[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.