Re: Why the Kindle and other e-book readers are doomed

Thomas Womack <twomack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <7b5j1lF21suliU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Greg Goss <gossg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Mike Ash <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

She's from China, I'm from the US. The two countries have basically
the same level of technology now, at least considering urban China,
just with Chinese people having a bit less of it due to having less
money.

I've been digging around on a "basic Chinese literacy" site for a
while. I have very limited ability to learn foreign languages, but
a lot of interest in it. For very many of the characters, the site
gives both the traditional and the modern character.

I tried the Web for a while, but this term I signed up for evening
classes in Chinese (two hours a week) and found I made much better
progress ... I'm not sure it's possible to learn the tones sensibly
without a Chinese person to talk to.

Back in 90 to 92, I was working with Cantonese immigrants. I took a
ten-lesson course from the local Chinatown's cultural center.
Apparently I'm not too bad with the tones. But I have an almost
complete inability to remember vocabulary. By the end of the course I
probably had a hundred words or more. By a decade later, I can
remember three.

Seventeen years later, I was in a college class with some cute Chinese
girls. But anything I could remember was Cantonese and they all spoke
Mandarin. Sigh.

Does everyone use the simplified modern characters, or are both
scripts used side-by-side?

It depends where you are. Taiwan and Hong Kong use the traditional
script, the PRC uses the simplified characters. I don't think it's
common to see them used side-by-side.

I asked my Chinese teacher whether people in the PRC might use
traditional characters in the way that people in England use Olde
Englishe fonts, but I don't think she understood the question.

Somewhere after asking the question, I was reading the wikipedia entry
on the various "generations" of characters available. On the entry
for the two-generations-back ("clerical") version, they said that
Due to its high legibility to modern readers, it is still used for
artistic flavor in a variety of functional applications such as
headlines, signboards and advertisements.

The Clerical / Chancery script dates well back into BCE, so it's
unlike "Olde English" in age. But then again, other than missing a
couple of letters, Latin looks a lot more like modern capitals than
the overdecorated script you refer to.
--
Tomorrow is today already.
Greg Goss, 1989-01-27
.

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