As a relatively well-educated Japanese native speaker, I too experience this problem when writing Japanese on paper - being unable to write many kanji characters by hand. I am no exception among Japanese native speakers. While the author seems to interpret this problem as something crucial, I question whether it truly is.
The orthography of Mandarin and Japanese includes an alphabet consisting of thousands of characters, the majority of which comprise dozens of strokes. Although East Asian people have higher IQ scores on average, we are not superhuman - our memory capacity is bound by human limits, and the decreased frequency of actually writing kanji on paper has naturally resulted in our forgetting how to write many of them. Is this surprising?
Furthermore, orthography is not part of language in a fundamental sense - it's merely a useful tool that accompanies a language. Therefore, I do not see the writing system becoming less stable as a significant issue. Consider Korea as an example: they used to use kanji in their orthography but have almost completely eliminated it with virtually no adverse effects. While laypeople often assume orthography is an integral part of a language, this is just not the case from the linguistic perspective.
If you consider that a lot of people using the Latin alphabet does use the cellphone autocomplete to check how to write a word used infrequently...
So I would say this text is biased by the "western" view of the writer, something that could be categorized as "Orientalism". A study about this phenomenon is valid, is important. But this post is not a good study.
But autocomplete even for basic words? My wife is Chinese. I'll never forget when she was helping her family write some formal letter in Chinese in Microsoft Word and she simply could not input the numbers 1, 2, and 3 in Chinese because she forgot how. And I know this may be apples and oranges because this is keyboard input versus writing on paper but as a programmer who can type at a moderate pace since I was a kid (~120wpm) this was perplexing for me! And similar to the article, she's an Ivy league grad. Similarly, when she's communicating with her family via WeChat half the time she simply sends audio messages instead of text messages. I'm pretty surprised this method is so popular instead of some voice-to-text google assistant type system.
I think there may be some confusion. The standard Chinese characters for 1, 2, and 3 (一, 二, 三) are among the simplest characters in Chinese: literally just one, two and three horizontal strokes. These would be extremely difficult to forget! What your wife was likely trying to write were the special variants (壹, 贰, 叁) that are used on checks, official documents, etc. These were specifically designed to be hard to alter or forge (think the difference between writing "100" versus "ONE HUNDRED" on a check). Even highly educated Chinese people might need to look these up since they are specialized characters not used in everyday writing.
That explains it. Yup these were some sort of official / govt documents. Thanks for the explanation!
Edit. I should have realized that. I just came back from China and my kids were watching a children's show with the following subtitles: "一二一二一二一二一二一二一二一二一二一二". Took me a while to realize the subtitles were not broken. The characters were marching chanting "one two one two..." :)
I think this is specifically more an IME (input method software) issue than a typing one. Japanese has similar "official" numbers (壱, 弐, 参, maybe some of the few cases where modern Japanese is more simplified than Simplified Chinese).
These numbers couldn't be easier to type. I just type 1, 2, 3 (i.e. the digit keys on top of my keyboard), hit the convert key and select the right character (I also get offered 三, ③, 3⃣,³ and several other options to choose from). That's it.
I tried the same with Google's IME and I couldn't use digits as input, like the Japanese IMEs let you do. I could find the character for 叁 quickly enough, but 壹 was only on the second or third page. Still, I suck at Chinese and I found it.
Now, writing these characters is an entirely different story. I think any character that's rarely written and appears only in one common word runs the risky of being forgotten, even if that word is quite simple and used on a day-to-day basis. A word like 喷嚏 (sneeze) in Chinese or 薔薇 (rose) in Japanese fit the bill.
The Japanese fallback, in case you forgot the character is quite simple: you'd just use either Katakana or Hiragana with different connotations[1]. I'm not quite sure what the fallback would be in Chinese, but I guess that would often be picking another character with a close or same pronunciation, as Chinese speakers often do on purpose as a sort of pun.
I also expect there are still fewer cases of "character amnesia" in China than Japan, since the fallback mechanism is simpler and more standardized in Japan, and children are taught far less Kanji in school than their counterparts in Mainland China, Hong Kong or Taiwan.
[1] While Hiragana gives a familiar connotation, writing the word as バラ in Katakana is "more official", if anything, since names of flora and fauna are conventionally written using Katakana in official contexts, especially when you want to use the exact scientific name. This is the equivalent of using Latin names in Western countries, e.g. Rosa hirtula would be サンショウバラ.
>The standard Chinese characters for 1, 2, and 3 (一, 二, 三) are among the simplest characters in Chinese: literally just one, two and three horizontal strokes.
Does that work for larger numbers, keep adding strokes?
I am not from Asia so I would trust more what our wife has to say than me.
But I would argue that it is common for people living in a country with different language from they native language to forget how to write or even say some simple words. There's a good active effort to learn a new language.
That's very much the impression I get. I've never seen pinyin used in Chinese writing, and the Chinese friends I've met have said they've never seen it either (they said they'd probably just look up the character or write a homonym instead, but even then it's pretty rare that it comes to that).
That's not to say it's never done, but it feels like an outlier. As if a friend found a word too hard to understand and drew a picture instead, and then the author wrote an article about how spelling is so difficult that it leads English speakers to draw words instead of writing them.
But the thing that struck me the most was just how confused people were when I asked them about it. It just didn't seem to be anything that was an actual issue for them.
> "This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence between sound and spelling. One might forget whether "abracadabra" is hyphenated or not, or get the last few letters wrong on "rhinoceros", but even the poorest of spellers can make a reasonable stab at almost anything. By contrast, often even the most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their hands and ask someone else in the room how to write some particularly elusive character."
Not at all - forgetting kanji just isn't similar to forgetting how to spell English words, as I think TFA made fairly clear. It's the simplest analogy to make, but it's not near enough to draw conclusions from.
The analogy I've used in the past is, you read kanji with your mind but you write them with your hand, so being unable to remember a kanji is more akin to forgetting a guitar chord or a keyboard shortcut - if your hands stop making the motions, you'll eventually forget them.
Yeah - the other analogy I've used is that everyone can recognize a Starbucks logo, but even if you went to the trouble of learning to accurately draw one, you'd forget if you didn't practice.
I'm studying Japanese at the moment and what struck me is how important context is, particularly in reading. You need to know where to read 1-3 letters ahead to read a word and interpret it. That's not really a thing in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way.
I think digital is a big crutch for Japanese/Chinese because you have input methods that help you write what you want to say, so you don't actually need to remember how to write kanji as much in daily life.
> You need to know where to read 1-3 letters ahead to read a word and interpret it. That's not really a thing in English
It happens in a English too, where you see a chunk of letters and mis-predict which word they represent in a way which affects its meaning [0], and sometimes that will also affect pronunciation. [1]
An example from the link:
> "The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families."
A reader linearly scanning along doesn't know whether "complex" is an adjective or a noun, and then whether "houses" is a noun or a verb. I'm pretty sure all human languages have similar problems where a certain amount of look-ahead or backtracking is necessary.
For another example to highlight pronunciation changes, consider the ambiguity of:
"I saw the rhino live in the zoo."
That could mean that the rhino was doing the verb of living, in which it rhymes with "give", or it could also mean that the speaker was seeing it in-person, in which case it rhymes with "drive".
Both rely on intonation (in addition to volume and pauses) for disambiguation, but the fun trick is that in the Chinese version the intonation is an integral part of the lexeme (i.e. it distinguishes between "words").
But I have to say, these kind of sentences (and full-fledged poems) are quite a different beast from simple cases of garden path sentences or syntactic ambiguity[1]. The poem lion-eating poet and the "buffalo buffalo buffalo..." sentence are both highly contrived and unlikely to be understood correctly on the first few goes even with the perfect prosody. They are cool "language hacks", but they do not occur in daily language and I personally believe (although I guess die-hard generative linguists would disagree) that they don't teach us very much about the language itself (except for what are the cool artistic possibilities it opens).
When this happens in English, teachers will label this as "bad English" and ask you to rewrite. That's how the formal language deals with this problem.
If anything, isn't that an informal solution? It relies on other people to complain that they dislike the sentence, without being able to point to any hard-and-fast rule.
Yes, this happens in English too, but to find examples like this you have to go to Wikipedia, or wrack your brain and see if you remember one. In Japanese, almost every other word is like this.
As is usual for Japanese, this sentence contains a mix of Chinese(-origin) ("kanji", e.g. 袋 小 路 文 法 的) as well as Japanese phonetic ("kana", e.g. ふくろこうじぶん) characters. Usually, when in a multi-kanji word, kanji are pronounced with (a time-changed version of) Chinese pronunciation. For example, 文法 is "bun-pou", not "fumi-nori" or something else. However, the first character of the article title (fukurokoubunji), 袋, is "fukuro" here despite being in a four-kanji word. Further, 小 is "kou" here, which is nonstandard enough that its dictionary entry does not even list it as a possible pronunciation! [1] Then 路文 are both in Chinese pronunciation (ji-bun), but this does not necessarily make sense because the word is not split in two down the middle, but instead as 袋-小路-文 (bag-lane-sentence, where bag-lane is English cul-de-sac / blind alley). [2]
Now fukurokoubunji is a bit of a specialised word, so it might not be a great example. But in the rest of the sentence, we find 文, which is always pronounced "bun" (sentence) here, even when appearing separately, but could also (though more rarely) have been "fumi" (letter) — nothing but semantical context helps distinguish. Then we have 正しい "tada-shi-i", where 正 could have been "sei" as in 正確 "sei-kaku" (accurate) or "shou" as in 正直 "shou-jiki" (honest), but it isn't just because しい come after. Similarly, 生 in 生じやすい is "shou"(-ji-ya-su-i), which is conjugated from the base form 生じる "shou-ji-ru" and could have been "u" (生まれる "u-ma-re-ru") or "sei" (先生 "sen-sei") or "i" (生きる "i-ki-ru") or more (生 is somewhat infamous for having many readings). And I could go on: 書 could be "syo" (文書 "bun-syo") but is "ka" (書き出して "ka-ki-da-shi-te" conjugated from 書く "ka-ku").
This is a bit like the comments elsewhere here noting that the Chinese word for "sneeze" is a bad example because it happens to have so uncommon characters in it — and then people point to examples like "onomatopoeia" and "diarrhoea" as similar tricky examples in English. I can't comment on Chinese, but existence does not necessarily say much about frequency.
[2]: This analysis of 袋小路文 is not completely etymologically honest. By the etymology ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B0%8F%E8%B7%AF#Etymology_... ), we see that the "kouji" pronunciation of 小路 is really a corruption of ancient "ko-michi", which is a consistent Japanese-Japanese reading of the two characters. However, because "ji" is also an (uncommon) Chinese reading of 路, if you don't know the etymology of the word, the re-analysis is appropriate in the context of how hard it is to read the written language.
> However, because "ji" is also an (uncommon) Chinese reading of 路,
It's not a Chinese reading at all (as you can tell because it's ... wildly out of place with the the actual Chinese-derived readings ろ・る, onyomi are supposed to have semi-regular correspondences with each other and with Chinese Chinese readings). It's really just rendaku of ち, the basic root of fossilized compound みち (with still-salient prefix "honorific" み).
But most importantly, you never really see either 袋 or 小路 and expect them to have any other readings; maybe you'd expect しょうろ if you don't know the latter, but unless you're already literate in a Chinese or are blindly memorizing kanji tables, the other reading of 袋 (たい) probably isn't even salient, because it's one of those kanji that almost always takes its kunyomi even in compounds.
Side note, the line about u-onbin kind of buries the implication that this is a loanword from western Japanese, which is the culprit of several quasi-systematic but unevenly distributed divergences from regular sound changes.
Maybe because I've seen a similar example used before, but I immediately read it correctly the first time. Honestly these sort of 'problems' only ever seem to occur when specifically created to demonstrate this problem and almost never happen in regular writing.
And yet, given the definition and language of origin, most high-level spelling bee participants can make a pretty good guess at spelling a word they may have never seen before.
English is phonetic, it just borrows its pronunciation rules from many differing (and sometimes directly opposed) other languages.
Very true - and every demonstration of “English is hard to spell/pronounce” focuses directly on the exceptions which exaggerates the problem. One analysis I’ve seen puts it that with a single set of rules, 59% of a sample corpus of 5000 English words can be pronounced perfectly from the spelling (of course, there will be regional accent and dialect differences so that percentage will be a bit different for each one) and up to 85% can be pretty close with only slight errors.
Then there’s a percentage where they’re just direct borrowings from other languages and you need to have an idea of how that language pronounces words (especially French), so really only 10-15% or so of English words end up being true exceptions.
Fruit flies like a banana. English has its own ambiguity, so it isn’t really that different.
I can only write Chinese via an IME these days. For one, I’m left handed so writing characters was always a struggle since stroke order worked against me, but it’s mostly how I only use Chinese anyways.
I told my wife our kid should learn to write via an IME as well and she was just horrified about that, though. None of the teaching material really supports it.
I've been (very) casually learning Japanese for a couple years, and almost every time I think I find something "weird" that Japanese does, I almost immediately think of a very similar example in English.
The alphabet is a pretty awesome invention (alphabet > kana-style syllabary > kanji-style logography) but English writing is at least as complex as JP writing, just in different dimensions.
JP's phonetics, for example, are dead simple compared to English's, but they do a good job making up for it by having a few thousand Kanji.
I'm not a native English speaker, so I don't really know why, or if, there's a problem for native English speakers to learn or "get" pitch accent. For speakers of many other European languages Japanese pitch accent is not tricky. You listen, and then you speak. Just as you would listen to English, and repeat it the same way.
Japanese, despite being extremely logical and so beautiful in so many ways, is still hard to learn for me, and of course learning the writing system is not done in the blink of an eye (unlike the Latin-based writing system we use), but pitch accent isn't really the problem here.
Is that any more complicated than English stress, though? And regardless, Japanese has a very small number of phonemes (compared to English) and extremely restricted phonotactics.
Yeah, but I don't expect this to be substantively harder than learning most regional accents (could be wrong), and afaik it's also not critical for legibility.
In English you have to know a word in order to pronounce it.
The “ou” diphthong in “hound” and “double” or “would” is pronounced differently. Or “ieu” in “lieutenant” vs “lieu”.
Or “oo” in “poor” vs “root”
Or “berry” in “berry” vs “strawberry”
I could go on forever. There’s no other western language I know of that behaves like that.
English is a quasi-phonetic language in that most words can be mostly pronounced how they're written, but in some cases it inherits the pronunciation of the language the word came from. I'd imagine many English speakers would consider this an undesirable quirk, though.
Indeed, there has been a tendency over the centuries, particularly in the US, to move towards writing words how they sound or pronouncing words how they're written. Lieutenant is an interesting example, since in the UK we pronounce that "lef-tenant" traditionally, but the US moved to the (IMO superior) "lieu-tenant". Nowadays, most young people would probably use the US pronunciation.
I do take some slight umbrage with the implication that some people seem to be making in this thread that language features can't be criticised or that one language can't be better than another. I'm don't see why this would necessarily be true. Even with spoken languages. There are a ton of annoying aspects to English that simply aren't issues in other languages, and I think it's fair to criticise other languages for their failings too. This is especially true of writing systems, which are human inventions rather than something we learn intuitively.
Logographic/logo-syllabic orthographies are harder to learn and remain proficient at than alphabets/abjads, for native speakers and second language learners alike. Alphabets are an innovation that improved on ancient orthographies and enabled a wider range of people to be able to communicate as easily by writing as they do by speaking. Besides the issue mentioned in the article, the writing systems in China/Japan are associated with other issues we rarely see here. Even dictionaries are a non-obvious challenge with logographic languages, which has resulted in several competing ways to sort words.
I don't think one can reasonably claim that in English "words are mostly pronounced how they're written". I mean, "i" can stand for /i/, /ɪ/, or /aɪ/, for example (and also for /ə/ if you don't count "ir" as a distinct grapheme). Although vowels at least (mostly) follow some predictable patterns based on syllables - but e.g. it's impossible to say whether "ch" stands for /k/, /tʃ/, /ʃ/, or /x/ without knowing the etymology of the word.
French can be pretty bad. Not as bad as English for reading, but it's much worse for writing because there are so many spelling options for the same thing.
Posted up above, here's a collection of English pronunciation rules that English speakers have internalized so well they can't generally explain them: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
"Ghoti" is mentioned a few times there, but basically "fish" is a nonsensical pronunciation that breaks several rules. There's a reason (well, a few reasons) why if you ask English speakers how to pronounce "ghoti" and they've never seen it before, they'll probably all guess some variation of "go-tee" or "go-tie".
That's such a dumb example because it claims to follow english rules for those letters while ignoring the actual rules. It makes a somewhat humorous joke, but people pretending that it means anything linguistically are either ignorant or intentionally trying to confuse people.
Not so much in terms of meaning but in terms of pronunciation, sometimes you also need to read ahead in English to know how a certain word is pronounced. For example:
"I read a book yesterday."
and
"I read a book every night."
Depending on the context that follows, "read" is pronounced differently. The same thing happens for "present" and "record". Admittedly, these are exceptions to the rule.
People love to complain about how much work other people can do in order to slightly convenience themselves. And the media loves to run air their complaints, because they are snappy, and photogenic, and easy to pitch as "feel good stories about how much I care for the old ways unlike those lazy sloppy people over there"... even if "I" also find myself forgetting how to write kanji.
It doesn't matter. It won't be a top-down decision. It'll just be a long, slow progression of people slowly realizing that writing in kanji for this character is annoying, so maybe I'll just write it phonetically, and then that character, and then there will be a year or two where there's a phase change and suddenly it's everywhere, even though nobody decided.
And people will complain and whine and moan about the "beauty" of the kanji disappearing. And even though they have a point, it won't matter because the kanji will still be there as much as they ever were, and all one has to do is go study them... but they won't. Because complaining about how other people should keep doing something hard is easy, but actually doing the hard thing yourself is hard, and the vast, vast majority of the complainers won't actually do anything about it other than complain, but take the easier options themselves, just maybe a year or two later than others.
I have no beef with the people taking the easier option. Life is full of things to spend effort on and we can't give maximum effort to all of them. I am annoyed at people who complain about how other people can do vast, vast quantities of work so they can briefly feel slightly better about themselves in some way.
You'd be surprised how much staying power these things have. The nation and its language are two concepts inherently intertwined. Take the case of Welsh in Wales. It was an almost dead language that no one spoke, but as soon as the Welsh got the ability to self-govern, they enacted laws to mandate all documents and road signs were available in Welsh, required it to be taught in schools, etc. It's very difficult to kill a language in a democratic state because it's a very bad look to oppose laws that "protect the nation's culture". The people who want these things are endlessly pandered to as a result.
Welsh is generally highlighted as the example of a successful language revitalism movement, but it's also one of the rare examples of such movements succeeding. By contrast, you can look at Irish--where the need for the language that wasn't English was seen as absolutely essential as part of the (successful) revolution and independence movement--and see that the language revitalism there is more or less a failure. A century after independence, the number of L1 speakers of Irish has gone down, and I believe the Irish government still conducts most of its business using English (despite English officially being the lesser of the official languages) since so few members of government are sufficiently proficient in Irish.
I've studied kanji to some degree. I'm not a "master", but I am aware of the way it resolves a lot of ambiguities in Japanese.
But that does not on its own mean that Japanese couldn't evolve out of Kanji. It is not the case that if Kanji goes away, the entire rest of the language MUST stay static. It in fact would not. It would begin a multi-decade process of adjustment to the new issues.
It has happened before in other contexts, and it will happen again. There's a lot of signs that Chinese is on the verge of such a change (on a decadal time scale), which carries somewhat different baggage, but roughly the same amount of it.
What really throws the wrench into the whole thing is computers, and I don't just mean that it will simply speed up or slow down such a change, but that it could send all of this flying out in an entirely new direction. If we're all wearing augmented reality goggles full time in 20 years, what will happen to ideograms if every ideogram you see comes with floating pronunciation guides, and your googles can also translate phonetic spellings transparently in real time back into kanji/ideograms? Could languages like English start growing something like ideograms, presumably descended from modern-day emoji, if computers erase the disadvantages of emoji that cause languages to largely go alphabetic thousands of years ago?
What I absolutely do know is this: In 50 years, no language will be the same as it is today. Guessing what the changes will be, especially in a rapidly evolving novel landscape, is really hard. I don't think kanji/ideograms being seriously diminished is off the table.
Sure, and there were complaints in Korea, too. Lest we forget, Hangul was developed in 15th century, and was promptly condemned by the educated elites while being enthusiastically adopted by the underclasses. But the elite pushback, going as far as outright bans in some periods, meant that it wouldn't become the standard orthography until 1900s.
I don't think anyone today would seriously argue that Hanja is preferable, though. In retrospect, it's clear that the benefits of easily accessible universal literacy are too substantial to ignore for the sake of tradition.
> I don't think anyone today would seriously argue that Hanja is preferable
It's necessary to use Hanja today in educated contexts because Hangul has too many homophones, and most educated (technical, literary, scientific) vocabulary has a Sinitic origin and therefore are more homophonic than typical Korean words.
Sure, and lawyers in English-speaking countries similarly use Latin and Old French jargon to reduce ambiguity. But this is a fairly narrow use case that is really more of a specialized notation - it's not used day-to-day even by people who regularly use Hanja professionally.
AFAIK (maybe someone can correct or confirm) it is essential for studying law in Korea. To avoid ambiguity with identically sounding words, Chinese characters are used in law.
This is the reason Chinese characters are not going away. It is essential to comprehending written documents, because the Chinese language (and similars) have too many sounds that are the same or very similar for different words. So, if they abolish the characters and use something purely phonetic they'll have to reinvent the whole language to be understandable, especially for anything that is not colloquial.
It seems there's room for "legal innovation" there, by providing definitions early on in various texts to disambiguate, and then sticking to them throughout the text!?
I assume it's already done anyway for some terms. Why isn't this more widespread?
Before calling it racist we could ask him for a reference. After all, it might be a truthful fact.
But yes, it stood out to me too, and I'm confused how you're the only person commenting on it.
I wonder if these people justify having a shitty writing mechanism by being smart. "It's so needlessly complex, but we're smart so we can afford it" when in reality if you're smart you want it as simple as possible.
And then he comes on HN and rationalizes the fact that he can't spell. Ironic.
IQ has been disproved as not an accurate evaluation of intelligence even for problem solving, so asking for a scientific reference for this is like asking a scientific reference for how a certain locally dominant ethnicity have better chakras than another one. they don't, it's just racist.
I found the "we are not superhuman" bit annoying and condescending - replacing with different groups:
"While men are stronger than women on average, we are not superhuman" <- To me, this doesn't seem condescending. Not 100% sure why - perhaps because the difference in the trait (between men and women) is much larger?
"While left-leaning people are smarter than right-leaning on average, we're not superhuman" <- This definitely does seem condescending - perhaps because the skill in question is intelligence, and the statement reads as "You're stupider than me, but please strain your brain to understand".
"While rich people have higher IQ scores on average, we're not superhuman" <- I find this a bit less condescending than the previous one, not sure why. But still annoying for the same reason as previous.
"While whites are stronger than east asians on average, we're not superhuman" <- Again condescending and annoying, but I still think the intelligence statements are more grating.
My conclusion - the statement is irritating because it carries with it an implication people would be surprised Asian people can forget things too.
Additionally, it gives the intention that because other groups are stupider, it needs spelling out in simple terms that they're not godly intellects.
Maybe it's less of a factor since the standardization of mandarin, but the difference between kanji and an alphabet like Korean and Vietnamese has moved to is that writing with the alphabet leaves an artifact that is only understood by speakers of the same language, whereas kanji can have the same meaning but different spoken words entirely, such that cultures can communicate through written edicts without totally erasing linguistic differences through standardization. So you're right that the individual language/culture doesn't suffer from alphabetization or pinyinification, but I would submit there is change on the level of multicultural interactions, decreasing the mutual intelligibility between cultures for better or worse
Maybe parent was referring to the studies by Lynn, a self-declared "scientific racist".
I think that despite lower IQ scores on average South Korea has been consistently beating Japan in go in the recent years, and more importantly they get rid of hanja (Korean version of kanji) from their writing system.
a) Bad science.
b) Unsupported claim.
c) Who cares, and why?
As an Ashkenazi Jew with an IQ 3 SD above the mean myself, I focus my attention on that question and have a good grasp of the answer. I also have particular insight into why some Jews have high scores, and how the people who care so much about the average IQs of various populations draw all the wrong conclusions from them because of their ideology. (I would also note that many of those who care so much have lower IQs than a very large fraction of the populations they disparage.)
My wife is college educated and native Korean, so these are just my observations of her and her friend group's engagement with Chinese characters (Hanja).
Hanja, in daily life, has largely disappeared from colloquial Korean for those under 40 or so. It's still preserved in some formal settings like medicine and law, and is used to appeal to older generations. I've been with my wife long enough to remember when Hanja was still very common to see on newspapers.
There are some small vestigial problem with eliminating from daily life, the large number of monosyllabic Chinese-origin loan words in modern Korean can sometime create ambiguity when written in Hangul. Native Korean speakers will sometimes disambiguate these words by referring to the Hanja, but that's largely disappearing as a habit as well.
Younger Korean generations still learn it in K-12, but it's mostly wasted class time in an already overly crammed education. The kids who focus on it are really geared towards becoming lawyers, and certain kinds of doctors (mostly traditional medicine). STEM focused kids will focus on English instead. As a result there's an active linguistic process occurring where English loan words are slowly replacing Chinese-origin words and concepts in active and modern Korean.
I don't too much about Japanese, but I do have a sense from native speakers that writing the same words in the four major writing systems offers some sense of nuance to how close a reader might be to a concept, or how they might consider it in various ways. From visits there, I did notice the expectation that native speakers could seamlessly read and jump between the systems, often within the same sentence. But I also understand that the pronunciation of Kanji is somewhat nonstandard, and it's not immediately clear how to say something written purely in Kanji (sometimes this is supported by providing explanatory superscripts in another system next to the Kanji). Why persist with this? I suppose it's the nuance that's being conveyed, and this nuance is still prized among native Japanese speakers.
I do get the sense that China has no particular plans on moving away from the system, as it's a unifying source of national identity (and has been for centuries). And they really have very few other options. The main problem is that China is a highly linguistically diverse country, and Chinese offers the ability to transmit ideas instead of sounds which allows speakers of non-mutually-intelligible "dialects" to communicate. Moving to a Latinate system or even to Zhuyin Fuhao (Bopomofo) encodes sounds, not ideas, and risks fracturing the state. It would only become possible if there was a concerted effort, maybe over a couple generations, to Mandarinize and discourage the use of local dialects, but that would also be highly disruptive. Koreans, Japanese (and other adjacent non-Sino languages like Vietnamese, etc.) escaped this either through a higher level of linguistic uniformity, or strong efforts to standardize or teach a national dialect that the writing system (Hangul, Chữ Quốc ngữ, Hiragana, etc.) could amplify.
At one point, apparently it was fashionable amongst teens to type characters by using pinyin and always selecting the first character in the list of options, regardless of the intended actual character. That was essentially phonetic writing, but as a result, texts were incomprehensible to parents (the desired outcome).
It's the same logic as writing a sentence like this:
Y U gna be late
It's grammatically completely incorrect. But you can still understand it.
When it comes to chinese/japanese characters, many have the same phonetic reading. So you can do something similar, while selecting the wrong characters.
I think it's just easier for beginners (or teenagers) to go from phonetic to meaning. I guess advanced Chinese readers don't even read the words out loud in their head and go directly to meaning. I'm beginner/intermediate at Chinese and surprisingly, I noticed that my pinyin often seems better than many Chinese natives.
The real answer to your question: the most commonly used Chinese input method allows you to type the first pinyin letters only, and the algorithm will figure out the most likely Chinese characters you want.
It's not "the parents" can't read it. It's that people who don't use electronics have a harder time reading it.
Read the nonsense text aloud and then listen. Presumably with practice, you don't actually to actually speak aloud, and your 'inner monologue' voice is sufficient.
Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. It's like an intermediate language (IL) of mind. Many studentds in China can understand a subject but had the pronouciation completely wrong. In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were.
Chinese characters also had the benifits of photographic memory, presumably you are trained with the right method. The key is to detach the "listening/speaking" phonetics from the characters, wire your brain directly to visual ideograms along with reading/writing. Plus the grammar don't have conjugation nor declension, without the tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness and shit, which makes the scripts very fast to parse. I'd argue reading a paragraph of text is extremely fast in Chinese. You can grasp the general meaning from a large chunk of text without sequencially reading every word. It's like one of these novel apps that hightlight important vowel from English sentences for fast reading but still, you have to go to the translation layers of recall - sound - meaning process.
Sadly this art is lost because ideograms are fading in favor of PinYin in cyber world. The rise of shot-vids make literacy an expensive skill.
> In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were.
This is, in fact, the default stance held by most non-CCP linguists. If you read what experts in the Chinese language family say, it's basically "Chinese languages are mutually unintelligible and more distinct than the Romance languages, but because the government of China says they're just dialects and we (as linguists) recognize that the line between dialect and language is basically arbitrary, we'll call them dialects so we can just study the languages and avoid getting sucked into nasty political discussions."
As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy—and this works both to define distinct languages that are otherwise mutually intelligible and to merge dialects that aren't.
> In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were.
This is the correct understanding, even within mainland China, and across all times. The practice of assigning a "mandarin" based on where the capital is/was dates back at least hundreds of years, if not thousands. You can easily Google "Mandarin in Republic of China" to see the Republic of China's attempt to standardize its mandarin. It's really not a CCP issue.
Linguists often use terms like "isolect" these days just to dodge this whole debate and the associated (often very toxic) politics. Not just with Chinese - it's also an issue around e.g. Serbo-Croatian.
I think it's also an issue of translation. "Dialect" in English is variety of a language. 方言 (fangyang, translated as dialect) in Chinese is a regional language or speech. Linguistically, Cantonese and other varieties of Chinese are recognised to be part of the Chinese language group / family.
I'm sure there are plenty of scholarly academics with a whole body of literature to argue otherwise, but I've never bought all the arguments of how different Cantonese and Mandarin are.
To my mind assimilating Cantonese from Mandarin or vice versa is way easier than French <> Italian or Italian <> Spanish. Spanish <> Portuguese is an interesting contender.
Good luck pretending Mandarin and Cantonese are distinct languages while comparing German and French lol.
I say this as someone with a whole lot of Cantonese dna in my heritage before people get all up in arms. I've personally always figured the barriers to learning both Mandarin and Cantonese was cultural and there are plenty of people in Guangzhou who are perfectly bilingual
I currently speak and understand English, Spanish, Cantonese and Mandarin to varying degrees.
I was forced to take French for 2 years in high school. Never even took it seriously. But because of that, after 6 weeks of private Spanish tutoring, I was able to hold hour+ long conversations with strangers while backpacking LatAm.
I've spoken Cantonese my entire life (but not truly native level). I took an entire year of college level accelerated "Mandarin for Other Chinese Language Speakers". I took it quite seriously. I'm backpacking China right now. I still can't even talk to anyone for more than a couple minutes without having to use a translator or look up words.
> there are plenty of people in Guangzhou who are perfectly bilingual
There are also plenty who move to Guangzhou and Shenzhen and can't pick up Cantonese at all. Turns out having an authoritarian government force Mandarin on you will make the Cantonese speakers bilingual rather quickly.
> Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet.
Yes, they are. Modern Hanzi are a very bad phonetic alphabet.
While a minority of characters are indeed pure logograms (小，大，田，etc.), most modern Chinese words are two-syllabic. And syllables often don't have meaningful connection to the meaning of the word: 东西 （"east-west" literally, but means "a thing, object"), some characters have lost _any_ semantic meaning in most words (“子”), and many more characters can only be used as a part of another word ("bound forms", e.g. "据").
Classical Chinese was more logographic and less phonetic, but modern Chinese is not really close to it anymore.
alphabets, universally have one common property: they are sortable.
I challenge you to sort Chinese characters.
This is an idea from James Gleick's The Information. The Chinese may never be able to invent morse code alone, because encoding Chinese scripts is extremely hard, even today (think of all those massive code-points in CJK Unicode, with dups and errors)
Chinese text on the Internet may have some emulation of phonemes, but it's never systematically standarized. It just borrows some aspects here or there.
Dictionaries written in Chinese exist. They are in a sorted order, just like English dictionaries, so users can quickly look up the word they have in mind.
Alphabet is a very specific thing: it's a small set of letters (usually less than 30) where each letter usually represents a single phoneme.
Sometimes a letter might represent a phoneme cluster (such as the letters "x" and "j" in English, that usually represent the consonant clusters /ks/ and /dʒ/ respectively). Sometimes there might be some ambiguity, like two letters being used for the same sound (both "c" and "k" can produce the sound /k/ in English) or one letter having two different pronunciations ("c" can be pronounced as either /k/ or /s/).
What distinguishes alphabets from all other similar written systems is that a single letter cannot represent a combination of a consonant and a vowel and that vowels can be independently represented by letters.
Other similar scripts are Abjad (like ancient Hebrew), where letters only represent consonants and vowels are implied from the context. The Ancient Hebrew script (which is different than the square Aramaic alphabet used to write Hebrew after circa 300 BC) is a later variant of the Proto-Canaanite script, an abjad which served as a basis to all later European alphabets (Etruscan, Greek, Latin, Runic and Cyrillic) and other Near Eastern alphabets (such as Aramaic, Arabic and Syriac). The only pre-modern alphabet (or abjad or abugida) I'm aware of that is not derived from Proto-Canaanite is Hangul (which is a true alphabet, unlike the two Japanese Kana).
Modern Hebrew and Arabic are mixed-alphabets, since some vowels can be represented by consonants, but not all of the vowels, and the letters that represent a vowel leave some ambiguity with regards to which vowels they represent (or whether they represent a vowel or a consonant).
The next type of similar system is abugida, which covers most of the Ethiopian, South Asian and South-East Asian scripts (Ge'ez, Devanagari, Tamil, Tibetan, Thai, Burmese, Khmer and many more). These are all probably derived from the Aramaic alphabet. In abugidas most letters represent a consonant that comes with default vowel (e.g. क in Devanagari used to write Hindi represents /ka/), but there are special diacritics that can modify a letter to have a different vowel (e.g. कॆ represents /ke/ in Devanagari) or even insert extra consonants or glides before the vowel. These combined forms together with the diacritics can get fairly irregular (especially in Ge'ez) and consonant clusters can become quite unwieldy and then about 80% of the consonants would just get dropped in Tibetan. But that's the general idea.
Then you've got syllabaries: these are pretty straightforward systems, where every letter represent a combination of a consonant (or a consonant cluster) and a vowel (sometimes a diphthong or a vowel with a glide). These scripts require you to remember more letters, but the combinations are simpler and more regular than most alphabets (let alone abjads and abugidas). This is the kind of writing system you see getting developed independently more often than others: Linear B, Japanese Kana, Cherokee, Vai, Yi.
Chinese characters are none of these. Characters never represent a single consonant or a stand-alone vowel that can combine with another consonant. In fact, bar few exceptions (such as 儿 in Mandarin) every character represents a full syllable and does not combine to form a syllable. But Chinese characters are not syllabaries either, since there are many characters that can be used to write each sound and they are not interchangeable with each other. A specific character has to be used based on the meaning of the word. This is how logographic writing systems works and modern Chinese is logographic language par excellence.
To appreciate that you have to compare Chinese characters with other logographic languages. Let's take Akkadian cuneiform (the writing system used for writing Babylonian and Assyrian) for example.
Cuneiform was first developed to write Sumerian, but this language was mostly dead by the times of Hammurabi (18th century BC), and it was a far-gone relic during the heyday of the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar II. The Akkadians (i.e. the various Eastern Semitic language speakers of Mesopotamia) needed to write their own language with characters that represented Sumerian concepts, and they used the same methods modern Chinese (or Japanese) speakers use today: using a single Sumerian logogram in its own original meaning (but Akkadian pronounciation), transcribing a word using syllables that represent different words with same sounds and combining multiple logograms to form a new meaning. Like Japanese (but unlike Chinese), Akkadian cuneiform characters can represent a multi-syllable word and multiple logograms can combine to a new word with completely different (and unexpected) pronunciation. Akkadian is also commonly using logograms as word classifier (e.g to indicate geographical locations, gender, type of object and many other things[1]). These classifiers were written, but rarely (if ever?) pronounced.
Egyptian hieroglyphs, which I am even less familiar with than cuneiform, seem to have a far more developed system of classification (determinaties). They also seem to exhibit combinations of logograms to denote new meanigns and phonetic writing from a very early stage. In fact, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the quintessential "pictographic" in contemporary imagination, are mostly phonetic. Each hieroglyphs generally represents a cluster of 1-3 consonants, which probably came from the original pronunciation of the word it represented.
But this is like an abjad! And yes, the Proto-Canaanite abjad probably originated in a simplification of Egyptian hieroglyphs. And like abjads, which dveloped into mixed scripts (like Modern Hebrew and Arabic) and developed optional diacritics, Egyptian hieroglyphs also needed a method to disambiguate the multitude of similar-sounding words. And for that reason most phonetic Egyptian words (as far as I know) are accompanied by a logographic determinative [2] (classifer) that signifies whether it's the name of a God, a city, a house, a lotus flower, a lotus bud, another part of the lotus (stem, stalk or rhizome) or foxes skins. Yeah, these classifiers get rather specific. [3]
No system out there (including Japanese Kanji) is exactly like Chinese characters as used in Mandarin Chinese and other modern Chinese languages, but what I want to show here is that even though Modern Chinese is quite different from Classical Chinese, the writing system is still logographic. All logographic systems (including classical Chinese) have some phonetic features, at the very least in order to account for words that have no agreed-upon logogram. But what makes them logographic, is the pervasive use of logograms in a semantic role to disambiguate meanings.
> Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. It's like an intermediate language (IL) of mind.
I realized this in Taiwan when I started being able to recognize characters, know what it means in English, and have absolutely no idea what the word is in Mandarin. The written language is almost orthogonal to the spoken one.
> The written language is almost orthogonal to the spoken one.
I'm almost certain that this is true of Chinese script (after all, it was and is used for writing many languages!), but it might not be deducible based on this sort of experience.
I say thus because I had a very similar experience after I had to spend a month in the UAE. Thanks to frequent bilingual signs, I started recognizing common Arabic words, but I had no idea what the words are in Arabic or how to say them. But as far as I know, written Arabic is not at all orthogonal to spoken Arabic, every word is written exactly as it sounds.
Arabic is significantly more difficult for English speakers than a Romance language, but you're still able to draw a straight line from symbols to sounds. Once you learn the alphabet, sounding words out in your head isn't difficult. (Naturally, you will not sound like a native speaker for a long time.)
It's true that Chinese words don't inflect, but not all the grammatical categories you list are missing. There are aspect markers like 了 and 正在, and nouns are definite or indefinite even if they're not marked as such by articles: 有 can only have an indefinite object, for example.
Mao and the party nearly adopted pinyin as the national alphabet but stepped back from the brink.
I remember the great Peking->Beijing uplift. Reading "China reconstructs" magazines there were suggestions it was coming, and then it just went away. BBC newsreaders explained it was the new official look. Like Turkey-> Türkiye.
I suspect all syllabery/ideogram scripts have this latent problem. At 2,500 ideograms for "literate" there's a lot of potential to lose non core elements. "Educated" means over 5,000 heading to 10,000 and the complete set is north of 40,000 from what I understand. I can't imagine the investment in time to get there.
Some years ago I saw street-signs in China that had both Mandarin characters and also alphabetical versions, and I couldn't understand why they would go so far and then omit the accent marks.
No, those are not the same, because Chinese is a tonal language. [0] Taking Pinyin [1] and erasing the accent-marks creates ambiguity between several different words.
The English sign-equivalent would be... Well, something so dumb that nobody does it. Like perhaps deleting the ascenders and descenders of letters dbqp so that they look like oooo, which doesn't even help with horizontal space.
iirc, the official story from the mainland was that during around 1957 in order to boost literacy the govt simplified the characters, something like that...
China is highly competitive, with a history of using ‘merit’ based admission tests.
The system/barriers were setup (as one’s always are) by incumbents, and the way they did it (while continuing to present it as ‘merit’ based) was to lean heavily on tests that require extensive memorization and tutoring, because only the wealthy can afford it.
This is one obvious sign of that. After all, who has time to memorize 40k different characters?
That seems a bit made up tbh. I’ve worked with a fair number of Chinese overachievers (both in domestic China and abroad) and family background/affluence weren’t even remotely as much of a factor compared to the US or India (except for the IITs). Also, I noticed there were many many cases of brilliant young people rising through the ranks of the academic system in China compared to India for example where teachers often simply would not show up in public schools.
Personal background: I worked and studied in the US, I worked in China and I studied in India
I think they mean historic (as in pre-1911 China).
And they aren't wrong, as even major China scholars like Yasheng Huang and Yuhua Wang point out that the Imperial Civil Service in China was stacked against merit due to structural issues that biased in favor of incumbents.
That said, similar issues continue to persist in China to this day due to the Zhongkao.
Specifically, if you didn't attend a academic high school (which only accepts around 45-55% of Zhongkao takers) you wouldn't be prepared for the Gaokao unless it was out of pocket at a cram school (which are now technically banned, but were anyhow exorbitantly expensive in a country where the median household income is $4,000). And if you couldn't pass the Gaokao, you couldn't attend university.
Furthermore, Academic High Schools tend to be few and far between, yet take the lion's share of resources unlike Vocational High Schools which most Chinese attend - but not the ones you meet in an air conditioned office unless you order from Meituan. In the vocational schools you see similar issues of teacher absence and lack of pedagogy.
The failure of the VET system in China has been a major sticking point in Chinese policymaking recently and a lot of domestic research is being done to understand why it failed [0][1][2]
Once you get to ~5000 characters you can read most common texts. Vanishingly few people will know ~40,000 characters; a large fraction of those are obscure or ancient characters that only show up in historical texts.
This is comically incorrect. Even the article plainly states that you need to know ~1500 characters to be considered literate in Chinese, with sixth graders required to learn ~2500 characters. A quick perusal of practically any Chinese-language website (e.g. https://zh.wikipedia.org/) will quickly disabuse you of the notion that there are "only 200+ Chinese ideograms".
You might be conflating "ideogram" with "radical", i.e. components of characters. There's probably a few hundred of those defined, but they're more like pieces of characters rather than whole ones. Combining radicals produces very different characters that have totally different meanings; learning the radicals alone buys you very little.
There are thousands of characters, and you have to know thousands. There are tens of thousands of characters in existence, although only highly educated folks will know anywhere near 10000 characters.
Um, no. If you're talking about radicals (of which there are generally considered to be 214), yes, but you can't read / write in general if you only know those. Also, of those 214, a good chunk aren't standalone words. You're never going to see 疒 or 丶 by itself.
You won't have the words for "I" or "you". You might be able to read "melon" but not "fruit". You could read "papaya" and "corn" but not "vegetable". You could read "beef" or "lamb" but not "chicken". You could read "small" but not "few". You wouldn't be able to read "hello" or "goodbye", "happy" or "sad". But you'd be able to count 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, 18, 20...
The fact that characters are made up of radicals does make them easier to learn, though. There are ~2000 characters in the core vocabulary, sure - but it's not like you have to learn to write every one of them individually, just like you don't have to learn the spelling of every English word from scratch. There's common patterns.
Learning the radicals is maybe the first 10% of the effort in learning how to read and write Chinese.
After that, you still have to learn how to combine the radicals in pretty much arbitrary ways to form several thousand characters. The way you combine them is sometimes related to the sound and/or meaning of the radicals, but it's not systematic at all.
The grandparent comment is massively downplaying the difficulty involved in learning to read and write Chinese.
I'd say thousands of ideograms composed by hundreds of logograms, and you can be both right (this is actually a very reduced view of what logogram is, but English is quite imprecise on this).
> Chinese people are increasingly forgetting how to write characters by hand.
For those who can’t read Chinese here, I’ll just note that this is basically the equivalent of forgetting how to spell certain words in English. For example, I can read just fine, but there are still words I’m not good at spelling.
I’m just noting this so that this problem doesn’t seem totally exotic or specific to Chinese(/Japanese).
If you can remember the word "chocolate" but not the spelling then you can guess it. You might write choklit or choclate or something but you can at least get close.
If you forget what 警察 (police officer, jing3cha2) looks like then you're just completely screwed. Maybe you can remember a radical or two but it's still just going to be wrong and not meaningfully recognisable.
I guess you could write down 景茶 (jing3cha2) and rely on the phonetics, or use a different word if you know one, but it's still wrong on a level that "choclit" just isn't.
The counter-argument would be that the person could just use the pinyin or use a digital device to get them the characters. But as the article pointed out, those are both modern conveniences. Less than 100 years old both. The script absolutely gives no clues otherwise.
Let's put it this way: We know what ancient might egyptian (most likely) sounds like because they gave their writting system the uniliterals, which are pronunciation guides for complex words. We know that they said waw, and we know what a waw sounds like. They did this probably so they would not to explode their character count from hundreds to thousands.
> I guess you could write down 景茶 (jing3cha2) and rely on the phonetics, or use a different word if you know one, but it's still wrong on a level that "choclit" just isn't.
If a non-native did this in their own way would likely look wrong, but Chinese natives do occasionally use phonics to write or to substitute some characters with others.
I don't think these two forms of'amnesia-induced' typos are so different.
"Typos" happen quite often, especially when typing on a smartphone and selecting the wrong character. And people learn to read it correctly.
It's sometimes used intentionally, e.g. 歪果仁.
Exactly this, it was only recently my Italian friend was musing about how even other European languages don't really have this ability to just absoelootleigh fudge staff ind stihl b undurdudd.
> However, this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character. Highly literate people are forgetting how to write the characters in words like ‘kitchen’ (厨房), ‘lips’ (嘴唇), ‘cough’ (咳嗽), and ‘broom’ (扫帚). Victor Mair (2014) provides a striking example of the severity of the character amnesia problem. The following image is of a shopping list hastily written by a social science researcher from the PRC. The writer of the list struggled to remember the characters in ‘egg’ (鸡蛋), ‘shrimp’ (虾仁), and ‘chives’ (韭菜), and simply resorted to Pinyin.
Completely common problem. Anyone that speaks multiple languages sees this everyday, there are many words in Portuguese/Spanish/English I need the spellchecker for (or even translation) to write because I don't use it as frequently in that specific language.
That is happening a lot with cooking, as I started to take it much more seriously when I moved to the US and now my cooking vocabulary in English is much better/wider than it is in my native Portuguese, so I'll frequently use words in english for stuff I should know in portuguese but don't remember.
> For those who can’t read Chinese here, I’ll just note that this is basically the equivalent of forgetting how to spell certain words in English.
I can't read Chinese, but I think the article has a better analogy: "most people can easily recognise the musical symbol for treble clef (𝄞), but very few could draw it by memory."
Nah, it's common in German too. For example, the first parts of "Widerspruch" and "wiedersehen" are said/heard the same, so you just have to learn the spelling. Many, many other examples... Although on the scale of languages German is indeed closer to phonetic spelling than some others.
But if you were asked to spell the words, you'd produce something close to what was expected, rather than drawing a blank. The question "how do you spell wiedersehen" contains in itself a lot of clues.
This feels more like "what's the Unicode character for 'full moon'?" I'd be able to recognize the result as correct, but if I don't know the answer, I just don't know.
(Of course, that goes too far in the other direction. I assume you can draw a few strokes to "get someone started" on a character and they'll pick it up, whereas most people wouldn't recognize the first half of a Unicode code point. As the grandparent poster said, it's an exotic problem that's hard to empathize with in phonetic languages)
I do not think that the example is good. "Wider" and "wieder" have different meanings, even if they are probably derived from the same word.
I do not know if this is true in all the German dialects, but at least some pronounce "wider" with short "i" and "wieder with long "i", so they are easy to distinguish when heard (like the difference in English between "fill" and "feel").
English and German appear to have had a similar semantic evolution for this pair of words, because "wider" means "against", while "wieder" means "again", so in both cases a single word has evolved to cover these two different meanings and the variants have become differentiated in pronunciation too.
I don't know any German, so I can't comment on this, but I'll add that the concept of a spelling contest (like we have in English) wouldn't make sense in a lot of languages because the spelling of words are so obvious/consistent.
If you need an example of a germanic language that has a very regular phonetic spelling I think Dutch is a better example than German. German has a lot of idiosyncrasies, because the spelling tries to preserve the etymology of the words. In Dutch they don't bother trying to preserve a word's history, everything is written as it sounds. (With a handful easy to memorize exceptions)
Finnish does this very well too. There is only a few tricky parts, but in general the spelling and pronunciation match. And if they don't, obvious solution is to write as word is pronounced. Which is a drift, but I think it is more desirable way.
And Italian. Way back in time I used to get phone calls (at work) from Italian customers not speaking English, and I could always write down what they said on the phone, and get it right. Always. I knew very little Italian at the time.
Hmmm not so literate people (or just children) make a lot of mistakes writing Spanish because a bunch of letters are pronounced the same. And then the “h” when not preceded by a “c” is silent, which causes issues.
What is true however is that of you learn the pronunciation rules you should be able to read a text correctly even if you have no clue what you’re saying. That’s not true of English for example.
Is it? There is a lot of historical spelling in Spanish, though not as much as English. German, on with the other hand, has its spelling routinely updated every few years.
The article points out that, because Chinese is not a phonetic language, if you don't know how to write something, you might not be able to write it at all, while in phonetic languages you can always spell something that sounds the same. E.g. "snees" for "sneeze".
I'm not sure where you've got this from, but I lived in Taiwan for years - you might be thinking of 注音 which does look similar to kana but is distinct and unrelated.
And the authors article is referring to the writing of the logograph - 注音 is strictly for pronunciation.
Even the Chinese Character Heroes competition mentioned in the article seems a lot like the spelling bee in the US, doesn't it? I wonder if the anecdote about the PhD students has a cultural dimension in addition to language proficiency — could the students have refused not because they don't know the characters, but because they aren't fully confident they wouldn't make a mistake?
We have a word describing what it is, we have a symbol of how it looks, and we have a word of how it is pronounced "and". We also tend not to write ampersands down by hand. Its a more common symbol. However unlike the treble clef the meaning and the pronunciation is the same so perhaps the example isn't as good?
Yes, I endorse his research. As a Taiwanese, I use Traditional Chinese daily in Taiwan, primarily on computers and mobile phones, but I can’t write many of the Chinese characters he mentioned in the article.
I can share a more personal story: after spending a year studying abroad in Britain, I almost forgot how to write Chinese characters—even my own name—since I hadn't written any for over a year! However, when I returned to Taiwan, I was able to recall most of them within minutes. I consider this a temporary phenomenon that fades quickly with focus and a bit of practice.
The Heisig method, which recursively breaks down Chinese characters into patterns with arbitrary meanings, can help you sidestep this problem. You're never dealing with shapes anymore, but rather reconstructing stories from these stroke/meaning pairs. Since patterns consist of subpatterns, you can tweak the level of granularity until a sensible narrative emerges. Just recite that story as you move your pen.
It's a lifesaver as an adult foreign learner, but I don't really see anything preventing native writers of Chinese and Japanese from benefitting from this general process as well. I've wondered if the guys who pass those truly insane 6,000+ character exams have to fall back on some sort of hack at that point.
As another adult Chinese learner, does something like the Heisig method really help with language acquisition or just memorizing characters? I’m skeptical because of the immense amount of time it takes to learn even without elaborate story construction for each character. I’ve kind of resigned to being a word processor idiot, and only memorizing characters in handwriting as a bi-product of usage.
It may be anecdotal, but I once involuntarily trained my memory by trying to recall what I've been doing each day. After a few weeks, my memory noticeably improved.
That's to say, the task may feel insurmontable at first, but if you give time to your body to adjust, it should become easier.
That's very interesting. Did the memory boost persist? If so do you do any maintenance exercises like the original ones or have you noticed other effects?
It's designed for Japanese where it probably works better - pretty much all Kanji have multiple pronunciations that can be completely different to each other so it makes some amount of sense to ignore the sound and focus on the shape and the meaning. Much less relevant for Chinese where you can usually tie the character to a single sound and learn all three halves at the same time.
I did Heisig's Remembering The Kanji as my first step on my Japanese learning journey. It helped make the written language feel more accessible, and I took it on as a fun challenge, but in hindsight only learning to read is important and learning to write is mostly a waste of time. Learning to read is vital, but being a word processor idiot is how everyone is living their lives for the most part.
As someone who switched to using a keyboard for writing at the age of 14.. yes. But at least I can write my own language by hand, if I have to, even though it looks horrible (always did). I can draw it instead of writing it, and it looks better (filling in forms and the like).
For Japanese I use a keyboard.. should be fine but.. no. Whenever we're at a table and need to jot something down on paper, or near a whiteboard, I feel like an illiterate person, because I can't write by hand. I can read stuff I can't write. Even hiragana. I never did enough practice. My wife writes down everything so easily.. and I can't. Writing romaji.. argh. I hate that I can't write, by hand, what I can read.
You've got it backwards. The Heisig method is faster, and less work overall. It takes about 10 seconds or so to set an image in your mind of the scene for a character, then a handful of reviews over the following weeks. Then you never forget it.
Classical methods would have you drilling characters for hours upon hours of wasted time.
> It takes about 10 seconds or so to set an image in your mind of the scene for a character, then a handful of reviews over the following weeks. Then you never forget it.
As someone with experience using the Heisig method, I would strongly disagree. Yes, it is a helpful system to ease the burden of memorization, but it does not permanently embed this knowledge into your memory after "a handful of reviews over the following weeks". If this were true, there would be many, many more people who have memorized 4000+ Chinese characters, required for fluency.
I mean to say that my current method mostly omits hand writing. I can use a keyboard or phone to write and I can recognize characters fine. But on top of just learning a language, is Heisig so effective that I will be able to also memorize handwriting each character? Or do people measure how useful it is by being able to memorize the strokes for many characters, yet fail to become fluent in the language otherwise?
It surely helps. Mnemonics are a good tool for memorization. You don't have to remember elaborate stories, just something like: "歌" - "older brother lacks singing". It certainly doesn't work with all characters, but it helps.
fwiw I studied Japanese, but I believe most of this still applies.
It's divide and conquer. When you are reading the book, you are indeed just learning the characters. It's a significant ~2-3 month investment that maybe doesn't make sense unless you plan on living and working in the country. But once you've gotten through it, it absolutely feeds back into vocab acquisition, since the characters are now completely unambiguous to you. Much like how Latin/Greek helps with English, you can also work out what entirely new words might mean if you are familiar with their characters.
I did RTK. I also learned to read around 3k kanji. Turns out it wasn't at all necessary to learn to write that additional 1k Kanji in order to become able to read / distinguish it.
The time is better invested in simply studying how to distinguish visually similar characters. That alone solves the problem directly.
Characters are not words. Most words are 2- or 4-character combinations. Individually they have fragments of meaning, so you may get a hint, but not enough to understand for sure unless you’ve learned the word.
If this seems oddly familiar, you may actually have read it before, and no plagiarism is involved. Moser wrote the beginning of this article in the middle of his classic essay, ”Why Chinese is So Damn Hard” https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
> Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??
嚔 is an unusual character, though. Not just in that it's not often used, but also because it's construction is atypical. It would be like Ph.D. students forgetting how to spell "onomatopoeia," which, yes, wouldn't be surprising.
The sneeze example is contrived because in English, sneeze is both phonetic and a word with common occurence.
A better example might involve a common English word with a wierd, non-phonetic spelling. A word that you might imagine it forgivable for even someone who recieved an English PhD to misspell. After all Chinese is a seperate language from English and it is neccessary for it to be evaluated in its own context.
If you think this definetly couldn't happen in English, take a look again at this post -- for it contains eight outright, unambiguous, misspellings of common English words that I would not be surprised if even an English PhD from Harvard made on occassion, especially if your choice of three students were unlucky and they were having embarassingly bad days. (After all, English PhDs isn't the study of spelling, it's the study of literature).
It may be contrived, but it still highlights the key difference.
Even if sneeze was a word that you were taught once in school and hadn't used for 30 years, you would still likely get close to the correct spelling from the sound (sneaze, snease, sneeze), and seeing the misspelling also helps with recall and to self correct.
This is the "virtual circle" of speaking/listening -> reading -> writing -> referred to by the author, which is not possible with Chinese.
It's true that there are some weird non-phonetic English words that PhDs would likely misspell, but it's not 100% of the language and you still could at least make an attempt.
It's possible to just write Chinese in phonetic form (e.g. pinyin), which bypasses this issue, but you have a secondary problem, which is the extremely narrow range of syllables (~400 * 4/5 tones = 1600-2000), resulting in quite ambiguous text.
This is not analagous. The sound of every English word give clues – and often precise guidance - on how to write it, but the sound of a Chinese word typically offers no hint of how to write it. If you give me some obscure English word, say "persiflage", I might have no idea what it means, but I can probably spell it. But if you give a Chinese speaker 馘 (góu) in context, almost no one will be able to write it, even if they know the precise meaning ("to cut off the left ear of the slain").
I would guess that most Harvard students could spell those misspelled words in your comment correctly if you asked them to directly. When reading we know what the word is supposed to be and we correct it in our mind to the intended spelling. If anything it’s a testament to the resiliency of phonetic alphabets - but more so it’s illustrative of how English pronunciation has deviated from spellings that were mostly set with the advent of printing in England. Most of the misspellings in your comment involve misplaced letters that are not directly pronounced.
Strictly in terms phonetics, why couldn’t “weird” be spelled “wierd” when English also has “tier”? I’m guessing the Normans are to thank for turning “wyrd” into “weird”.
Even with the misspellings it's obvious what words you meant. If someone forgets how to write "嚔" are they just missing a few strokes but it's obvious what they actually meant? Or do they have zero clue what it's supposed to look like?
Therein lies the resiliency of phonetic orthography: despite the misspellings the sound represented by the words did not significantly change thus most readers would never even notice.
If anything it’s a statement on how the orthography of English in particular doesn’t well match the phonetic structure of the language - something due to a confluence of factors in English several hundred years ago, including the rise of printing.
Remember the english -> pirate translator? Simularily, per your graf, a "spell wrecker" tool, witch introduces mispellings and other errs, could be amusing.
I admit I would have liked it if English language Ph.D candidates had some basic working understanding of Ancient Greek, Latin and Old English to serve as a cornerstone for their studies, but that ship has sailed more than a century ago. If you know Greek, onomatopoeia is not that confusing anymore, and you'd know that if you want to be super-pedantic, the plural of octopus would be octopodes, but never octopi.
Then again, if you knew some Old English, you would know correcting everyone and forcing them to use the "original form" is a silly goose chase. You'd know better than to remind everyone that children is a pesky double plural, and childer (from the old English cildru, and like the German Kinder) is more than enough? Or to remind everyone that's it's not "a newt tail" but rather "an EWT tail" and please mind your ewts and a good day to you to sir.
Or maybe there will be some people who would still keep doing that, who am I fooling...
I would honestly be astonished if a 4 English department PhD students who were all native speakers of English could all not spell onomatopoeia. I’d expect 2 of the 4 could in the absolute worst case.
Spelling is simply not as hard as remembering hanzi, even in English.
Would it not be possible that the three students did not want to embarrass the author by showing their knowledge? I sometimes get that behavior from Chinese and Japanese colleagues when I am supposed to know something but temporarily forgot it (or just cannot access it at the time).
No, they really just forgot the characters. I lived in Japan for the better part of a decade and it isn't at all uncommon. There were many times when I explicitly asked natives to recognize or help me with a Kanji and they struggled as well. I doubt everyone's been systematically lying when you genuinely ask for help.
The reason is just digital input really. Pinyin and Romaji typing have become so common that a lot of people write Hanzi/Kanji by hand less and less and it's so complicated of a skill there's really no other way to get it in your brain other than practice. I even notice it myself, I easily recognize 10x more characters than I can accurately write.
I've seen my wife (Chinese) and her friends (also Chinese) have this same problem with the exact same word "sneeze", so I'm inclined to believe the author.
The fact that 嚔/sneeze is usually the go to example means it ends up becoming the exception that proves the rule. Most other characters are much more easily remembered.
As a Chinese native speaker, I should admit that I forgot how to write them ("sneeze" characters 喷嚏) before I saw them just now. One of the reason, I think, is they are used quite often in oral Chinese, but rarely in written Chinese. And those characters are not easy to write, as you see.
Happens all the time to Japanese people, too. There's a core set of characters that are well remembered, then there is a set of characters that you can remember most strokes of (so that someone else can read it) and then there's the stuff where you just have no idea.
Of course, you _can_ escape to Hiragana if you're so inclined, but then you would show that you don't know the character - so it's just avoided.
That’s a pretty good point… if I saw ‘three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard’ forget how to write ‘sneeze’, I would assume they were lunatics pretending, not that they genuinely forgot how to write the word.
Does that imply learning the advanced literary culture, that is usually associated with prestige academia, has a vastly higher threshold in Chinese than in English?
It’s pretty disturbing for language itself to be a potentially retarding force on learning.
A better example than sneeze might be diarrhoea. In Chinese this is very easy - 拉肚子 - but I'm sure there are English speakers who might forget the spelling for diarrhoea if they're having a bad day.
All three PhD's were perfectly capable of communicating the word for sneeze and also recognize it in writting. They just couldn't write it exactly.
I don't think it has a slowing effect. Except maybe by adding annoying/useless classes for mid/primary students - which is just par for course everywhere else. I can name 3 objectively completely useless classes from my european youth (plus one in college) that were only there because 'culture'.
How does your assessment of the relative usefulness of ‘classes’ from youth relate to the possible existence of a retarding effect arising from language differences?
The article lumps together writing characters slightly incorrectly and failing to come up with the character at all. For instance, the game show contestant wrote the word "烹" with one extra stroke, while the writer of the shopping list writer gave up entirely on the characters for "egg" and "chives". (This is analogous to the difference between misspelling an English word and not being able to think of the word at all.) In the story of three PhD students who couldn't write the characters for "sneeze" (打喷嚏), it's entirely unclear if they were completely stuck, or if they just made small mistakes.
My question is if "character amnesia" describes trivial errors or if people are forgetting characters to a significant extent. In other words, is this article genuine or is it the equivalent of claiming English writers suffer from "word amnesia" because they sometimes need to look up a spelling?
> In the story of three PhD students who couldn't write the characters for "sneeze" it's entirely unclear if they were completely stuck, or if they just made small mistakes.
The article says "all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment", which in context, reads clearly to me that they were embarrassed for not knowing where to start, not that they wrote them down with minor errors that they were embarrassed about after checking a dictionary. The rest of the article strongly reinforces this interpretation. For example: "‘lift the pen, forget the character’... this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character..."
Further in the article he discusses the 'virtuous cycle'; connections between writing, speaking, and reading. With phonetic alphabets, the way something is spoken reinforces the way that it is read, the way it is read reinforces the way that it is written, the way that it is written reinforces the way that it is spoken (for the most part, even English fails this cycle sometimes). However, with character sets the cycle is broken, and the speaker has to learn 3 different memorization techniques.
Regarding your question, there is a difference between not knowing how to write a word and not knowing how to spell a word. If someone in English doesn't know how to spell 'sneeze' or any other word, they can at least come close enough and convey information 'fuzzily' via text using an incorrect spelling. Now that I'm writing this, though, I suppose with character sets like Chinese if you know characters that are close enough you potentially could use other characters to convey the information, like mouth-fart for sneeze or something along these lines. But I don't speak the language, so that is just a theory.
Do Chinese speakers use the language this way if there is a character they don't know how to write?
> Do Chinese speakers use the language this way if there is a character they don't know how to write?
I'm by no means an expert on the topic but one thing I have noticed in learning Chinese languages is that there are a huge number of homophones. That means there are probably 20 other characters with the same pronunciation for any given syllable that are considered different words (not to get into it here but the conception of a word in Chinese languages can be a bit odd too). It seems to be very common for people to use the character for a similar sounding word or syllable to write slang words or local dialect words that don't have an official character.
In the example at the start of the article, 烹, the contestant wrote "child" when the proper grapheme was "complete." That's a non-trivial error, even if it is only one stroke difference.
Even less of a difference. There's no equivalent character, so it's clearly 烹 written with an extra stroke. It's more like the difference between writing "deceive" and decieve."
I don’t think so, no. English is phonetic and so some of those spelling errors can come down to your dialect pronouncing the word differently and forgetting the official spelling. That’s now how Chinese characters work though. It tells a story, and a story with “child” instead of “complete” is a vastly different story.
The equivalent in English would be writing "ghyche" when trying to write the word, "fish". Yeah, that combination of characters/marks can make sounds equivalent to "f" "ih" and "sh" but it's so far off it's laughable.
> This is analogous to the difference between misspelling an English word and not being able to think of the word at all.
Part of the distinction is that you can always at least misspell the word when using an alphabet. That's why the shopping list used an alphabetic script.
If people normally enter characters in their phone or computer rather than actually handwriting, then there is no reason to keep remembering all of the character details.
Just like it doesn't matter that I frequently am uncertain about spelling for some words because we have spell check built into everything.
Do Chinese usually use pinyin to enter characters or what is the normal method? Whatever it is, they don't need to remember the character strokes apparently.
Some older folks, particularly those with regional accents or less Pinyin education, stick with handwriting input (which was surprisingly good even ~20 years ago) - drawing the characters with a stylus or a finger.
Most folks these days use Pinyin. The T9 input method (Pinyin, but using a nine-key telephone pad) is popular with folks who grew up using dumbphones.
Finally, voice input is really popular in China. Lots of folks send texts (on WeChat) as short voice messages. WeChat even has a feature to auto-transcribe these voice messages.
But Pinyin is based on pronunciation, which varies across China. So Pinyin is based on Putonghua ? So Pinyin reinforces the role of putonghua as a project of national unification ? And the pre-eminent role of Beijing ?
Either way it's phonetic; it's not based on either the radicals or the strokes. Even though there are input methods that use those, they are not commonly used.
There are other input methods such as Cangjie or Sucheng which are also popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong. They have much faster WPM since they are based on the structure of the characters. Pre-smartphone there was a Q9 input method with one stroke mapped to each of 8 numbers and a wildcard for if you forgot.
> Just like it doesn't matter that I frequently am uncertain about spelling for some words because we have spell check built into everything.
But it does matter that you don't know the spelling for some words. For one, you don't always have a computer to fix it for you. For two, the computer's spelling is often wrong and you need the human knowledge to fill that gap.
The interesting thing here is that nobody writes chinese one character at a time with pinyin; you almost always type out an entire phrase in pinyin, and usually there's only one meaningfully correct combination of those sounds in terms of characters and meaning (that's how the listener can tell what you're saying, after all, when listening) which will be the first choice in your input software (input software traditionally gives you a first choice with what it thinks the entire phrase is, and gets shorter with the 2nd choice onwards to partially match a phrase.)
The problem is not that people can't recognise the words; it's that we can't write them if given pen a paper. If the phone gets it wrong you just choose the nth choice instead of the first.
> For one, you don't always have a computer to fix it for you.
You can't be serious. I thought that the "you need to be good at algebra because you won't have a calculator in your pocket" argument died out naturally. I can't recall the last time I actually made hand-written notes.
> For two, the computer's spelling is often wrong and you need the human knowledge to fill that gap.
It happens to me once a month that the computer cannot recognize a correctly spelled word, and virtually never in English.
> You can't be serious. I thought that the "you need to be good at algebra because you won't have a calculator in your pocket" argument died out naturally. I can't recall the last time I actually made hand-written notes.
Then you are an extreme outlier. Most people write plenty of things down by hand in their day to day life. And there's no reason for the argument to die out, because it's completely correct.
> It happens to me once a month that the computer cannot recognize a correctly spelled word, and virtually never in English.
Again, this seems like an outlier. False positives and false negatives are both quite common in spell checkers.
In short, it's the same nominal sound with varying tones ("shi", which is closer in pronunciation to "shirr" than "she"), repeated about a hundred times, which is of course meaningless in spoken form (since there's not enough context to differentiate between the various forms), but actually conveys a story in written form.
With the shift toward typing and (especially mobile) computerization in the recent era, it's really not surprising (to me, at least) that Chinese society is moving in a direction where literacy no longer extends to recall of individual characters, and only encompasses recognition, since recall is no longer as necessary of a skill in day-to-day life.
The poem is written in Classical Chinese, which was spoken over 2000 years ago, and back then would have been intelligible to a listener because the words would have sounded different. Even today, they sound different in e.g. Cantonese.
There's a close relative of Mandarin (Dungan) which is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. The spoken language is tonal, but tones aren't used in the written language because written words are polysyllabic, and if you know how to speak Dungan, you can reliably infer the tones.
The poem uses now-rare characters from classical Chinese but it was written in the 1930s and uses the modern Mandarin pronunciation of said characters. The whole point of the poem is to make everything "shi" in modern Mandarin pronunciation, to argue against switching from Chinese characters to Latin alphabet romanization.
You can also construct ridiculous sentences in English that no native speaker will understand [0].
In normal texts written in modern Chinese, this is not a problem. Nobody writes real texts like the "shi" poem. In cases where something can only be understood in written form, you can rephrase it to avoid homophones.
This argument is also used for Japanese, but I do not consider it valid.
This just proves that a phonetic writing is not sufficient, but it does not mean that the phonetic writing must be replaced with traditional writing.
To resolve the ambiguity of the phonetic writing, both in Chinese and in Japanese, where the ambiguity is much worse, it is enough to retain at most a couple hundred symbols to be used as semantic classifiers. It is likely that a great part of the traditional radicals would be suitable to be retained as classifiers, with perhaps a part of them omitted if redundant and a few other symbols added, if necessary.
Then the writing could be phonetic, but with classifier symbols attached to words, wherever the ambiguity makes them necessary.
This is not a new method. The oldest writing systems, like those of Egypt or Mesopotamia, also used classifier symbols (with meanings like: "a kind of human", "a kind of god", "a kind of animal", "a kind of stone", "a kind of wood", "a body part", "a kind of tool" and so on) attached to the words written phonetically, to avoid ambiguities.
If one would have to learn only 200 classifier symbols and with lower stroke counts than most symbols used now, that would be a great simplification.
Many of the Chinese characters are actually intended to be composed of two parts, a semantic classifier and a phonetic symbol, but this principle is applied too inconsistently and with too many variants, so the system can be greatly simplified by using a simple phonetic writing like Pinyin together with semantic classifiers inserted in the text only if they are necessary.
I think ambiguous homophones aren't actually much of a problem. There's usually only correct option that matches the surrounding context, so the correct inference is easy to make even with no characters at all . After all, there aren't subtitles when you're talking to other people, all the homophones still exist, and yet communication doesn't seem to be impeded.
> Many of the Chinese characters are actually intended to be composed of two parts […]
That is not entirely true in the case of Mandarin, but it is more true in the case of Cantonese (and a few other Chinese languages).
Owing to the historical loss of sounds (especially finals) over the course of the Mandarin development, many Mandarin words tend to be longer (3-4 syllables are common) compared to their counterparts in, say, Cantonese where they are most of the time (but not always) are two syllables long due to the fact that Cantonese has retained more sounds from Middle Chinese (plus, the intermingling with the Bat Yue) over the course of its development.
Which is why the «Lion eating poet in the stone den» still makes some sense when read out loud in Cantonese (also in Wu, Min) and makes no sense in Mandarin.
correctly however, the text was not meant as an argument against romanization but as a playful example of how pinyin are unfit for classical rather than modern vernacular chinese.
I'd accept that interpretation. To be more precise, I view it as a demonstration of information loss from replacing classical characters entirely with romanization, as opposed to a forceful argument against any form of adoption of romanization.
I think a helpful analogy here for the non-chinese is recalling the names of pieces of music from hearing a short part and vice versa. I'm classically trained, and in my circles I can probably hum out a short piece of music that'll have other musicians go "I know the piece but am drawing a blank on the name" and vice versa. I know I'm not the only one to have had that happen to pieces I'm actively practicing :)
Anecdotally, I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half).
I guess this is analogous to only remembering the main themes of a piece and forgetting how the rest of it goes. I'll recognise it when I hear it, but can't recall it off the top of my head.
The Greeks and the Romans got it right; a small set of characters that can be combined to form any word. Complexity from the composition of simpler elements, not inherent. Computer interaction via keyboard makes the superior design all the more obvious. Those guys were ahead of their time. Ave imperator, morituri te salutant.
I would argue that a system like the Japanese Hiragana or Katakana are a better system: they are each 56 letters that directly correspond to syllables. So "ha" is a single letter, as is "he", as is "be". With this nearly everything you say is directly translated both directions, and there are fewer complications (there are always a few, for example in Japanese one of those 56 letters is "n".. so no vowel, and in many dialects you say "s" for the "su" character if it is on the end of a word, and there are a few oddities around letters involving "y").
English, being the composite/mongrel language that it is has really complicated patterns for how you put letters together. For example the "i before e except after c as in neighbor and weigh" sort of thing (which does not cover all of the exceptions of course). This sort of thing has lead to the existence of spelling competitions in the English-speaking world (spelling bees). My Hungarian wife was surprised that such a thing existed. In Hungarian it is much closer to see-what-you say, with only a few exceptions (not that the rules are kind on English-speaking Hungarian learners like myself).
>I would argue that a system like the Japanese Hiragana or Katakana are a better system: they are each 56 letters that directly correspond to syllables.
No, they're really not. First, they have 46 characters (each), not 56, though there are another 36 combination characters like ちゃ. Regardless, the problem here is that number comes from the total number of allowed sounds in the entire language. Japanese has an extremely small number of total possible sounds in the language compared to most other languages, particular western ones, and almost all syllables are of the form consonant+vowel: there's basically no way to write, for instance, a word ending in a hard "t" sound, so when Japanese adopts such words, it adds a vowel ending like "tu", and does this for every syllable with a hard consonant without a following vowel. Because of this, loanwords can be really hard to recognize even if you're a speaker of the language that word was adopted from (usually English these days), because the sounds don't map over very well.
And because there's so few total possible syllables, there's a huge number of homophones. The main reason kanji is still around is because it resolves ambiguity and makes it much, much easier to read Japanese text: trying to read text that's all in hiragana (or katakana) is cumbersome, even if spaces are added (Japanese text doesn't normally have spaces).
Syllabaries are great if the language has relatively simple phonotactics. Once you start having things like triple consonant clusters or a dozen different vowels, it breaks down pretty quickly.
The other thing that makes alphabets more popular in the long run is that they spread easier because they're easier to adapt to different languages compared to syllabaries (indeed, it's not uncommon for a syllabary to become semi-alphabetic as part of such adoption).
I believe you mean the Ugarites, Phoenicians, & other northwest Semitic peoples. They developed from cuneiform syllabaries the abjad which the Greeks subsequently adopted (being their language's second written form, preceded by Linear B before an interlude of illiteracy). The Greeks added only non-diacritic vowels.
There are benefits to both systems. Western readers have a hard time reading older writing - while eastern readers have no problem with very old texts.
On the other hand - western scholars can understand what the spoken word sounded like - but eastern readers have a much harder time what ancient words sounded like.
Western writing systems "decay" faster. Look at french writing - the spellings are phonetic for the time they were first put to paper - but they sound nothing like the current pronunciations.
> Western readers have a hard time reading older writing - while eastern readers have no problem with very old texts.
That's simply not true.
Ancient Chinese calligraphy and language is so different that you have entire PhD fields about it.
By contrast, as someone who has studied basic Latin in high school, I can read stuff from the walls of Pompeii without issue. I can directly read Latin texts from 700AD or so with the standard difficulty of reading handwriting.
This is completely backwards and comically wrong. Japanese text looks very little like it did even 150 years ago; the characters have changed completely, and the language was highly standardized during the Meiji era. Try taking a native Japanese speaker to a museum with old Japanese texts or handwriting and see if they can read any of it; they generally can't understand much of it at all.
Modern Korean people can't even read stuff older than a century or so because the language changed from using Chinese characters to the home-grown Hangul character set, and that was only completed a few decades ago.
By contrast, English speakers can read Shakespeare just fine mostly, with a little difficulty understanding some words that are no longer used.
Japanese is not really the right example, because unlike Chinese the writing is really more phonetic than not (and when it isn't, as in kanbun texts, it's basically an idiosyncratic translation to a completely different language). I imagine that the reasonably educated Chinese should be able to read something like the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Stele from the 8th century just fine, given the regular typeface. English, from the same time period, has Beowulf, which is incomprehensible to any lay reader.
Once calligraphy/handwriting is involved, the situation on the Western side is not much better either. Modern Anglosphere children probably would struggle with 19th-century cursive like https://www.pinterest.com/pin/375276581427478862/ ; in Germanic countries, the handwriting system underwent deeper changes, so nobody apart from selected nerds and antiquarians can read Kurrent as in Goethe's letters - https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goethe_Brief_(nich... - or even the newer Sütterlin. Contra what some posters here claim, Roman cursive (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive) is right out. I don't think this should be conflated with the question of whether the writing system is understood by future readers - as an imperfect computer analogy, an ASCII text document is in some meaningful sense more futureproof than an Autodesk Animator .FLI, even if the former is on a five-inch floppy and the latter is on a USB thumb drive.
(As for the effects of the Japan's Chinese character simplification, I think they are a bit overstated. I accidentally bought a 旧字体 copy of Mishima's Haru no Yuki at a book sale once, and at least as an L2 speaker I didn't find it particularly more painful to read than I find unmodernised Shakespeare as an L2 speaker of English.)
Where did you get that idea from? I can read most books in Japanese, but probably not a word of most reasonably ‘old’ texts. I think most native speakers would struggle as much as English speakers do with, say, medieval-era English.
Yes, and when you strip out the vowels and squeeze the individual syllables together - the syllable almost becomes a chinese character or a llm token. Paleo-Hebrew (10th century BCE) was a century older then ancient Greek (9th century BCE). Like Phoenician (from which ancient Greek derived) it shared close roots with Proto-Sinaitic.
The Proto-Sinaitic alphabetic script is the oldest (1800–1500 BCE) and evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols. It contained simplified characters representing consonants,
The Phoenician alphabet came later, around 1050 BCE, evolving from Proto-Sinaitic. It became a widely used script with 22 consonantal characters and was highly influential, serving as a foundation for both the Paleo-Hebrew and Greek alphabet. The Etruskan alphabet was adapted from the Greek alphabet in the 8th centry BCE and the Roman alfabet was adapted from the Etruskan alphabet in the 7th century.
Alphabets with 20–30 letters seem to be close to a neurolinguistic optimum for balancing simplicity with expressiveness.
The Armenian script was designed by monk and linguist Mesrop Mashtots in the 5th century CE to enable the translation of the Bible into Armenian. With 39 letter it represents Armenian phonetics.
The Khmer alphabet with 74 characters evolved from the ancient Pallava script, which was developed in Southern India around the 4th century CE.
By the 7th century CE, the Khmer people had adapted the Pallava script, creating an early form of the Khmer script. This script was initially used to write Sanskrit and Pali, the languages of Hindu and Buddhist texts.
One can have a larger inventory of letters if the glyphs themselves are consistently patterned in some way. E.g. if "c" is /ts/ and "č" is /tʃ/, then one can expect "š" to be /ʃ/, and "ž" to be /ʒ/ (which is indeed the case in many Slavic alphabets).
Sounds like a losing battle to me. Handwriting in general is doomed to go the way of the dodo. The difference is that with Latin characters, you can at least "draw" them fairly easily from memory.
I've seen Chinese input methods where instead of keys corresponding to sounds in Pinyin, they correspond to strokes in characters, I wonder if this could help with character amnesia.
They do exist, but as far as I'm aware, wubi and cangjie are very uncommon relative to zhuyin and pinyin. Even so, my experience is that you end up just memorizing chords for typing particular characters, as opposed to regularly deriving from first principles how a given character is constituted.
Meanwhile, if you remember how the character is pronounced and can identify it in a lineup, it's far easier to use the phonetic approaches. (Even if your input method doesn't auto-correct the word based on context, experienced typists will also memorize the position of common words, so even they don't need to stop and look at the individual candidates in most situations.)
There's a related paper from Chen & Chuang (2008), Experience with a computer word-entry method in processing Chinese characters by fluent typists ( https://escholarship.org/content/qt2s84m9t0/qt2s84m9t0.pdf) that has an unsurprising finding: If you type with a phonology-based input method, you can more easily recall (transcribe) a character by its sound. If you type with an orthography-based input method, you can more easily recall it by sight.
Right but it seems slower for people who are comfortable with pinyin. If I want to reply to a friend saying "I'm on my way and will be there soon", I can tap 'msll' and the input method will show 马上来了 as the first suggestion. 5 taps in total to enter 4 characters.
The BBC produced a great series, The Secret History of Writing. There's a segment where you can watch some Chinese speakers experiencing this while being prompted to write mildly uncommon words like "cough" or "embarrassment".
> The orthography may be inconsistently phonetic, as is the case with English spelling, or highly consistent, such as the Korean Hangul system. No writing system is perfectly phonetic. But phonetic systems enable the native speaker, with just a few dozen symbols, to reliably write whatever they can speak, and read out loud anything they can read.
I'm not sure if the author has studied Vietnamese. I'm a native Vietnamese, and I believe the language is perfectly phonetic.
If I hear a word, I can write it. If I see a word, I can pronounce it, regardless of whether I understand the meaning.
It's interesting that among the 4 countries (China/Japan/Korea/Vietnam), it's the only one that completely reinvented the language into Latin based. I think that refactor addressed the phonetic issue well enough. When I was there, there was also no TV program for "spelling bees" or something like that. Even a third grader could read/write almost any word (even when they don't understand the text yet)
Edit: adding to this original post to reply a common theme people brought up in multiple posts.
I think bringing up dialects and provincial accents is not convincing. There is one official way "gia đình" should be pronounced. It's taught in school, even in the South. Pronouncing it as "da đình" can still be understood, and it doesn't retract from the point that the language is phonetic.
In other words, assuming I know nothing about the meaning of the word, if I hear "da đình" I can correctly write down it as so. I wouldn't know that in Saigon that also means "gia đình". But I definitely can write it down exactly.
I don't think using provincial speaking accent is a good line of argument here. Otherwise, no language in the world can satisfy the phonetic requirements. Any group of people can have different accents, different tones, different sound length and pauses.
Not if you account for variations of pronunciation in dialects. Not even the most phonetically accurate accent, the Hanoian Northern accent which I am a native speaker of, is perfect.
For example, you could hear Northern Vietnamese people say "dổ", "dá" instead of "rổ", "rá". Morning dew is pronounced "xương" but is written as "sương". These characters are pronounced with greater clarity in the Central and Southern regions, but they have their own peculiarities too. Til' this day I still find it iffy they call someone named "Diễm" as "Yỉm". Unless you have seen the correct way to spell those words before, you can't say for sure. Even now as a working adult I find myself referring to the dictionary to make sure my accent doesn't embarrass me in official emails.
In a perfect world, we can have one single Vietnamese accent that aims to pronoun all these words true to the intended way of the alphabet, but it isn't practical. That being said, one can get pretty far in Vietnamese when encountering new words.
Yeah, and because the "common" way of pronouncing these words/letters have become so entrenched in our minds, it often feels pretentious to hear people actively try to pronounce words in a way that they feel is "correct", for example trying to emphasize the "strength" of the tr/s/gi sounds as opposed to ch/x/d.
That's not quite true. There are many letters that sounds mostly/exactly the same, especially in everyday pronunciation. For example, "gia đình" vs "da đình", or "lý trí" vs "lí trí", or "xổ số" vs "sổ số", etc. If you don't know the word beforehand you wouldn't be able to write it down after hearing it.
It's not a problem, just transition to new writing instruments. I completely forgot how to write in my birth language (Russian) while my English handwriting is slow and messy. Doesn't affect me in any way. There is a valid need to leave a note when technology is not handy, sounds like pinyin solves this problem. Although, unless we are talking scratching out a message with a sharp stone, ballpoint pen and paper is also complex technology.
There is nothing wrong with being sentimental, I lift heavy weights, collect vinyl and do film photography because I like the aesthetic of these activities. But let me force my own kids to learn whatever I think they should learn just like me at home rather than everyone forcing everyone else's kids in school.
The phrase "Tibiwangzi" (Character amnesia) was popular long before the digital age. Back when I was a child in the 90s, middle-aged and old people often found themselves unable to recall specific characters.
I somehow kept the habit of handwriting for years. But as a guy in my early 30s, I do notice characters fade away from my brain from time to time, which wasn't a thing at all in the 20s. And to my surprise, some of the characters are fairly frequently used - I was just completely stuck when I was trying to recall them.
Probably that's how brains and organs peaked and will slowly break down over the following decades just like hard drives.
When I compare my handwriting to my father's I can see nearly 100% computer / phone use for writing has had its effect. With a gigantic number of characters, it would obviously be worse.
It always struck me that a phonetic alphabet for writing rather was much simpler and easier to learn than a system based on pictograms. So much that a society could achieve the same level of literacy with much lower cost if they adapted a phonetic system.
But I wonder if that is actually true? Has there been comparative studies of what mainland China did compared to Taiwan (which kept the traditional system) or Vietnam (which adopted latin letters) and its effect on literacy. Obviously hard to do ...
It certainly doesn’t help literacy in general, but one advantage of a writing system divorced from phonetics is that you can still read old written material even after the phonetics have changed over time.
Another advantage of using pictograms is that people who speak completely different versions of Chinese can still communicate in writing. They may pronounce the characters completely differently, but the characters still mean the same thing.
I don't think you can truly do a proper comparative study for something like this - there's just too many other factors.
That said, you can look at Korean for a historical example of how a well-designed alphabet can fare when replacing a historical Chinese-based system. It actually spawned whole new literary genres by making writing more accessible to large segments of the populace that were effectively excluded before.
I think "complicated" is one way to describe pictogrammic(ideogrammic) languages, and "offloading OCR to geometric sub-systems" is another. Formal Hanzi writings are grid aligned so it's probably more suited for batched processing too.
I wanted to write in cursive a few years ago and realized I had completely forgotten. It didn’t take long to remember with the help of a cursive alphabet, but I was still completely unable to get started without it.
Apparently Gen Z didn't learn to write in cursive at all, since it had been removed from the curriculum. Some US states have since started adding it back.
We have this too! It’s not just treble clefs and ampersands- while everyone can read both forms of g, what fraction of people can draw both forms of g? Of course it doesn’t have the cultural baggage in the US.
OTOH, the pinyin-based typing systems on computers and phones has been a godsend to students of Chinese.
I started to learn Chinese in the 80s at my high school and then in the 90s in Taiwan and was laughably bad at writing. Literally, people would laugh at my characters not only because they looked terrible, but also because I was using the wrong stroke order.
Now, it is possible for me to get away with not knowing how to write characters or the stroke order. Using pinyin and recognizing the characters (or certain radicals) is enough to take me very far in social media, texting, etc.
For instance, for one of the phrases in the article ti2bi3wang4zi4 knowing the last character (zi, 字) and kind of remembering wang is enough to recognize the entire colloquialism when I type in the pinyin tibiwangzi: 提筆忘字
In Taiwan they have a TV game show featuring college students, basically like a crossword featuring 4-character colloquialisms and other phrases that have obscure characters. It's quite fun for the audience to watch, almost everyone is writing characters in the air in front of them as they try to remember the hard characters.
Chinese writing system is a language in itself. You can translate Mandarin, Cantonese and even English to that language. To learn that language is harder because it has to support more than one spoken language.
Using an alphabet would make things far more easier, but then how would people from different parts of China understand each other?
It's not a language. It's a writing system used to write Classical Chinese for 3000 years and Mandarin for 150 years.
When I was in Hong Kong, I was surprised that the written language is Mandarin (in traditional form).
Math notation consists of symbols and syntax (order of symbols).
How to arrange the Chinese characters (syntax) is very different between different languages.
I suppose advocates of alphabetic writing imagine everyone in China (outside Hong Kong and Macau) will be speaking standard Mandarin in a few generations anyway due to standardized public education.
I would argue that alphabetisation would increase the use of regional languages because it would be possible to write down your speech, instead of relying on Mandarin or phonetical transcription with Chinese characters.
This is actually one of the main reasons I don't think China will become a global hegemon. English, with all its flaws, is far easier to speak, read, and write.
I don't think English is particularly easy to speak, read nor write. The pronounciation is highly irregular and the writing system is very non-phonetic. E.g. "spelling bees" don't make any sense in most languages.
Chinese also seems to be moving to the very phonetic and regular Pinyin that (for Mandarin) doesn't suffer from character amnesia.
I do agree that languages are walls between peoples and should be taken down with a global language. Maybe in few decades the kids speak some kind of Chinglish.
"Easier" I didn't say easy. It's a relative comparison. Spanish and ASL are easy languages, but they won't help Peru or the Deaf community become hegemons for their own reasons.
We already have the global language. It's called English lol
Writing is a relatively recent add-on in human history so I was making a point distinguishing the difficulty of the two. There isn't really anything contradictory there. I did this because some people have the idea that the language itself is easier rather than just the writing system.
You are thinking of writing as part of Language difficulty which is fair(I mean it is in a practical sense and I don't disagree) but it doesn't make as much of a dent as you might think compared to difficulty of everything else.
According to the FSI who tracks the number of class hours it takes their diplomats to reach sufficient mastery, Korean and Arabic are still Category IV Languages for native English speakers (along with Japanese, Chinese) despite having a much easier writing system than those two.
Could argue this works in exactly the opposite way.
This "wall" makes the west an open book to china, while for the west it is hard to crack the Chinese. For one thing, think of the implications on recruiting people to spy or interpret intercepted messages from china or on espionage in general.
Also the impact of this "problem" on running a well-functioning highly-productive and scientific powerhouse society is highly exaggerated and easily refuted by empirical facts.
Just think of what Japan and China managed to accomplish in engineering and scientific accomplishment in the last 50 years and they both use character-based languages.
This is true. I learned Chinese and then hitchhiked China in 2018 for exactly this reason. Everyone was yapping about how important China had become, but China was a black box to me.
After months of hitchhiking I came back home unconcerned.
I think the fact that it's a black box makes us overhype China.
China should make another attempt at simplifying their written language. Yes it’s a monumental task, but Korea managed to mostly transition off of Chinese characters.
I think this is not as complicated as it sounds; it's same as how NN classifiers aren't always built to do label to image, only image to label. Being able to do former through a parallel pipeline helps(that's like GAN), but that ability isn't required in training or in inference.
Your OCR engine in the brain might generate "𰻞" for 'zh_hant_適' if reversed, doesn't mean it can't recognize the latter.
It's simply people stop writing stuffs on paper. Nothing too surprising. I myself cannot spell some English words because I rely too much on auto-correction.
I wonder is the increase in external input from a growing world that is full of distraction competes with storage for these kinds of things. Such an intricate writing system might have been easier to contain in the mind before it was bombarded with limitless electronic entertainment and communication. How many people actually sit down and put a pencil to paper these days?
I think the question is rather: should it? Is there a real benefit for average Joe to memorize insane amount and complexity (at least to my untrained eye) of such characters? I think my brain would just explode. I'd rather use my memory for something more creative.
Can't figure out if Moser misspelling "abacus" as "abacas" in the final paragraph was some sort of joke - regardless, extremely ironic given the argument that phonetic systems are better suited for accurate active textual reproduction.
In China, children start studying at the age of 6 and continue until they graduate from university at around 23. They have a large amount of homework and exams that require handwriting. There's nothing to worry about.
“Sneeze” or “喷嚏” is a pretty difficult word to write in Chinese in terms of number of strokes and its internal components. I’m not surprised people wouldn’t know it off the top of their heads. It’s like if someone asked you to spell “unnecessary.”
The other dimension is that the second character 嚏 in particular is obscure: it's virtually never used in any other word than 喷嚏.
In Japanese, it's a hyogai kanji not taught in school, meaning most people would spell it phonetically. Alas, this is not a practical/socially acceptable option in Chinese.
The first, 喷 "erupt", is not exactly common either but is at least used in a few other compounds like 喷水 "fountain".
I don't think anybody is proposing that Chinese people are not normal humans making normal mistakes. The difference is that if somebody asked people to spell "unnecessary", there would only be three common mistakes they would make (based on whether letters are arbitrarily duplicated or not), and all would be easily understood by readers if written.
English orthography is terrible (i.e. a single vowel can be a half-dozen letters), but there's a limit to how complicated it can be to write a word that one knows how to say.
Wiyul I took migh yot to Luffbruh (acting az a cooryer surviss), I inshored my dissertacion woz cerrect bye revuwing the seilerfoan musick. Suddenly, their was a laud noys. I rush't too the sighed of the bote, but I sore the wartre fludding inn. "Quick! Sumbody hasta seel the hoal!" I cryde. Fourtuneatley, the glew oonder the bought's scin maid the holl cloaze up, sow we kepped floting, butt we terned arowned buy mesteak. Immajin mie shock wen wee woshed up in Lossymuth! Eye wonet fourget thatt deigh enny thyme sune, that's fore shur.
(I'm pretty sure this isn't eye dialect: I consulted the rhyming dictionary a lot, to make sure I was swapping spellings between two words with the same phonemes. I also tried to avoid reanalysis, though some of these words might not quite achieve that.)
Unicode has stroke and radical counts for over 75000 characters. As this article states, most Chinese written text on computers is actually typed using pinyin.
Meanwhile, another trend among Chinese teenagers is the use of Pinyin initials to replace Chinese words. For example, 永远的神 (pinyin: Yǒngyuǎn de shén), a meme used to praise something, is often written as "yyds."
These teens have become accustomed to reading and writing sentences composed of such acronyms, and they even use them in real-life conversations—much to the annoyance of cultural conservatives. This phenomenon highlights how online communication can influence offline speech patterns.
It would be rather interesting if technology simply caused people to start writing in the roman alphabet. Phonetic spelling is certainly the superior option, so perhaps that will simply be what people arrive at through inevitable statistical pressure.
it is quite common, since chinese people use hand write not a lot as previous time.The computer and internet will make this more common after serveral decades.
Many people here may not be familiar with David Moser, the author of this article. He’s frequently mentioned in Douglas Hofstadter’s book Le Ton Beau le Marot (fantastic book on language and translation BTW) in regards to matters related to Mandarin. He was a well known (as Mo Dawei) in China’s xiangsheng scene (a verbal comedy routine, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangsheng#:~:text=Xiangshen....) and is probably one of the most knowledgeable foreigners on Mandarin. He started learning it in college in mid 80s.
I understand that the topic of writing systems is touchy because it involves people's national identity and national pride.
That's why all the comments that mention efficiency of different writing systems are heavily downvoted.
But if we think about writing systems' evolution as an optimization problem that optimizes for "efficiency" (whatever that means. It is pretty hard to define so I'm not even going to try) we could easily imagine some systems being stuck at a local minimum. Or maybe even all of them being stuck at different local minimums some of which are smaller than the others.
I remember almost 25 years ago, when I was teaching English in Japan, one of my adult students couldn't remember how to write the kanji (i.e. Chinese characters) for "police".
Text input is now universally phonetic, and young people have a lot of trouble remembering how to write words.
Add to this the enormous (and increasing) use of English words, written either in katakana or actually in Roman letters, and it's plain that Japan is further down the road of losing its writing identity than China is.
I got a little more than halfway into this long article, so I apologize if this was answered at some point. So what?
Many native English speakers can't pick up a pen and paper and write intelligibly and would be in real trouble if they lost their phones; an increasingly annoying number TALK into their phones, not even pretending to type and just spewing auto-corrected crap out into the world.
Doctors have messy handwriting, but I don't think I've ever met a native English speaker who completed elementary school who would pick up a pen and pause, completely uncertain of how to draw a letter of the alphabet. They might make minor spelling mistakes, but I don't think that's closely analogous to the phenomenon the author is talking about.
The "Doctors have messy handwriting" trope derives from the fact that prescriptions often contain a large fraction of Latin terms, chemical names, abbreviations and acronyms that don't parse (and thus seem sloppy/illegible) if you are trying to "decipher" them as English. Doctors don't have significantly messier handwriting compared to similar populations (esp. now that drafting isn't as emphasized in architecture, engineering, and similar programs)
>>>Doctors don't have significantly messier handwriting compared to similar populations
I'm skeptical of this claim. My family doctor had bad handwriting, and one time the hospital worker had to call him to ask if he ordered a x-ray or Ct scan.
Please. I still have my medical charts from my childhood, back before the computers. I can barely read the handwriting there, and it's not because of medical terms.
Apparently, it became slightly better recently, now that doctors spend less time scribbling things and mostly type them instead.
The entire article is an argument to the contrary. It's fine if you disagree with the author's opinion on that point, but it's begging the question to just dismiss it on that basis. They even specifically mention that "this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character", which would be more like a spelling mistake.
What the author describes is a phenomenon like wanting to write the word "analogous" but having no idea how to even begin putting pen to paper. Not writing the word and ending up with "analagous" by mistake.
My hot take - this isn’t that much different than English speakers not being able to write in cursive anymore. It’s just not something that’s as practiced as much now that we have digital input methods.
> After Japanese administration ended, the system soon became obsolete. Now, only a few scholars, such as those who study the aforementioned dictionary, learn Taiwanese kana.
Manny people mistakenly recognise Bopomofo as katakana. I use bopomofo and get this reaction a lot, it just have to mention its actually bopomofo/zhuyin and then they know what it is.
This is not true. If you need to type on your phone, everyone needs to know that the mainland used the Wubi input method, which is Katakana, and now uses Pinyin typing. Taiwan has always used the original Katakana input method. Pinyin typing was invented later.
As a relatively well-educated Japanese native speaker, I too experience this problem when writing Japanese on paper - being unable to write many kanji characters by hand. I am no exception among Japanese native speakers. While the author seems to interpret this problem as something crucial, I question whether it truly is.
The orthography of Mandarin and Japanese includes an alphabet consisting of thousands of characters, the majority of which comprise dozens of strokes. Although East Asian people have higher IQ scores on average, we are not superhuman - our memory capacity is bound by human limits, and the decreased frequency of actually writing kanji on paper has naturally resulted in our forgetting how to write many of them. Is this surprising?
Furthermore, orthography is not part of language in a fundamental sense - it's merely a useful tool that accompanies a language. Therefore, I do not see the writing system becoming less stable as a significant issue. Consider Korea as an example: they used to use kanji in their orthography but have almost completely eliminated it with virtually no adverse effects. While laypeople often assume orthography is an integral part of a language, this is just not the case from the linguistic perspective.
If you consider that a lot of people using the Latin alphabet does use the cellphone autocomplete to check how to write a word used infrequently...
So I would say this text is biased by the "western" view of the writer, something that could be categorized as "Orientalism". A study about this phenomenon is valid, is important. But this post is not a good study.
But autocomplete even for basic words? My wife is Chinese. I'll never forget when she was helping her family write some formal letter in Chinese in Microsoft Word and she simply could not input the numbers 1, 2, and 3 in Chinese because she forgot how. And I know this may be apples and oranges because this is keyboard input versus writing on paper but as a programmer who can type at a moderate pace since I was a kid (~120wpm) this was perplexing for me! And similar to the article, she's an Ivy league grad. Similarly, when she's communicating with her family via WeChat half the time she simply sends audio messages instead of text messages. I'm pretty surprised this method is so popular instead of some voice-to-text google assistant type system.
I think there may be some confusion. The standard Chinese characters for 1, 2, and 3 (一, 二, 三) are among the simplest characters in Chinese: literally just one, two and three horizontal strokes. These would be extremely difficult to forget! What your wife was likely trying to write were the special variants (壹, 贰, 叁) that are used on checks, official documents, etc. These were specifically designed to be hard to alter or forge (think the difference between writing "100" versus "ONE HUNDRED" on a check). Even highly educated Chinese people might need to look these up since they are specialized characters not used in everyday writing.
That explains it. Yup these were some sort of official / govt documents. Thanks for the explanation!
Edit. I should have realized that. I just came back from China and my kids were watching a children's show with the following subtitles: "一二一二一二一二一二一二一二一二一二一二". Took me a while to realize the subtitles were not broken. The characters were marching chanting "one two one two..." :)
I think this is specifically more an IME (input method software) issue than a typing one. Japanese has similar "official" numbers (壱, 弐, 参, maybe some of the few cases where modern Japanese is more simplified than Simplified Chinese). These numbers couldn't be easier to type. I just type 1, 2, 3 (i.e. the digit keys on top of my keyboard), hit the convert key and select the right character (I also get offered 三, ③, 3⃣,³ and several other options to choose from). That's it.
I tried the same with Google's IME and I couldn't use digits as input, like the Japanese IMEs let you do. I could find the character for 叁 quickly enough, but 壹 was only on the second or third page. Still, I suck at Chinese and I found it.
Now, writing these characters is an entirely different story. I think any character that's rarely written and appears only in one common word runs the risky of being forgotten, even if that word is quite simple and used on a day-to-day basis. A word like 喷嚏 (sneeze) in Chinese or 薔薇 (rose) in Japanese fit the bill.
The Japanese fallback, in case you forgot the character is quite simple: you'd just use either Katakana or Hiragana with different connotations[1]. I'm not quite sure what the fallback would be in Chinese, but I guess that would often be picking another character with a close or same pronunciation, as Chinese speakers often do on purpose as a sort of pun.
I also expect there are still fewer cases of "character amnesia" in China than Japan, since the fallback mechanism is simpler and more standardized in Japan, and children are taught far less Kanji in school than their counterparts in Mainland China, Hong Kong or Taiwan.
[1] While Hiragana gives a familiar connotation, writing the word as バラ in Katakana is "more official", if anything, since names of flora and fauna are conventionally written using Katakana in official contexts, especially when you want to use the exact scientific name. This is the equivalent of using Latin names in Western countries, e.g. Rosa hirtula would be サンショウバラ.
>The standard Chinese characters for 1, 2, and 3 (一, 二, 三) are among the simplest characters in Chinese: literally just one, two and three horizontal strokes.
Does that work for larger numbers, keep adding strokes?
I am not from Asia so I would trust more what our wife has to say than me. But I would argue that it is common for people living in a country with different language from they native language to forget how to write or even say some simple words. There's a good active effort to learn a new language.
It might be surprising but, in terms of written words, sneeze (喷嚏) is not "basic".
That's very much the impression I get. I've never seen pinyin used in Chinese writing, and the Chinese friends I've met have said they've never seen it either (they said they'd probably just look up the character or write a homonym instead, but even then it's pretty rare that it comes to that).
That's not to say it's never done, but it feels like an outlier. As if a friend found a word too hard to understand and drew a picture instead, and then the author wrote an article about how spelling is so difficult that it leads English speakers to draw words instead of writing them.
But the thing that struck me the most was just how confused people were when I asked them about it. It just didn't seem to be anything that was an actual issue for them.
> "This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence between sound and spelling. One might forget whether "abracadabra" is hyphenated or not, or get the last few letters wrong on "rhinoceros", but even the poorest of spellers can make a reasonable stab at almost anything. By contrast, often even the most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their hands and ask someone else in the room how to write some particularly elusive character."
- https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
Not at all - forgetting kanji just isn't similar to forgetting how to spell English words, as I think TFA made fairly clear. It's the simplest analogy to make, but it's not near enough to draw conclusions from.
The analogy I've used in the past is, you read kanji with your mind but you write them with your hand, so being unable to remember a kanji is more akin to forgetting a guitar chord or a keyboard shortcut - if your hands stop making the motions, you'll eventually forget them.
Most people cannot accurately draw a bicycle.
Yeah - the other analogy I've used is that everyone can recognize a Starbucks logo, but even if you went to the trouble of learning to accurately draw one, you'd forget if you didn't practice.
I am Italian and was taught cursive in elementary school and I can barely remember upper case cursive letters[0] thirty years later.
In my experience, most people of my generation have generally forgot and usually just write "lower case letters but big" or block letters.
So yeah, I don't think there's anything inherently chinese about forgetting writing things you don't use.
[0] https://www.genitorialmente.it/2016/10/alfabeto-corsivo-maiu...
I'm studying Japanese at the moment and what struck me is how important context is, particularly in reading. You need to know where to read 1-3 letters ahead to read a word and interpret it. That's not really a thing in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way.
I think digital is a big crutch for Japanese/Chinese because you have input methods that help you write what you want to say, so you don't actually need to remember how to write kanji as much in daily life.
> You need to know where to read 1-3 letters ahead to read a word and interpret it. That's not really a thing in English
It happens in a English too, where you see a chunk of letters and mis-predict which word they represent in a way which affects its meaning [0], and sometimes that will also affect pronunciation. [1]
An example from the link:
> "The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families."
A reader linearly scanning along doesn't know whether "complex" is an adjective or a noun, and then whether "houses" is a noun or a verb. I'm pretty sure all human languages have similar problems where a certain amount of look-ahead or backtracking is necessary.
For another example to highlight pronunciation changes, consider the ambiguity of:
"I saw the rhino live in the zoo."
That could mean that the rhino was doing the verb of living, in which it rhymes with "give", or it could also mean that the speaker was seeing it in-person, in which case it rhymes with "drive".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)
seems like an opportune time to also talk about buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
The Chinese equivalent would be the "The story of Mr. Shi Eating Lions":
https://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/stonelion.php
Both rely on intonation (in addition to volume and pauses) for disambiguation, but the fun trick is that in the Chinese version the intonation is an integral part of the lexeme (i.e. it distinguishes between "words").
But I have to say, these kind of sentences (and full-fledged poems) are quite a different beast from simple cases of garden path sentences or syntactic ambiguity[1]. The poem lion-eating poet and the "buffalo buffalo buffalo..." sentence are both highly contrived and unlikely to be understood correctly on the first few goes even with the perfect prosody. They are cool "language hacks", but they do not occur in daily language and I personally believe (although I guess die-hard generative linguists would disagree) that they don't teach us very much about the language itself (except for what are the cool artistic possibilities it opens).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity
Incorrect capitalization.
When this happens in English, teachers will label this as "bad English" and ask you to rewrite. That's how the formal language deals with this problem.
If anything, isn't that an informal solution? It relies on other people to complain that they dislike the sentence, without being able to point to any hard-and-fast rule.
Honestly, it rarely happens in English other than in contrived examples used to demonstrate the concept.
Yes, this happens in English too, but to find examples like this you have to go to Wikipedia, or wrack your brain and see if you remember one. In Japanese, almost every other word is like this.
I went to the first link in your comment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence ), selected the Japanese version of the article, and took the first sentence:
> 袋小路文（ふくろこうじぶん）とは、文法的には正しいけれども、誤読が生じやすい書き出しで始まる文のことである。
As is usual for Japanese, this sentence contains a mix of Chinese(-origin) ("kanji", e.g. 袋 小 路 文 法 的) as well as Japanese phonetic ("kana", e.g. ふくろこうじぶん) characters. Usually, when in a multi-kanji word, kanji are pronounced with (a time-changed version of) Chinese pronunciation. For example, 文法 is "bun-pou", not "fumi-nori" or something else. However, the first character of the article title (fukurokoubunji), 袋, is "fukuro" here despite being in a four-kanji word. Further, 小 is "kou" here, which is nonstandard enough that its dictionary entry does not even list it as a possible pronunciation! [1] Then 路文 are both in Chinese pronunciation (ji-bun), but this does not necessarily make sense because the word is not split in two down the middle, but instead as 袋-小路-文 (bag-lane-sentence, where bag-lane is English cul-de-sac / blind alley). [2]
Now fukurokoubunji is a bit of a specialised word, so it might not be a great example. But in the rest of the sentence, we find 文, which is always pronounced "bun" (sentence) here, even when appearing separately, but could also (though more rarely) have been "fumi" (letter) — nothing but semantical context helps distinguish. Then we have 正しい "tada-shi-i", where 正 could have been "sei" as in 正確 "sei-kaku" (accurate) or "shou" as in 正直 "shou-jiki" (honest), but it isn't just because しい come after. Similarly, 生 in 生じやすい is "shou"(-ji-ya-su-i), which is conjugated from the base form 生じる "shou-ji-ru" and could have been "u" (生まれる "u-ma-re-ru") or "sei" (先生 "sen-sei") or "i" (生きる "i-ki-ru") or more (生 is somewhat infamous for having many readings). And I could go on: 書 could be "syo" (文書 "bun-syo") but is "ka" (書き出して "ka-ki-da-shi-te" conjugated from 書く "ka-ku").
This is a bit like the comments elsewhere here noting that the Chinese word for "sneeze" is a bad example because it happens to have so uncommon characters in it — and then people point to examples like "onomatopoeia" and "diarrhoea" as similar tricky examples in English. I can't comment on Chinese, but existence does not necessarily say much about frequency.
[1]: https://jisho.org/search/%E5%B0%8F%20%23kanji — Kun are the Japanese readings (chiisai, ko, o, sa), and On are the Chinese readings (only "shou" in this case)
[2]: This analysis of 袋小路文 is not completely etymologically honest. By the etymology ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B0%8F%E8%B7%AF#Etymology_... ), we see that the "kouji" pronunciation of 小路 is really a corruption of ancient "ko-michi", which is a consistent Japanese-Japanese reading of the two characters. However, because "ji" is also an (uncommon) Chinese reading of 路, if you don't know the etymology of the word, the re-analysis is appropriate in the context of how hard it is to read the written language.
> However, because "ji" is also an (uncommon) Chinese reading of 路,
It's not a Chinese reading at all (as you can tell because it's ... wildly out of place with the the actual Chinese-derived readings ろ・る, onyomi are supposed to have semi-regular correspondences with each other and with Chinese Chinese readings). It's really just rendaku of ち, the basic root of fossilized compound みち (with still-salient prefix "honorific" み).
But most importantly, you never really see either 袋 or 小路 and expect them to have any other readings; maybe you'd expect しょうろ if you don't know the latter, but unless you're already literate in a Chinese or are blindly memorizing kanji tables, the other reading of 袋 (たい) probably isn't even salient, because it's one of those kanji that almost always takes its kunyomi even in compounds.
Side note, the line about u-onbin kind of buries the implication that this is a loanword from western Japanese, which is the culprit of several quasi-systematic but unevenly distributed divergences from regular sound changes.
> "The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families."
Wow.. I had to read that sentence three times before I got it right.
Maybe because I've seen a similar example used before, but I immediately read it correctly the first time. Honestly these sort of 'problems' only ever seem to occur when specifically created to demonstrate this problem and almost never happen in regular writing.
"I saw the rhino live in the zoo"
Might also mean; "Noted native-American zoologist 'I Saw The Rhino' lives at the zoo"
No it couldn't.
I agree that Chinese/Japanese has it worse, but any language where "Spelling Bee" is a thing cannot be considered phonetic in a conventional sense.
And yet, given the definition and language of origin, most high-level spelling bee participants can make a pretty good guess at spelling a word they may have never seen before.
English is phonetic, it just borrows its pronunciation rules from many differing (and sometimes directly opposed) other languages.
Very true - and every demonstration of “English is hard to spell/pronounce” focuses directly on the exceptions which exaggerates the problem. One analysis I’ve seen puts it that with a single set of rules, 59% of a sample corpus of 5000 English words can be pronounced perfectly from the spelling (of course, there will be regional accent and dialect differences so that percentage will be a bit different for each one) and up to 85% can be pretty close with only slight errors.
Then there’s a percentage where they’re just direct borrowings from other languages and you need to have an idea of how that language pronounces words (especially French), so really only 10-15% or so of English words end up being true exceptions.
1. https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
"ough" has at least 9 different possible pronunciations, how is that phonetic?
Fruit flies like a banana. English has its own ambiguity, so it isn’t really that different.
I can only write Chinese via an IME these days. For one, I’m left handed so writing characters was always a struggle since stroke order worked against me, but it’s mostly how I only use Chinese anyways.
I told my wife our kid should learn to write via an IME as well and she was just horrified about that, though. None of the teaching material really supports it.
Time flies. I can't they're too fast.
I've been (very) casually learning Japanese for a couple years, and almost every time I think I find something "weird" that Japanese does, I almost immediately think of a very similar example in English.
The alphabet is a pretty awesome invention (alphabet > kana-style syllabary > kanji-style logography) but English writing is at least as complex as JP writing, just in different dimensions.
JP's phonetics, for example, are dead simple compared to English's, but they do a good job making up for it by having a few thousand Kanji.
> JP's phonetics, for example, are dead simple compared to English's
I'm not so sure about that. Do you know about pitch accent?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent
I'm not a native English speaker, so I don't really know why, or if, there's a problem for native English speakers to learn or "get" pitch accent. For speakers of many other European languages Japanese pitch accent is not tricky. You listen, and then you speak. Just as you would listen to English, and repeat it the same way.
Japanese, despite being extremely logical and so beautiful in so many ways, is still hard to learn for me, and of course learning the writing system is not done in the blink of an eye (unlike the Latin-based writing system we use), but pitch accent isn't really the problem here.
Is that any more complicated than English stress, though? And regardless, Japanese has a very small number of phonemes (compared to English) and extremely restricted phonotactics.
Yeah, but I don't expect this to be substantively harder than learning most regional accents (could be wrong), and afaik it's also not critical for legibility.
In English you have to know a word in order to pronounce it.
The “ou” diphthong in “hound” and “double” or “would” is pronounced differently. Or “ieu” in “lieutenant” vs “lieu”. Or “oo” in “poor” vs “root” Or “berry” in “berry” vs “strawberry”
I could go on forever. There’s no other western language I know of that behaves like that.
English is a quasi-phonetic language in that most words can be mostly pronounced how they're written, but in some cases it inherits the pronunciation of the language the word came from. I'd imagine many English speakers would consider this an undesirable quirk, though.
Indeed, there has been a tendency over the centuries, particularly in the US, to move towards writing words how they sound or pronouncing words how they're written. Lieutenant is an interesting example, since in the UK we pronounce that "lef-tenant" traditionally, but the US moved to the (IMO superior) "lieu-tenant". Nowadays, most young people would probably use the US pronunciation.
I do take some slight umbrage with the implication that some people seem to be making in this thread that language features can't be criticised or that one language can't be better than another. I'm don't see why this would necessarily be true. Even with spoken languages. There are a ton of annoying aspects to English that simply aren't issues in other languages, and I think it's fair to criticise other languages for their failings too. This is especially true of writing systems, which are human inventions rather than something we learn intuitively.
Logographic/logo-syllabic orthographies are harder to learn and remain proficient at than alphabets/abjads, for native speakers and second language learners alike. Alphabets are an innovation that improved on ancient orthographies and enabled a wider range of people to be able to communicate as easily by writing as they do by speaking. Besides the issue mentioned in the article, the writing systems in China/Japan are associated with other issues we rarely see here. Even dictionaries are a non-obvious challenge with logographic languages, which has resulted in several competing ways to sort words.
I don't think one can reasonably claim that in English "words are mostly pronounced how they're written". I mean, "i" can stand for /i/, /ɪ/, or /aɪ/, for example (and also for /ə/ if you don't count "ir" as a distinct grapheme). Although vowels at least (mostly) follow some predictable patterns based on syllables - but e.g. it's impossible to say whether "ch" stands for /k/, /tʃ/, /ʃ/, or /x/ without knowing the etymology of the word.
Americans pronounce "lieutenant" closer to the native French pronunciation.
> “ieu” in “lieutenant” vs “lieu”
> “berry” in “berry” vs “strawberry”
Am I misunderstanding the point you are making or is my pronunciation just off? I would pronounce both parts of both examples the same.
That's mostly an British English vs American English distinction:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/lieut...
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/straw...
Strawberry is often pronounced as Strawbry. Sou the 'e' becomes silent. And Lieutenant as Lutenant (or leftenant in Britain)
French can be pretty bad. Not as bad as English for reading, but it's much worse for writing because there are so many spelling options for the same thing.
You are right, but you can read French words without knowing the language, because a written word has a unique correct pronunciation.
You have the right idea on “ou” but your other examples don’t make sense.
>That's not really a thing in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)
> in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way
Are you sure about that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
Posted up above, here's a collection of English pronunciation rules that English speakers have internalized so well they can't generally explain them: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
"Ghoti" is mentioned a few times there, but basically "fish" is a nonsensical pronunciation that breaks several rules. There's a reason (well, a few reasons) why if you ask English speakers how to pronounce "ghoti" and they've never seen it before, they'll probably all guess some variation of "go-tee" or "go-tie".
That's such a dumb example because it claims to follow english rules for those letters while ignoring the actual rules. It makes a somewhat humorous joke, but people pretending that it means anything linguistically are either ignorant or intentionally trying to confuse people.
shure!
reads like it would be pronounced with an aspirated -s- not sh.
Not so much in terms of meaning but in terms of pronunciation, sometimes you also need to read ahead in English to know how a certain word is pronounced. For example: "I read a book yesterday." and "I read a book every night." Depending on the context that follows, "read" is pronounced differently. The same thing happens for "present" and "record". Admittedly, these are exceptions to the rule.
When teaching reading and English, learning about context clues is one of the ways students are taught to figure out the meaning of words.
> in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way
Some context-dependent examples: "read": /ɹid/ vs. /ɹɛd/; "lead": /lid/ vs. /lɛd/ (plumbum); "desert": /ˈdɛz.ɚt/ vs. /dɪˈzɝt/.
For more examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)
I think you’ll find all of those things are true of English too.
People find value in the tradition of writing. If Japanese were to ditch kanji as Korea did, I think there would be some complaints.
People love to complain about how much work other people can do in order to slightly convenience themselves. And the media loves to run air their complaints, because they are snappy, and photogenic, and easy to pitch as "feel good stories about how much I care for the old ways unlike those lazy sloppy people over there"... even if "I" also find myself forgetting how to write kanji.
It doesn't matter. It won't be a top-down decision. It'll just be a long, slow progression of people slowly realizing that writing in kanji for this character is annoying, so maybe I'll just write it phonetically, and then that character, and then there will be a year or two where there's a phase change and suddenly it's everywhere, even though nobody decided.
And people will complain and whine and moan about the "beauty" of the kanji disappearing. And even though they have a point, it won't matter because the kanji will still be there as much as they ever were, and all one has to do is go study them... but they won't. Because complaining about how other people should keep doing something hard is easy, but actually doing the hard thing yourself is hard, and the vast, vast majority of the complainers won't actually do anything about it other than complain, but take the easier options themselves, just maybe a year or two later than others.
I have no beef with the people taking the easier option. Life is full of things to spend effort on and we can't give maximum effort to all of them. I am annoyed at people who complain about how other people can do vast, vast quantities of work so they can briefly feel slightly better about themselves in some way.
You'd be surprised how much staying power these things have. The nation and its language are two concepts inherently intertwined. Take the case of Welsh in Wales. It was an almost dead language that no one spoke, but as soon as the Welsh got the ability to self-govern, they enacted laws to mandate all documents and road signs were available in Welsh, required it to be taught in schools, etc. It's very difficult to kill a language in a democratic state because it's a very bad look to oppose laws that "protect the nation's culture". The people who want these things are endlessly pandered to as a result.
Welsh is generally highlighted as the example of a successful language revitalism movement, but it's also one of the rare examples of such movements succeeding. By contrast, you can look at Irish--where the need for the language that wasn't English was seen as absolutely essential as part of the (successful) revolution and independence movement--and see that the language revitalism there is more or less a failure. A century after independence, the number of L1 speakers of Irish has gone down, and I believe the Irish government still conducts most of its business using English (despite English officially being the lesser of the official languages) since so few members of government are sufficiently proficient in Irish.
Kanji is never going away. I struggle to believe anyone who fully mastered kanji would say something like this.
Kanji is not just “harder”. It’s better.
I've studied kanji to some degree. I'm not a "master", but I am aware of the way it resolves a lot of ambiguities in Japanese.
But that does not on its own mean that Japanese couldn't evolve out of Kanji. It is not the case that if Kanji goes away, the entire rest of the language MUST stay static. It in fact would not. It would begin a multi-decade process of adjustment to the new issues.
It has happened before in other contexts, and it will happen again. There's a lot of signs that Chinese is on the verge of such a change (on a decadal time scale), which carries somewhat different baggage, but roughly the same amount of it.
What really throws the wrench into the whole thing is computers, and I don't just mean that it will simply speed up or slow down such a change, but that it could send all of this flying out in an entirely new direction. If we're all wearing augmented reality goggles full time in 20 years, what will happen to ideograms if every ideogram you see comes with floating pronunciation guides, and your googles can also translate phonetic spellings transparently in real time back into kanji/ideograms? Could languages like English start growing something like ideograms, presumably descended from modern-day emoji, if computers erase the disadvantages of emoji that cause languages to largely go alphabetic thousands of years ago?
What I absolutely do know is this: In 50 years, no language will be the same as it is today. Guessing what the changes will be, especially in a rapidly evolving novel landscape, is really hard. I don't think kanji/ideograms being seriously diminished is off the table.
Why is this if you don't mind me asking? I thought that hiragana could already write all the words. What makes kanji so much better than that?
Sure, and there were complaints in Korea, too. Lest we forget, Hangul was developed in 15th century, and was promptly condemned by the educated elites while being enthusiastically adopted by the underclasses. But the elite pushback, going as far as outright bans in some periods, meant that it wouldn't become the standard orthography until 1900s.
I don't think anyone today would seriously argue that Hanja is preferable, though. In retrospect, it's clear that the benefits of easily accessible universal literacy are too substantial to ignore for the sake of tradition.
> I don't think anyone today would seriously argue that Hanja is preferable
It's necessary to use Hanja today in educated contexts because Hangul has too many homophones, and most educated (technical, literary, scientific) vocabulary has a Sinitic origin and therefore are more homophonic than typical Korean words.
Sure, and lawyers in English-speaking countries similarly use Latin and Old French jargon to reduce ambiguity. But this is a fairly narrow use case that is really more of a specialized notation - it's not used day-to-day even by people who regularly use Hanja professionally.
Hanja still get used in some contexts --- had to memorize ~500 of them when I was studying Korean.
AFAIK (maybe someone can correct or confirm) it is essential for studying law in Korea. To avoid ambiguity with identically sounding words, Chinese characters are used in law.
This is the reason Chinese characters are not going away. It is essential to comprehending written documents, because the Chinese language (and similars) have too many sounds that are the same or very similar for different words. So, if they abolish the characters and use something purely phonetic they'll have to reinvent the whole language to be understandable, especially for anything that is not colloquial.
It seems there's room for "legal innovation" there, by providing definitions early on in various texts to disambiguate, and then sticking to them throughout the text!?
I assume it's already done anyway for some terms. Why isn't this more widespread?
Yeah, because Japanese without Kanji is at least 2x harder to read.
"Although East Asian people have higher IQ scores on average, we are not superhuman" weird explicit racism as the highest voted comment
Before calling it racist we could ask him for a reference. After all, it might be a truthful fact.
But yes, it stood out to me too, and I'm confused how you're the only person commenting on it.
I wonder if these people justify having a shitty writing mechanism by being smart. "It's so needlessly complex, but we're smart so we can afford it" when in reality if you're smart you want it as simple as possible.
And then he comes on HN and rationalizes the fact that he can't spell. Ironic.
IQ has been disproved as not an accurate evaluation of intelligence even for problem solving, so asking for a scientific reference for this is like asking a scientific reference for how a certain locally dominant ethnicity have better chakras than another one. they don't, it's just racist.
The absolute state of orange reddit
I found the "we are not superhuman" bit annoying and condescending - replacing with different groups:
"While men are stronger than women on average, we are not superhuman" <- To me, this doesn't seem condescending. Not 100% sure why - perhaps because the difference in the trait (between men and women) is much larger?
"While left-leaning people are smarter than right-leaning on average, we're not superhuman" <- This definitely does seem condescending - perhaps because the skill in question is intelligence, and the statement reads as "You're stupider than me, but please strain your brain to understand".
"While rich people have higher IQ scores on average, we're not superhuman" <- I find this a bit less condescending than the previous one, not sure why. But still annoying for the same reason as previous.
"While whites are stronger than east asians on average, we're not superhuman" <- Again condescending and annoying, but I still think the intelligence statements are more grating.
My conclusion - the statement is irritating because it carries with it an implication people would be surprised Asian people can forget things too. Additionally, it gives the intention that because other groups are stupider, it needs spelling out in simple terms that they're not godly intellects.
Maybe it's less of a factor since the standardization of mandarin, but the difference between kanji and an alphabet like Korean and Vietnamese has moved to is that writing with the alphabet leaves an artifact that is only understood by speakers of the same language, whereas kanji can have the same meaning but different spoken words entirely, such that cultures can communicate through written edicts without totally erasing linguistic differences through standardization. So you're right that the individual language/culture doesn't suffer from alphabetization or pinyinification, but I would submit there is change on the level of multicultural interactions, decreasing the mutual intelligibility between cultures for better or worse
> Although East Asian people have higher IQ scores on average
Citation needed.
Maybe parent was referring to the studies by Lynn, a self-declared "scientific racist".
I think that despite lower IQ scores on average South Korea has been consistently beating Japan in go in the recent years, and more importantly they get rid of hanja (Korean version of kanji) from their writing system.
[flagged]
Here is one citation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10416...
But also in most other IQ tests, Ashkenazi Jewish and East Asian people tend to score the highest.
a) Bad science. b) Unsupported claim. c) Who cares, and why?
As an Ashkenazi Jew with an IQ 3 SD above the mean myself, I focus my attention on that question and have a good grasp of the answer. I also have particular insight into why some Jews have high scores, and how the people who care so much about the average IQs of various populations draw all the wrong conclusions from them because of their ideology. (I would also note that many of those who care so much have lower IQs than a very large fraction of the populations they disparage.)
"While the author seems to interpret this problem as something crucial"
Does he? Read his last paragraph.
My wife is college educated and native Korean, so these are just my observations of her and her friend group's engagement with Chinese characters (Hanja).
Hanja, in daily life, has largely disappeared from colloquial Korean for those under 40 or so. It's still preserved in some formal settings like medicine and law, and is used to appeal to older generations. I've been with my wife long enough to remember when Hanja was still very common to see on newspapers.
There are some small vestigial problem with eliminating from daily life, the large number of monosyllabic Chinese-origin loan words in modern Korean can sometime create ambiguity when written in Hangul. Native Korean speakers will sometimes disambiguate these words by referring to the Hanja, but that's largely disappearing as a habit as well.
Younger Korean generations still learn it in K-12, but it's mostly wasted class time in an already overly crammed education. The kids who focus on it are really geared towards becoming lawyers, and certain kinds of doctors (mostly traditional medicine). STEM focused kids will focus on English instead. As a result there's an active linguistic process occurring where English loan words are slowly replacing Chinese-origin words and concepts in active and modern Korean.
I don't too much about Japanese, but I do have a sense from native speakers that writing the same words in the four major writing systems offers some sense of nuance to how close a reader might be to a concept, or how they might consider it in various ways. From visits there, I did notice the expectation that native speakers could seamlessly read and jump between the systems, often within the same sentence. But I also understand that the pronunciation of Kanji is somewhat nonstandard, and it's not immediately clear how to say something written purely in Kanji (sometimes this is supported by providing explanatory superscripts in another system next to the Kanji). Why persist with this? I suppose it's the nuance that's being conveyed, and this nuance is still prized among native Japanese speakers.
I do get the sense that China has no particular plans on moving away from the system, as it's a unifying source of national identity (and has been for centuries). And they really have very few other options. The main problem is that China is a highly linguistically diverse country, and Chinese offers the ability to transmit ideas instead of sounds which allows speakers of non-mutually-intelligible "dialects" to communicate. Moving to a Latinate system or even to Zhuyin Fuhao (Bopomofo) encodes sounds, not ideas, and risks fracturing the state. It would only become possible if there was a concerted effort, maybe over a couple generations, to Mandarinize and discourage the use of local dialects, but that would also be highly disruptive. Koreans, Japanese (and other adjacent non-Sino languages like Vietnamese, etc.) escaped this either through a higher level of linguistic uniformity, or strong efforts to standardize or teach a national dialect that the writing system (Hangul, Chữ Quốc ngữ, Hiragana, etc.) could amplify.
At one point, apparently it was fashionable amongst teens to type characters by using pinyin and always selecting the first character in the list of options, regardless of the intended actual character. That was essentially phonetic writing, but as a result, texts were incomprehensible to parents (the desired outcome).
If the texts were incomprehensible to parents, how were they comprehensible to their intended recipients?
It's the same logic as writing a sentence like this:
Y U gna be late
It's grammatically completely incorrect. But you can still understand it.
When it comes to chinese/japanese characters, many have the same phonetic reading. So you can do something similar, while selecting the wrong characters.
I think it's just easier for beginners (or teenagers) to go from phonetic to meaning. I guess advanced Chinese readers don't even read the words out loud in their head and go directly to meaning. I'm beginner/intermediate at Chinese and surprisingly, I noticed that my pinyin often seems better than many Chinese natives.
It sounds like the Chinese version of 1337speak.
The real answer to your question: the most commonly used Chinese input method allows you to type the first pinyin letters only, and the algorithm will figure out the most likely Chinese characters you want.
It's not "the parents" can't read it. It's that people who don't use electronics have a harder time reading it.
(I misread the top comment)
Read the nonsense text aloud and then listen. Presumably with practice, you don't actually to actually speak aloud, and your 'inner monologue' voice is sufficient.
Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. It's like an intermediate language (IL) of mind. Many studentds in China can understand a subject but had the pronouciation completely wrong. In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were.
Chinese characters also had the benifits of photographic memory, presumably you are trained with the right method. The key is to detach the "listening/speaking" phonetics from the characters, wire your brain directly to visual ideograms along with reading/writing. Plus the grammar don't have conjugation nor declension, without the tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness and shit, which makes the scripts very fast to parse. I'd argue reading a paragraph of text is extremely fast in Chinese. You can grasp the general meaning from a large chunk of text without sequencially reading every word. It's like one of these novel apps that hightlight important vowel from English sentences for fast reading but still, you have to go to the translation layers of recall - sound - meaning process.
Sadly this art is lost because ideograms are fading in favor of PinYin in cyber world. The rise of shot-vids make literacy an expensive skill.
> In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were.
This is, in fact, the default stance held by most non-CCP linguists. If you read what experts in the Chinese language family say, it's basically "Chinese languages are mutually unintelligible and more distinct than the Romance languages, but because the government of China says they're just dialects and we (as linguists) recognize that the line between dialect and language is basically arbitrary, we'll call them dialects so we can just study the languages and avoid getting sucked into nasty political discussions."
As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy—and this works both to define distinct languages that are otherwise mutually intelligible and to merge dialects that aren't.
> In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were.
This is the correct understanding, even within mainland China, and across all times. The practice of assigning a "mandarin" based on where the capital is/was dates back at least hundreds of years, if not thousands. You can easily Google "Mandarin in Republic of China" to see the Republic of China's attempt to standardize its mandarin. It's really not a CCP issue.
Linguists often use terms like "isolect" these days just to dodge this whole debate and the associated (often very toxic) politics. Not just with Chinese - it's also an issue around e.g. Serbo-Croatian.
I think it's also an issue of translation. "Dialect" in English is variety of a language. 方言 (fangyang, translated as dialect) in Chinese is a regional language or speech. Linguistically, Cantonese and other varieties of Chinese are recognised to be part of the Chinese language group / family.
Cf https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%B1%89%E8%AF%AD/22488993?fro...
I'm sure there are plenty of scholarly academics with a whole body of literature to argue otherwise, but I've never bought all the arguments of how different Cantonese and Mandarin are.
To my mind assimilating Cantonese from Mandarin or vice versa is way easier than French <> Italian or Italian <> Spanish. Spanish <> Portuguese is an interesting contender.
Good luck pretending Mandarin and Cantonese are distinct languages while comparing German and French lol.
I say this as someone with a whole lot of Cantonese dna in my heritage before people get all up in arms. I've personally always figured the barriers to learning both Mandarin and Cantonese was cultural and there are plenty of people in Guangzhou who are perfectly bilingual
How many of these languages do you speak?
I currently speak and understand English, Spanish, Cantonese and Mandarin to varying degrees.
I was forced to take French for 2 years in high school. Never even took it seriously. But because of that, after 6 weeks of private Spanish tutoring, I was able to hold hour+ long conversations with strangers while backpacking LatAm.
I've spoken Cantonese my entire life (but not truly native level). I took an entire year of college level accelerated "Mandarin for Other Chinese Language Speakers". I took it quite seriously. I'm backpacking China right now. I still can't even talk to anyone for more than a couple minutes without having to use a translator or look up words.
> there are plenty of people in Guangzhou who are perfectly bilingual
There are also plenty who move to Guangzhou and Shenzhen and can't pick up Cantonese at all. Turns out having an authoritarian government force Mandarin on you will make the Cantonese speakers bilingual rather quickly.
> Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet.
Yes, they are. Modern Hanzi are a very bad phonetic alphabet.
While a minority of characters are indeed pure logograms (小，大，田，etc.), most modern Chinese words are two-syllabic. And syllables often don't have meaningful connection to the meaning of the word: 东西 （"east-west" literally, but means "a thing, object"), some characters have lost _any_ semantic meaning in most words (“子”), and many more characters can only be used as a part of another word ("bound forms", e.g. "据").
Classical Chinese was more logographic and less phonetic, but modern Chinese is not really close to it anymore.
> Modern Hanzi are a very bad phonetic alphabet
alphabets, universally have one common property: they are sortable.
I challenge you to sort Chinese characters.
This is an idea from James Gleick's The Information. The Chinese may never be able to invent morse code alone, because encoding Chinese scripts is extremely hard, even today (think of all those massive code-points in CJK Unicode, with dups and errors)
Chinese text on the Internet may have some emulation of phonemes, but it's never systematically standarized. It just borrows some aspects here or there.
> I challenge you to sort Chinese characters.
Chinese characters are in fact definitely sortable. There are multiple keys, the most popular ones being by stroke or by sound.
Example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke-based_sorting
> alphabets, universally have one common property: they are sortable.
Isn't this just an arbitrary order? Why could I not assign numbers to chinese characters and sort them? I know next to nothing about Chinese.
Dictionaries written in Chinese exist. They are in a sorted order, just like English dictionaries, so users can quickly look up the word they have in mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_orders
Alphabet is a very specific thing: it's a small set of letters (usually less than 30) where each letter usually represents a single phoneme.
Sometimes a letter might represent a phoneme cluster (such as the letters "x" and "j" in English, that usually represent the consonant clusters /ks/ and /dʒ/ respectively). Sometimes there might be some ambiguity, like two letters being used for the same sound (both "c" and "k" can produce the sound /k/ in English) or one letter having two different pronunciations ("c" can be pronounced as either /k/ or /s/).
What distinguishes alphabets from all other similar written systems is that a single letter cannot represent a combination of a consonant and a vowel and that vowels can be independently represented by letters.
Other similar scripts are Abjad (like ancient Hebrew), where letters only represent consonants and vowels are implied from the context. The Ancient Hebrew script (which is different than the square Aramaic alphabet used to write Hebrew after circa 300 BC) is a later variant of the Proto-Canaanite script, an abjad which served as a basis to all later European alphabets (Etruscan, Greek, Latin, Runic and Cyrillic) and other Near Eastern alphabets (such as Aramaic, Arabic and Syriac). The only pre-modern alphabet (or abjad or abugida) I'm aware of that is not derived from Proto-Canaanite is Hangul (which is a true alphabet, unlike the two Japanese Kana).
Modern Hebrew and Arabic are mixed-alphabets, since some vowels can be represented by consonants, but not all of the vowels, and the letters that represent a vowel leave some ambiguity with regards to which vowels they represent (or whether they represent a vowel or a consonant).
The next type of similar system is abugida, which covers most of the Ethiopian, South Asian and South-East Asian scripts (Ge'ez, Devanagari, Tamil, Tibetan, Thai, Burmese, Khmer and many more). These are all probably derived from the Aramaic alphabet. In abugidas most letters represent a consonant that comes with default vowel (e.g. क in Devanagari used to write Hindi represents /ka/), but there are special diacritics that can modify a letter to have a different vowel (e.g. कॆ represents /ke/ in Devanagari) or even insert extra consonants or glides before the vowel. These combined forms together with the diacritics can get fairly irregular (especially in Ge'ez) and consonant clusters can become quite unwieldy and then about 80% of the consonants would just get dropped in Tibetan. But that's the general idea.
Then you've got syllabaries: these are pretty straightforward systems, where every letter represent a combination of a consonant (or a consonant cluster) and a vowel (sometimes a diphthong or a vowel with a glide). These scripts require you to remember more letters, but the combinations are simpler and more regular than most alphabets (let alone abjads and abugidas). This is the kind of writing system you see getting developed independently more often than others: Linear B, Japanese Kana, Cherokee, Vai, Yi.
Chinese characters are none of these. Characters never represent a single consonant or a stand-alone vowel that can combine with another consonant. In fact, bar few exceptions (such as 儿 in Mandarin) every character represents a full syllable and does not combine to form a syllable. But Chinese characters are not syllabaries either, since there are many characters that can be used to write each sound and they are not interchangeable with each other. A specific character has to be used based on the meaning of the word. This is how logographic writing systems works and modern Chinese is logographic language par excellence.
To appreciate that you have to compare Chinese characters with other logographic languages. Let's take Akkadian cuneiform (the writing system used for writing Babylonian and Assyrian) for example.
Cuneiform was first developed to write Sumerian, but this language was mostly dead by the times of Hammurabi (18th century BC), and it was a far-gone relic during the heyday of the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar II. The Akkadians (i.e. the various Eastern Semitic language speakers of Mesopotamia) needed to write their own language with characters that represented Sumerian concepts, and they used the same methods modern Chinese (or Japanese) speakers use today: using a single Sumerian logogram in its own original meaning (but Akkadian pronounciation), transcribing a word using syllables that represent different words with same sounds and combining multiple logograms to form a new meaning. Like Japanese (but unlike Chinese), Akkadian cuneiform characters can represent a multi-syllable word and multiple logograms can combine to a new word with completely different (and unexpected) pronunciation. Akkadian is also commonly using logograms as word classifier (e.g to indicate geographical locations, gender, type of object and many other things[1]). These classifiers were written, but rarely (if ever?) pronounced.
Egyptian hieroglyphs, which I am even less familiar with than cuneiform, seem to have a far more developed system of classification (determinaties). They also seem to exhibit combinations of logograms to denote new meanigns and phonetic writing from a very early stage. In fact, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the quintessential "pictographic" in contemporary imagination, are mostly phonetic. Each hieroglyphs generally represents a cluster of 1-3 consonants, which probably came from the original pronunciation of the word it represented.
But this is like an abjad! And yes, the Proto-Canaanite abjad probably originated in a simplification of Egyptian hieroglyphs. And like abjads, which dveloped into mixed scripts (like Modern Hebrew and Arabic) and developed optional diacritics, Egyptian hieroglyphs also needed a method to disambiguate the multitude of similar-sounding words. And for that reason most phonetic Egyptian words (as far as I know) are accompanied by a logographic determinative [2] (classifer) that signifies whether it's the name of a God, a city, a house, a lotus flower, a lotus bud, another part of the lotus (stem, stalk or rhizome) or foxes skins. Yeah, these classifiers get rather specific. [3]
No system out there (including Japanese Kanji) is exactly like Chinese characters as used in Mandarin Chinese and other modern Chinese languages, but what I want to show here is that even though Modern Chinese is quite different from Classical Chinese, the writing system is still logographic. All logographic systems (including classical Chinese) have some phonetic features, at the very least in order to account for words that have no agreed-upon logogram. But what makes them logographic, is the pervasive use of logograms in a semantic role to disambiguate meanings.
[1] https://sumerianlanguage.tumblr.com/post/167245277900/hi-i-w...
[2] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/writing/sy...
[3] http://web.ff.cuni.cz/ustavy/egyptologie/pdf/Gardiner_signli...
> Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. It's like an intermediate language (IL) of mind.
I realized this in Taiwan when I started being able to recognize characters, know what it means in English, and have absolutely no idea what the word is in Mandarin. The written language is almost orthogonal to the spoken one.
> The written language is almost orthogonal to the spoken one.
I'm almost certain that this is true of Chinese script (after all, it was and is used for writing many languages!), but it might not be deducible based on this sort of experience.
I say thus because I had a very similar experience after I had to spend a month in the UAE. Thanks to frequent bilingual signs, I started recognizing common Arabic words, but I had no idea what the words are in Arabic or how to say them. But as far as I know, written Arabic is not at all orthogonal to spoken Arabic, every word is written exactly as it sounds.
Arabic is significantly more difficult for English speakers than a Romance language, but you're still able to draw a straight line from symbols to sounds. Once you learn the alphabet, sounding words out in your head isn't difficult. (Naturally, you will not sound like a native speaker for a long time.)
It's true that Chinese words don't inflect, but not all the grammatical categories you list are missing. There are aspect markers like 了 and 正在, and nouns are definite or indefinite even if they're not marked as such by articles: 有 can only have an indefinite object, for example.
> which makes the scripts very fast to parse
Yes my wife is bilingual and she thinks in English but prefers reading in Chinese because it's more terse
Mao and the party nearly adopted pinyin as the national alphabet but stepped back from the brink.
I remember the great Peking->Beijing uplift. Reading "China reconstructs" magazines there were suggestions it was coming, and then it just went away. BBC newsreaders explained it was the new official look. Like Turkey-> Türkiye.
I suspect all syllabery/ideogram scripts have this latent problem. At 2,500 ideograms for "literate" there's a lot of potential to lose non core elements. "Educated" means over 5,000 heading to 10,000 and the complete set is north of 40,000 from what I understand. I can't imagine the investment in time to get there.
Official standard defines around 8k characters in modern usage. I’d guesstimate native highly educated speaker recognizes maybe 6-7k at most.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Commonly_Used_Standa...
> nearly adopted pinyin as the national alphabet
Some years ago I saw street-signs in China that had both Mandarin characters and also alphabetical versions, and I couldn't understand why they would go so far and then omit the accent marks.
I wonder if it's been fixed since.
It's common. The Pinyin transcription is needed for foreigners to be able to recognize the directions, and so it doesn't need accent marks.
Yet then foreigners can't accurately repeat it, like "I'm at the corner of X and Y" or "The hotel is the one on Z road."
Maybe the same reason English road signs omit punctuation.
No, those are not the same, because Chinese is a tonal language. [0] Taking Pinyin [1] and erasing the accent-marks creates ambiguity between several different words.
The English sign-equivalent would be... Well, something so dumb that nobody does it. Like perhaps deleting the ascenders and descenders of letters dbqp so that they look like oooo, which doesn't even help with horizontal space.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
iirc, the official story from the mainland was that during around 1957 in order to boost literacy the govt simplified the characters, something like that...
today i learnt
China is highly competitive, with a history of using ‘merit’ based admission tests.
The system/barriers were setup (as one’s always are) by incumbents, and the way they did it (while continuing to present it as ‘merit’ based) was to lean heavily on tests that require extensive memorization and tutoring, because only the wealthy can afford it.
This is one obvious sign of that. After all, who has time to memorize 40k different characters?
That seems a bit made up tbh. I’ve worked with a fair number of Chinese overachievers (both in domestic China and abroad) and family background/affluence weren’t even remotely as much of a factor compared to the US or India (except for the IITs). Also, I noticed there were many many cases of brilliant young people rising through the ranks of the academic system in China compared to India for example where teachers often simply would not show up in public schools.
Personal background: I worked and studied in the US, I worked in China and I studied in India
I think they mean historic (as in pre-1911 China).
And they aren't wrong, as even major China scholars like Yasheng Huang and Yuhua Wang point out that the Imperial Civil Service in China was stacked against merit due to structural issues that biased in favor of incumbents.
That said, similar issues continue to persist in China to this day due to the Zhongkao.
Specifically, if you didn't attend a academic high school (which only accepts around 45-55% of Zhongkao takers) you wouldn't be prepared for the Gaokao unless it was out of pocket at a cram school (which are now technically banned, but were anyhow exorbitantly expensive in a country where the median household income is $4,000). And if you couldn't pass the Gaokao, you couldn't attend university.
Furthermore, Academic High Schools tend to be few and far between, yet take the lion's share of resources unlike Vocational High Schools which most Chinese attend - but not the ones you meet in an air conditioned office unless you order from Meituan. In the vocational schools you see similar issues of teacher absence and lack of pedagogy.
The failure of the VET system in China has been a major sticking point in Chinese policymaking recently and a lot of domestic research is being done to understand why it failed [0][1][2]
[0] - https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/ET-09-20...
[1] - https://www.ewadirect.com/proceedings/lnep/article/view/9075
[2] - https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/125949173.pdf
Made up how?
It’s still more merit based and class mobile than caste anything.
But the tests are the tests and require massive prep, eh?
And the tests require massive amounts of memorization and time to prep for, compared to western tests - even now.
Historically it was orders of magnitude worse though.
Once you get to ~5000 characters you can read most common texts. Vanishingly few people will know ~40,000 characters; a large fraction of those are obscure or ancient characters that only show up in historical texts.
That is rather the point I was making, wasn’t it?
There are only about 200+ Chinese ideograms. Certainly not in the thousands.
This is comically incorrect. Even the article plainly states that you need to know ~1500 characters to be considered literate in Chinese, with sixth graders required to learn ~2500 characters. A quick perusal of practically any Chinese-language website (e.g. https://zh.wikipedia.org/) will quickly disabuse you of the notion that there are "only 200+ Chinese ideograms".
You might be conflating "ideogram" with "radical", i.e. components of characters. There's probably a few hundred of those defined, but they're more like pieces of characters rather than whole ones. Combining radicals produces very different characters that have totally different meanings; learning the radicals alone buys you very little.
There are thousands of characters, and you have to know thousands. There are tens of thousands of characters in existence, although only highly educated folks will know anywhere near 10000 characters.
The vast majority of Chinese characters aren't ideograms.
Um, no. If you're talking about radicals (of which there are generally considered to be 214), yes, but you can't read / write in general if you only know those. Also, of those 214, a good chunk aren't standalone words. You're never going to see 疒 or 丶 by itself.
You won't have the words for "I" or "you". You might be able to read "melon" but not "fruit". You could read "papaya" and "corn" but not "vegetable". You could read "beef" or "lamb" but not "chicken". You could read "small" but not "few". You wouldn't be able to read "hello" or "goodbye", "happy" or "sad". But you'd be able to count 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, 18, 20...
The fact that characters are made up of radicals does make them easier to learn, though. There are ~2000 characters in the core vocabulary, sure - but it's not like you have to learn to write every one of them individually, just like you don't have to learn the spelling of every English word from scratch. There's common patterns.
Learning the radicals is maybe the first 10% of the effort in learning how to read and write Chinese.
After that, you still have to learn how to combine the radicals in pretty much arbitrary ways to form several thousand characters. The way you combine them is sometimes related to the sound and/or meaning of the radicals, but it's not systematic at all.
The grandparent comment is massively downplaying the difficulty involved in learning to read and write Chinese.
The vast majority of Chinese characters are phonetic compounds, not ideograms. There are only a few hundred ideograms.
I'd say thousands of ideograms composed by hundreds of logograms, and you can be both right (this is actually a very reduced view of what logogram is, but English is quite imprecise on this).
> Chinese people are increasingly forgetting how to write characters by hand.
For those who can’t read Chinese here, I’ll just note that this is basically the equivalent of forgetting how to spell certain words in English. For example, I can read just fine, but there are still words I’m not good at spelling.
I’m just noting this so that this problem doesn’t seem totally exotic or specific to Chinese(/Japanese).
Strongly disagree.
If you can remember the word "chocolate" but not the spelling then you can guess it. You might write choklit or choclate or something but you can at least get close.
If you forget what 警察 (police officer, jing3cha2) looks like then you're just completely screwed. Maybe you can remember a radical or two but it's still just going to be wrong and not meaningfully recognisable.
I guess you could write down 景茶 (jing3cha2) and rely on the phonetics, or use a different word if you know one, but it's still wrong on a level that "choclit" just isn't.
The counter-argument would be that the person could just use the pinyin or use a digital device to get them the characters. But as the article pointed out, those are both modern conveniences. Less than 100 years old both. The script absolutely gives no clues otherwise.
Let's put it this way: We know what ancient might egyptian (most likely) sounds like because they gave their writting system the uniliterals, which are pronunciation guides for complex words. We know that they said waw, and we know what a waw sounds like. They did this probably so they would not to explode their character count from hundreds to thousands.
> I guess you could write down 景茶 (jing3cha2) and rely on the phonetics, or use a different word if you know one, but it's still wrong on a level that "choclit" just isn't.
If a non-native did this in their own way would likely look wrong, but Chinese natives do occasionally use phonics to write or to substitute some characters with others.
Yeah I agree with this. It's also super common in Pinyin to just typo and choose the wrong character through autocomplete.
I'm strictly referring to the handwritten language here, basically I don't think there is an analogue in alphabetic languages.
I don't think these two forms of'amnesia-induced' typos are so different. "Typos" happen quite often, especially when typing on a smartphone and selecting the wrong character. And people learn to read it correctly. It's sometimes used intentionally, e.g. 歪果仁.
Exactly this, it was only recently my Italian friend was musing about how even other European languages don't really have this ability to just absoelootleigh fudge staff ind stihl b undurdudd.
The severity of the problem seems exotic.
> However, this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character. Highly literate people are forgetting how to write the characters in words like ‘kitchen’ (厨房), ‘lips’ (嘴唇), ‘cough’ (咳嗽), and ‘broom’ (扫帚). Victor Mair (2014) provides a striking example of the severity of the character amnesia problem. The following image is of a shopping list hastily written by a social science researcher from the PRC. The writer of the list struggled to remember the characters in ‘egg’ (鸡蛋), ‘shrimp’ (虾仁), and ‘chives’ (韭菜), and simply resorted to Pinyin.
Completely common problem. Anyone that speaks multiple languages sees this everyday, there are many words in Portuguese/Spanish/English I need the spellchecker for (or even translation) to write because I don't use it as frequently in that specific language.
That is happening a lot with cooking, as I started to take it much more seriously when I moved to the US and now my cooking vocabulary in English is much better/wider than it is in my native Portuguese, so I'll frequently use words in english for stuff I should know in portuguese but don't remember.
> For those who can’t read Chinese here, I’ll just note that this is basically the equivalent of forgetting how to spell certain words in English.
I can't read Chinese, but I think the article has a better analogy: "most people can easily recognise the musical symbol for treble clef (𝄞), but very few could draw it by memory."
> I’m just noting this so that this problem doesn’t seem totally exotic or specific to Chinese(/Japanese).
English orthography is exactly that. Exotic.
Imagine having such a strange spelling system that you have competitions where you try to recite spelling. Exotic.
Many people would consider Spanish, my native language, to be much more straightforward when it comes to spelling.
We still have spelling contests at state and nation levels.
I am from Spain and I have never heard of the national spelling contest.
I guess every word in that contest must have a v/b/y/ll or an h.
> We still have spelling contests at state and nation levels.
That’s horrible. ;)
Except in German this is not a problem. The idea that you could say/hear a word and not know how to spell it doesn't even make sense in that context.
Nah, it's common in German too. For example, the first parts of "Widerspruch" and "wiedersehen" are said/heard the same, so you just have to learn the spelling. Many, many other examples... Although on the scale of languages German is indeed closer to phonetic spelling than some others.
But if you were asked to spell the words, you'd produce something close to what was expected, rather than drawing a blank. The question "how do you spell wiedersehen" contains in itself a lot of clues.
This feels more like "what's the Unicode character for 'full moon'?" I'd be able to recognize the result as correct, but if I don't know the answer, I just don't know.
(Of course, that goes too far in the other direction. I assume you can draw a few strokes to "get someone started" on a character and they'll pick it up, whereas most people wouldn't recognize the first half of a Unicode code point. As the grandparent poster said, it's an exotic problem that's hard to empathize with in phonetic languages)
I do not think that the example is good. "Wider" and "wieder" have different meanings, even if they are probably derived from the same word.
I do not know if this is true in all the German dialects, but at least some pronounce "wider" with short "i" and "wieder with long "i", so they are easy to distinguish when heard (like the difference in English between "fill" and "feel").
English and German appear to have had a similar semantic evolution for this pair of words, because "wider" means "against", while "wieder" means "again", so in both cases a single word has evolved to cover these two different meanings and the variants have become differentiated in pronunciation too.
> Except in German this is not a problem.
I don't know any German, so I can't comment on this, but I'll add that the concept of a spelling contest (like we have in English) wouldn't make sense in a lot of languages because the spelling of words are so obvious/consistent.
If you need an example of a germanic language that has a very regular phonetic spelling I think Dutch is a better example than German. German has a lot of idiosyncrasies, because the spelling tries to preserve the etymology of the words. In Dutch they don't bother trying to preserve a word's history, everything is written as it sounds. (With a handful easy to memorize exceptions)
>In Dutch they don't bother trying to preserve a word's history, everything is written as it sounds.
That explains why it looks like a 'silly' version of english to english speakers.
Finnish does this very well too. There is only a few tricky parts, but in general the spelling and pronunciation match. And if they don't, obvious solution is to write as word is pronounced. Which is a drift, but I think it is more desirable way.
And Italian. Way back in time I used to get phone calls (at work) from Italian customers not speaking English, and I could always write down what they said on the phone, and get it right. Always. I knew very little Italian at the time.
I think Spanish is a much better example for write how you speak and still being correct, than German.
Hmmm not so literate people (or just children) make a lot of mistakes writing Spanish because a bunch of letters are pronounced the same. And then the “h” when not preceded by a “c” is silent, which causes issues.
What is true however is that of you learn the pronunciation rules you should be able to read a text correctly even if you have no clue what you’re saying. That’s not true of English for example.
Is it? There is a lot of historical spelling in Spanish, though not as much as English. German, on with the other hand, has its spelling routinely updated every few years.
The article points out that, because Chinese is not a phonetic language, if you don't know how to write something, you might not be able to write it at all, while in phonetic languages you can always spell something that sounds the same. E.g. "snees" for "sneeze".
This is true in mainland China, but not in Taiwan. There, katakana is used as pinyin, and words can be composed by katakana.
I'm not sure where you've got this from, but I lived in Taiwan for years - you might be thinking of 注音 which does look similar to kana but is distinct and unrelated.
And the authors article is referring to the writing of the logograph - 注音 is strictly for pronunciation.
Even the Chinese Character Heroes competition mentioned in the article seems a lot like the spelling bee in the US, doesn't it? I wonder if the anecdote about the PhD students has a cultural dimension in addition to language proficiency — could the students have refused not because they don't know the characters, but because they aren't fully confident they wouldn't make a mistake?
I think the example of "ampersand" "&" is good.
We have a word describing what it is, we have a symbol of how it looks, and we have a word of how it is pronounced "and". We also tend not to write ampersands down by hand. Its a more common symbol. However unlike the treble clef the meaning and the pronunciation is the same so perhaps the example isn't as good?
Yes, I endorse his research. As a Taiwanese, I use Traditional Chinese daily in Taiwan, primarily on computers and mobile phones, but I can’t write many of the Chinese characters he mentioned in the article.
I can share a more personal story: after spending a year studying abroad in Britain, I almost forgot how to write Chinese characters—even my own name—since I hadn't written any for over a year! However, when I returned to Taiwan, I was able to recall most of them within minutes. I consider this a temporary phenomenon that fades quickly with focus and a bit of practice.
The Heisig method, which recursively breaks down Chinese characters into patterns with arbitrary meanings, can help you sidestep this problem. You're never dealing with shapes anymore, but rather reconstructing stories from these stroke/meaning pairs. Since patterns consist of subpatterns, you can tweak the level of granularity until a sensible narrative emerges. Just recite that story as you move your pen.
It's a lifesaver as an adult foreign learner, but I don't really see anything preventing native writers of Chinese and Japanese from benefitting from this general process as well. I've wondered if the guys who pass those truly insane 6,000+ character exams have to fall back on some sort of hack at that point.
As another adult Chinese learner, does something like the Heisig method really help with language acquisition or just memorizing characters? I’m skeptical because of the immense amount of time it takes to learn even without elaborate story construction for each character. I’ve kind of resigned to being a word processor idiot, and only memorizing characters in handwriting as a bi-product of usage.
It may be anecdotal, but I once involuntarily trained my memory by trying to recall what I've been doing each day. After a few weeks, my memory noticeably improved.
That's to say, the task may feel insurmontable at first, but if you give time to your body to adjust, it should become easier.
That's very interesting. Did the memory boost persist? If so do you do any maintenance exercises like the original ones or have you noticed other effects?
It's designed for Japanese where it probably works better - pretty much all Kanji have multiple pronunciations that can be completely different to each other so it makes some amount of sense to ignore the sound and focus on the shape and the meaning. Much less relevant for Chinese where you can usually tie the character to a single sound and learn all three halves at the same time.
I did Heisig's Remembering The Kanji as my first step on my Japanese learning journey. It helped make the written language feel more accessible, and I took it on as a fun challenge, but in hindsight only learning to read is important and learning to write is mostly a waste of time. Learning to read is vital, but being a word processor idiot is how everyone is living their lives for the most part.
As someone who switched to using a keyboard for writing at the age of 14.. yes. But at least I can write my own language by hand, if I have to, even though it looks horrible (always did). I can draw it instead of writing it, and it looks better (filling in forms and the like).
For Japanese I use a keyboard.. should be fine but.. no. Whenever we're at a table and need to jot something down on paper, or near a whiteboard, I feel like an illiterate person, because I can't write by hand. I can read stuff I can't write. Even hiragana. I never did enough practice. My wife writes down everything so easily.. and I can't. Writing romaji.. argh. I hate that I can't write, by hand, what I can read.
You've got it backwards. The Heisig method is faster, and less work overall. It takes about 10 seconds or so to set an image in your mind of the scene for a character, then a handful of reviews over the following weeks. Then you never forget it.
Classical methods would have you drilling characters for hours upon hours of wasted time.
I mean to say that my current method mostly omits hand writing. I can use a keyboard or phone to write and I can recognize characters fine. But on top of just learning a language, is Heisig so effective that I will be able to also memorize handwriting each character? Or do people measure how useful it is by being able to memorize the strokes for many characters, yet fail to become fluent in the language otherwise?
It surely helps. Mnemonics are a good tool for memorization. You don't have to remember elaborate stories, just something like: "歌" - "older brother lacks singing". It certainly doesn't work with all characters, but it helps.
fwiw I studied Japanese, but I believe most of this still applies.
It's divide and conquer. When you are reading the book, you are indeed just learning the characters. It's a significant ~2-3 month investment that maybe doesn't make sense unless you plan on living and working in the country. But once you've gotten through it, it absolutely feeds back into vocab acquisition, since the characters are now completely unambiguous to you. Much like how Latin/Greek helps with English, you can also work out what entirely new words might mean if you are familiar with their characters.
I did RTK. I also learned to read around 3k kanji. Turns out it wasn't at all necessary to learn to write that additional 1k Kanji in order to become able to read / distinguish it.
The time is better invested in simply studying how to distinguish visually similar characters. That alone solves the problem directly.
Characters are not words. Most words are 2- or 4-character combinations. Individually they have fragments of meaning, so you may get a hint, but not enough to understand for sure unless you’ve learned the word.
If this seems oddly familiar, you may actually have read it before, and no plagiarism is involved. Moser wrote the beginning of this article in the middle of his classic essay, ”Why Chinese is So Damn Hard” https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
> Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??
This page is from 02004: http://web.archive.org/web/20040811151534/http://pinyin.info.... Possibly the rest of the article is not simply an excerpt from it.
嚔 is an unusual character, though. Not just in that it's not often used, but also because it's construction is atypical. It would be like Ph.D. students forgetting how to spell "onomatopoeia," which, yes, wouldn't be surprising.
The sneeze example is contrived because in English, sneeze is both phonetic and a word with common occurence.
A better example might involve a common English word with a wierd, non-phonetic spelling. A word that you might imagine it forgivable for even someone who recieved an English PhD to misspell. After all Chinese is a seperate language from English and it is neccessary for it to be evaluated in its own context.
If you think this definetly couldn't happen in English, take a look again at this post -- for it contains eight outright, unambiguous, misspellings of common English words that I would not be surprised if even an English PhD from Harvard made on occassion, especially if your choice of three students were unlucky and they were having embarassingly bad days. (After all, English PhDs isn't the study of spelling, it's the study of literature).
It may be contrived, but it still highlights the key difference.
Even if sneeze was a word that you were taught once in school and hadn't used for 30 years, you would still likely get close to the correct spelling from the sound (sneaze, snease, sneeze), and seeing the misspelling also helps with recall and to self correct.
This is the "virtual circle" of speaking/listening -> reading -> writing -> referred to by the author, which is not possible with Chinese.
It's true that there are some weird non-phonetic English words that PhDs would likely misspell, but it's not 100% of the language and you still could at least make an attempt.
It's possible to just write Chinese in phonetic form (e.g. pinyin), which bypasses this issue, but you have a secondary problem, which is the extremely narrow range of syllables (~400 * 4/5 tones = 1600-2000), resulting in quite ambiguous text.
This is not analagous. The sound of every English word give clues – and often precise guidance - on how to write it, but the sound of a Chinese word typically offers no hint of how to write it. If you give me some obscure English word, say "persiflage", I might have no idea what it means, but I can probably spell it. But if you give a Chinese speaker 馘 (góu) in context, almost no one will be able to write it, even if they know the precise meaning ("to cut off the left ear of the slain").
I would guess that most Harvard students could spell those misspelled words in your comment correctly if you asked them to directly. When reading we know what the word is supposed to be and we correct it in our mind to the intended spelling. If anything it’s a testament to the resiliency of phonetic alphabets - but more so it’s illustrative of how English pronunciation has deviated from spellings that were mostly set with the advent of printing in England. Most of the misspellings in your comment involve misplaced letters that are not directly pronounced.
Strictly in terms phonetics, why couldn’t “weird” be spelled “wierd” when English also has “tier”? I’m guessing the Normans are to thank for turning “wyrd” into “weird”.
Something like Wednesday or was it Wensday, Wendsday, Wednsday, Wedensday, Wednseday, Wednesdy, Wednesay, Wedsday, Wednseday, or, Wendseday?
Even with the misspellings it's obvious what words you meant. If someone forgets how to write "嚔" are they just missing a few strokes but it's obvious what they actually meant? Or do they have zero clue what it's supposed to look like?
Therein lies the resiliency of phonetic orthography: despite the misspellings the sound represented by the words did not significantly change thus most readers would never even notice.
If anything it’s a statement on how the orthography of English in particular doesn’t well match the phonetic structure of the language - something due to a confluence of factors in English several hundred years ago, including the rise of printing.
Remember the english -> pirate translator? Simularily, per your graf, a "spell wrecker" tool, witch introduces mispellings and other errs, could be amusing.
Well done. I spotted weird on its own but I had to go looking for the others.
>It would be like Ph.D. students forgetting how to spell "onomatopoeia,"
A (native) PhD student forgetting how to spell onomatopeia might be normal, but 3 I would say is statistically unlikely.
I admit I would have liked it if English language Ph.D candidates had some basic working understanding of Ancient Greek, Latin and Old English to serve as a cornerstone for their studies, but that ship has sailed more than a century ago. If you know Greek, onomatopoeia is not that confusing anymore, and you'd know that if you want to be super-pedantic, the plural of octopus would be octopodes, but never octopi.
Then again, if you knew some Old English, you would know correcting everyone and forcing them to use the "original form" is a silly goose chase. You'd know better than to remind everyone that children is a pesky double plural, and childer (from the old English cildru, and like the German Kinder) is more than enough? Or to remind everyone that's it's not "a newt tail" but rather "an EWT tail" and please mind your ewts and a good day to you to sir.
Or maybe there will be some people who would still keep doing that, who am I fooling...
The fact there are two variants of 嚔 (嚏 and 嚔) implies that even ancient chinese people found it difficult and they misspelled it.
I would honestly be astonished if a 4 English department PhD students who were all native speakers of English could all not spell onomatopoeia. I’d expect 2 of the 4 could in the absolute worst case.
Spelling is simply not as hard as remembering hanzi, even in English.
You can spell as onomatopia and people will understand you just fine. You can't do that in Chinese.
Would it not be possible that the three students did not want to embarrass the author by showing their knowledge? I sometimes get that behavior from Chinese and Japanese colleagues when I am supposed to know something but temporarily forgot it (or just cannot access it at the time).
No, they really just forgot the characters. I lived in Japan for the better part of a decade and it isn't at all uncommon. There were many times when I explicitly asked natives to recognize or help me with a Kanji and they struggled as well. I doubt everyone's been systematically lying when you genuinely ask for help.
The reason is just digital input really. Pinyin and Romaji typing have become so common that a lot of people write Hanzi/Kanji by hand less and less and it's so complicated of a skill there's really no other way to get it in your brain other than practice. I even notice it myself, I easily recognize 10x more characters than I can accurately write.
I've seen my wife (Chinese) and her friends (also Chinese) have this same problem with the exact same word "sneeze", so I'm inclined to believe the author.
The fact that 嚔/sneeze is usually the go to example means it ends up becoming the exception that proves the rule. Most other characters are much more easily remembered.
Yeah, this particular character seems to cause people problems because it’s not really used anywhere else.
As a Chinese native speaker, I should admit that I forgot how to write them ("sneeze" characters 喷嚏) before I saw them just now. One of the reason, I think, is they are used quite often in oral Chinese, but rarely in written Chinese. And those characters are not easy to write, as you see.
Happens all the time to Japanese people, too. There's a core set of characters that are well remembered, then there is a set of characters that you can remember most strokes of (so that someone else can read it) and then there's the stuff where you just have no idea.
Of course, you _can_ escape to Hiragana if you're so inclined, but then you would show that you don't know the character - so it's just avoided.
Ambiguity is king in Japan.
That’s a pretty good point… if I saw ‘three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard’ forget how to write ‘sneeze’, I would assume they were lunatics pretending, not that they genuinely forgot how to write the word.
Does that imply learning the advanced literary culture, that is usually associated with prestige academia, has a vastly higher threshold in Chinese than in English?
It’s pretty disturbing for language itself to be a potentially retarding force on learning.
A better example than sneeze might be diarrhoea. In Chinese this is very easy - 拉肚子 - but I'm sure there are English speakers who might forget the spelling for diarrhoea if they're having a bad day.
Does English not have a native word? It would be „Durchfall“ in German, and the Greek word only be used if one wanted to be fancy.
All three PhD's were perfectly capable of communicating the word for sneeze and also recognize it in writting. They just couldn't write it exactly.
I don't think it has a slowing effect. Except maybe by adding annoying/useless classes for mid/primary students - which is just par for course everywhere else. I can name 3 objectively completely useless classes from my european youth (plus one in college) that were only there because 'culture'.
How does your assessment of the relative usefulness of ‘classes’ from youth relate to the possible existence of a retarding effect arising from language differences?
Having read it, the rest of the article was new.
Thanks!
Thank you for this. I checked the date on the article twice and still couldn’t shake the strange feeling of deja vu.
The article lumps together writing characters slightly incorrectly and failing to come up with the character at all. For instance, the game show contestant wrote the word "烹" with one extra stroke, while the writer of the shopping list writer gave up entirely on the characters for "egg" and "chives". (This is analogous to the difference between misspelling an English word and not being able to think of the word at all.) In the story of three PhD students who couldn't write the characters for "sneeze" (打喷嚏), it's entirely unclear if they were completely stuck, or if they just made small mistakes.
My question is if "character amnesia" describes trivial errors or if people are forgetting characters to a significant extent. In other words, is this article genuine or is it the equivalent of claiming English writers suffer from "word amnesia" because they sometimes need to look up a spelling?
> In the story of three PhD students who couldn't write the characters for "sneeze" it's entirely unclear if they were completely stuck, or if they just made small mistakes.
The article says "all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment", which in context, reads clearly to me that they were embarrassed for not knowing where to start, not that they wrote them down with minor errors that they were embarrassed about after checking a dictionary. The rest of the article strongly reinforces this interpretation. For example: "‘lift the pen, forget the character’... this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character..."
Further in the article he discusses the 'virtuous cycle'; connections between writing, speaking, and reading. With phonetic alphabets, the way something is spoken reinforces the way that it is read, the way it is read reinforces the way that it is written, the way that it is written reinforces the way that it is spoken (for the most part, even English fails this cycle sometimes). However, with character sets the cycle is broken, and the speaker has to learn 3 different memorization techniques.
Regarding your question, there is a difference between not knowing how to write a word and not knowing how to spell a word. If someone in English doesn't know how to spell 'sneeze' or any other word, they can at least come close enough and convey information 'fuzzily' via text using an incorrect spelling. Now that I'm writing this, though, I suppose with character sets like Chinese if you know characters that are close enough you potentially could use other characters to convey the information, like mouth-fart for sneeze or something along these lines. But I don't speak the language, so that is just a theory.
Do Chinese speakers use the language this way if there is a character they don't know how to write?
> Do Chinese speakers use the language this way if there is a character they don't know how to write?
I'm by no means an expert on the topic but one thing I have noticed in learning Chinese languages is that there are a huge number of homophones. That means there are probably 20 other characters with the same pronunciation for any given syllable that are considered different words (not to get into it here but the conception of a word in Chinese languages can be a bit odd too). It seems to be very common for people to use the character for a similar sounding word or syllable to write slang words or local dialect words that don't have an official character.
In the example at the start of the article, 烹, the contestant wrote "child" when the proper grapheme was "complete." That's a non-trivial error, even if it is only one stroke difference.
> That's a non-trivial error, even if it is only one stroke difference.
As is the difference between "fitter" and "filter" in English.
Even less of a difference. There's no equivalent character, so it's clearly 烹 written with an extra stroke. It's more like the difference between writing "deceive" and decieve."
I don’t think so, no. English is phonetic and so some of those spelling errors can come down to your dialect pronouncing the word differently and forgetting the official spelling. That’s now how Chinese characters work though. It tells a story, and a story with “child” instead of “complete” is a vastly different story.
The equivalent in English would be writing "ghyche" when trying to write the word, "fish". Yeah, that combination of characters/marks can make sounds equivalent to "f" "ih" and "sh" but it's so far off it's laughable.
> This is analogous to the difference between misspelling an English word and not being able to think of the word at all.
Part of the distinction is that you can always at least misspell the word when using an alphabet. That's why the shopping list used an alphabetic script.
If people normally enter characters in their phone or computer rather than actually handwriting, then there is no reason to keep remembering all of the character details.
Just like it doesn't matter that I frequently am uncertain about spelling for some words because we have spell check built into everything.
Do Chinese usually use pinyin to enter characters or what is the normal method? Whatever it is, they don't need to remember the character strokes apparently.
Some older folks, particularly those with regional accents or less Pinyin education, stick with handwriting input (which was surprisingly good even ~20 years ago) - drawing the characters with a stylus or a finger.
Most folks these days use Pinyin. The T9 input method (Pinyin, but using a nine-key telephone pad) is popular with folks who grew up using dumbphones.
Finally, voice input is really popular in China. Lots of folks send texts (on WeChat) as short voice messages. WeChat even has a feature to auto-transcribe these voice messages.
But Pinyin is based on pronunciation, which varies across China. So Pinyin is based on Putonghua ? So Pinyin reinforces the role of putonghua as a project of national unification ? And the pre-eminent role of Beijing ?
Exactly.
> Do Chinese usually use pinyin to enter characters or what is the normal method?
In mainland China, it’s pinyin, but in Taiwan, they often use Bopomofo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
Either way it's phonetic; it's not based on either the radicals or the strokes. Even though there are input methods that use those, they are not commonly used.
There are other input methods such as Cangjie or Sucheng which are also popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong. They have much faster WPM since they are based on the structure of the characters. Pre-smartphone there was a Q9 input method with one stroke mapped to each of 8 numbers and a wildcard for if you forgot.
> Just like it doesn't matter that I frequently am uncertain about spelling for some words because we have spell check built into everything.
But it does matter that you don't know the spelling for some words. For one, you don't always have a computer to fix it for you. For two, the computer's spelling is often wrong and you need the human knowledge to fill that gap.
The interesting thing here is that nobody writes chinese one character at a time with pinyin; you almost always type out an entire phrase in pinyin, and usually there's only one meaningfully correct combination of those sounds in terms of characters and meaning (that's how the listener can tell what you're saying, after all, when listening) which will be the first choice in your input software (input software traditionally gives you a first choice with what it thinks the entire phrase is, and gets shorter with the 2nd choice onwards to partially match a phrase.)
The problem is not that people can't recognise the words; it's that we can't write them if given pen a paper. If the phone gets it wrong you just choose the nth choice instead of the first.
> For one, you don't always have a computer to fix it for you.
You can't be serious. I thought that the "you need to be good at algebra because you won't have a calculator in your pocket" argument died out naturally. I can't recall the last time I actually made hand-written notes.
> For two, the computer's spelling is often wrong and you need the human knowledge to fill that gap.
It happens to me once a month that the computer cannot recognize a correctly spelled word, and virtually never in English.
> You can't be serious. I thought that the "you need to be good at algebra because you won't have a calculator in your pocket" argument died out naturally. I can't recall the last time I actually made hand-written notes.
Then you are an extreme outlier. Most people write plenty of things down by hand in their day to day life. And there's no reason for the argument to die out, because it's completely correct.
> It happens to me once a month that the computer cannot recognize a correctly spelled word, and virtually never in English.
Again, this seems like an outlier. False positives and false negatives are both quite common in spell checkers.
This discussion wouldn't be complete without a mention of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_..., which AIUI was initially constructed as an argument against Romanization.
In short, it's the same nominal sound with varying tones ("shi", which is closer in pronunciation to "shirr" than "she"), repeated about a hundred times, which is of course meaningless in spoken form (since there's not enough context to differentiate between the various forms), but actually conveys a story in written form.
With the shift toward typing and (especially mobile) computerization in the recent era, it's really not surprising (to me, at least) that Chinese society is moving in a direction where literacy no longer extends to recall of individual characters, and only encompasses recognition, since recall is no longer as necessary of a skill in day-to-day life.
The poem is written in Classical Chinese, which was spoken over 2000 years ago, and back then would have been intelligible to a listener because the words would have sounded different. Even today, they sound different in e.g. Cantonese.
There's a close relative of Mandarin (Dungan) which is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. The spoken language is tonal, but tones aren't used in the written language because written words are polysyllabic, and if you know how to speak Dungan, you can reliably infer the tones.
https://www.omniglot.com/chinese/dungan.htm
The poem uses now-rare characters from classical Chinese but it was written in the 1930s and uses the modern Mandarin pronunciation of said characters. The whole point of the poem is to make everything "shi" in modern Mandarin pronunciation, to argue against switching from Chinese characters to Latin alphabet romanization.
You can also construct ridiculous sentences in English that no native speaker will understand [0].
In normal texts written in modern Chinese, this is not a problem. Nobody writes real texts like the "shi" poem. In cases where something can only be understood in written form, you can rephrase it to avoid homophones.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
This argument is also used for Japanese, but I do not consider it valid.
This just proves that a phonetic writing is not sufficient, but it does not mean that the phonetic writing must be replaced with traditional writing.
To resolve the ambiguity of the phonetic writing, both in Chinese and in Japanese, where the ambiguity is much worse, it is enough to retain at most a couple hundred symbols to be used as semantic classifiers. It is likely that a great part of the traditional radicals would be suitable to be retained as classifiers, with perhaps a part of them omitted if redundant and a few other symbols added, if necessary.
Then the writing could be phonetic, but with classifier symbols attached to words, wherever the ambiguity makes them necessary.
This is not a new method. The oldest writing systems, like those of Egypt or Mesopotamia, also used classifier symbols (with meanings like: "a kind of human", "a kind of god", "a kind of animal", "a kind of stone", "a kind of wood", "a body part", "a kind of tool" and so on) attached to the words written phonetically, to avoid ambiguities.
If one would have to learn only 200 classifier symbols and with lower stroke counts than most symbols used now, that would be a great simplification.
Many of the Chinese characters are actually intended to be composed of two parts, a semantic classifier and a phonetic symbol, but this principle is applied too inconsistently and with too many variants, so the system can be greatly simplified by using a simple phonetic writing like Pinyin together with semantic classifiers inserted in the text only if they are necessary.
I think ambiguous homophones aren't actually much of a problem. There's usually only correct option that matches the surrounding context, so the correct inference is easy to make even with no characters at all . After all, there aren't subtitles when you're talking to other people, all the homophones still exist, and yet communication doesn't seem to be impeded.
> Many of the Chinese characters are actually intended to be composed of two parts […]
That is not entirely true in the case of Mandarin, but it is more true in the case of Cantonese (and a few other Chinese languages).
Owing to the historical loss of sounds (especially finals) over the course of the Mandarin development, many Mandarin words tend to be longer (3-4 syllables are common) compared to their counterparts in, say, Cantonese where they are most of the time (but not always) are two syllables long due to the fact that Cantonese has retained more sounds from Middle Chinese (plus, the intermingling with the Bat Yue) over the course of its development.
Which is why the «Lion eating poet in the stone den» still makes some sense when read out loud in Cantonese (also in Wu, Min) and makes no sense in Mandarin.
Thanks for the interesting link! Nitpicking a bit, but if I understand this page (linked from the wikipedia article? see point 3)
https://pinyin.info/readings/zyg/what_pinyin_is_not.html
correctly however, the text was not meant as an argument against romanization but as a playful example of how pinyin are unfit for classical rather than modern vernacular chinese.
I'd accept that interpretation. To be more precise, I view it as a demonstration of information loss from replacing classical characters entirely with romanization, as opposed to a forceful argument against any form of adoption of romanization.
> Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den
Sounds like Buffalo buffalo, but it's more like someone being clever than pointing out an actual problem with the language.
I think a helpful analogy here for the non-chinese is recalling the names of pieces of music from hearing a short part and vice versa. I'm classically trained, and in my circles I can probably hum out a short piece of music that'll have other musicians go "I know the piece but am drawing a blank on the name" and vice versa. I know I'm not the only one to have had that happen to pieces I'm actively practicing :)
Anecdotally, I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half).
I guess this is analogous to only remembering the main themes of a piece and forgetting how the rest of it goes. I'll recognise it when I hear it, but can't recall it off the top of my head.
The Greeks and the Romans got it right; a small set of characters that can be combined to form any word. Complexity from the composition of simpler elements, not inherent. Computer interaction via keyboard makes the superior design all the more obvious. Those guys were ahead of their time. Ave imperator, morituri te salutant.
I would argue that a system like the Japanese Hiragana or Katakana are a better system: they are each 56 letters that directly correspond to syllables. So "ha" is a single letter, as is "he", as is "be". With this nearly everything you say is directly translated both directions, and there are fewer complications (there are always a few, for example in Japanese one of those 56 letters is "n".. so no vowel, and in many dialects you say "s" for the "su" character if it is on the end of a word, and there are a few oddities around letters involving "y").
English, being the composite/mongrel language that it is has really complicated patterns for how you put letters together. For example the "i before e except after c as in neighbor and weigh" sort of thing (which does not cover all of the exceptions of course). This sort of thing has lead to the existence of spelling competitions in the English-speaking world (spelling bees). My Hungarian wife was surprised that such a thing existed. In Hungarian it is much closer to see-what-you say, with only a few exceptions (not that the rules are kind on English-speaking Hungarian learners like myself).
>I would argue that a system like the Japanese Hiragana or Katakana are a better system: they are each 56 letters that directly correspond to syllables.
No, they're really not. First, they have 46 characters (each), not 56, though there are another 36 combination characters like ちゃ. Regardless, the problem here is that number comes from the total number of allowed sounds in the entire language. Japanese has an extremely small number of total possible sounds in the language compared to most other languages, particular western ones, and almost all syllables are of the form consonant+vowel: there's basically no way to write, for instance, a word ending in a hard "t" sound, so when Japanese adopts such words, it adds a vowel ending like "tu", and does this for every syllable with a hard consonant without a following vowel. Because of this, loanwords can be really hard to recognize even if you're a speaker of the language that word was adopted from (usually English these days), because the sounds don't map over very well.
And because there's so few total possible syllables, there's a huge number of homophones. The main reason kanji is still around is because it resolves ambiguity and makes it much, much easier to read Japanese text: trying to read text that's all in hiragana (or katakana) is cumbersome, even if spaces are added (Japanese text doesn't normally have spaces).
Syllabaries are great if the language has relatively simple phonotactics. Once you start having things like triple consonant clusters or a dozen different vowels, it breaks down pretty quickly.
The other thing that makes alphabets more popular in the long run is that they spread easier because they're easier to adapt to different languages compared to syllabaries (indeed, it's not uncommon for a syllabary to become semi-alphabetic as part of such adoption).
I believe you mean the Ugarites, Phoenicians, & other northwest Semitic peoples. They developed from cuneiform syllabaries the abjad which the Greeks subsequently adopted (being their language's second written form, preceded by Linear B before an interlude of illiteracy). The Greeks added only non-diacritic vowels.
There are benefits to both systems. Western readers have a hard time reading older writing - while eastern readers have no problem with very old texts.
On the other hand - western scholars can understand what the spoken word sounded like - but eastern readers have a much harder time what ancient words sounded like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rime_dictionary
Western writing systems "decay" faster. Look at french writing - the spellings are phonetic for the time they were first put to paper - but they sound nothing like the current pronunciations.
> Western readers have a hard time reading older writing - while eastern readers have no problem with very old texts.
That's simply not true.
Ancient Chinese calligraphy and language is so different that you have entire PhD fields about it.
By contrast, as someone who has studied basic Latin in high school, I can read stuff from the walls of Pompeii without issue. I can directly read Latin texts from 700AD or so with the standard difficulty of reading handwriting.
See: http://www.edr-edr.it/edr_programmi/view_img.php?lang=en&id_...
Now, perhaps if I were Chinese, I could read ancient graffiti on the Great Wall, but nobody seems to have ever mentioned that.
This is completely backwards and comically wrong. Japanese text looks very little like it did even 150 years ago; the characters have changed completely, and the language was highly standardized during the Meiji era. Try taking a native Japanese speaker to a museum with old Japanese texts or handwriting and see if they can read any of it; they generally can't understand much of it at all.
Modern Korean people can't even read stuff older than a century or so because the language changed from using Chinese characters to the home-grown Hangul character set, and that was only completed a few decades ago.
By contrast, English speakers can read Shakespeare just fine mostly, with a little difficulty understanding some words that are no longer used.
Japanese is not really the right example, because unlike Chinese the writing is really more phonetic than not (and when it isn't, as in kanbun texts, it's basically an idiosyncratic translation to a completely different language). I imagine that the reasonably educated Chinese should be able to read something like the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Stele from the 8th century just fine, given the regular typeface. English, from the same time period, has Beowulf, which is incomprehensible to any lay reader.
Once calligraphy/handwriting is involved, the situation on the Western side is not much better either. Modern Anglosphere children probably would struggle with 19th-century cursive like https://www.pinterest.com/pin/375276581427478862/ ; in Germanic countries, the handwriting system underwent deeper changes, so nobody apart from selected nerds and antiquarians can read Kurrent as in Goethe's letters - https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goethe_Brief_(nich... - or even the newer Sütterlin. Contra what some posters here claim, Roman cursive (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive) is right out. I don't think this should be conflated with the question of whether the writing system is understood by future readers - as an imperfect computer analogy, an ASCII text document is in some meaningful sense more futureproof than an Autodesk Animator .FLI, even if the former is on a five-inch floppy and the latter is on a USB thumb drive.
(As for the effects of the Japan's Chinese character simplification, I think they are a bit overstated. I accidentally bought a 旧字体 copy of Mishima's Haru no Yuki at a book sale once, and at least as an L2 speaker I didn't find it particularly more painful to read than I find unmodernised Shakespeare as an L2 speaker of English.)
Where did you get that idea from? I can read most books in Japanese, but probably not a word of most reasonably ‘old’ texts. I think most native speakers would struggle as much as English speakers do with, say, medieval-era English.
Yes, and when you strip out the vowels and squeeze the individual syllables together - the syllable almost becomes a chinese character or a llm token. Paleo-Hebrew (10th century BCE) was a century older then ancient Greek (9th century BCE). Like Phoenician (from which ancient Greek derived) it shared close roots with Proto-Sinaitic.
The Proto-Sinaitic alphabetic script is the oldest (1800–1500 BCE) and evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols. It contained simplified characters representing consonants, The Phoenician alphabet came later, around 1050 BCE, evolving from Proto-Sinaitic. It became a widely used script with 22 consonantal characters and was highly influential, serving as a foundation for both the Paleo-Hebrew and Greek alphabet. The Etruskan alphabet was adapted from the Greek alphabet in the 8th centry BCE and the Roman alfabet was adapted from the Etruskan alphabet in the 7th century.
Alphabets with 20–30 letters seem to be close to a neurolinguistic optimum for balancing simplicity with expressiveness. The Armenian script was designed by monk and linguist Mesrop Mashtots in the 5th century CE to enable the translation of the Bible into Armenian. With 39 letter it represents Armenian phonetics. The Khmer alphabet with 74 characters evolved from the ancient Pallava script, which was developed in Southern India around the 4th century CE. By the 7th century CE, the Khmer people had adapted the Pallava script, creating an early form of the Khmer script. This script was initially used to write Sanskrit and Pali, the languages of Hindu and Buddhist texts.
One can have a larger inventory of letters if the glyphs themselves are consistently patterned in some way. E.g. if "c" is /ts/ and "č" is /tʃ/, then one can expect "š" to be /ʃ/, and "ž" to be /ʒ/ (which is indeed the case in many Slavic alphabets).
Sounds like a losing battle to me. Handwriting in general is doomed to go the way of the dodo. The difference is that with Latin characters, you can at least "draw" them fairly easily from memory.
You write in school, then you take notes at work or at home, even brief annotations count.
I haven't written by hand in years.
I've seen Chinese input methods where instead of keys corresponding to sounds in Pinyin, they correspond to strokes in characters, I wonder if this could help with character amnesia.
They do exist, but as far as I'm aware, wubi and cangjie are very uncommon relative to zhuyin and pinyin. Even so, my experience is that you end up just memorizing chords for typing particular characters, as opposed to regularly deriving from first principles how a given character is constituted.
Meanwhile, if you remember how the character is pronounced and can identify it in a lineup, it's far easier to use the phonetic approaches. (Even if your input method doesn't auto-correct the word based on context, experienced typists will also memorize the position of common words, so even they don't need to stop and look at the individual candidates in most situations.)
There's a related paper from Chen & Chuang (2008), Experience with a computer word-entry method in processing Chinese characters by fluent typists ( https://escholarship.org/content/qt2s84m9t0/qt2s84m9t0.pdf) that has an unsurprising finding: If you type with a phonology-based input method, you can more easily recall (transcribe) a character by its sound. If you type with an orthography-based input method, you can more easily recall it by sight.
Right but it seems slower for people who are comfortable with pinyin. If I want to reply to a friend saying "I'm on my way and will be there soon", I can tap 'msll' and the input method will show 马上来了 as the first suggestion. 5 taps in total to enter 4 characters.
The BBC produced a great series, The Secret History of Writing. There's a segment where you can watch some Chinese speakers experiencing this while being prompted to write mildly uncommon words like "cough" or "embarrassment".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3seWGtZ3DQ&t=3035s
The whole series is worth a watch if you're into writing.
> The orthography may be inconsistently phonetic, as is the case with English spelling, or highly consistent, such as the Korean Hangul system. No writing system is perfectly phonetic. But phonetic systems enable the native speaker, with just a few dozen symbols, to reliably write whatever they can speak, and read out loud anything they can read.
I'm not sure if the author has studied Vietnamese. I'm a native Vietnamese, and I believe the language is perfectly phonetic.
If I hear a word, I can write it. If I see a word, I can pronounce it, regardless of whether I understand the meaning.
It's interesting that among the 4 countries (China/Japan/Korea/Vietnam), it's the only one that completely reinvented the language into Latin based. I think that refactor addressed the phonetic issue well enough. When I was there, there was also no TV program for "spelling bees" or something like that. Even a third grader could read/write almost any word (even when they don't understand the text yet)
Edit: adding to this original post to reply a common theme people brought up in multiple posts.
I think bringing up dialects and provincial accents is not convincing. There is one official way "gia đình" should be pronounced. It's taught in school, even in the South. Pronouncing it as "da đình" can still be understood, and it doesn't retract from the point that the language is phonetic.
In other words, assuming I know nothing about the meaning of the word, if I hear "da đình" I can correctly write down it as so. I wouldn't know that in Saigon that also means "gia đình". But I definitely can write it down exactly.
I don't think using provincial speaking accent is a good line of argument here. Otherwise, no language in the world can satisfy the phonetic requirements. Any group of people can have different accents, different tones, different sound length and pauses.
> If I hear a word, I can write it.
Not if you account for variations of pronunciation in dialects. Not even the most phonetically accurate accent, the Hanoian Northern accent which I am a native speaker of, is perfect.
For example, you could hear Northern Vietnamese people say "dổ", "dá" instead of "rổ", "rá". Morning dew is pronounced "xương" but is written as "sương". These characters are pronounced with greater clarity in the Central and Southern regions, but they have their own peculiarities too. Til' this day I still find it iffy they call someone named "Diễm" as "Yỉm". Unless you have seen the correct way to spell those words before, you can't say for sure. Even now as a working adult I find myself referring to the dictionary to make sure my accent doesn't embarrass me in official emails.
In a perfect world, we can have one single Vietnamese accent that aims to pronoun all these words true to the intended way of the alphabet, but it isn't practical. That being said, one can get pretty far in Vietnamese when encountering new words.
Yeah, and because the "common" way of pronouncing these words/letters have become so entrenched in our minds, it often feels pretentious to hear people actively try to pronounce words in a way that they feel is "correct", for example trying to emphasize the "strength" of the tr/s/gi sounds as opposed to ch/x/d.
That's not quite true. There are many letters that sounds mostly/exactly the same, especially in everyday pronunciation. For example, "gia đình" vs "da đình", or "lý trí" vs "lí trí", or "xổ số" vs "sổ số", etc. If you don't know the word beforehand you wouldn't be able to write it down after hearing it.
Korea's writing system is not logographic anymore. They didn't go Latin but Hangul is absolutely an alphabet/syllabary
It's not a problem, just transition to new writing instruments. I completely forgot how to write in my birth language (Russian) while my English handwriting is slow and messy. Doesn't affect me in any way. There is a valid need to leave a note when technology is not handy, sounds like pinyin solves this problem. Although, unless we are talking scratching out a message with a sharp stone, ballpoint pen and paper is also complex technology.
There is nothing wrong with being sentimental, I lift heavy weights, collect vinyl and do film photography because I like the aesthetic of these activities. But let me force my own kids to learn whatever I think they should learn just like me at home rather than everyone forcing everyone else's kids in school.
How long have you been living outside of a Russian-speaking county?
Over 3 decades :-)
The phrase "Tibiwangzi" (Character amnesia) was popular long before the digital age. Back when I was a child in the 90s, middle-aged and old people often found themselves unable to recall specific characters.
I somehow kept the habit of handwriting for years. But as a guy in my early 30s, I do notice characters fade away from my brain from time to time, which wasn't a thing at all in the 20s. And to my surprise, some of the characters are fairly frequently used - I was just completely stuck when I was trying to recall them.
Probably that's how brains and organs peaked and will slowly break down over the following decades just like hard drives.
When I compare my handwriting to my father's I can see nearly 100% computer / phone use for writing has had its effect. With a gigantic number of characters, it would obviously be worse.
It always struck me that a phonetic alphabet for writing rather was much simpler and easier to learn than a system based on pictograms. So much that a society could achieve the same level of literacy with much lower cost if they adapted a phonetic system.
But I wonder if that is actually true? Has there been comparative studies of what mainland China did compared to Taiwan (which kept the traditional system) or Vietnam (which adopted latin letters) and its effect on literacy. Obviously hard to do ...
It certainly doesn’t help literacy in general, but one advantage of a writing system divorced from phonetics is that you can still read old written material even after the phonetics have changed over time.
Another advantage of using pictograms is that people who speak completely different versions of Chinese can still communicate in writing. They may pronounce the characters completely differently, but the characters still mean the same thing.
I don't think you can truly do a proper comparative study for something like this - there's just too many other factors.
That said, you can look at Korean for a historical example of how a well-designed alphabet can fare when replacing a historical Chinese-based system. It actually spawned whole new literary genres by making writing more accessible to large segments of the populace that were effectively excluded before.
I think "complicated" is one way to describe pictogrammic(ideogrammic) languages, and "offloading OCR to geometric sub-systems" is another. Formal Hanzi writings are grid aligned so it's probably more suited for batched processing too.
I wanted to write in cursive a few years ago and realized I had completely forgotten. It didn’t take long to remember with the help of a cursive alphabet, but I was still completely unable to get started without it.
Apparently Gen Z didn't learn to write in cursive at all, since it had been removed from the curriculum. Some US states have since started adding it back.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32884213 (2022)
We have this too! It’s not just treble clefs and ampersands- while everyone can read both forms of g, what fraction of people can draw both forms of g? Of course it doesn’t have the cultural baggage in the US.
OTOH, the pinyin-based typing systems on computers and phones has been a godsend to students of Chinese.
I started to learn Chinese in the 80s at my high school and then in the 90s in Taiwan and was laughably bad at writing. Literally, people would laugh at my characters not only because they looked terrible, but also because I was using the wrong stroke order.
Now, it is possible for me to get away with not knowing how to write characters or the stroke order. Using pinyin and recognizing the characters (or certain radicals) is enough to take me very far in social media, texting, etc.
For instance, for one of the phrases in the article ti2bi3wang4zi4 knowing the last character (zi, 字) and kind of remembering wang is enough to recognize the entire colloquialism when I type in the pinyin tibiwangzi: 提筆忘字
In Taiwan they have a TV game show featuring college students, basically like a crossword featuring 4-character colloquialisms and other phrases that have obscure characters. It's quite fun for the audience to watch, almost everyone is writing characters in the air in front of them as they try to remember the hard characters.
In Japan, they call them "wapuro-baka" (idiot who's forgotten how to write stuff because he's only using WADO-PUROCESSA).
Chinese writing system is a language in itself. You can translate Mandarin, Cantonese and even English to that language. To learn that language is harder because it has to support more than one spoken language.
Using an alphabet would make things far more easier, but then how would people from different parts of China understand each other?
It's not a language. It's a writing system used to write Classical Chinese for 3000 years and Mandarin for 150 years. When I was in Hong Kong, I was surprised that the written language is Mandarin (in traditional form).
It's a language in the same sense math notation is a language. It's understood by both a Chinese and an American mathematician.
Math notation consists of symbols and syntax (order of symbols). How to arrange the Chinese characters (syntax) is very different between different languages.
I suppose advocates of alphabetic writing imagine everyone in China (outside Hong Kong and Macau) will be speaking standard Mandarin in a few generations anyway due to standardized public education.
I would argue that alphabetisation would increase the use of regional languages because it would be possible to write down your speech, instead of relying on Mandarin or phonetical transcription with Chinese characters.
This is actually one of the main reasons I don't think China will become a global hegemon. English, with all its flaws, is far easier to speak, read, and write.
Languages are the walls between cultures.
I don't think English is particularly easy to speak, read nor write. The pronounciation is highly irregular and the writing system is very non-phonetic. E.g. "spelling bees" don't make any sense in most languages.
Chinese also seems to be moving to the very phonetic and regular Pinyin that (for Mandarin) doesn't suffer from character amnesia.
I do agree that languages are walls between peoples and should be taken down with a global language. Maybe in few decades the kids speak some kind of Chinglish.
"Easier" I didn't say easy. It's a relative comparison. Spanish and ASL are easy languages, but they won't help Peru or the Deaf community become hegemons for their own reasons.
We already have the global language. It's called English lol
> We already have the global language. It's called English lol
Around 82% of people don't speak English. Mandarin at around 86% isn't that far off.
Lingua francas come and go, and it's a lot more about weapons than about linguistics.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266808/the-most-spoken-l...
Language difficulty is not absolute. Most Japanese natives have a much easier time learning Korean than they do English.
What makes a 2nd Language easier or not to speak is how closely related it is to your native language.
English is not any easier to speak than Chinese if your native language is far removed from both.
It is definitely harder to write though. Writing systems can be absolute in difficulty.
> Language difficulty is not absolute
> Writing systems can be absolute in difficulty
These things contradict each other.
Writing is a relatively recent add-on in human history so I was making a point distinguishing the difficulty of the two. There isn't really anything contradictory there. I did this because some people have the idea that the language itself is easier rather than just the writing system.
You are thinking of writing as part of Language difficulty which is fair(I mean it is in a practical sense and I don't disagree) but it doesn't make as much of a dent as you might think compared to difficulty of everything else.
According to the FSI who tracks the number of class hours it takes their diplomats to reach sufficient mastery, Korean and Arabic are still Category IV Languages for native English speakers (along with Japanese, Chinese) despite having a much easier writing system than those two.
Could argue this works in exactly the opposite way.
This "wall" makes the west an open book to china, while for the west it is hard to crack the Chinese. For one thing, think of the implications on recruiting people to spy or interpret intercepted messages from china or on espionage in general.
Also the impact of this "problem" on running a well-functioning highly-productive and scientific powerhouse society is highly exaggerated and easily refuted by empirical facts.
Just think of what Japan and China managed to accomplish in engineering and scientific accomplishment in the last 50 years and they both use character-based languages.
This is true. I learned Chinese and then hitchhiked China in 2018 for exactly this reason. Everyone was yapping about how important China had become, but China was a black box to me.
After months of hitchhiking I came back home unconcerned.
I think the fact that it's a black box makes us overhype China.
China should make another attempt at simplifying their written language. Yes it’s a monumental task, but Korea managed to mostly transition off of Chinese characters.
I think this is not as complicated as it sounds; it's same as how NN classifiers aren't always built to do label to image, only image to label. Being able to do former through a parallel pipeline helps(that's like GAN), but that ability isn't required in training or in inference.
Your OCR engine in the brain might generate "𰻞" for 'zh_hant_適' if reversed, doesn't mean it can't recognize the latter.
It's simply people stop writing stuffs on paper. Nothing too surprising. I myself cannot spell some English words because I rely too much on auto-correction.
I wonder is the increase in external input from a growing world that is full of distraction competes with storage for these kinds of things. Such an intricate writing system might have been easier to contain in the mind before it was bombarded with limitless electronic entertainment and communication. How many people actually sit down and put a pencil to paper these days?
In English I find that I frequently cannot spell words without typing them. I wonder if there is actually some other related computer use effects.
>"Can the Education System Solve the Problem..."
I think the question is rather: should it? Is there a real benefit for average Joe to memorize insane amount and complexity (at least to my untrained eye) of such characters? I think my brain would just explode. I'd rather use my memory for something more creative.
Can't figure out if Moser misspelling "abacus" as "abacas" in the final paragraph was some sort of joke - regardless, extremely ironic given the argument that phonetic systems are better suited for accurate active textual reproduction.
In China, children start studying at the age of 6 and continue until they graduate from university at around 23. They have a large amount of homework and exams that require handwriting. There's nothing to worry about.
Would someone kindly explain what the authors means in the last paragraph with
"There is a bit of irony in all this: the digital technology is both a cause of and a solution to the problem."
? How is it a solution?
Pinyin
“Sneeze” or “喷嚏” is a pretty difficult word to write in Chinese in terms of number of strokes and its internal components. I’m not surprised people wouldn’t know it off the top of their heads. It’s like if someone asked you to spell “unnecessary.”
The other dimension is that the second character 嚏 in particular is obscure: it's virtually never used in any other word than 喷嚏. In Japanese, it's a hyogai kanji not taught in school, meaning most people would spell it phonetically. Alas, this is not a practical/socially acceptable option in Chinese.
The first, 喷 "erupt", is not exactly common either but is at least used in a few other compounds like 喷水 "fountain".
喷 is included in HSK 5 and Heisig's version of the most common ~3000 characters, it can't be that infrequent.
I don't think anybody is proposing that Chinese people are not normal humans making normal mistakes. The difference is that if somebody asked people to spell "unnecessary", there would only be three common mistakes they would make (based on whether letters are arbitrarily duplicated or not), and all would be easily understood by readers if written.
English orthography is terrible (i.e. a single vowel can be a half-dozen letters), but there's a limit to how complicated it can be to write a word that one knows how to say.
Wiyul I took migh yot to Luffbruh (acting az a cooryer surviss), I inshored my dissertacion woz cerrect bye revuwing the seilerfoan musick. Suddenly, their was a laud noys. I rush't too the sighed of the bote, but I sore the wartre fludding inn. "Quick! Sumbody hasta seel the hoal!" I cryde. Fourtuneatley, the glew oonder the bought's scin maid the holl cloaze up, sow we kepped floting, butt we terned arowned buy mesteak. Immajin mie shock wen wee woshed up in Lossymuth! Eye wonet fourget thatt deigh enny thyme sune, that's fore shur.
(I'm pretty sure this isn't eye dialect: I consulted the rhyming dictionary a lot, to make sure I was swapping spellings between two words with the same phonemes. I also tried to avoid reanalysis, though some of these words might not quite achieve that.)
I'm not a native speaker even, but this is mostly readable.
> It’s like if someone asked you to spell “unnecessary.”
I would be quite surprised if someone couldn't spell that word, unless it was a child.
Unicode has stroke and radical counts for over 75000 characters. As this article states, most Chinese written text on computers is actually typed using pinyin.
They really should let it go for common communication.
It’s beautiful and culturally significant, and that will never be forgotten. But it doesn’t fit well with modern writing.
Suddenly the woes of English spelling seem slight.
I decided to practise some “千字文” in fountain pen calligraphy after mind struggling as well for the character ”嚏“
Meanwhile, another trend among Chinese teenagers is the use of Pinyin initials to replace Chinese words. For example, 永远的神 (pinyin: Yǒngyuǎn de shén), a meme used to praise something, is often written as "yyds."
These teens have become accustomed to reading and writing sentences composed of such acronyms, and they even use them in real-life conversations—much to the annoyance of cultural conservatives. This phenomenon highlights how online communication can influence offline speech patterns.
It would be rather interesting if technology simply caused people to start writing in the roman alphabet. Phonetic spelling is certainly the superior option, so perhaps that will simply be what people arrive at through inevitable statistical pressure.
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it is quite common, since chinese people use hand write not a lot as previous time.The computer and internet will make this more common after serveral decades.
Many people here may not be familiar with David Moser, the author of this article. He’s frequently mentioned in Douglas Hofstadter’s book Le Ton Beau le Marot (fantastic book on language and translation BTW) in regards to matters related to Mandarin. He was a well known (as Mo Dawei) in China’s xiangsheng scene (a verbal comedy routine, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangsheng#:~:text=Xiangshen....) and is probably one of the most knowledgeable foreigners on Mandarin. He started learning it in college in mid 80s.
This has been a perennial "story" for at least 15 years on English language internet, but for actual Chinese it's not really a thing.
I understand that the topic of writing systems is touchy because it involves people's national identity and national pride.
That's why all the comments that mention efficiency of different writing systems are heavily downvoted.
But if we think about writing systems' evolution as an optimization problem that optimizes for "efficiency" (whatever that means. It is pretty hard to define so I'm not even going to try) we could easily imagine some systems being stuck at a local minimum. Or maybe even all of them being stuck at different local minimums some of which are smaller than the others.
Does this happen in Japanese as well?
I remember almost 25 years ago, when I was teaching English in Japan, one of my adult students couldn't remember how to write the kanji (i.e. Chinese characters) for "police".
Text input is now universally phonetic, and young people have a lot of trouble remembering how to write words.
Add to this the enormous (and increasing) use of English words, written either in katakana or actually in Roman letters, and it's plain that Japan is further down the road of losing its writing identity than China is.
Does Arabs and Sanskrit have the same problem to some extend? AFAIK, characters can sometimes combine and not.
Arabic is still fundamentally phonetic. The article mentions thus is only a Chinese and Japanese problem.
No one uses Sanskrit anymore.
Thar said, South Asian languages are phonetic so similar problems to Chinese do not exist.
The best comparison for character amnesia in Chinese would probably be Japanese.
Arabic is an adjad, so of course not. The "combination" you're thinking of is akin to cursive - stylistic.
I got a little more than halfway into this long article, so I apologize if this was answered at some point. So what?
Many native English speakers can't pick up a pen and paper and write intelligibly and would be in real trouble if they lost their phones; an increasingly annoying number TALK into their phones, not even pretending to type and just spewing auto-corrected crap out into the world.
Doctors have messy handwriting, but I don't think I've ever met a native English speaker who completed elementary school who would pick up a pen and pause, completely uncertain of how to draw a letter of the alphabet. They might make minor spelling mistakes, but I don't think that's closely analogous to the phenomenon the author is talking about.
The "Doctors have messy handwriting" trope derives from the fact that prescriptions often contain a large fraction of Latin terms, chemical names, abbreviations and acronyms that don't parse (and thus seem sloppy/illegible) if you are trying to "decipher" them as English. Doctors don't have significantly messier handwriting compared to similar populations (esp. now that drafting isn't as emphasized in architecture, engineering, and similar programs)
>>>Doctors don't have significantly messier handwriting compared to similar populations
I'm skeptical of this claim. My family doctor had bad handwriting, and one time the hospital worker had to call him to ask if he ordered a x-ray or Ct scan.
Please. I still have my medical charts from my childhood, back before the computers. I can barely read the handwriting there, and it's not because of medical terms.
Apparently, it became slightly better recently, now that doctors spend less time scribbling things and mostly type them instead.
This is far more analogous to spelling mistakes.
The entire article is an argument to the contrary. It's fine if you disagree with the author's opinion on that point, but it's begging the question to just dismiss it on that basis. They even specifically mention that "this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character", which would be more like a spelling mistake.
What the author describes is a phenomenon like wanting to write the word "analogous" but having no idea how to even begin putting pen to paper. Not writing the word and ending up with "analagous" by mistake.
My hot take - this isn’t that much different than English speakers not being able to write in cursive anymore. It’s just not something that’s as practiced as much now that we have digital input methods.
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katakana! This is true in mainland China, but not in Taiwan. There, katakana is used as pinyin, and words can be composed by katakana.
Wikipedia says [0]:
> After Japanese administration ended, the system soon became obsolete. Now, only a few scholars, such as those who study the aforementioned dictionary, learn Taiwanese kana.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_kana
Manny people mistakenly recognise Bopomofo as katakana. I use bopomofo and get this reaction a lot, it just have to mention its actually bopomofo/zhuyin and then they know what it is.
This is not true. If you need to type on your phone, everyone needs to know that the mainland used the Wubi input method, which is Katakana, and now uses Pinyin typing. Taiwan has always used the original Katakana input method. Pinyin typing was invented later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
It’s a highly inefficient writing system, that’s why it was godly that Korea moved away from it with Hangul.