I find the comparison of J symbology and written Chinese interesting. I struggled for years learning Spanish, Latin and German in my early school years and I gained little useful fluency. In my last year of college, I studied Mandarin Chinese (since mostly forgotten).
I found spoken Mandarin a surprisingly easy language to learn (at a 6 year old level.) I found written Chinese much more challenging. Part of the course discussed the history of the language. Our teacher noted that classical written Chinese was a formal language of the elite, never intended for general use. He said that there had been a breakthrough in written Chinese that had happened during the leadership of Chairman Mao, where the symbols used were greatly simplified to allow a more universal access to the written language. On 1/29/2010 18:27, Dan Bron wrote: > DIETER ENSSLEN wrote: >> J is challenging in itself. > > I agree that J is challenging to learn. > >> All meaningless symbols. > > But I disagree here. The phrase "meaningless symbol" is an oxymoron: if a > symbol doesn't mean anything, it's not a symbol. And, > of course, all J's symbols mean something ([1]). > > The analogy we usually give is to Chinese. When I look at a Chinese > newspaper or sign, I certainly can divine no meaning. So yes, > to me, the symbols are meaningless. But over a billion people on this planet > live their whole lives using only Chinese, so > obviously it means something to them. And maybe that "something" is worth > the difficult challenge to learn Chinese (which is so > very different from English). Or maybe not. Depends on what your goals are. > > -Dan > > [1] http://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/vocabul.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
