10 ms·

Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan

51 points by vorg 16y ago

brazzy 16y ago
Um, yeah. This has been happening since approximately 1980, when word processors became available. And it's also the reason why those were a lot more important in Japan than in the West: mechanical typewriters that would have allowed the use of 3000+ Kanji were simply impossible to construct, so digital word processors were a huge revolution.
- dublinclontarf 16y ago
  Sorry but there has been a typewriter that supports this since the 40's, invented by the author of 'A moment in Peking'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Kwai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Kwai And a Japanese typewriter since 1929 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_typewriter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_typewriter
tomjen3 16y ago
Not really much different from what has happened in the west, my handwriting (which was never easy to read) as flown of a cliff since I left grade school. Which is mostly not a problem, except that I makes it more difficult to write on whiteboards.
- ramchip 16y ago
  > as flown of a cliff > I makes it more difficult I suppose you inadvertently illustrated the problem...
  - chbarts 16y ago
    No, that illustrates a different problem entirely. He would be just as incomprehensible were he writing in calligraphy.
- pjscott 16y ago
  But you can still hand-write any word you can spell, right? If you really try? Imagine trying to write on a whiteboard and just being completely unable to remember how to write "shoulder". There's a big difference of degree here.
  - tomjen3 16y ago
    If by handwriting, you mean "painting" then yes, but only because there are so few letters and they are relatively simple. I am Danish, and we have three letters that are not from the Roman alphabet. I constantly have to think about how to paint æ.
    - rue 16y ago
      Even writing e.g. "frimaerke" is not unintelligible, though. One could also imagine that ø and æ were replaced by the more common ö and ä in the future. I think the "there are so few letters and they are relatively simple" is the point here.
jdietrich 16y ago
I'm not at all surprised. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for Hanzi and Kanji. The failings of these writing systems are manifold, but perhaps the most pernicious is the effect on education. The countless classroom hours wasted on memorising characters poison the classroom with a culture of rote learning. It should be no surprise that when the fundamental skill of literacy can only be acquired through mindless drill, that will almost inevitably become the default approach to the rest of schooling. Those of us who work with the Japanese are often amazed at how so much schooling leads to so little learning, but with the millstone that is kanji I am surprised that so much is achieved.
- dublinclontarf 16y ago
  The advantage of Hanzi is that it can be used for any dialect of spoken Chinese(or any spoken language), of which, in China there are hundreds. China is really 30 countries bound together by a unified writing system. The tradeoff is that it's difficult to learn. If you want a totally phonetic alphabet then look at Hangul(Korean characters). Beautiful in it's simplicity and how it mirrors the spoken language. But Korea would only be a small province in China, and Hangul would be useless to those who spoke a different dialect. Hanzi will be around for quite some time, so few Chinese are immersed in technology to the point they forget how to write, in fact the majority of Chinese are peasants and don't even have an email.
  - Groxx 16y ago
    I've really got to look into learning Korean some time. It seems like a near-ideal written language (albeit at a potential loss to historical documents, because it mirrors the spoken language. But that's what linguists and historians are for, and are needed in every language).
    - gwern 16y ago
      I've been learning Korean myself. Hangul is actually pretty cool and logical! I particularly like the regular way it has of denoting a 'y' version of a vowel - just adding a little perpendicular stroke to all the vowels. ㅏ (a) and ㅑ (ya), ㅜ (oo) and ㅠ (yoo), etc.
mjgoins 16y ago
I have this problem in English, and I'm not even young by tech standards. I should probably spend some time re-learning to write, because it's kind of frightening.
pavlov 16y ago
David Moser's essay Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard [1] has an amusing and enlightening passage about this "character amnesia". 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"?? [1] http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
- vorg 16y ago
  "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." Simple! 嚏 is spelt 口十冖田厶止. The first character, 口, meaning "mouth", is on the left of the other 5 characters, 十冖田厶止, which are stacked on top of each other on the righthand side. Those five are the picture of a body: 十 is the head, 冖 are the shoulders, 田 is the sixpack abs, 厶 are the privates, and 止 means "stop walking", for the legs. When he sneezes, the mouth becomes detached from the body, comic book style. Perhaps when Chinese students learn characters in primary school, they don't remember them because they learn them in rote style, not remembering WHY a character has a certain shape. The character amnesia is because of the rote learning, not because of the enlarged character lexicon.
  - 16y ago
miguelpais 16y ago
In here you have a very interesting video about Kanji I saw some months ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WxihOeMPBg#t=4m10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WxihOeMPBg#t=4m10 (I put the flag to skip to the moment he speaks about this issue).
ww520 16y ago
This is a non-event when better tools come along. It's like people complaining they forgot how to carve writing on stone when paper and pen come along.
mikecane 16y ago
This is fascinating because in the 1980s when there was nearly a trade war between the US & Japan, part of the rhetoric from Japan was that their symbol-based system was superior to Western alphabets in that it used a different part of the brain and therefore somehow enhanced intelligence. My own testimony is that my English-based handwriting (my native and only language) has gotten progressively worse due to using a keyboard daily for years instead of using pen & paper. It's also frustrating, because it's slower. It feels like labor now.
- vorg 16y ago
  Quoting from http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/writjap.htm http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/writjap.htm ... "Kana are read phonetically and kanji are read visually, with a dissociation between the processes involved, according to Morton & Sasanuma and popular Japanese belief. (This must be a little awkward in reading pages of mixed text, surely?) Nomura found that meaning was extracted faster from kanji than kana words, and thought that kana pronunciation was data-driven and that kanji pronunciation was conceptually-driven. Morton & Sasanuma (1982) also claimed that evidence supports the intuitive belief that kanji can give direct access to the meaning of words, but that kana always require translation into a phonological code when they are being read, and there is no development of automatic visual recognition of the kana symbols. One of the most intriguing ways of studying what differences there may really be in processing is in observing brain-damaged patients - following certain lesions some patients can still read kana but not kanji, while other insults to the brain leave the ability to read kanji but not kana."
- Dn_Ab 16y ago
  While language does not limit or boost what is expressible, conceivable or knowable it does impose a default in how we structure the world and what details we take in as important. There was a fairly interesting article in the NYT recently that goes over this. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html... What I found interesting were the accounts on a particular tribe of Australian aborigines who had an amazing sense of cardinal direction - instantly knowing north from south regardless of orientation due to a language based on geographic instead of egocentric directions and the Matses people whose precision in relaying past events would make a Vulcan logician proud. Intrigued I researched this concept to be evidentiality and epistemic modality. Enforcing such reporting precision into the grammar seems like it would combat sloppy thinking. I wonder if someone raised in such a language would have an easier time creating proofs, programming or studying subjects like bayesian probability or philosophy. I wonder how marketing would work in such a default. I bet statistics would not be a form of lying in that culture.
greenlblue 16y ago
As an outside observer I find this a little funny. It's very much akin to how some segments of America constantly blame technological advancement for what they see as the deteriorating quality of youth.
yewweitan 16y ago
I learnt both Chinese and English as a child and all the way through my formal education (up to 18), and I must say, that the phenomenon of forgetting easy characters is pretty common. Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters are ridiculously complex. The resultant expressive power is obvious, and it's no wonder why these are the few languages in which calligraphy blossomed into a fully-fledged artform, which I personally practice as well. As with everything, we're going to artificially and naturally select the best language. I personally think that 'best' here is defined by flexibility and beauty. Flexibility - no way would you have come up with a word like "globalization" in Chinese, it lacks the prefix/suffix system to do that. It also doesn't have the phonetic flexibility to include foreign terms like Japanese does. Eg: "Basketball" in japanese can be pronounced "baskeboru" but it's "lan qiu" in Chinese. I think one overlooked point is that Chinese isn't a beautiful language, at least not in the opinion of youth today. It's conciseness has spawned some of the best poetry (i think) on earth. But as much as the French complain about how it's hard to sound romantic in English, it's even harder in Chinese (not to mention some of the dialects like Cantonese and Hokkien). Kinda reminds me of how people despise Lisp (of which I'm also a fan of). It's an obscure language, but it's the most expressive one that I've seen, and will continue to admire it for it's beauty forever. That's probably the reason why it's still around after all this time. Will the Chinese language suffer a similar fate to Lisp over the long run? I doubt so, since natural languages are a whole different beast. But the problems are real, and with more than a billion people potentially using the same character set, this will be interesting to watch. --- TL;DR - Chinese is difficult to learn. It's not as flexible as English; you can add "ization" to "global" easily in English, not so in Chinese. It's also not a beautiful language in the way that youth see it; Chinese makes for great poetry about the mountains and the ocean, but not for whispering sweet nothings into a partner's ear (at least compared to a language like French)
- aikinai 16y ago
  Does Chinese not use 化 or something similar to mean "ization?" If not, how do they turn "global" into "globalization?" (I'm just curious) In Japanese, the kanji 化 is almost perfectly equivalent to the English "ization," and I think it's very elegant. For example, 機械 is machine and 機械化 is mechanization. Or another very popular one in Japan these days is 高齢化, old-age-ization, used to refer to the phenomenon of Japan's "aging society." That's actually one of the main benefits I see with kanji is the elegance and succinctness. The worst thing to translate from Japanese to English is a table (figure in a document). Kanji allows you to express things so succinctly that you can have lots of tiny columns with one or two kanji for the heading (no longer than the digits in the content). Often that heading has to be at least three or four words in English, and it's impossible to recreate the table in the same space.
mkramlich 16y ago
heck I think every written/human language but English should die out. If there are some words worth saving from those languages, let's figure out how to import them into English, then move on already.
- GeneralMaximus 16y ago
  Agreed. Some other things that should die out include: all operating systems but Mac OS X, all programming languages but C, all car companies but Toyota, all clothing retailers but Banana Republic, all coffee shops but Starbucks, all pizza chains but Domino's ...
  - jephthai 16y ago
    With you so far...
jephthai 16y ago
I find myself forgetting how to write in cursive. To combat this problem, I force myself to write cursive periodically, just to stay in practice. It will never be as consistent and attractive as my grandmother's cursive, though.

51 points by vorg 16y ago

Um, yeah. This has been happening since approximately 1980, when word processors became available. And it's also the reason why those were a lot more important in Japan than in the West: mechanical typewriters that would have allowed the use of 3000+ Kanji were simply impossible to construct, so digital word processors were a huge revolution.

dublinclontarf 16y ago
Sorry but there has been a typewriter that supports this since the 40's, invented by the author of 'A moment in Peking'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Kwai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Kwai And a Japanese typewriter since 1929 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_typewriter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_typewriter

tomjen3 16y ago

Not really much different from what has happened in the west, my handwriting (which was never easy to read) as flown of a cliff since I left grade school. Which is mostly not a problem, except that I makes it more difficult to write on whiteboards.

ramchip 16y ago
> as flown of a cliff > I makes it more difficult I suppose you inadvertently illustrated the problem...
- chbarts 16y ago
  No, that illustrates a different problem entirely. He would be just as incomprehensible were he writing in calligraphy.
pjscott 16y ago
But you can still hand-write any word you can spell, right? If you really try? Imagine trying to write on a whiteboard and just being completely unable to remember how to write "shoulder". There's a big difference of degree here.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  If by handwriting, you mean "painting" then yes, but only because there are so few letters and they are relatively simple. I am Danish, and we have three letters that are not from the Roman alphabet. I constantly have to think about how to paint æ.
  - rue 16y ago
    Even writing e.g. "frimaerke" is not unintelligible, though. One could also imagine that ø and æ were replaced by the more common ö and ä in the future. I think the "there are so few letters and they are relatively simple" is the point here.

jdietrich 16y ago

I'm not at all surprised. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for Hanzi and Kanji. The failings of these writing systems are manifold, but perhaps the most pernicious is the effect on education. The countless classroom hours wasted on memorising characters poison the classroom with a culture of rote learning. It should be no surprise that when the fundamental skill of literacy can only be acquired through mindless drill, that will almost inevitably become the default approach to the rest of schooling. Those of us who work with the Japanese are often amazed at how so much schooling leads to so little learning, but with the millstone that is kanji I am surprised that so much is achieved.

dublinclontarf 16y ago
The advantage of Hanzi is that it can be used for any dialect of spoken Chinese(or any spoken language), of which, in China there are hundreds. China is really 30 countries bound together by a unified writing system. The tradeoff is that it's difficult to learn. If you want a totally phonetic alphabet then look at Hangul(Korean characters). Beautiful in it's simplicity and how it mirrors the spoken language. But Korea would only be a small province in China, and Hangul would be useless to those who spoke a different dialect. Hanzi will be around for quite some time, so few Chinese are immersed in technology to the point they forget how to write, in fact the majority of Chinese are peasants and don't even have an email.
- Groxx 16y ago
  I've really got to look into learning Korean some time. It seems like a near-ideal written language (albeit at a potential loss to historical documents, because it mirrors the spoken language. But that's what linguists and historians are for, and are needed in every language).
  - gwern 16y ago
    I've been learning Korean myself. Hangul is actually pretty cool and logical! I particularly like the regular way it has of denoting a 'y' version of a vowel - just adding a little perpendicular stroke to all the vowels. ㅏ (a) and ㅑ (ya), ㅜ (oo) and ㅠ (yoo), etc.

mjgoins 16y ago

I have this problem in English, and I'm not even young by tech standards. I should probably spend some time re-learning to write, because it's kind of frightening.

pavlov 16y ago

David Moser's essay Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard [1] has an amusing and enlightening passage about this "character amnesia". 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"?? [1] http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

vorg 16y ago
"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." Simple! 嚏 is spelt 口十冖田厶止. The first character, 口, meaning "mouth", is on the left of the other 5 characters, 十冖田厶止, which are stacked on top of each other on the righthand side. Those five are the picture of a body: 十 is the head, 冖 are the shoulders, 田 is the sixpack abs, 厶 are the privates, and 止 means "stop walking", for the legs. When he sneezes, the mouth becomes detached from the body, comic book style. Perhaps when Chinese students learn characters in primary school, they don't remember them because they learn them in rote style, not remembering WHY a character has a certain shape. The character amnesia is because of the rote learning, not because of the enlarged character lexicon.
- 16y ago

miguelpais 16y ago

In here you have a very interesting video about Kanji I saw some months ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WxihOeMPBg#t=4m10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WxihOeMPBg#t=4m10 (I put the flag to skip to the moment he speaks about this issue).

ww520 16y ago

This is a non-event when better tools come along. It's like people complaining they forgot how to carve writing on stone when paper and pen come along.

mikecane 16y ago

This is fascinating because in the 1980s when there was nearly a trade war between the US & Japan, part of the rhetoric from Japan was that their symbol-based system was superior to Western alphabets in that it used a different part of the brain and therefore somehow enhanced intelligence. My own testimony is that my English-based handwriting (my native and only language) has gotten progressively worse due to using a keyboard daily for years instead of using pen & paper. It's also frustrating, because it's slower. It feels like labor now.

vorg 16y ago
Quoting from http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/writjap.htm http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/writjap.htm ... "Kana are read phonetically and kanji are read visually, with a dissociation between the processes involved, according to Morton & Sasanuma and popular Japanese belief. (This must be a little awkward in reading pages of mixed text, surely?) Nomura found that meaning was extracted faster from kanji than kana words, and thought that kana pronunciation was data-driven and that kanji pronunciation was conceptually-driven. Morton & Sasanuma (1982) also claimed that evidence supports the intuitive belief that kanji can give direct access to the meaning of words, but that kana always require translation into a phonological code when they are being read, and there is no development of automatic visual recognition of the kana symbols. One of the most intriguing ways of studying what differences there may really be in processing is in observing brain-damaged patients - following certain lesions some patients can still read kana but not kanji, while other insults to the brain leave the ability to read kanji but not kana."
Dn_Ab 16y ago
While language does not limit or boost what is expressible, conceivable or knowable it does impose a default in how we structure the world and what details we take in as important. There was a fairly interesting article in the NYT recently that goes over this. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html... What I found interesting were the accounts on a particular tribe of Australian aborigines who had an amazing sense of cardinal direction - instantly knowing north from south regardless of orientation due to a language based on geographic instead of egocentric directions and the Matses people whose precision in relaying past events would make a Vulcan logician proud. Intrigued I researched this concept to be evidentiality and epistemic modality. Enforcing such reporting precision into the grammar seems like it would combat sloppy thinking. I wonder if someone raised in such a language would have an easier time creating proofs, programming or studying subjects like bayesian probability or philosophy. I wonder how marketing would work in such a default. I bet statistics would not be a form of lying in that culture.

greenlblue 16y ago

As an outside observer I find this a little funny. It's very much akin to how some segments of America constantly blame technological advancement for what they see as the deteriorating quality of youth.

yewweitan 16y ago

I learnt both Chinese and English as a child and all the way through my formal education (up to 18), and I must say, that the phenomenon of forgetting easy characters is pretty common. Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters are ridiculously complex. The resultant expressive power is obvious, and it's no wonder why these are the few languages in which calligraphy blossomed into a fully-fledged artform, which I personally practice as well. As with everything, we're going to artificially and naturally select the best language. I personally think that 'best' here is defined by flexibility and beauty. Flexibility - no way would you have come up with a word like "globalization" in Chinese, it lacks the prefix/suffix system to do that. It also doesn't have the phonetic flexibility to include foreign terms like Japanese does. Eg: "Basketball" in japanese can be pronounced "baskeboru" but it's "lan qiu" in Chinese. I think one overlooked point is that Chinese isn't a beautiful language, at least not in the opinion of youth today. It's conciseness has spawned some of the best poetry (i think) on earth. But as much as the French complain about how it's hard to sound romantic in English, it's even harder in Chinese (not to mention some of the dialects like Cantonese and Hokkien). Kinda reminds me of how people despise Lisp (of which I'm also a fan of). It's an obscure language, but it's the most expressive one that I've seen, and will continue to admire it for it's beauty forever. That's probably the reason why it's still around after all this time. Will the Chinese language suffer a similar fate to Lisp over the long run? I doubt so, since natural languages are a whole different beast. But the problems are real, and with more than a billion people potentially using the same character set, this will be interesting to watch. --- TL;DR - Chinese is difficult to learn. It's not as flexible as English; you can add "ization" to "global" easily in English, not so in Chinese. It's also not a beautiful language in the way that youth see it; Chinese makes for great poetry about the mountains and the ocean, but not for whispering sweet nothings into a partner's ear (at least compared to a language like French)

aikinai 16y ago
Does Chinese not use 化 or something similar to mean "ization?" If not, how do they turn "global" into "globalization?" (I'm just curious) In Japanese, the kanji 化 is almost perfectly equivalent to the English "ization," and I think it's very elegant. For example, 機械 is machine and 機械化 is mechanization. Or another very popular one in Japan these days is 高齢化, old-age-ization, used to refer to the phenomenon of Japan's "aging society." That's actually one of the main benefits I see with kanji is the elegance and succinctness. The worst thing to translate from Japanese to English is a table (figure in a document). Kanji allows you to express things so succinctly that you can have lots of tiny columns with one or two kanji for the heading (no longer than the digits in the content). Often that heading has to be at least three or four words in English, and it's impossible to recreate the table in the same space.

mkramlich 16y ago

heck I think every written/human language but English should die out. If there are some words worth saving from those languages, let's figure out how to import them into English, then move on already.

GeneralMaximus 16y ago
Agreed. Some other things that should die out include: all operating systems but Mac OS X, all programming languages but C, all car companies but Toyota, all clothing retailers but Banana Republic, all coffee shops but Starbucks, all pizza chains but Domino's ...
- jephthai 16y ago
  With you so far...

jephthai 16y ago

I find myself forgetting how to write in cursive. To combat this problem, I force myself to write cursive periodically, just to stay in practice. It will never be as consistent and attractive as my grandmother's cursive, though.