[OmniBus]

You get confused in the Chinese languages system. Spoken and written are very different beasts in Chinese language. The literacy relies on the meaning of characters. It is just like one can understands the meaning "1234" and "+, -" while reading them out loud in their own language. I write "1 + 2" and read it "yat ka yi" when you read "one plus two". It does not hinder the understand of mathematics.

Although there are numerous Chinese languages, the characters are basically the same. Although there are many variants in text, the written language is long unified. They can communicate by text.

In the past, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese can read Chinese text in their own languages. But, you know, they are from different language families.

[tokenadult]

the written language is long unified. They can communicate by text.

I already mentioned above that I have seen counterexamples--written Chinese that was incomprehensible to many of the people who might reasonably be expected to read it--in several daily life situations in various parts of China.

Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese can read Chinese text in their own languages.

No, strictly speaking they were reading Chinese text in Chinese (possibly with mind's-ear pronunciation of the Chinese characters reflecting influence 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. I had occasion recently to read a brush painting of bamboo with some Chinese characters on it hanging in the office of a physician, who is a man of Korean-Japanese heritage. We could both sight-translate the Chinese characters into English. I didn't ask him on that occasion how he would pronounce them.)

[OmniBus]

That's why I said "Spoken and written are very different beasts in Chinese languages". Yes, I can write some variants that only local people can read. It'd just like an Australian writes some English that other world cannot easily understand. But generally, the written form of English by and large is basically the same.

If one is illiterate and cannot recognise any written word, it is nothing to do with writing system. It is about education.

The news article (xinhaunet) you given is about spoken languages, nothing do with written language.

Yes, they read characters in their native languages, not in any modern Chinese languages. Characters are just symbol with meaning. It pronunciation varies from language to language. It does not matter you say "一" in /jat1/, /yi1/, /qit/, /ichi/, /itsu/, /hitotsu/, /hitotbai/, /hajime/, or /il/ and it basically means one.

[dkarl]

Yes, they read characters in their native languages, not in any modern Chinese languages.

I think the parent was speaking historically about how Chinese characters were read (and written) by Koreans and Japanese before they were adapted for writing Korean and Japanese. In a sense you are both correct, since Japanese kanji have both a "Japanese" and "Chinese" reading, and I believe the same is (or was) true for Korean hanja. In both cases "literacy" was nearly synonymous with "literacy in Chinese" in Japan and Korea for quite a long time, during which those languages adopted thousands of Chinese words. (Part of the resistance against other writing systems, including simpler phonetic ones, in Japan and Korea came from the assumption that any serious person would aspire to Chinese literacy, and a simpler writing system that was not a door to Chinese would only be of use to "stupid people" and women -- people who did not aspire to full literacy.)

Even today the distinction between "Japanese" and "Chinese" readings is used when teaching Kanji, and Koreans are much more commonly aware of the distinction between words of Chinese and native Korean etymology than English speakers are aware, say, of the distinction between words of Romantic and Germanic origin.

[elblanco]

> Even today the distinction between "Japanese" and "Chinese" readings is used when teaching Kanji, and Koreans are much more commonly aware of the distinction between words of Chinese and native Korean etymology than English speakers are aware, say, of the distinction between words of Romantic and Germanic origin.

Correct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orthography_for_the_Korean_...

North Korea in particular has gone to great lengths to de-Sino (and de-foreign) their version of Korean. So much so that they've introduced many, often cumbersome description words to replace more elegant Chinese (Korean pronounced) or other loan words like 전자 계산기 (Mechanical Calculating Device) instead of 컴퓨터 (Computer).

Most south Koreans can likewise tell you immediately if a word is of Chinese origin (usually because they know the Hanja for it) vs. of purely Korean origin. Like 공룡 (Dinosaur) which is pronounced almost the same as 恐龍 vs. 피 (Blood) instead of 血.

[tokenadult]

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 writing system could possibly operate that way.

To say that Chinese characters unify a nation of high illiteracy whose citizens in many cases cannot converse with one another in person or on the telephone

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...

is much like saying that writing in Latin unifies the continent of Europe by providing a common means of communication among scholars from Basque Country to Finland. Each statement is about equally true, and each is about equally irrelevant to current language policy.

[Jun8]

I believe the difficulty you refer to is caused by the inadequacy of the script to address Chines vernaculars, like Cantonese. Written Cantonese has many characters that would be alien to a monolingual Mandarin speaker.

[elblanco]

>No, strictly speaking they were reading Chinese text in Chinese.

That's only partially correct though. Often as not, before Hangul was introduced in Korea, or Latin alphabets were modified for Vietnam, many people wrote their venacular using Chinese logograms, with the meaning known, but the word order and pronunciation adapted for their own language. Korean in particular has a whole class of special characters to capture the particulars of Korean grammar and language when written with Chinese characters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja

Most Koreans will likewise pronounce Hanja using Korean words not Chinese ones. Like 'Dae' (대) for 大, 'In' (인) or 'Salam' (사람) for 人, 'Sal' (쌀) or 'Bap' (밥) for 稻.

You are right that, in the old days, because of the nature of the political ties betweem 韓國 and 中國, it was expected that formal government documents were written, read and pronounced in Chinese. But in general, most Koreans today do not know how to read Chinese out loud in a way that a Chinese speaker would understand. Most of the time Hanja is just used to clarify homophones from Koreanized loan words from Chinese.

[xiaoma]

As a long-time speaker of Mandarin who is learning Taiwanese Hokkien, I can't really agree with that. There are many characters and even words that are written the same way in each language, but there are many, many more which are not. Aside from the characters used specifically for Hokkien, there are numerous phrases which mean one thing in one language and another in the other. For example, 失禮 would mean lacking in manners in Mandarin, but it means sorry in Hokkien. Hokkien text, even when rendered in characters, is largely incomprehensible to Mandarin speakers.

[tokenadult]

Hokkien text, even when rendered in characters, is largely incomprehensible to Mandarin speakers.

I can confirm the truth of this example, which is one of the examples I had in mind in some of my earlier comments.