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> I think it's related to there being fewer ways to "fuck up". In English, it's easy to mix up the letters, transpose them, etc.. With Chinese characters/kanjix
by pezezin 4y ago
> I think it's related to there being fewer ways to "fuck up". In English, it's easy to mix up the letters, transpose them, etc.. With Chinese characters/kanjix, _you can't transpose strokes_ digitally. There are people who make mistakes when writing by hand, but even that is much less when writing kana, the reason being that while in English, "relatiounally" and "relationally" might be similarly, transposing whole kana changes the pronunciation such that it's entirely distinct. Transposing strokes within a kana is of course still possible.
They don't transpose the strokes, they just forget how to write the character entirely, even if they can read it perfectly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
I live in Japan and I have seen it happen many times, suddenly the person needs to stop and check the character in their phone or a dictionary. I have never seen it happens with an alphabet-based language. Sure, you might not be 100% sure about the spelling, but you can always approximate it and write something.
Every single Japanese person who I know has told me how much a pain in the ass their language is to read and write, and how they wish it was simpler, but shoganai.
- IIAOPSW 4y agoMao tried to simplify Chinese and frankly Mao didn't go far enough.
- ickoonite 4y agoThey actually tried to do a second round in the 1970s. It was felt that they had gone too far so it was abandoned, but not before some people had changed their surnames to use the new simplifications (e.g. 傅 became 付). Some never changed back.
- hinkley 4y agoI love how ` basically becomes 'yadda yadda yadda' for the entire middle of 傅
- Laaas 4y agoCharacter amnesia isn't a problem because we have IMEs, but they're also a problem _because_ of IMEs. In the pre-digital world, character amnesia was likely a rarer thing.
- Dylan16807 4y agoSure but now you're going to transpose strokes, I bet.
- extraduder_ire 4y ago> I have never seen it happens with an alphabet-based language. I got it once for a couple of days when I was about 7 years old. Learned how to write an uppercase N, and became unable to write it lowercase (n) for a few days. (it's a super weird feeling, trying to write something and producing a different shape)