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...one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write th

...one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. ... 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"? ... ...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. It was related to me by a Chinese colleague that some young people in China mostly use Pinyin and can barely write any characters, since cellphones take care of turning the Pinyin into characters.

fspeech 8y ago
"It was related to me by a Chinese colleague that some young people in China mostly use Pinyin and can barely write any characters, since cellphones take care of turning the Pinyin into characters." Very true! Which means technology now also makes it a lot easier for people who don't want to bother learning to write Chinese characters. It is FAR easier to recognize them in reading than to remember how to write them.
jimmydef 8y ago
I think many non-Chinese sensationalize this problem. Yes, forgetting certain characters is common but not too an overwhelming or overproblematic extent. What many people like to do is to confuse word difficulty with the difficult of the concept the word is representing and then generalizing it to all words, making it seem that Chinese is tougher than it really is. Yes knee is simple to write in English and it represents an easy concept, but the word (膝盖) itself is difficult to remember in Chinese. But that doesn't mean that all easy concepts are difficult to write in Chinese and vice versa. Difficult concepts may also have simple characters representing them. There's no direct correlation between these two. Put it another way, the word "diarrhoea" is a very simple concept and very easy to write in Chinese. Almost no Chinese will forget how to write it in Chinese. But ask a native English speaker, and a large percentage will not be able to get it correct. Does this somehow mean that all English words are as difficult to write as "diarrhoea"? And then they can throw the same thing back at you. Can you imagine a well-educated native Chinese speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "diarrhoea"?
- Koshkin 8y ago
  Not anymore.

fspeech 8y ago

"It was related to me by a Chinese colleague that some young people in China mostly use Pinyin and can barely write any characters, since cellphones take care of turning the Pinyin into characters." Very true! Which means technology now also makes it a lot easier for people who don't want to bother learning to write Chinese characters. It is FAR easier to recognize them in reading than to remember how to write them.

jimmydef 8y ago

I think many non-Chinese sensationalize this problem. Yes, forgetting certain characters is common but not too an overwhelming or overproblematic extent. What many people like to do is to confuse word difficulty with the difficult of the concept the word is representing and then generalizing it to all words, making it seem that Chinese is tougher than it really is. Yes knee is simple to write in English and it represents an easy concept, but the word (膝盖) itself is difficult to remember in Chinese. But that doesn't mean that all easy concepts are difficult to write in Chinese and vice versa. Difficult concepts may also have simple characters representing them. There's no direct correlation between these two. Put it another way, the word "diarrhoea" is a very simple concept and very easy to write in Chinese. Almost no Chinese will forget how to write it in Chinese. But ask a native English speaker, and a large percentage will not be able to get it correct. Does this somehow mean that all English words are as difficult to write as "diarrhoea"? And then they can throw the same thing back at you. Can you imagine a well-educated native Chinese speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "diarrhoea"?

Koshkin 8y ago
Not anymore.