[Lorelei]

[quote]Originally posted by yautiawoman2
Dear Compas de Puerto Rico. Com

In a way, a new problem in a new cultural paradigm is like reading a "Chinese Picturegraph" (there is no Chinese Alphabet, each picture has a whole meaning, and you need to memorize each picturegraph, that is the way the Chinese Language works when it is in writing). Also many Japanese and Koreans and even Vietnamese use the same pictures to mean the same thing, so they may not understand each other when they speak but they can read each others' picturegraphs.

Yes, Yautia, I knew that the Chinese characters were actually pictographs. That's why I referred to them as characters rather than alphabet. Still, not all the characters are recognizeable as the words or ideas they represent. So my point was that there is still a whole lot more memorization going on in order to be able to read Chinese than to be able to read using the roman alphabet. That's probably why the Japanese came up with their own phonetic alphabet (hiragana and katakana)--they do still use the Chinese kanji though not as widely. I think that the Koreans may have done this as well. What I never learned, while living in Japan, was why they had to devise two. I'd learned that one was masculine (katakana?) and one was feminine (hiragana). Perhaps, with your linguistics background you know the answer to this and could enlighten me.