China: alphabet in china. was there or will there ever be an alphabet-based writing system.?

Question

life expectancy was only 40 in year 1949.

who got time to learn 4000 characters in a short liftime.

Answer 1

First off, you need to learn about understanding statistics.  Life expectancy is an average that gets driven down due to infant mortality rates.  People who survive childhood generally live to a ripe old age.  Secondly, have you learned all the half million plus words in the English language?  Do your homework next time.

Answer 2

there is one. it's called pinyin. that's how peking became beijing, etc. Ni hao = hello. shay shay= thank you.                           tengri

Answer 3

The main force behind pinyin was Zhou Youguang (born 1905, turning 103 in 2008 in good health).[3] [4] Zhou Youguang was working in a New York bank when he decided to return to China to help rebuild the country after the war. He became an economics professor in Shanghai. The government assigned him to help the development of a new romanisation system. The switch to language and writing largely saved him from the wrath of the Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong.

Answer 4

The Chinese language is written in characters as you realize. Even though it is complex, children by the age of 10 have mastered the character system.  There is an English alphabet system that was developed more than 50 years ago which uses English lettering based on Chinese sounds so as to enable people to type on a standard keyboard these letters and transpose them to Chinese characters.  Most Chinese are familiar with this system which is called "pin yin"

This character system originated as "pictograms" and over the 5000 years of existence has been greatly modified from the original pictures.  Nonetheless the Chinese are happy with the system and think that it should become the international language of the world.

Answer 5

You can not use a phonetic system in China!

There is Pinyin, plus a few other romanization systems.

The language is also very context based, if you speak out of context nobody will understand what you talk. The problem with Mandarin is, that it has very few sounds compare to other languages. Mandarin can express only 420 or so different syllables, add the tones then you are at about 1200 different syllables.

That means you have a very limited number of syllables to express a large number of words. Many same syllables there have a number of different meaning.

To give an example:  "s**+" has 78 meanings

shī has 16 meanings

shí has 16 meanings

shǐ has 7 meanings

shì has 39 meanings

To give a sample sentence:  Long time no see (a commen greeting for Chinese)

很久不见 = hěn jiǔ bù jiàn

hěn jiǔ bù jiàn - can also mean:  Good alcohol, don't spill!

很酒不溅 - phonetically the same, but completely different meaning.

@Lloyd

The Chinese character system is a writing system, not a language. Writing systems are just to put a language into written text. Chinese characters are very unsuitable for other languages. The Koreans gave it up, the Japanese had to modify it drastically.