Chinese Doesn't Have Many Syllables (And Why That's Interesting)

I have changed the title from "Why Chinese Needs All Those Characters" to "Chinese Doesn't Have Many Syllables (And Why That's Interesting)". This current title was in fact the original title, but after a little while I (quite absent-mindedly) decided to switch the title to "Why Chinese Needs All Those Characters" for - and I'll be honest here - clickbait purposes, and because I thought retrospectively that this video could function as a good argument for keeping the characters. A lot of people have pointed out that this isn't a complete argument - and this is true, because it wasn't originally meant to be a complete argument, and it was disingenuous of me to refer to the video as such. I don't denounce the points I make in the video - but the points I brought up were originally more to do with the problems with transliterations, rather than a full argument for keeping Chinese characters. Mind you, I DO believe in keeping the Chinese characters alive for a variety of reasons, but I completely conceed that a full argument for this is NOT given in this video. I also changed the title because, understandably, 99% of comments are focused on my argument about pinyin, either defending it or attacking it, which is all well and good - but really the majority of this video has nothing to do with Chinese characters or transliterations, but rather with 1. explaining what phonotactics are and 2. the interesting ways in which Chinese deals with homonyms. And honestly, those are the parts of the video I'd much rather have engagement on, because they are what I myself find interesting and where most of the effort for this video went.

Only to clarify, Japanese still very much needs all those characters as well because of the same reason. Using hiragana or katakana alone just isn’t enough to let you know if せんこう is a major of study 専攻 something with precedence 先行 a submarine travel 潜航 an incense stick 線香 or your dead dad 先考

This is EXACTLY what I’ve been trying to explain for so long. My friends ask me why can’t we just write in pinyin wǒ shì zhōngguórén can be read and we can understand it but when it comes to things like búyào lí can be read as don’t leave or no pears and often causes confusion if context is not given. 不要离 means don’t leave and 不要梨 means no pears. But overall you did an outstanding job in explaining the need of hanzi 🙏🙏🙏.

*for language nerds* I teach Mandarin, and my students are surprised when I explain how much faster it is to type in Chinese (thanks to built-in text prediction). If you're lazy enough, you can type just the initial sound of each syllable, and the software will help choose/predict the most likely character combination, for multiple words simultaneously. In this way, I can write out: "他们想吃香蕉" ("they would like to eat bananas" by just pressing T-M-X-C-X-J (6 strokes), Or "我也看过那个电影" ("I've also seen that movie [before]" with W-Y-K-G-N-G-D-Y (8 strokes). Honestly, it can be annoying when I have to type on a basic English keyboard again and can't write out a concept like "cultural differences" with 4 quick presses (文化差异，W-H-C-Y).

As a native Chinese speaker these combinations just come so naturally lol , but your explanation is really clear and interesting! I think one of the reason why spoken Chinese is understandable is that many formal expressions are not common in everyday conversation. For example, words like 晦明 or 晦冥 will hardly appear in spoken Chinese because they are too formal and poetic. But on the other hand we can understand these words when written because the characters that form them carry meaning, so when they are combined it's simple to see what they mean. (and I guess that's why in traditional Chinese (written) poetry there are so many ways to name one single thing, yet few of them actually are used in everyday speaking.)

in most of chinese history, the spoken language has been largely irrelevant due to having to manage a huge empire that will inevitably span across many language, dialect, cultural zones. the first emperor did NOT unify the spoken language but instead unified the WRITTEN language. since everybody already used logograms already so it worked. The PURPOSE of written language is to convey MEANING, not sound.

To everyone saying it is "unrealistic" to memorize thousands of characters, firstly, over a billion people are able to do it every day. Secondly, when you read english, do you sound out every single word letter by letter? No. In fact, sometimes people are able to read a word in english but are unable to spell it. Our minds are logographic by nature, we remember how the word "looks" instead of how the word is spelled.

I think “long time no see” might be a very literal translation of hao jiu bu jian that somehow became a popular phrase in English. But it’s unusually concise for English. On another note, Chinese pun jokes are on another level

The thing with Japanese too is that the ~120 "syllables" is really ~120 **mora**. And that is an important distinction to make too because if you take into account the fact that Japanese allows multi-mora long syllables, the true number of "syllables" is actually a lot higher. For example, syllables like "kan" and "tou" are 2 mora each, and aren't counted towards that 120 number. So Japanese does technically have several hundred possible syllables.

And that's why Vietnamese could switch to Latin alphabet and still works fine. Its more complicated phonology allows it a lot more syllables, enough to distinguish between most Chinese loan words as well as its native ones For a demonstration, here's the first few lines of that famous poem read aloud in Mandarin Chinese: 《施氏食獅史》"Shīshì shí shī shǐ" 石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。 (Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.) 氏時時適市視獅。 (Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.) 十時，適十獅適市。 (Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.) 是時，適施氏適市。 (Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.) Completely not understandable to a native Mandarin speaker. Every syllable is just "shi" with various tones. The same poem in a Vietnamese pronunciation would be: "Thi Thị thực sư sử" Thạch thất thi sĩ Thi Thị, thị sư, thệ thực thập sư. Thị thì thì thích thị thị sư. Thập thì, thích thập sư thích thị. Thị thì, thích Thi Thị thích thị. Still not understandable to a Vietnamese speaker, because Classical Chinese is a foreign language to us. But at least we have way more diverse syllables, and we can actually make out some words that are still used in modern Vietnamese, like (poet) or (stone cave).

DUDE! Your explanation of what you called the "complementary morphemes" explains SO MUCH. I've been studying and writing Japanese for years now, and I've always wondered why they do this thing where they pair up two similar meaning on-yomi (readings derived from Chinese). You can have a word like 上昇 "jōshō" which is literally just two different characters with the same nuance of "up/rising" or a word like 恐怖 "kyōfu" which is two characters with the similar nuance of "fear/scary." NOW I UNDERSTAND! I of course knew this must be influenced by Chinese, but I just didn't know why this pattern of two-character compounds came about. Your explanation is so illuminating, thank you! And I love how you stomp out the idea that Chinese should only use pinyin. I've had to deal with people saying the same shit for Japanese. The worst is when people think Japanese should be romanized, when they already have two native sets of phonetic syllabic symbols, but then to think they should get rid of Kanji (Chinese characters), is just so ignorant and asinine. You talk about those 1200 or so possible syllables in Chinese, well Japanese borrowed all those (or their ancient versions rather), and then stripped them of the tone distinctions, then reduced many of the consonant distinctions found in the original Chinese, so that the number of possible on-yomi in Japanese is MUCH lower, I would say. Long-short vowel distinction, and the "ku" or "tsu" endings might bolster the possible combinations to be somewhat comparable again, but the point is they have the same problem as Chinese, if not worse. I'm really not sure how modern Korean got away with eliminating Chinese characters. A video exploring that might be super interesting. Maybe they made a grave mistake.

The thing about "literay words" is so real. I have never seen "晦冥" and would never recognize it when I hear it, but I'll have no problem reading it. This technique is in fact a common literay device on the Chinese Internet these days, swapping out characters in a common word to mean the opposite thing. 治愈 "healing" -> 致郁 "depressing" is an early example and almost cliche today. 罗马贵族 literally "Roman aristocrat" -> 骡马跪族 roughly "toiling masses" is another I remember from a recent video.

3:35 The syllable "biang" does exist in mandarin, as a type of noodle with a famously elaborate character representation.

The word Mandarin is useful because it's not the same as standard Chinese. There are varieties of Mandarin that are non-standard. Basically, Mandarin is the one Han language that the whole country adopted.

As a Chinese I found this video helped me understand English better. When I was a little kid I can read Chinese books effortlessly with knowing only 2000 characters, but when I started to learn English, I found that I can read nothing with knowing only 2000 words.

That "complementary morpheme" mechanism is called 双音词羡余, or duplicate two-character word. Basically all the disambiguating mechanisms are just using two-character words which tend to be less ambiguous. Also, the pronunciation of yü should contain a glide onset, and be a bit more fronted. It should be /ɥy/, while you're doing /ʉ/.

Your video is truly remarkable and insightful. The phenomenon you have named “complementary morpheme” is actually called 同義互訓 in Chinese, which literally translates to “same meaning, mutually defines”. Phrases consisting of two characters often explain each other, and it helps us understand ancient Chinese texts. This terminology is rather advanced as most ordinary users of Chinese have never heard of it. It is only taught at a University level to students who major in studying ancient texts. Also, this phenomenon is much rarer in ancient texts, as phrases often only consist of 1 character. However, in modern Chinese, vocabulary items often consists of two characters(which explains why the subscript 子 is required after 桌) This is apparent in Mandarin(I prefer this name as it comes from the Man people) but in other dialects such as my mother tongue, Cantonese, it’s much less common, i.e. we would simply use 檯 to express “table”. The subscript 子 doesn’t appear anywhere in Cantonese. I recall this being a great research topic in Linguistics from my professor, leading to some profound understanding to the language itself. Discussion is much appreciated!

The fact that each sound in chinese have so many words associated is why most Chinese poems strictly follow 5/7 words per line, 4/8 lines, rhymes while still being able to tell a paragraph long story. All of the words are without conjunctions, or any of the supporting words that allows people to understand the word by voice, and many of them aren't commonly used at all. This becomes so complex that most people even Chinese won't be able to understand a poem if they didn't specialize in language. in their highschool studies

You are a linguistic gift to the world -- thank you so very much for your presentstions! Sincerely your student (Pand also a sociology Phd and a speaker of five languages and currently studying chineese but so very stumped as to why it is the way it is)

As a person who knows Chinese, this never really come to my mind Interesting insight. Should definitely talk about Cantonese where there are 9 tones