singaporean chinese and i often score 30s percent for my overall chinese exams of the whole year
@@marikojournals A good teacher doesn't mean a student with good chinese will be developed
King sejong of korea saw this problem hundreds of years ago and created hangul because chinese was so hard to learn
yeah after seeing this I'm glad I chose to learn Korean instead...I learned hangul in a few days, but no one can ever learn all of the chinese characters haha
还好吧，不算太难。
leeway Y 那是因为有很多字都是不用在平常生活
Because Korean is not like Chinese; they have entirely different grammatical structures. There was no choice BUT to adapt the writing system. It’s not because of anything inherent to Hanzi; it’s because the monosyllabic characters didn’t fit with Korean words and grammar. And it’s not as though Korean is considered much easier to learn than Chinese, even with a simple alphabetic script.
@@看云-r5u 我不同意 韩语 比较容易学。
These characters are not hard, in fact, they are very common words, but many modern Chinese in their age of 20-40 forget how to write them because they are used to type the words on their mobile devices or computers instead of writing them on paper.
Just to show you guys how much more complicated some traditional characters are than their simplified equivalents: 1. Turtle 烏龜（乌龟）2. Melancholy 憂鬱（忧郁）3. Taiwan 臺灣（台湾）4. Experience 體驗（体验）5. Switch 開關（开关）⋯⋯There’s much more examples like these. Of course there’s also examples of traditional characters not so much more complicated than their simplified forms. For example, 1. Fish 魚（鱼）2. Door 門（门）3. Red 紅（红）4. Blue 藍（蓝）5. Yellow 黃（黄）⋯⋯As you can see, actually most of the simplified characters and their traditional roots look alike (at least to us Chinese lol), so usually people educated in simplified Chinese can also read BUT NOT write traditional Chinese, and vice versa for people educated in traditional Chinese. Some people though, like myself, can both read and write both simplified and traditional characters because I guess although I’m a mainlander from Guangzhou (educated in simplified Chinese), I grew up with a lot of TV shows from Hong Kong (in traditional Chinese). Hope this is helpful to some of you that are interested in Chinese. :)
Oscar Pan lol they aren't hard at all, in Japanese I know melancholy 'Yuuutsu' 憂鬱 I know thousands of kanji easy.
Alright. Good for you.
haha, i had to zoom in to really see them! also i always find it funny that the fish looks like a horse :)
Oscar Pan yeah some of those do not look alike or look only half alike.
Oscar Pan turtle and melancholy just do not look like their old symbols much at all.
I want to learn chinese
*watches this*
哈哈 :(
Bad Bish Angela 哈哈 :(
Bad Bish Angela 恶露摩羯座人哦培训
@@felcia2317 ？？怎么扯上魔蝎座了
@@cdrl3170 呵呵，我想他只是随便在键盘上点了几下，就像"核武库顶尖高手" 或 "给我很多我仍见不到"，呵呵
@@NierJpeg 哦哈哈哈哈哈
Am coming back here after 1 year learning chinese:
Me that time : what ??
现在:什么??
hahahahhaahaha making progress
@@dddllmo2655 想哭
simsie sims 加油
@@dddllmo2655 谢谢你 😁
不要放弃
Fun fact:
Due to the difficulty of Chinese characters, the Koreans removed Chinese characters (called "Hanja", which made up about 30% to 50% of Korean written language back then) from the Korean written system to make it easier to learn.
Whereas the Japanese kept the Chinese characters (called "Kanji", which also makes up about 30% to 50% of Japanese written language now) to this day.
i actually didn't know about the korean thing! thank u :o
Yah its annoying for Japanese. Its the most annoying part
@@lastninjaitachi it sounds ironic but when you get to a more complex sentence in japanese, especially for academia, using hiragana and katakana only make a sentence much harder to read than including kanji.
@@lastninjaitachi Japan might as well abandon Japanese and use a full set of Chinese system, so that the two peoples can communicate without obstacles
@@壹忈-k5d that would make sense.
Me : I bought some Chinese books yesterday
TH-cam : I'm gonna end this dude new year resolution
I have some language partners, what tortures me the most during language exchange sessions is sometimes I could not even make a good explanation of why I'd construct a Chinese sentence like that....it's just the way we say it..lol
No don't give up! If these people were writing more simple/common words, they would probably write them all correctly. Plus, even though it's nice to be able to write the characters too, it's not completely necessary to do so in everyday life. Reading is what you'll do more often and it's much easier to memorize how to read characters than how to write them. 😊
~:~
@@yanmiao7945 I would probably be the one asking those questions all the time. 😂 I'm always asking my teachers stuff like "Why do we have to use 把 structure here? Why do we have to use 了 here and not there?" etc. and they're often just like, "I don't know why; that's just how you have to say it." 😒😂
~:~
Your English is really good ,
And how is your Chinese now?
0:28 Why is that guy walking backwards in the background 😂😂😂
some elders in China believe that walking backwards are good for health.
@@cloudlaw7979 really!??
@@anvi7yearsago687 l don't actually know if it works. My grandma often does.
Elders love to do it as an exercise. My grandma does it every morning but I never get it lol
Walking backwards in china:a master practicing his craft
Walking backwards in usa:that dude is on shrooms
Thank you so much, king Sejong for making Hangeul
But Korean language is hard. Chinese grammar, Korean letter, and Japanese pronounciation might be good.
Hangeul is super easy to learn and write , but super hard to read and use in daily life bcoz it doesn't have any meanings, and thank god we didn't use Chinese Pinyin to replace Chinese charactor , even though Chinese Pinyin is way more easy to learn and write than Hangeul, and only requires few hours to learn, but we don't use it much in daily bases, bcoz it's just like hangeul have no meanings , you have to read the whole sentence to understand it
金泰宇 every langauge has its pros and cons. I agree our language is hard to learn although letter is simple. And many korean words are containing Chinese meaning, so learning Chinese might be good for who want to learn Korean and Japanese.
金泰宇 If people are super smart to memmorize well, Chinese is more efficient like just two words can show whole sentence in Korean or English. I think China should simplify their characters for their citizens.
흐에에엑 it is already simplified ie Simplified Chinese.
then there is me who wants to learn chinese
same here little afraid of the writting tbh lol
Rishi This your life is too short to lean anything......
There are literally hundreds of millions of people on this planet that speaks Chinese, how in the world do you think it's dead
chinese is the most spoken language in the world...
Rishi This one in ten people are Chinese, we have the most populated country in the world (currently at 1.4 billion). So, I think it’s safe to assume that it’s not going to be dead for a long time.
"I can actually write more Traditional Chinese"...at 6:38 It's b/c that guy is from Taiwan. His accent was a big tell.
不过关于繁体字的吹捧也是胡说八道，没有人会在写字的时候去思考造字法和背后的意义，不管简体还是繁体，何况简体字也就是几百个字而已。
不一定啊，很多南方人都是这个accent
@@oaksoedrgh5974 我是南方人，这家伙的确是台湾口音，台湾口音和南方口音是有区别的，即使是福建人说的也和台湾口音有很大区别。
@@handle4ytb 谢谢你的纠正。身为北方人，有的时候确实分的不是很清楚
@@zebraimage 又不是要你每天看到都要想 重點在於學習及保存 這是文化
如果你真那麼不在乎 何不提倡改成使用拼音就好 像韓國跟越南一樣 不是更簡易
"the test won't be that difficult"
The test: write an essay using traditional Chinese in about 2000 words
In which you describe how the law of gravity works in the milky way
I did that assignment in my Chinese class and I just copied it off from Google translate. And the professor still gave me an A.
让我写200字都难
@Ziqi Zhu I'm actually proud I knew how to read the entire sentence.
hhhh I am an IB Diploma Chinese A Higher Lever student. One of our test is to write two analysis essays on two given reading materials in 105 mins as a whole. And the min words for each essay is 1200. I always realize I haven’t written in Chinese by hand for a long while before the tests cuz all my other subjects are in English and I always only type in pinyin online everyday, but its still fine to finish the tests cuz you can always change your expression if you find some words hard to write.
大家早上好。作为一名印度人，我认为我们亚洲居民应该团结起来，重视彼此学习语言。我喜欢 Chinna，她的人民，传统，最重要的是
Hey My India bro, I love your comment, we should union together, love from China! 你的中文很不错！
nice
❤️
nice❤
... 冰淇淋
Lmao I'm Chinese so I'm good
I remember this post in tumblr like
" japanese is such a kind language if you can't write in kanji you can write hiragana and everyone will understand
Meanwhile in Chinese a little change and my mom becomes a horse "
Which is true,,
Fun fact when I get overly pissed I start screaming in Chinese it's just a habit lmao
For people who dont understand the joke,, the romanized chinese word for mom & horse is actually the same "ma", but has different way to pronounce and different character, though the character is a similar
From 媽/妈(mom) to 馬/马(horse), all you need is to remove 女.
@@peisong1114 was there that tongue twister, something about mom riding a horse?
@@Groza_Sadika here you go, 媽媽騎馬馬慢媽媽罵馬 (Mom was riding a horse, but the horse was too slow, so Mom scolded it.)
@@peisong1114 Oh, 谢谢。Btw, is it traditional Chinese?
The guy at the back at 2:43
*me being extra when sees a video shooting😂*
Omg I just saw that 😂😂
@@hansroberts2574 lol he's doing moonwalk.
he's walking backwards! it's a common exercise in China especially for the elderly :)
Well, in Vietnamese, you can always write a word perfectly right no matter how hard it is to pronounce or if you've never heard that word before :) Also, you can pronounce a word 100% correctly by looking at its written form as well even if you have no idea what the word means :) and I feel grateful for that :)
Anw, I'm studying Chinese, and from my point of view it is such an amazing language. Chinese intonation is really comfortable to listen to, and Chinese characters are so interesting to learn that I never get bored of them. In fact I enjoy writing the most among the 4 skills. Being a Vietnamese also makes it much easier for me to learn Chinese, since both languages have many things in common (especially a large part of Vietnamese vocabulary was borrowed from Chinese which we call “Han-Viet” words, and these words must account for like 60% of our total vocabulary I believe)
Really? Vietnam is that convenient? I might learn it
@@realdeal5712 That happens also in finnish and spanish!
Actually alots of European language have that feature (example is French which makeup Vietnamese's writing now). Except English !!!!
Oh ok I see 🤔
nope it’s nowhere near 70-80%
Chinese is an interesting language with a very beautiful script. This script teaches people be to modest and patient. There is no end in learning Chinese.
Fun fact. Before the introduction of alphabetic script, Greek was written with a script that had ideographic characters, similar in faction with the Chinese characters. For details, please check about Linear script B.
yesss in ancient times many cultures used characters to convey or write their languages.
As a Korean(i really loved studying Chinese when i was in high school and then, I met a great wall of Hanzi)
Hanzi 😭
Pronounciation 😰(most difficult part)
Grammars 😍 (it's totally different with Korean but easy to understand)
When I learn Japanese,
Grammars 😄
Pronounciation 😙 (slightly difficult for tsu and j sound but mostly ok)
Kanji 😭
Fyi, for English,
Grammars 😅(not that hard, but i don't think i can ever be perfect on this...) Pronounciation 😌
alphabet 😍
Newly created words and phrasal verbs i can't even guess the meaning 😢
Nice emoji
JY Jang
I have selective photographic memory so it's easy for me to learn any and all languages.
I just kinda watch chinese movies, read chinese online news, and memorize the entire dictionary.
Cute comment
You’re so cute
加油
"characters are just a way to communicate"
Boom, thousands of years of Chinese culture gone
well I think the guy has a point, could you imagine people not being able to comunicate because the difficulty of their language?. That´s why it constantly changes. by the way, Sorry if my english is not good I hope you understand :P
@@vz1115 Yes, that's actually why Hangeul was created. Chinese characters were never meant to be used by everyone, it was a writing system that was evidently meant to be used by a specialised class of scribes that studied it devoutly whereas Hangeul had the exact opposite philosophy. Saying that Chinese characters are bad at communicating is both right and wrong, wrong because it most definitely works and history speaks for itself, but also right because it most definitely wasn't meant to be used in a day to day basis by the laymen
I mean hey do you love going through the history books of English
Have you ever tried reading old English? It's basically a whole other language lol
@@SpiderDibs Because it kind of is.
There is a debate amongst linguists if English is a descendant of Anglo-saxon or if it's a creole and personally, I'd opt more for the creole theory. And there are two points where this has happened : first was during the Danelaw where a big part of Northern England was under Danish rule and the area was heavily settled by Danes as well and you can see that the language there evolved in strange ways, it's not so much that it simply borrowed heavily from the nords, but even grammar was impacted to an extent which is not usual. The second and most obvious case of creolisation (I ...... think that's a word at least) is during the Norman rule. It's still a debated topic but it is very possible that modern English is a very indirect descendant of Anglo-saxon and not it's natural evolution (unlike modern french and german which are direct descendants and you can see the difference in the fact that french and germans have a way easier time picking up a text from the middle age and reading it than English do with Anglo-saxon
I have always wondered how Chinese people type. Thank you!
erico1098 Thanks for the additional information.
我一直想知道中国人是怎么打字的。谢谢！
Meme Generator There are different ways of typing chinese actually. Mostly used is the pinyin, which is typing in the sounds and show the words for u to choose. Another is typing in the strokes
Meme Generator Here in Taiwan we type differently, we have a system called "bopomofo", for example the word for China (中國)is: ㄓㄨㄥ(中) ㄍㄨㄛˊ(國), but I don't know how Hong Konger type Chinese since they don't speak Mandarin much, so they definitely can't use pinyin to type.
I wonder if increasing the use of stroke typing could help people remember how to write characters better.
As a native Chinese I have to say that writing Chinese is not that hard if you keep practicing it - pick any random high school student on the street and they would be able to write relatively well (because ofc they have to write essays at school lol) The problem is that people tend to forget the writing system when they go off to uni or leave school. Typing is totally different with writing in Chinese.
Do Chinese type using simplified characters?
@@Anna-li8dy they type with pinyin keyboard
@@Anna-li8dy All are input by keyboard pinyin. I can switch between simplified and traditional Chinese by pressing shift+F.
Girl: I don't know them all, only the commonly used ones
Me:Hahaha so you know about 50-100?(I know there are a hell lotta characters but not the exact count)
Girl: I know only about 3000.
Me: .......................
Mridula J 😂Don’t worry. English is even harder. We have to remember 10,000 words for the TOEFL test.
Honestly, its not really that much. You take those 3000 characters and combine different parts and they create new characters, some might be so uncommon that nobody thinks about them. 😂
Stephanie D.
Only 3000 character but combined words are too much and alot of idiom
Tim Lou, and that is harder how? 10 000 english word are still made by 26 letters, 3000 characters can make more words than you'll ever know
@@pacificdawn5999 toefl is ludicrously simple to be honest. So i wouldn't really compare the two
I love how the one that was like "I know them all!" was the first to ask for help xD
Love your videos, guys. They are really fun and at the same time educational. Keep up the good work!
She's a cute dum dum
I think she knows them all by using help...
Maybe she can read them. You can be able to read characters but not to write them.
When she said she knew them all, I was wondering what she meant because even an expert in Chinese language wouldn't know them all. There are over 80,000 characters, but only about 3,500 are used in every day language.
yea, there can be no one in this world that can claim that they know all of the chinese characters..not even chinese language professors..
When I first started studying Mandarin, we had the option of both traditional and simplified characters (our textbooks had both for every exercise/example/etc.) So I - being a complete masochist - decided to learn the traditional set.
Fast forward 2 years, and my college changed the syllabus to a different set of textbooks, in which we *only* learned the simplified characters.
*cue an angry panda throwing things off a desk. And then throwing the desk. And then throwing the human behind the desk. *
lol, so sad
I have kind of the same problem. I studied Japanese for 5 years before I started Chinese (using simplified), and Japanese uses traditional aside from a few characters. So when I started learning simplified Chinese I had to relearn a bunch of the characters I already knew from Japanese but in their simplified forms. Sometimes I have a problem where I know a character in both simplified and traditional but I don't realize that they're just different versions of the same character until much later. 😂
~:~
I am a Taiwanese , we write in traditional characters.
But it's very strange that we can recognize simplified characters without learning. If you master the traditional characters, you can recognize simplified by instinct
确实，虽然我不会写繁体字，但我却看到懂繁体字
@@pnguo6970 Fair point. But for a European, we need to create a whole new section in our brains for understanding pictographs to begin with. LOL (Sorry, my current computer doesn't have Mandarin language set right now.)
Learning to write has one advantage: it helps you to memorize the form, and thus you are more likely to recognize the character when it comes up. The same principle can be applied to memorize English words. As a bi-lingual, I find this particular learning experience quite similar: learning how to write/spell is always helpful for the memory.
(Note: Chinese characters are not equivalent to letters, and the characters are equivalent to English words.)
I don't think people need to worry about the future of hanzi, because the characters are actually highly functional and practical linguistic tools. For daily users/readers, the existence of hanzi are NOT solely for aesthetic purpose.
The current practice of digital input actually shows how the Chinese culture (language) is integrated with modern technology.
The integration between traditions and contemporary lifestyle has actually been a recurring phenomenon that has appeared throughout Chinese history (most of the time).
Many interviewees didn't seem to think this question through, but the question itself wasn't easy to answer in short.
Also, the statement at around 6:05 is NOT fully correct.
Many of the simplified characters were actually derived from historical, alternative forms of traditional characters. Many commonly used simplified characters had already existed throughout history, although their usages were not widespread or mainstream until modern eras.
I had a struggle writing Chinese than I write in Latin
(On paper)
Sir, have you ever thought of reviving the Baybayin script in the Philippines?
if you type it with phone ，it will be easy
Rodigo Duterte pogi duterte ☺
Maverick ？？？how do you get this conclusion. mysterious..
I understand that you probably mean 罗马 (Roman characters) not 拉丁 (the Latin language spoken by the Romans)
0:28 why the woman at the back walkin backwards
She's woman
wuyi lu omg.. I’m sorry-
same person walks backwards again at 2:43
They somehow think this is a good exercise. Old people think this can prevent Alzheimer. I still don’t know why, but it’s actually really fun to do that .Just don’t do that on a crowded street, in a park perhaps.
walter pu ngl... that do sound cool lol
Its like how english has a dictionary that is half a ruler thick, no one will ever know every single word in that book and half the time people need to ask others for the right word to something.
@LIFE IS WORTH LIVING Well if you ask someone on China street about how to write '' schizophrenia" in Chinese, I am sure that he/her know how to write 100%, but you try it on US street. This is just because some of the Chinese characters are difficult to remember even they are basic things, but some of them are simple to remember, even if they are only used under certain condition by certain people.
LIFE IS WORTH LIVING Wow 3 guy don't understand how different two languages can be liked this comment. V E R Y C O O L. Pretty white I'll say.
LIFE IS WORTH LIVING but if you live in another country for 5 years and barely write in that language is hard to remember, especially for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Becuz those characters are already really complex.
It's not about knowing words or not - it's about how to write the word! In english, if you know basic pronounciation rules, you can write down ANY word, even if it 's not correctly spelled as english uses a PHONETIC writing system. you DON"T have to know the meaning of the word to write it down! That's the KEY advantage of phonetic writing system
Yeah, but it's not just the words. They know the words. They just don't know how to spell them, because they don't know all the "letters" of their alphabet.
5:04 In that accent, I think that was actually “I’m a programmer” rather than “I’m a correspondent.”
I'm currently learning chinese. Wish me luck to get a scholarship from a big school here in the philippines.
My scores from my chinese language exams varies from 18-20 out of 20
Good luck!
你在哪裡學習?
Dragonz He just said he’s from the Philippines
@@trixtao 你看不懂中文嗎?我的意思是他在菲律賓學習，我不問他在哪裡國家
Dragonz Ah sorry sorry, but it is said. He is studying from the Philippines.
其实是电脑电子产品导致了文字书写的缺失，已经很严重了，看都知道，写都不会了
可以使用「倉頡輸入法」，是根據字型輸入的，不過會比較複雜
小学时期有开书法课，毛笔写诗词。后来到中学也有校方举办的书法比赛。但是成为社会人就很少接触写字，最多也就写写简历。😩书法比赛我还拿过三等奖🥉。
@慕慧 沒辦法，拼音類輸入法學習上的確快得多
Me: I will learn and study Chinese, yahoohh!!!
Asian Boss: I don't want you to be in trouble.
Girl: "I think i know all the characters."
Interviewer: "Imma end this guy's whole career."
Guy
Guy
Man
Boy
Lad
2:35 “at this point I’m just drawing pictures” me too brother, me too 😂😂😂😂
哈哈哈哈
if you ask elementry school students they may get them all correct because I'm from Hong Kong and we used to have chinese dictations everyday oml
omg your pfp i love CLC
Yeah I'm from hk too and I agree
In Poland i hated dictations xD when i was 7 i wasnt able to remember all rules like when to write Rz ż h ch u ó 😂
Well duh, ask my 12th grade self all the hard math questions and I can answer them all, asking me a simple equation now and I got no idea. It's called being at school.
I am a Chinese American who came to the U.S when I was like 9. Now im 26.
I can read a lot of the common Chinese characters (maybe 2000-3000 words).. But if you ask me to write Chinese on the spot, I can probably write like 10 words.
I will admit this video restored my confidence in my ability to learn Chinese, ive only been learning for about 28 days and to see that Chinese themselves have difficulties id say I'm doing well so far
Learn to speak is easier than learning to write
Imagine having a test in chinese, i would take an hour to write one character😂
then its time already 😂 i cannot
Not really...but yes, it is a little more time-consuming depending on how complicated the characters ur using are lol
When I was younger, I took Chinese School (I'm a Chinese-American), and every week the teacher would give us the vocab words to study, and the next week, she would read them out loud and we would have to write down the characters for each of the words. Let me just tell you this, I failed the test pretty much every week.
After writing your name
“Time’s up! All pens down”
And then the teacher can’t read your handwriting because you messed up the character
Should have asked other strangers to try and read what they wrote.
hahaha u so fking clever, but i think others may can read, beacause skimming doesn't need to be very clear, just it seems like... , would be ok.
Haha Honestly that would not be a problem for native speaker 😂 Reading and guessing is easy but writing is another level
I'm not a native speaker of chinese.
But i know read, write, listen and speak well in Mandarin Chinese. 😄 from India.
你好！我是阿拉伯 人学习汉语。 我觉得汉语很漂亮认为太难 了！ 我能写也说一些汉字！
您好兄弟，您们的阿拉伯语更难。
What have you written ?
在大多数中国人看来，阿拉伯文=天书
我觉得阿拉伯语更难…
你太谦虚了 我们认为阿拉伯语是最难的
Another way is they should try typing Chinese but using hand-writing mode sometimes in a while, to practice the strokes more often~
I agree the Traditional chinese writings could convey very deep meaning and are just simply beautiful
Haha I’ve once forgot how to write my name in Chinese during a test! HARDEST QUESTION OF MY LIFE HAHA
Reel Fitness 6
哈哈哈哈，尴尬
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😄😄
😂
For those who are not aware, when typing characters on a computer/smart phone, most of us use Pin Yin, a way to convert letters to characters based on the pronunciation instead of strokes.
It's also much easier to read than to write Chinese. Your brain automatically recognize the characters when you see it, but it's much harder to picture it in your head. Its basically a photographic memory test.
There’s also the stroke-writing method which you can use your fingers and write the character but people rarely do it these days.
@@osmomosis9216 you have to use it if you dunno the pinyin. useful for people who speak in dialects like Cantonese, hakka, etc.
There’s input methods like Canjie or Wubi which are typed based on how characters are written, not how they are pronounced. Apparently Cangjie is common in HK where it’s likely that people are less likely to forget how to write, but because any graphical input methods are more difficult to learn than phonetic ones, people don’t bother learning them and end up getting character amnesia.
@@jinnimoo yes just like CNN it's a neural network and do image recognization. When you read it, you actually do not need to see every detail of the charactor.
Teacher: Today we have a surprise essay writing exam.
Yep, it's about corona virus created by chinese
@@spaceman6742 oh look, a moron
@@spaceman6742 you're racist bro...
Essay: Write 3000 words about history of China
@@Handwritinghelp Be real here. China is a monoethnic country. Chinese is not only a nationality it is also an ethnicity.
I’m even worse- I can listen and understand intermediate phrases but when I need to use them in my own verbal sentences I forget them, never mind knowing how to write them
this is why Chinese scholars were so influential
Chinese characters are incredibly beautiful, aesthetic, connote deeper meanings and have a long history - which is why they will never be Latinised :)
Joseph Stalin
They are already latinized in the form of Pinyin.
Every mainland Chinese can read and write pinyin so that itself is already a seperate language that is useable.
Raynold Regan
Pinyin is only for typing and an aid for Westerners to learn Chinese - it is just a phonetic representation of Chinese using the Latin alphabet, meaning it is not a separate language. Every language has such a Latin transliteration to allow Westerners to learn its pronunciations. But pinyin has no presence in Chinese books and it is never going to be adopted as the written form of the language for reasons which I mentioned, plus there are other ways of typing Chinese apart from Pinyin.
Joseph Stalin
I mean it's a working writing system that every Chinese outside Taiwan can read and write.
People can use pinyin only to communicate if they really need to.
Raynold Regan
For Chinese ppl reading pinyin is actually harder than reading characters, because characters are unique and recognisable, whereas reading pinyin is like reading English for them - hard with repetitive foreign letters.
Then create a different phonetic script if Latin doesn't suit you. Koreans did it in 1443.
There were some attempts to get rid of Kanji throughout japanese history, but they failed because the linguists claimed the chinese heritage. Again the elites boycotting progress.
The Chinese just forgetting how to write the words are such a mood. I've literally been eating and breathing Chinese for the past 15 years, every since I've popped out from my mum's womb. And I'm literally failing the subject
I liked this because it makes me feel better about my own lack of ability to remember the characters I study. Also, I was happy to see that among the interviewees, young and old alike, they felt the situation should be reversed through more awareness and more actual writing. That is equally true even in western languages, I believe.
This gives me hope as a learner, that I don't hvae to be perfect.
Yes, just like your 'have' is also not needed to be perfect lol.
@@anvi7yearsago687 Golden comment found
Really unless your in school you don't need perfect Chinese, If you can speak it well and know the commonly used words you can get by pretty well.
@@anvi7yearsago687 yes, just like your 'needed' does not also have to be perfect lol.
Ye i agri with u u don hvae to
lmao, " I only write my name when needed for signature" at 4:51
I don’t even know how to write my Chinese surname character.. 😂
OMG THE GUY WITH THE GRAY SHIRT IS CUTE
No, you are.
Yes, all three of them. ;-)
I prefer the red shirt one
花痴。。。
Harish ew gtfo
I grew up in Europe in a Chinese family. I learnt Chinese as a kid but mostly speaking so I can barely read and write. If I want to write Chinese symbols on my phone, I also use pinyin because I know how to say it. And then I choose whatever symbol seems right with my very limited knowledge (I can maybe recognize max. 200 symbols compared to ca. 5000 that you need for daily life). And then I put my sentence in Google translate to double check whether it made sense what I wrote. Works pretty well actually although I can neither write nor READ :D
Are you chinese or white?
So you're fluent in spoken Chinese but can't read it?
Very interesting.
@@davidsenra2495 not entirely fluent but I can have normal conversations, I couldn't discuss deeper topics though
I'm a Korean student studying Chinese. Korean people don't have to memorize such a difficult characters, but our language has more complex grammers and orthographies than Chinese.
I also want to watch "Can Korean Write Chinse Characters?" Many of Korean vocabularies consist of Hanja(汉字, 한자, Chinsese Character). So knowing Hanja helps you understand deeper meaning of vocas. But like Chinese, young Koreans recently forgot Hanja. I want to know Koreans' awareness of Hanja.
Taiqi Xu actually we learn a lot. Still.many korean words are from Chinese characters.
Such an interview must be very interesting.
I think it's good for korean to learn some basic Hanzi.
It's still useful.
It is a big mistake for Korea to abandon hanja. Hunminjeongeum is like Pinyin, it marks the pronunciation but not the meaning. Ambiguities can occur if the hanja is not written. For example, 방화 하다 can mean 防火 to prevent fire, or 放火 to set fire, which are antonyms! The constitution of korea is written in hanja mixed script, which makes it very easy to read and the meaning is very clear
I find Korean SOOOO hard to pronounce!!! Why do you have to have multiple double p, k, s and such? 😆
Everyone: *talking about Chinese language*
Me: *why the wind is blowing so fast*
Q- can you tell me the difference between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese
A- Traditional Chinese is much more complex (🙄 duh) 😂😂🤣
刘 劉
With just much more strokes in a lot of characters
@@EdwardDawnCG so tru so tru
Complex, in stroke count, not in semantic/phonetic value
Simplifying the language was necessary so that the people could communicate more efficiently. This also allowed the country to develop more rapidly as a whole.
“The General Standard Chinese Characters Library" （通用规范汉字表中的一级字表为“常用字”） shows that the most commonly used characters have 3500. But in daily life, 2500 capacity is enough for reading newspapers.
From an article I found in a Chinese uni: usually a Chinese senior high school student can recognize 3500-4000 characters.
Yep. I have studied chinese for years and probably can read/type (not write tho!) around 1,000 characters. I can grasp what an article is talking about, but I can never fully get it :(
I can read basic things tho.