I am currently learning the language labeled by English as Simplified Chinese (Chinese for the sake of brevity). I was hoping Chinese would not be as confusing as English, but I have been disappointed. The more I study Chinese, the more I realize how Chinese and English are poorly created languages, yet Chinese and English are extremely popular languages. Chinese and English are outdated languages, like the vast majority of languages out there. The fact that Chinese and English have been used by mankind for thousands of years proves that mankind is biologically inclined to think and communicate, but not very well. Despite all of mankind’s flaws, mankind has advanced so much since the beginning of history, especially with the popularization of science, yet mankind has barely upgraded its languages. I think the world needs a new language.
All of the world’s known languages can fall into two major categories: general languages and specific languages. General languages include, but are not limited to: English, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, Latin, Japanese, and Arabic. Specific languages include mathematics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer programming, and physics. These two major categories are guidelines, because chemistry and biology actually uses both specific and general languages. The specific languages work pretty well, despite their highly sophisticated design that only a few people have mastered. However, the general languages employ backward concepts, despite the relatively simple design that is far easier to master than the specific languages. Don’t believe me? Take an English class. Then take an advanced engineering class. See which class is easier for the vast majority of people. Notice which class creates a lot more goodies than the other class. I have greatly enjoyed reading Dicken’s “Great Expectations,” Sima Qian’s “Records of the Grand Historian,” and the amazing journals of Ibn Battuta or the spectacular diaries of Niccolò Da Conti, but they don’t bring me as much joy as computers, satellites, iPhones, Nintendo Wiis, vehicles, manufacturing tools, financial solutions, and medical services. It’s not even close. The point of the matter is that languages like Chinese and English are barbaric, or barely effective. If mankind has any sense of decency, it would soon create a brand-new international language.
Let me start with the crude Chinese language. The Chinese language has these fundamental designs. The idea or thing comes first, then follows the symbol or Chinese characters, and then comes the sound or pronunciation. This system allows countless ideas or things to be symbolized by countless Chinese characters with seemingly limitless sounds. Here’s my simple diagram:
1 idea or thing = an exact symbol or Chinese character = a specific sound.
These are only simplistic guidelines, which explains why the vast majority of Chinese characters have multiple definitions, and a few rare symbols have multiple pronunciations.
Here are the benefits of the Chinese language:
(1) Each Chinese character, when written, takes up as much 2-D space or the same square space as all other Chinese characters, thus the same written space can symbolize simple ideas and things, moderately complex thoughts and tools, and sophisticated concepts and gadgets.
(2) Each Chinese character is only spoke with one syllable, or a flowing mixture of two or three syllables.
(3) Chinese grammar is A LOT more simple than English grammar, but Chinese grammar is just as effective, if not more so.
(4) Chinese characters, Chinese radicals (parts of characters), and the special characters of Hanyu Zhuyin can represent ideas, things, and sounds. Chinese has the potential to be a highly adaptable language.
Then there are the devastating drawbacks of the Chinese language.
(1) You have to memorize each Chinese character with its exact definitions and pronunciation. Chinese characters are designed to be logical, such that similar looking characters have similar definitions, but the truth is that this is a very superficial statement. Chinese characters are vaguely logical, and have more to do with sheer memorization than rational. The people who invented Chinese must have been misanthropes, sadistic pranksters, and masochists. George Orwell once correctly hypothesized that if ideas can corrupt a language, then a language then corrupt ideas. Maybe the frustratingly perplexing Chinese language is greatly responsible for why China has a long history psychotic civil wars and barbaric internecine conflicts.
(2) Chinese characters are made up of smaller parts called radicals. Radicals are the building blocks of Chinese characters. There are 214 radicals, and many radicals have subtypes. Chinese characters can also be built of Hanyu pinyin characters. These radicals can be combined in countless ways to form innumerable characters, and multiple characters can be combined with each other. Compare this to English’s 26-letter alphabet. In other words, the fundamentals of Chinese are crazy.
(3) There is NO such thing as writing a Chinese character. It’s more like drawing a Chinese character. If you suck at drawing, then stay away from Chinese. Drawing a newly learned Chinese character could take A LOT more effort than writing a newly learned English word.
(4) Chinese characters, radicals, and Hanyu pinyin characters are pronounced with one to three syllables, and each pronunciation has a certain tone. Simplified Chinese has a net total of 5 tones: high pitch, rising pitch, dipping down and up pitch, abrupt and forceful tone, and a neutral tone. Other Chinese dialects can have a lot more than 5 tones. Good luck with learning how to speak Chinese, ‘cuz you’re gonna need it.
I am still a beginner (or “newb”) when it comes to Chinese, but already I see the huge shortcomings of the Chinese language. Don’t you hate buyer’s remorse? However, I have no choice but to learn Chinese, because I think it’s increasingly important to understand various ideas or communicate with many people.
The upside is that if you are dumb enough to believe in the Chinese language, you should be stupid enough to learn English (or other crappy languages like Spanish, Latin, Korea, or Hindu), or is it the other way around?
When I first came to America as a toddler, I struggled to learn English, and because I struggled to understand English, I struggled in many other classes. Physical education (PE) was an easy “A,” but even the fat kids and girly girls got “A’s” in PE, which just shows how lame PE really is. Physical education should be renamed National and Corporate Indoctrination Motions. It won’t teach much about physical health and effective techniques in various physical needs, but it does a great job of brainwashing kids to worship sports favored by the government and corporations. “Be like Mike!”
From kindergarten to elementary school, my teachers told me I was either an average student or a slow learner. It wasn’t that I had normal mental capacities for language. It was the fact that I was gullible. I actually believed that English was a phonetic language or based on the simple 26-characters of the alphabet.
During the fifth grade, something awoken in me. I began to barely realize how much bullshit the public education was, and the same goes with any “official” erudition or “authoritative” source. The more I realize how standard educational systems were full of crap, and how some teachers are more harmful than helpful, the better my grades became. By the end of the sixth grade, I became a special student. No, I was not one of those students who rode in the little buses with the elevators, but the student sent to advanced courses (advanced my ass). I barely put any effort in any of my classes’ homework from middle school to high school; I barely paid attention to my teachers; I hated going to school (boring!); and, yet, I got good grades in San Diego’s better schools.
Let me you my secret: see reality as it is. To avoid any trouble, pretend to pay attention to those blabbering pedants who think your mind can be summarized as an “A,” “B,” “C,” “D,” “F,” and everything in between. What a horrible grading system by a horrible education system.
I was a poor student, too. I didn’t have lots of toys, I didn’t wear cool clothes, I didn’t have tutors, I didn’t pay hundreds of dollars for ACT/SAT preparation courses or any other get-good-grades-quick cheating systems, I didn’t have any powerful connections, and I wasn’t born a genius. However, the more I saw reality as it is, despite whatever I was told by the authorities, the smarter I became. Real intelligence requires you to put lots of effort, thorough analysis, and resources into learning conflicting opinions of various degrees of objectivity and subjectivity, and then coming up with your opinion. Experience tells you that no matter how smart you think you are, you’ll still make errors. This is why my academic self was an idiot, even though my past self obtained good grades at school despite my youthful laziness and humble background.
So let me tell you how English is a language for idiots. I’ll begin with the basic idea behind English, then move to the few good features of English, and end with how English is for Neanderthals.
English’s fundamentals are different than Chinese’s. In English, the idea or thing comes first, then follows the sound or pronunciation, then comes the phonetic symbols or spelling. Here’s a recap:
Chinese: idea/thing —> symbol or Chinese character —> pronunciation
English: idea/thing —> combination of sounds or pronunciation of a word —> phonetic symbols or spelling of the word
You see how Chinese and English are backwards of one another? Besides the fact that they both suck, both Chinese and English have similarities. A Chinese character could possess multiple definitions, and each English sound or pronunciation could have multiple definitions. For example, define “Byzantine.” Chinese characters have be combined with each other to form new ideas and things, and English words can be combined with one another to create new ideas and things.
The good news about English is that each word is only made up of 26 letters or phonetic symbols, and each letter only has two variations: an uppercase form or capital letters, and a lowercase form. Each letter is very easy to write, and each letter requires minimal space to be written easily and clearly (compare this to the torturous drawing of Chinese characters).
Now comes the bad news about English, and there is A LOT. First off, English grammar is very complex, and based on illogical rules that must be memorized. Don’t believe me? Go find any college-level grammar book, and the “guide” book will be hundreds of pages long filled with rules requiring a little logic and lots memorization.
The English language has singular nouns, plural nouns, verbs and modified verbs, verb tenses, adjectives, and adverbs. Sometimes multiple words can be chained together like “artificial intelligence” or the “University of California, Los Angeles.” Notice how these chained words can be very long, thus English has initials or acronyms to shorten these chained words. “Artificial intelligence” becomes “AI” and the second example becomes “UCLA.” If you want a lot more acronyms, go to any engineering book or military guide. In other words, English words are often times too long to completely say and excessively lengthy to fully spell.
Thankfully, English is nowhere near as confusing or gaudy as Spanish, Latin, Russian, or Arabic. For example, Spanish has a lot more modified verbs and verb tenses than English, even though most of these variations are USELESS. Spanish even has male or female labels for ideas and nouns. The English word “table” has the Spanish equivalents, “meseta,” “catalogo,” and “mesa.” Notice how many Spanish words end in an “-a” or an “-o.” The ending means the word is either female or male. It’s pretty obvious a (regular) table does not possess a vagina or penis, yet the Spanish language gives sexuality to nonsexual ideas and things. This is nonsense.
You don’t need these variations, despite the crap coming from the language majors and language PhD’s. Unfortunately, you’ll have to learn all of these variations if you want a education degree, which allegedly proves you are not a moron.
I, me, myself
They are, they’re, their, there
Is, am, was, were have, has, had, has been, have been, had been, have had, is being, was being, been, has been having . . .
The joys of learning English! Not.
Then there is the BIG lie about English: English is a phonetic language, or English is based on an alphabet. Each letter in the alphabet has specific pronunciation. Just listen to the spoken word, and effortlessly spell it out. Just look at each written word, and logically pronounce it.
In reality, each letter possesses multiple pronunciations based on many memorized rules or barely logical patterns. There is a logic to this madness, but the logic is crude. Don’t believe me? Here is the caveman logic of English.
The English alphabet is so illogical, it is unable to accurately spell or it fails to phonetically represent most English words. For example, every major English dictionary uses two spellings: the regular spelling of the word, and a secondary spelling that reveals how to pronounce the word. The former spelling uses the standard English alphabet, but the latter spelling uses a modified English alphabet consisting of the standard alphabet mixed with an upside-down "e," bars over vowels, one or two dots over vowels, underlined consonants, commas or apostrophes before letters, an "n" and a "j" combined together, and parentheses to reveal optionally pronounced letters. What a disaster.
See below for examples of the regular spelling vs the secondary spelling or the pronunciation spelling. These spellings are based on Merriam-Webster’s dictionary and my opinion. For example, you write “psychology,” but, in reality, you say “ ‘sie-call-uh-gee.”
psychology \sie-‘call-uh-gee\
cantankerous \kan-'tanj-k(u)res\
phoenix \fee-niks\
sigh \sie\
mighty \mie-tee\
mouse \m-ow-s\
mousse \moo-s\
ineffective \i-ni-fek-tiv\ (notice how it is not "in-e-fek-tive\
aerobic \uh-roe-bik\
anaerobic \an-uh-roe-bik\
anachronism \uh-‘na-kru-,ni-zim\
anachronic \,a-na-‘krah-nik\
The above examples make up just one snowflake on top of an iceberg gashing a massive incision into the cruise ship known as the English language. Only by sheer luck does the English language survive, because it only travels upon shallow needs, and its passengers are willing to labor with rowboats or swim to make ends meet. See below for more insidious ice crystals.
Compare how these words have different spellings or similar spellings, yet they have similar sounds or different sounds: Maine, sane, rain, reign, rein, receive, reiterate, and Breit equation. The "ei" in "reign" and "rein" have the same "a" sound, but the "ei" in "receive” has an "e" sound. The “ei” in “reiterate” has two syllables (re-ih-tuh-rate), and the “ei” in “Breit” has an “ih” sound. See the idyllic beauty of the English language? I surely don’t.
Then check out these spellings of parts of words and complete words: I, aye, ay, ai, and eye (all "I" sounds despite the different spelling. Try this (focus on the letter "c" or "q"): a rack, cricket, medicinal, machine, chocolate, psychiatry, Iraq, quick, cue, and queue. You see how a letter possesses multiple pronunciations depending on which word the letter is a part of?
Compare the pronunciation of "c" in these words: cat, cricket, special, science, conscientious (“sci” and “ti” both share the “sh” sound), and psychology. The same goes with "shin," "-tion," "lion", and "ion." The only way you can accurately understand the English language is by using the dictionary’s secondary spelling, which has problems in itself. English is a quasi-phonetic language.
Now examine the pronunciation of this past tense spelling or suffix, "-ed." "Laughed" is pronounced "laft," but "buzzed" is pronounced "buzd," while "contacted" is pronounced "con-takt-id." The memorized pattern is "-ed" is said (as in “sed” not “sade” like "raid") as a "-t" for voiceless sounds, then "-ed" is spoken (not "is spoked" or "is spoke" or "is speak" or "is speaked") as a "-d" when matched with a voiced sound, and "-ed" is voiced as "-id" after "d" and "t." There is very little logic to this pattern, but lots of memorization.
The past tense gets even trickier: the past tense of sing is NOT "singed," but "sang" or "have/had sung," and the past tense of "seek" is NOT "seeked" but "sought."
Here is the various pronunciations of these plural suffixes: plural of bus is "bus + es" and "buses" is pronounced "bus-iz," plural of cat is "cat + s" and "cats" is pronounced as spelled or "cats" or "kats," and plural of car is "car + s" and "cars" is pronounced "karz" or "games" is pronounced "game-z." The memorized rule is that "-iz" applies to sibilants, but "-s" goes with unvoiced consonants, and "-z" matches with all other sounds. Think you have mastered English plurals by now? Think again.
Look at these plurals: plural of "woman" is "women," plural of "child" "children," plural of "zoea" is "zoeae," plural of "medium" is "media," bacterium and bacteria, virion or virus and viruses, etc.
Once again, notice how different spellings create the same sound, or the same spelling creates different sounds. In English, each idea is matched with a specific sound, and this combination has a specific spelling. Even if a sound can be spelled in various ways, the idea and sound must be written down with a certain spelling or the spelling is incorrect or meaningless. For example, compare the correct spelling with the incorrect spelling:
(1) Constitution vs. kon-sti-too-shin
(2) Cat vs. kat
(3) “A phonetic language is not as simple as claimed by its users” vs “A fuhnetic laingwij iz not az simpull az claymd bie its uzers.”
The sound is the same, but the spelling is not, and only one spelling is correct or meaningful.
Test out the pronunciation of "daughter.” It is not pronounced as “dah-ug-huh-tur,” but it is pronounced as “dah-tur.” When the letters are in this combination, they do NOT always follow the alphabet's standard pronunciation rules for each letter, but the letters do follow specialized rules based on very little logic and lots of sheer memorization. Compare the pronunciation of "daughter" vs "laughter" (suddenly an “f” sound appears) vs “slaughter” (suddenly the “f” sound disappears). Check out these words: cough, furlough, brought, and rough.
Want more examples? How about these (focus on the "c” and “h"): machine, arch, psychotic, church, archeology, archaic, ache, and nonchalant. Listen to how “c” and “h” can be pronounced in various ways depending on the exact word. This phonetic pattern, alphabet, or spelling system is illogical or quasi-phonetic. It’s based on the sheer memorization of highly inconsistent phonetics.
I could go on and on like this, but I don’t have time to do so. If you want lots of examples of the quasi-phonetic nature of the English language, then check out the vast majority of words in a good lexis. Notice how the each listed word has a standard spelling and a secondary spelling or pronunciation spelling.
There is no such thing as listening to an English word, and then spelling out the English word based on its pronunciation, or looking at an English word and working out the pronunciation based on its spelling. It does NOT work, because every word can be spelled in various ways, or the same spelling could result in multiple pronunciations. This is because the English alphabet, like all alphabets, is a broken phonetic language that is superficially based on logical phonetics and greatly depends on ad-hoc rules and secondary alphabets that must be memorized. Do understand my point? It’s stupid to use an alphabet that barely works. Today’s alphabet systems are made up of letters with multiple and redundant sounds, or they have an illogical spelling and pronunciation system.
So now what? Both Chinese and English are backward languages, despite the questionable merits claimed by their proponents. The alternatives are Spanish, Latin, Russian, Korean, Arabic, and so forth, but these languages are arguably more confusing than Chinese and English. These languages are all general languages (as oppose to specific languages), and they have been around for too long. I think the world needs to develop a new, single language for general purposes and for everyone to use. Here is my basic advice on creating a new, international language.
This new, international language should have a writing system that empowers people to effectively express themselves by using a combination of an alphabet and pictorial symbols that are accurate and logical with minimal ad-hoc rules or sheer memorization of the rules. The writing system should have the strengths of as many languages as possible, and none of their weaknesses.
The alphabet, pictorial symbols, and grammar must be as simple as possible without being simplistic. It should have rules that can be used by simple people, moderately intelligent people, and sophisticated people, sort of like math. It doesn't need to be anywhere near as specific as the math or other specific languages, but it needs to be able to express simple ideas to complex ideas. It needs to be easy to use, such as math's addition, subtraction, multiplication and division; but it needs to have intermediate forms such as math's algebra and calculus. It probably won’t require advanced subtypes such as math's advanced formulas or arcane equations.
The new, international language should be easily improved or modified, and the changes must be universally adopted by everyone as quickly as possible. This ensures everyone is able to easily and clearly communicate with each other.
The conceptual, written, and spoken aspects of the new, international language should follow all of the above goals.
Imagine a world where everyone effortlessly communicates with everyone else. Think of the unparalleled flow of information from all minds of the earth.
Some people claim math can replace all languages and become the new, international language for all functions, but I disagree. Math and other specific languages excel with detailed communications, but they are lousy with relatively vague or broad ideas. On the other hand, general languages like Chinese and English excel with relatively vague or broad ideas, but they fail to deliver extremely specific ideas. The world is better off with two types of languages: general languages and specific languages. They have complementary features.
The specific languages (i.e., math and chemistry) are already highly universal, and they are highly effective when it comes to dealing with detailed communications. Compared to math, chemistry and biology is lagging behind because chemistry and biology do not have standardized symbols for each element. Chemistry needs to adopt international spellings or symbols for each element, and biology needs international spellings and symbols for each part of the many fractal units of living organisms.
Maybe mankind would advance a lot faster if mankind developed and continuously refined a single specific language and a single general language.