Pangu wrote:hedwards wrote:I should have mentioned it in my previous post, but the literacy figures being what they are is probably the driving force behind the government's push to have pinyin included on signs. I saw that even in areas where foreigners rarely go.
China has a literacy rate of 92.2%, it's not the best but it's relatively high for a developing country.
I, too, have noticed Pinyin in signage while traveling in China. However, they are rare and tend to be older, maybe from a few decades ago when China's literacy rate was lower?
Nope, it's current. And the reason for it is that it's incredibly difficult to look up words if you're not already literate. And as Linguoboy says, even for native speakers and individuals who are literate it can be challenging to look up words.
The main reason being that you don't necessarily know which radical they're using to index the character and you have to know the character in order to know how many strokes the character has. McGraw Hill has the best dictionary I've seen for people that haven't mastered that. They break the strokes if they turn 90 degrees or sharply. Looking up a character then becomes an issue of looking up the top-left most stroke and looking for the character with the number of strokes you have.
Apart from using something like Plecco or asking somebody else, it's really the only sane method.
Pangu wrote:hedwards wrote:I assume that's partially because of the difficulty of looking up characters you don't know.
It would no more difficult than looking up any word you don't know in any language. It's even easier if you have a smartphone
With a smart phone it's possible to look up characters, but without one it's a catch 22. You have to be able to read in order to look up the characters. And even with a smartphone you're not necessarily guaranteed to find the entry if it's a stylized character. Which happens a lot in my experience.
One of the scariest things about China is that you can't just look up a character, you'll be walking around and see warning signs and hope that the sign doesn't convey information that you really need, because trying to figure out the meaning is a lost cause without being literate.