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Character Amnesia: Negative Impact of Computers Upon Writing Chinese by Hand
- patio11 16y agoIn Japan, the phenomenon is called "ワープロ馬鹿" (roughly, "word-processor-induced idiocy". I have it bad, which is unfortunate because particularly for foreigners it is easy to confuse with illiteracy. Luckily, I'm very rarely required to handwrite anything more complicated than my name and address. (Work once gave me a surprise skills evaluation which included a (handwritten, timed) essay test, which very nearly reduced me to tears.)
- w1ntermute 16y agoThis is probably even worse with Japanese, because if you can't remember the kanji, you just write the kana. Since pinyin isn't used the same way for Chinese and zhuyin is mainly used in Taiwan, mainlanders are still forced to somehow figure out the character (probably ask someone else) if they really want to write something.
- harisenbon 16y agoWhile I notice a lot of people falling back into kana (especially for harder kanji) when writing by hand, it's usually rather embarrassing to have to write common words in kana when in front of other people. If you're making a presentation or doing sales, you definitely don't want to be writing in kana. I'm in the same boat as patio, as I write notes by hand MAYBE once a week (now that patio quit the dayjob, I'm sure he writes a lot less often). While my reading is still at a high level (Lv 2 of the Kanji-kentei) my writing is worse than an elementary school student (currently lv 8 in writing). As an aside, in this post I misspelled about 3-4 words and would never have been able to correct them if I didn't have spellcheck... so this definitely isn't a problem limited to character-based languages.
- qq66 16y agoA "surprise skills evaluation?" Wow, Japan is like another planet to me.
- sparky 16y ago(2001) Still interesting, but it would be good to put in the title.
- kogir 16y agoTwo easy solutions come to mind: 1) Use pens and pads for computer character entry so the same characters can be used by both. 2) Switch to a new written form that can also be typed. I'd personally love to see global adoption of a new language designed from the beginning to be simple, unambiguous, and easily written and typed. It'll never happen of course.
- DLWormwood 16y agoEven though the problem is probably much worse in ideographic scripts, we alphabet users haven’t been immune. (We had a head start, after all.) About the only thing I can write reliably any more is my signature; every once in a blue moon when I need to write a check, it literally takes me over five minutes to write it out legibly.
- _delirium 16y agoYeah, I'm really really bad at writing by hand now. It physically makes my hand hurt if I have to write more than a few sentences, because I've gotten totally unused to it (the callouses I used to have on my ring finger, where the pen/pencil sit, have long since gone away as well). But I suppose it's a bit less of a problem because I do at least know how to write all 26 letters when I need to. I did recently though want to write something in cursive (jokily flowery greeting in a card) and I couldn't remember how to write a bunch of stuff, especially capital letters. Had to go online to remind myself how you write a cursive capital Q.
- GiraffeNecktie 16y agoIt's an interesting article for me because right now I'm trying to learn Chinese. I'm mostly interested in learning to speak the language, but I've discovered that it really helps to be able to read as well. Chinese has a very small palette of sounds, which means that there's a lot of ambiguity. The same sound and tone could be represented by many different characters and have many different meanings. But there's no way I can do the traditional approach of writing out each character hundreds and hundreds of times. I don't have the time or temperament. So I'm hoping a combination of flashcards and watching TV (most Chinese programs seem to have Chinese script subtitles, I assume to serve the various dialects that share the writing system) will do the trick. That's one issue the article didn't fully address: the importance of that muscle memory in learning and retaining the characters.
- Jd 16y agoMuscle memory was entirely neglected and is, in many aspects, the most important "memory" for writing Chinese characters, esp. under time pressure. The way that characters can be reconstructed that are "forgotten" by your Chinese speaker is simply that they go back to their visually retained memory of what the character looks like and then render it piece by piece. I've seen this happen to a Chinese lawyer friend of mine who was Peking University grad -> Harvard JD (not a dumb cookie), but after time in an English speaking law firm tripped up when asked to write even simple phrases that I, a foreigner, could still write fairly easily. As for your problems learning the language, there is no other way other than rot memorization, and if you don't have the time, you shouldn't even bother. Seriously. If you can make the time but don't have the temperament, go somewhere where they will beat it into you Chinese-style, because there really is no other way to memorize the thousands of characters necessary to be proficient in Chinese. If you become serious and are looking for recommendations ping me and I will give you some.
- ramchip 16y agoI'm not so sure about the Chinese-style beating. At least use a structured approach; Chinese characters aren't random strokes, they have rules and history, and learning it can help your memory a lot (especially if you're like me - I just can't memorize something I don't "understand"). The Japanese version of this book is quite well-known and I found it helpful: http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Traditional-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833244 http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Traditional-Hanzi-Meaning-... (this is the trad. Chinese version)
- zavulon 16y agoI don't necessarily think it's bad. It's evolution. It's much more efficient to have each character represent a sound (western way) than a word (Chinese/Japanese/etc way), anyway. The cultural loss is sad, sure, but in the end, it's survival of the fittest.
- harisenbon 16y agoI find it interesting that you say that each character represents a sound in western language, while not in Japanese or Chinese. In Japanese こ can only be pronounced one way. In Chinese (I believe) 子 can only be pronounced one way. It also has an associated meaning which is handy for learning new words. In english, what sound does C make? ex) Chair Care cycle Why can I pronounce Ghoti as 'Fish'? Read <-- How do you pronounce this? Is it Red or Reed? I actually find the looseness of English spelling to be much more of a hardship than learning a number of different pronunciations.
- zavulon 16y agoI don't speak Chinese or Japanese, but people that do told me that there are more than five ways to pronounce "yi", they all mean different things, but they're all transliterated to English in the same way. However, that's not what I meant. I meant to say as far as ease of transcribing spoken word onto paper, alphabet system is fundamentally easier, because you only have to remember 25-45 (approximately) number of characters. While in hieroglyphics, the number is much much larger.
- w1ntermute 16y agoI don't speak Chinese or Japanese, but people that do told me that there are more than five ways to pronounce "yi", they all mean different things, but they're all transliterated to English in the same way. That's because Chinese is tonal. There are 5 different tones in Standard Mandarin. When transliterating Chinese to the English alphabet, there is no way to write the tone, so you introduce ambiguity that wasn't officially present.
- derefr 16y ago
- quadhome 16y agoSince 2001, has pinyin begun to appear in day-to-day writing? Cursory image searches puts it on street signs and a mention of National Common Language Law promulgating its use. If someone forgets a hanzi, is a pinyin substitute acceptable? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language#Other_phonetic_transcriptions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language#Other_phonetic...
- HappySushiCo 16y agoLet's put it this way: most symbol based systems (Chinese and Japanese kanji) aren't very scalable because each symbol represents multiple objects/ideas. The only way these languages can grow to incorporate more and more modern ideas is to get deconstructed into characters that represent sounds (Japanese hiragana). I for one think that it's a positive thing to move away from the symbolic characters - it'll make languages easier to learn and let more people communicate with each other.
- echaozh 16y agoIt's like saying the assembly language is much more scalable than a higher level languages. Separating the meaning from the sound is like naming variables with meaningless short combination of letters.
- xiaoma 16y agoI dunno. My friends with iPhones in Taiwan preferred the handwriting recognition to phonetic IMEs. I think the article is a bit sensationalist.
- tokenadult 16y agoHave your friends actually put themselves to speed and accuracy tests in writing through each method? Of course most people do best what they practice most, but one of the reasons phonetic input (Hanyu pinyin on the mainland, still BO PO MO FO mostly in Taiwan) is the predominant way of entering Hanzi computer data all over the Chinese-speaking world is that other methods were tried (since the 1980s, repeatedly) and found wanting. It would be interesting to see if handwriting input on the latest generation of pads could ever catch up to moderately proficient typists. P.S. This reminds me of the days in the 1980s when I had to translate handwritten manuscripts by magazine reporters in Chinese into English. There is a lot of nonstandard handwriting in the Chinese-speaking world, as I discovered when I would ask colleagues to read one another's handwriting to get a reality check on how I read it.
- xiaoma 16y agoI doubt anybody has subjected themselves to a rigorous study on the subject. What the people I know have done is this: try the handwriting recognition for a few days, go back to zhuyin or maybe wubi for a day or two and then go back to handwriting because they believe it's faster based on their own experience. Non-standard writing and simplifications are recognized in many cases. It's far from perfect; it's just a bit faster and more convenient than their old phones.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Jd 16y agoApples and oranges. I believe the discussion was of standard input systems (i.e. keyboards) not iPhone keyboards for which I can easily believe that handwriting outperforms pinyin and/or wubi.