italiafree

We should say no to this.As chinese is now the only "independent language" ,that is,the sound of the character is not pronounced through the alphabets.It is unique to the world!
And what is more.the shape of the characters reflet the meaning and it is easy to remember!For instance,man=ÈË.what a vivid picture!It is art!

Peace-and-Love

Now that China is becoming an Economic Super Power in the world, I think that Romanizing the language might come in handy.

This does not mean that you need to completely get rid of the traditional Chinese writing, but if more of an emphasis is put on Pin Yin or another Romanization Style, then I think the rest of the world may actually be able to communicate better with their Chinese interests.

I know for me at least, I will be learning Chinese this year in University, and I am scared to death that it will be too hard, because I am aware of all the different characters.

Yau

Romanization will never be the way to reform. It was proposed and discussed many decades ago, but the proposal is regarded by many as a radical, inconsiderate or irrational today.

The obsolete reasons for romanization included:
1. it helped Chinese to increase literacy rate. It was extremely convincing, and many respectful scholars agreed that too, but Hong Kong and Taiwan experience proved that this argument is groundless. These rich regions also showed that how people can survive well with traditional writing system.

2. it helped chinese compatible with computer life, but the invention of Chinese encoding system and many chinese input methods solve the problem. Any reform on Chinese characters are for our next generation, who are also learning how to input chinese when they are very young.

Chinese characters may be still hard for learners, but language reform is not based on learners' needs, it's based on users themselves. In fact, if we can recognize a few thousand logos and trademarks, is it really difficult for learners to recoginze the basic 2000 chinese characters? It's, for me, so difficult to remember French and English vocab, it's a common problem to most learners who don't use the language frequently. I think it's the same to Chinese characters too.

IMHO, Characters are not necessarily bad things. Chinese dialects are as diversified as European language. If Roman created their own characters, modern EU would be able to cut back their expense on huge translation teams.

pidr1nhu

Yao, we are NOT discussing: create a NEW CHINESE STYLE OF LANGUAGE, what we are talking about is create a parallel between the traditional chinese written and a romanized one; you would continue learning your language the way it is today, the romanized chinese would be only for international relations, culture exchange and etc...
By saying "Any reform on Chinese characters are for our next generation" you are only delaying what can be really handy now....
"Chinese characters may be still hard for learners, but language reform is not based on learners' needs, it's based on users themselves. In fact, if we can recognize a few thousand logos and trademarks, is it really difficult for learners to recoginze the basic 2000 chinese characters? It's, for me, so difficult to remember French and English vocab, it's a common problem to most learners who don't use the language frequently. I think it's the same to Chinese characters too."
You can't compare chinese and other european languages, they are based in different standards; Analysing that learning french or english, you have got to know, let me guess, 26 letters in English and probably the same in french, now you ask us to know only basics 2000 chinese characters, calculating it would be approximately 77 chinese characteres to a letter.

chinoise

It baffles me why more and more people are interested in learning chinese, one of the most difficult languages in the world. It must be very charismatic.

whao1106

Yau

you confused up basic elements to write a language and vocab. If you're talking the very basic elements, as fundemental as 26 alphabets, to write all chinese characters, there're 5 strokes. Some Chinese computer input methods are based on those 5 strokes so that people can input all chinese characters with them.