Re: French VS English
Posted: Mon 08 Jul , 2013 8:06 pm
Difficult is debatable, but it is inefficient to an extreme. Being used to it doesn't make it any less so.focus wrote:1. Difficult and inefficient? They are such for us. Our cultures are very different,
that's why we percieve them this way. But from the point of view of average chinese man,
very english can be viewed as difficult. Remember, their hieroglyphs are signs for whole notions.
And in english - words serve for this purpose. As a result, complexity do not differ that much. Anyway
one have to learn thousands of words/hieroglyphs.
The English/Latin alphabet has 26 characters and it can make any word with it, often with far less penstrokes than Eastern logograms and syllabaries. Chinese and Japanese require memorization of thousands of characters, depending on your level of education and career. It is quite common in those languages to literally not know how to pronounce an obscure word because you do not recognize a character or a particular combination of characters.
When you're thirty years old and still have to ask people 'how do you read this word?', you know your written language is inefficient.