Do you guys think vietnamese would be easier if they had Chinese (whether Simplified or Traditional) Characters.
Posted Oct 20, 2019, 8:49 PM UTC
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Latin alphabet is objectively easier to learn than Chinese characters.
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Chinese characters arent easy to learn though...
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I can attest to that. If you grew up only knowing the alphabet system, learning a language that seems to have random strokes for words is very hard.
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Are you aware of the sino-vietnamese writing, admittedly a dying system which is only studied by specialists and preserved with minimal efforts from the government? You can read plenty of historical articles about how or why it is no longer the official version, but it is a fact that it took only about a century for a completely new alphabet system invented by a foreigner to almost completely replace the old one with such strong historical and traditional roots. The literary rate iirc also skyrocketed, so there is plenty of evidence to make a case for the current writing a much easier way to help common people learn. My only gripe is the official curriculum took the writing part out even though there are so many sino-based words in the language, so now I have to study Chinese from the scratch.
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not due to French colonialism?
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that's fine. Vietnamese have the freedom to use whatever script they feel is the best way to represent their language. So does every other ethnicity.
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The Vietnamese alphabet is similar to the English/ French alphabet though. And no, I don’t think it will definitely be easier if Vietnamese used Chinese characters. Chinese might be subjectively difficult to learn, depending on the learner.
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fuck no. chinese is quite possibly the most difficult writing system in the worls. in fact, if the chinese had an alphabet language, they would've reached the scientific revolution 100s of years before europeans did because they would've had a printing press much earlier. chinese writing was something only scholars and aristocrats learned in ancient times. so very few people could read and learn from books. books were very expensive because they had to be copied by hand by a scholar who had to be educated for 10 years to begin with.
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Unless your first language is Chinese, no.
Obviously, Vietnamese words have different pronunciation to English words, but as they are both derived from the Latin alphabet, English speakers can make out some Vietnamese words, and vice versa.