Belie (bluesylvia) wrote, @ 2009-04-27 16:44:00

Today in Linguistics we were going over different writing systems; and the first one that was touched upon was logographics and the teacher used Chinese as an example of it.
Her information was kind of... distorted, but since the one girl studying Chinese wasn't in class and I don't really know that much I let her have her say.
Then the questions began.

Boy: So... how do they, like, use computers? Or cellphones? I mean, our keyboards have all of our letters on it...
Girl: Yeah. Like, their keyboards would have to be huge
Me: Well, I know for Japanese you type the sound and then hit space and select the character you want, so Chinese probably has a similar method.
Teacher: Oh, okay, so there are Latin letters on the keyboards?
Me: Um, yeah, I think so?
Boy: Wow, that must take forever to type.
Girl: Why don't they just use the Latin alphabet instead? It'd be so much easier!
Another person: I think they just do it because it's tradition. It doesn't make sense otherwise.

Then, after class, a girl who was sitting behind me was talking to the person next to her.
"Asian languages are so hard. You have to learn so much and it's totally not necessary. I mean, I took Japanese for three years in high school and I still wasn't good at it. I mean, if it takes more than three years to be fluent in a language then what's the point?"

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