I Am Writing A Script And I Want My Main Character To Read A Poem In Latin With Eng. Subs. How Do I

Is Vietnamese harder to read since its shift to the Latin script from Chinese characters (chữ nôm 字)?

There is a similar question asked on zhihu: 越南文拉丁化后，有无影响越南人的实际交流？ - 文化 - 知乎Most people agree that the impact on communication is small but it dose cause a lot lose of culture that the language carries.A Chinese people lived in Vietnam gave some examples happened when she was learning Vietnamese in language school:1. Her teacher (Vietnamese) asked her about why “vong nam giao” in Vietnamese means “friends that have great gap in ages” because “vong” in Vietnamese usually means “die” like it is in “tử vong (die)”. After thinking a while she realize “vong nam giao” and “tử vong” corresponds to Chinese words “忘年交” and “死亡” respectively - 忘 and 亡has the same pronunciation (though of different tones), but different meanings: 忘 means “forget” and “亡” means “die” so “vong nam giao” actually has the literal meaning: “forget age relationship” or to say “a relationship that forgets (the difference of) ages”.2. A student (Vietnamese) who has the word “minh” in her name and she knows that means “bright” but she doesn't know why. The Chinese student then write down the corresponding Chinese character, 明， and explained: see the left part “日” is the sun, and the right part “月” is the moon, so of course it’s bright.3. A Vietnamese teacher can’t understand why after death people will go some place called “xxx minh” (the OP forgets the actual word but just knows there is a minh in it”) because the common sense is they will go a underground world where is not bright at all. He asked whether the OP can give a clue. It turns out that the sound minh maps to the Chinese sound “ming” which is the pinyin for 明 but also for 冥。冥’s original meaning is dark and has a extended meaning of “the nether world” (Pluto in Chinese is called 冥王/the king of the nether world).Most Chinese people believe it will be a disaster if the same thing happens to the Chinese language and we shall never allow it to happen.

Why Chinese remains the only language with a logographic script?

There was a time when Chinese characters were used throughout a wide area of east Asia. This includes mainland-China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, etc. That comes to something like 1.7 Billion people using some form of Chinese characters today.Granted, Vietnam and Korea have more or less retired the common use of Chinese characters.That’s a lot of people, and a written language that is still going strong.We could just as easily ask, “Why do people still bother to speak English when it’s a confusing amalgam of Latin, Greek, Germanic, and other languages with confusing and inconsistent rules?”Contrary to another answer, Chinese is highly efficient. Because there is so much meaning contained in each character, the Chinese version of an English novel is often about 1/3 the physical size. You need much less paper to convey the same meaning.In many cases a single character is a whole word. The majority of words are just two characters. Example: 電腦 which means computer (literally electric brain). The English word computer is 8 letters, and a space is required to separate English words (no spaces in Chinese), so that is 9 characters in English but just 2 in Chinese.So the argument would be that putting more information in less space is more efficient. Hence, Chinese is more efficient than English.I will grant you, Chinese is much harder to learn than a lot of languages. I’ve spent the last 15 years memorizing 3000 characters. So a few points off the efficiency score for that.The crazy part is, using Bopomofo (a certain kind of Chinese typing scheme), I can now type faster in Chinese than English. Scoring a few efficiency points back for that.Chinese people love their unique written language. Some will say they can “see” the story when they read Chinese (since characters are more or less pictographs or based on pictographs).Chinese calligraphy is an art form that goes back some 3000 years, and is very entrenched in the culture.No Chinese person will easily give up something so dear to their culture, language, identity, art, and history.

Do Mainland Chinese students still learn Traditional Mandarin?

I assume you mean do we still learn Traditional Chinese (TC) characters. In that case the answer is no, Traditional Chinese are not taught in schools.But here’s the thing, people of my generation born in the 90s actually learned TC by watching HK movies with TC subtitles and Japanese anime subtitled by Taiwanese.(a screenshot of Stephen Chow’s film with Traditional Chinese subtitles)(and Pokemon subtitled with Traditional Chinese by Taiwanese)The interesting thing, as I can recall, was that we thought those characters were just different forms of Chinese, without linking them to TC. It was until someday we realized that ‘Oh these are Traditional Chinese characters, but I can read them!’. Despite that, most of us are unable to write Traditional Chinese characters as the stroke orders require repeated practices, unless you have learned Chinese calligraphy which are exclusively written in Traditional Chinese.(a sample of Chinese calligraphy)However, with the decline of HK film industry and mainland Chinese’s taking over the translation of foreign movies, TV series and anime, the younger generation, especially those who were born after the new millennium, are not exposed so much to Traditional Chinese anymore.

Is using Chinese characters less efficient than using a Latin-based alphabet system (like pinyin)?

As Karen Ma has mentioned, the number of characters in current use is much lower than you thought. In your cited article, only 齉 is still in use. And naturally, complex characters tend to encode uncommon semantics, and are therefore rarely encountered.In addition, there are other factors that remove the need for a magnifying glass.Complex characters tend to look very different as a whole. When reading a newspaper, you don't have to look into the details of every character; recognizing them suffices. As shown below, these complex characters have very different structure/outline. Mostly, they are composed of familiar components; e.g. 攮囔馕齉 share the same phonetic component 囊 and their semantic components are easy to tell apart. Therefore, they are highly distinguishable, even though some stroke details may be lost when displayed with the normal font size.灞襻纛鬣攮囔馕戆爨齉 (10 characters with the most strokes out of the 6500 common characters designated by the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters)The context usually makes the complex characters predictable. As complex characters have very specific meanings, their context is relatively limited. For example, 鬣 almost always appears in the word 鬣狗 (hyena).To sum up, bearing in mind that reading means recognizing with context, you will understand that Chinese characters can be more efficient than pinyin.

Will Pinyin, Chinese written using the Latin alphabet, ever replace the traditional Chinese characters?

I strongly recommend you to read this poem (if you would like to call it a poem)named Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den, then you may understand why Chinese characters are not to be replaced by Pinyin.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/...Simplified Chinese《施氏食狮史》石室诗士施氏，嗜狮，誓食十狮。氏时时适市视狮。十时，适十狮适市。是时，适施氏适市。氏视是十狮，恃矢势，使是十狮逝世。氏拾是十狮尸，适石室。石室湿，氏使侍拭石室。石室拭，氏始试食是十狮。食时，始识是十狮尸，实十石狮尸。试释是事。Traditional Chinese《施氏食獅史》石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。氏時時適市視獅。十時，適十獅適市。是時，適施氏適市。氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。食時，始識是十獅屍，實十石獅屍。試釋是事。Translation« Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den »In a stone den was a poet with the family name Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.He often went to the market to look for lions.At ten o'clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.Try to explain this matter.Pinyin« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.Shì shì shì shì.Well, try your best to read it in Pinyin. :)