The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy
by John DeFrancis · first published 1986
78% recommend11% neutral11% critical
Why HN recommends it
Debunks common misconceptions about Chinese writing and language with clear argument; recommended to readers curious about the topic, including those without a linguistics background who want a grounded overview.
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…from their native languages), which they acquired as a second language while learning literacy. The full details to respond to the point of view you have put forth can be found in http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci... (P.S. I can read some current Japanese too, and of course current Japanese writing shows plainly that Japanese is a very different language from Chinese, as you correctly note.…
on “Why Chinese Is So Damned Hard” ↗…represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book…
on “An Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist” ↗…writing is badly designed compared to alphabetic systems, to the point where there are serious effects on the literacy rate. See Moser at http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html and DeFrancis' The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, linked from http://www.pinyin.info/readings/chinese_language.html
on “Rice Paddies And Math Tests” ↗…to pick out the tones well (although I still can't reproduce them as acurately!). Unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation surrounding Chinese. A good book mentioned in the bibliography is The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis.
on “Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)” ↗…represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book…
on “Cantonese Proverbs in One Picture” ↗…Are we cut off of our cultural heritage? Well, somewhat, but there are translations, and if you're really into it, you can still go and learn it, see a). Great resources on these issues, btw: * "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy", John DeFrancis * "Asia's Orthographic Dilemma", Wm. C. Hannas, extract available here http://www.pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html * Pinyin Info, http://www.pinyin.info/ * Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/…
on “Zhou Youguang, creator of the Pinyin writing system, has died” ↗DeFrancis book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy is excellent on that and many related questions [1]. First, Mandarin has no inflection (love/loves), which allows for writing in characters in the first place. Then, Mandarin has a fairly impoverished…
on “Kenya will start teaching Chinese to elementary school students from 2020” ↗…to children without regard to "phonics'' are by no stretch of the imagination pictures totally devoid of phonetic clues, as witness th in "the" and n in "one."' This is from the informative book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John D. Francis.
on “English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)” ↗…the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and thus much more use of personal telephone calls and radios and televisions and much more internal travel. China still has a lot of catching up to do. The book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci... does a lot to disentangle the issues of speech versus writing, and dialect versus language, that are discussed in several…
on “Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin” ↗Characters are just symbol with meaning. Again, I invite you to look at http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci... to see why that is not quite true. A newer book, http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-Invent... is very good for explaining the neurological reasons why NO…
on “Why Chinese Is So Damned Hard” ↗I'm no sinologist but found this book fascinating: "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" by John DeFrancis (ISBN 978-0824810689)
on “A simple explanation of Chinese characters” ↗…completely forget how to write a word. In English, you might misspell it, but it'll be rare that you can't render it at all. Great book on the topic of Chinese, debunking several misconceptions, is "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" by John DeFrancis. http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-819-9780824810689.aspx
on “Japanese writing system basics” ↗Pertinent resources: * Pinyin Info, http://www.pinyin.info/ * Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ , in particular Victor Mair's posts * "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy", John DeFrancis * "Asia's Orthographic Dilemma", Wm. C. Hannas, extract available here http://www.pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html
on “Zhou Youguang, creator of the Pinyin writing system, has died” ↗For anyone interested in the topic, a couple good books are: * Chinese: A Linguistic Introduction by Chaofen Sun, and * The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis.
on “Zhou Youguang, creator of the Pinyin writing system, has died” ↗Agreed. DeFrancis (in his delightful The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy) wrote (quoting from memory) that Japanese has the worst writing system among the character-based ones, and English the worst among the alphabetic ones. What a pleasure Spanish writing is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language%3A_Fact_a...
on “Kenya will start teaching Chinese to elementary school students from 2020” ↗