[EdwardDiego]

Really?

I once saw an old YouTube video that claimed that some hanzi are super obscure and even native Chinese have to look them up sometimes when wanting to use them, and gave the example of "sneeze".

I asked my Shanghai born coworker, who led the local Chinese friendship society, about this, and he furrowed his brow and said "...shit, actually, yeah, I'd need to look that up myself."

This is merely one anecdote, of course,

There's information density, but there's also information accessibility. And the trick is finding the balance between the two.

Having 8000 characters (in simplified Chinese) may be information dense, but how accessible is that information? E.g., a typical Chinese university graduate will know, on average, 3 -4K of them, and no doubt ones that are unused will atrophy over the years.

The balance between density and accessibility is always ongoing. E.g., I find reading presentation slides with a transcript far more information dense than watching a video of that presentation, but some people find it far more accessible in video form. And then for complex discussions, I find video calls far more information dense than Slack message or email exchanges.

[DiogenesKynikos]

Recognizing and writing characters are different skills. Chinese people typically recognize far more characters than they can write (this has become much more severe in the electronics age, because most people input text using the pinyin Romanization, so they don't write by hand any more).

In addition, if you're reading a text and you come across an uncommon character, you can often figure it out, both from context and by recognizing elements in the character (which give hints about the pronunciation and meaning).

[EdwardDiego]

True, and the context of "use them" was indeed writing them.

[yorwba]

> some hanzi are super obscure and even native Chinese have to look them up sometimes when wanting to use them, and gave the example of "sneeze".

喷嚏 is the example always used because it describes a common thing that is rarely written about, and there is no other, more frequently written character with the 疐 component that could remind people how to write it. So when handwriting, one might substitute 喷㖷 instead.

Most obscure characters are simply obscure because they refer to an obscure thing, like not being able to spell the name of a village you've never heard of.

And characters for non-obscure things made of obscure components are usually common enough that people get enough practice writing them. E.g. 藏 "store/hide" contains 臧, an archaic term for "good" that now mostly occurs in ancient idioms and as a rare surname. But hardly anybody seems to have trouble writing 藏.

[Beltalowda]

> I once saw an old YouTube video that claimed that some hanzi are super obscure and even native Chinese have to look them up sometimes when wanting to use them, and gave the example of "sneeze".

Isn't that also the case in other languages? Most people don't know all the words in a dictionary for example, and a word is roughly analogous to a character in Chinese.

[pezezin]

In most languages with alphabetic writing, if you know a spoken word, you can write it. But in Chinese and Japanese, people might know a word, use it daily, being able to read it, and still forget how to write it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

[dontlaugh]

It varies in alphabet languages too. Plenty of native English speakers can’t spell words they can speak. Chinese is not much worse than English in this respect.

[thrown_22]

Yes, English is a terrible written language. In a sane world we would have moved to IPA a long time ago.

jˈɛs, ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ ɪz ɐ tˈɛɹɪbəl ɹˈɪtən lˈaŋɡwɪdʒ. ɪn ɐ sˈeɪn wˈɜːld wiː wʊdhɐv mˈuːvd tʊ ˌaɪpˌiːˈeɪ ɐ lˈɒŋ tˈaɪm ɐɡˈəʊ.

[tokinonagare]

And then we would need to use two very different spellings for American and British English. Be careful with what you wish.

[thrown_22]

There isn't such a thing as a spelling when you write down what you hear. We can still understand each other despite the spelling of center and centre being different.

[pezezin]

Yes, that's why I wrote "in most languages" :D

We all agree that English spelling is a royal pain in the ass.

[Beltalowda]

Ah right, that makes sense.

[inglor_cz]

The real advantage that Chinese writing has is that it bridges very different, mutually unintelligible variants of the language.

Imagine a common "Germanic" or "Roman" script that would be comprehensible to any literate person that speaks any Germanic or Roman language. So the same book could be read by people in San Francisco, Berlin, Oslo and Amsterdam without the need to learn any new language.

This might be one of the reasons why China is still one country with one central bureaucracy, which is nigh impossible to establish in Europe, all the EU-wide initiatives notwithstanding.

But it comes with a high bar to clear as to what "literacy" even means. Westerners are fully literate in their native languages after several years of elementary school; the same cannot be said about the Chinese.