Many of my friends and classmates who are English majors have expressed the same opinion that as English majors, they find their Chinese fly away from them before their mastery of English. Actually there are many reasons. One of the reason is that the use of the word system. In word system, we are supposed to type out every single character of Chinese using a letter system as medium. The direct consequence is we forget how to write Chinese characters, especially those difficult ones. As my handwriting gets worse and worse, even myself don’t want to see it anymore. And it’s easier for the younger generation to confuse those characters of the same pronunciation. Chinese Character is a combination of meaning and sound, though the sound has changed a lot during the time, but through the formation of a character, usually we can judge the meaning of it. However, in American where the word system is created, the meaning of a word has nothing to do with the order of the letters. Two words seldomly pronounce the same in English, but in Chinese, as many characters share the same sound, the only difference is their meaning and their position in context. The use of the word system leads to the emphasis of remembering the sound of a character, not the meaning (i.e. formation) of a character. If a pupil only remembers the pronunciation of a character, the probability for him to confuse the character with others rises for sure.
The consequence of using the word system has already been shown in Chinese society, especially in the language used on the internet. I wish we could find some remedy before much more damage done to the Chinese language.
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Actually, I don't have a problem with confusing characters with the same pronounciation too much anymore. Figuring things out from the context isn't hard. The real consequence of the word system is that it creates an imbalance in my Chinese knowledge. I am so used to remembers spelled words, as in English, that I can remember "Guniang" with no trouble at all, so I can say it when talking about a girl. I just can't remember "姑娘“,so I have to go look the characters up in order to write it. Therefore, my knowledge of spoken Chinese is much less than my knowledge of written Chinese.
The problem with getting rid of pinyin is that it is very difficult to figure out the pronounciations of characters without it. I would have to ask a Chinese person every time I saw a new character!
The hardest part is that most Chinese characters don't really look like much of anything to me. For example, recently, I have been trying to memorize 鸡蛋羹。I keep forgetting 羹, because it just looks like a little blob to me. Confusing it is not the issue. I won't ever mistakenly think that it should be “鸡蛋耕”, but I just won't be able to remember how to write it.
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