Quote Originally Posted by Marcus View Post
Even if it doesn't. English didn't need a spelling reform to become international. If the Chinese can learn characters then all the other can too.
Oh for Pete's sake. Marcus, as crazy as English spelling is, it is MUCH more phonetic than Chinese.

Of course, you can say that about many other languages, too (that their writing system is much more phonetic than Chinese) because the Chinese writing system is incredibly NON-phonetic.

I'm not an expert on Chinese, but as I understand it, a typical Chinese character does contain a "phonetic element," but the phonetic element only gives you very vague information, such as: "this word begins with a sibilant consonant sound" (s, sh, z, zh, etc.). But it doesn't tell you WHICH sibilant consonant (s, or sh, or zh...), nor does it tell you which vowel follows the consonant, nor does it tell you the tone-value of the vowel. To understand what I mean, just imagine that Russian used the glyph $ to represent ALL of the following syllables: са, ся, се, сё, со, си, сы, су, сю, за, зя, зе, зё, зо... ...жа, же, жо... ...ша, ше ... щи, щу! Thus, Шла Саша по шоссе и сосала сушку would be written as $ла $$ по $$ и $$ла $$ку.

There are certain advantages to this extremely non-phonetic written language -- a Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker can both read the same written character, even though they will pronounce the spoken word so differently that they can't understand each other.

But if you're a native speaker of English, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, etc., and you're trying to learn Mandarin as a spoken AND written language, it's a significant disadvantage that written Chinese offers very few clues about the spoken pronunciation.