15 ms·

Word-processor idiot (Japanese expression)

163 points by acadapter 4y ago

rippercushions 4y ago
This affliction is now near-universal in Japan. A friend of mine was recently ribbed for forgetting how to handwrite an admittedly somewhat complex but still very common character (橋 hashi, "bridge") in her own name.
- ApolloFortyNine 4y ago
  I wonder how much time is collectively 'wasted' due to kanji/Chinese characters. Each of these characters also have a certain order to the way they should be drawn, and from what direction. And at least in Japanese, each one has at least 2 readings (and sometimes much more), a Chinese reading and a Japanese reading, but which one is used doesn't always follow the 'rules'. A lot of this is likely learned through simple exposure for listening and speaking, but it makes reading and especially writing rediculous.
  - Transfinity 4y ago
    I've heard that the Kanji make Japanese and Chinese much easier to scan quickly once you're fluent.
    - vharuck 4y ago
      I've only learned Japanese as far the N4 test (second of five levels of the standardized tests), but my experience backs this up. Those tests preferred syllabic symbols instead of kanji, and that just made them harder to read for me.
    - munchbunny 4y ago
      Chinese doesn’t have a writing system that mixes different sets of pictographs. It has traditional and simplified versions of the writing system but they’re not intermixed the way Japanese does it.
      - samus 4y ago
        Such mixing is simply not required in Chinese since words in all Chinese varieties are not inflected. There are some particles that are quite common (like 了 and 子), but they are very easy to write. The Simplified Characters are further optimized for writing speed. Most importantly 儿 for 兒 and 个 for 個, since these characters are very common in Modern Standard Chinese.
  - bsnnkv 4y ago
    Anyone interested in this train of thought (pro or against) should read the Chrysanthemum Dynasty series by Ken Liu.
    - recuter 4y ago
      I mean, I'm interested but I don't know I am that interested. Can you just tell me the conclusion and I'll read Liu based on that? :)
  - crispinb 4y ago
    > I wonder how much time is collectively 'wasted' due to kanji/Chinese characters. There's probably research on this in Chinese educational literature. Pinyin, though now used primarily for computer input and foreign language learning, was originally conceived for use in teaching literacy to native Chinese speakers. Mass literacy in China was a particularly hard nut to crack because of the huge challenge of learning thousands of characters as compared to a small phonetic alphabet. The ambition of replacing characters with pinyin never really developed momentum for native Chinese speakers. But the increasing use of computer input, I believe, has reduced the emphasis on years of character-writing memorisation drills in Chinese schools.
  - tokinonagare 4y ago
    Probably not that much, at least when comparing to French or English orthographies. Those two are very complex, and it's easy to forget about it because we used them for decades. But try teaching reading, then writing a beginner in those languages and you'll see for yourself how complex they actually are. Also communication with less educated people (in my company internal docs and code are riddled with mistakes in both languages) is revealing in that matter. I myself have to check very often if a letter is doubled or not, if a 'e' or 'a' is used in word like dependent and it doesn't help that cognates existing in French and English are often written slightly differently, which adds to the possible confusion.
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
      > Also communication with less educated people (in my company internal docs and code are riddled with mistakes in both languages) ...but you are still able to make out the meaning without all that much difficulty and without much of a chance of misinterpretation, i.e. these language are quite robust in the face of transmission errors. How does this work for ideographic scripts like Japanese Kanji or Chinese? When people make the sort of mistakes made by those less educated people mentioned above does their writing end up similarly readable, i.e. are ideographic scripts similarly robust in the face of transmission errors?
      - thfuran 4y ago
        >...but you are still able to make out the meaning without all that much difficulty and without much of a chance of misinterpretation, i.e. these language are quite robust in the face of transmission errors Well, sometimes. There are plenty of single-character errors in English that could change meaning though: Presence of absence of a comma, asymptomatic vs symptomatic, bat vs bet, etc.
        pclmulqdq 4y ago
        Look no further than the US constitution, particularly its second amendment, to see how much a single punctuation mark can matter. Also sentences like: "the Google party featured two strippers, Larry and Sergei." Are the founders of Google the two aforementioned strippers or VIP guests?
  - bluquark 4y ago
    In the reading direction, it has similar strengths and weaknesses as irregular English spellings. Faster to scan given there's more variety in glyph shapes to take cues from. Preserves etymology and relationships between words, so new words can actually be faster to learn at an intermediate level of fluency. Personally I often can guess the meaning of new words from kanji + context, but if I only hear the pronunciation I have no idea, so I always turn on closed captions on Japanese TV. In the writing direction, it's both time-consuming to learn initially and time-consuming to write every time, but it does carry a certain satisfaction and delight. So the current trend to learning exclusively how to read and type them seems economically productive, but the loss of aesthetic enjoyment of calligraphy in daily life is regrettable.
  - muyuu 4y ago
    no more time than it's spent in spelling and accurate grammar kanji is useful training for visual memory and can be used to provide memory pegs
  - quicklime 4y ago
    In my experience with Japanese, kanji is more work to learn how to write, but it makes it easier for others to read - not just compared to romaji but even hiragana and katakana. I'm not really sure it's time "wasted". > rediculous In a lot of ways, it's like spelling in English ;)
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      >kanji is more work to learn how to write, but it makes it easier for others to read - not just compared to romaji but even hiragana and katakana. The reason for this, which I think most westerners won't immediately understand, is because Japanese (and Chinese scripts in general) doesn't use spaces nor capitalization. What do I mean by "doesn't use spaces no capitalization"? Think of English, but without either: canyoureadthiseasily?ididn'tthinksoeither.nobodywriteslikethisinenglish. A sentence written purely in hiragana reads like that. Kanji serves the same function spaces and capitalization does for us, they distinguish individual words from each other. Some words are written entirely in hiragana for brevity or style, but generally speaking the purpose of hiragana is to string the kanji together and add contextual information so the sentence flows well. On that note, all foreign words are written in katakana, and katakana is also used for emphasis, similar to ALL CAPS or bold writing in English.
      - soldehierro 4y ago
        > canyoureadthiseasily?ididn'tthinksoeither.nobodywriteslikethisinenglish This is very legible for a native english speaker
        munchbunny 4y ago
        It’s legible, but it takes a bit of active effort which makes it tiring to read more than a few sentences in a single sitting.
        frosted-flakes 4y ago
        Spaces weren't always used. If you look at old greek/roman engravings everything is jammed together without spaces. I think you could eventually become quite good at reading spaceless text, even though spaces definitely aid in comprehension.
  - TT-392 4y ago
    >each of thrse characters also have a certain way they should be drawn I have been learning japanese for a few years now, and kanji stroke order was honestly one of the easiest things to get right. there are exeptions, but in general, after having practiced like 50 characters, you pick up on patterns and are able to guess stroke order pretty easily. I highly doubt learning that specific aspect causes a significant amount of time wasted.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      It also doesn’t truly matter. It just generally leads to being able to fit the parts together fairly easily.
      - TT-392 4y ago
        And it becomes easier to read if people have bad handwriting. Cause badly written characters with the same stroke order will look similar to each other, therefore it will be easier be easier to read for people used to reading japanese handwriting.
  - logbiscuitswave 4y ago
    There’s a stroke order but the rules are pretty easy to learn. Outside of calligraphy, nobody will likely care if you get the order wrong. There’s also shorthand ways to write kanji called ryakuji. Yeah, kanji can have lots of readings. There are some rules around when you use an on’yumi vs kun’yomi. A kanji paired with a hiragana is always a kun’yomi reading, but if there’s no kana you just have to know which reading to use. You can only pick that up through context and exposure. Of course any one kanji can have multiple on’yomi and kun’yomi readings. (And then there’s the concept of rendaku which can modify pronunciation based on neighboring syllables.) There’s nothing easy about it, but it is what it is. The you’re serious about learning Japanese it’s something you just have to get used to. But nevertheless, kanji has many positives. It can make it much faster to read things because they can wrap complex things into a single character. If you have an unfamiliar character, understanding its components can often times provide a hint as to its meaning. Think of it kind of like reading a conversation entirely in emoji. You may not get the whole meaning, but you can generally pick up the gist. And with far fewer words than it would take to write it out in full.
    - paulryanrogers 4y ago
      Does the terseness help with typing too? Or does it come out to more or roughly the same number of key presses to express things?
      - escapedmoose 4y ago
        Kanji take a few more key-pressed to type. You start by typing the phonetics, and your keyboard/word processor will suggest the kanji that fit the word, which you select with arrows or space bar.
        logbiscuitswave 4y ago
        This picture from the Japanese IME article on Wikipedia is a pretty good demonstration on typical use: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IME_demonstratie_-_Matsuo_Bashou_-_Furu_ikeya_kawazu_tobikomu_mizuno_oto.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IME_demonstratie_-_Mats...
  - numpad0 4y ago
    There's no way a language with that kind of major "deficiencies" have survived past 2k years, and especially the postwar media development. It's all just creative quirks, guaranteed to fit well within the computational budget of a human brain. Similar kind of criticism can be made up against English: English is such an inefficient language, there are only 26 symbols, 52 if you count "capital" letters but those cannot be used for better compression, and so you cannot just remember a letter but 2-3 sequences of letters as meta-symbols, and those meta-symbols would have tons of special cases when it comes to pronunciation, and and ... Most books in most languages compress into similar sizes of zip files, it's not like there is always one version that gets to just 512 bytes and the other that's always 50MB. I would think that "all languages are explicitly equal" is a stance too dogmatic to hold, but clearly all our human languages are quite close against each others even just looking at that.
  - idiocrat 4y ago
    I am "shocked" how much human collective time is wasted on inefficient software and configurations, including: - UI animations sliding/folding (e.g. 1Hz interactivity vs 120Hz interactivity). - MS Windows default keyboard settings with slowed down key repeat rate. - corporate firewalls configured to DROP instead of REJECT the LAN traffic. - latency to access office documents in the cloud. - MS Teams bugs frustrations. - increased number of mouse clicks in WIN11 to reach common functions. - other software bugs/annoyances we cannot fix, c.g Jonathan Blow.
    - idiocrat 4y ago
      - Multi-threaded UI updates, where the elements being shifted from the expected position (after a background update), causing the mouse clicks to miss the expected element. Need to delay the clicks and wait until the UI updates are settled, before clicking on an element.
      - LorenPechtel 4y ago
        No--you have it backwards. The problem comes from delayed clicks, it won't be cured by delaying clicks. You click the spot you want and something more loads causing the control to move before the click is processed. I'm not sure how to do it but the clicks need to be processed against the state of the display when the click was done rather than against the state when the click was processed. The only way to do this that comes to mind is to snapshot the hot zones on the screen before doing anything that will disrupt the screen and any click received during or within 300ms (configurable, I'm figuring a minimum reaction time) after the screen update should be processed against that map, not against the current state.
        idiocrat 4y ago
        It still will be a timing game. What if I want to click on the new object in 300 ms time period? I need to wait 300 ms to do so, this is a flow issue. If 1 billion current MS Windows users would make daily 1000 UI operations, but each time wait 100 ms for UI animations, the collective wasted time on the animations would be 3000 years of collective wasted time. Fortunately most are just watching movies and shopping online, so not much collective _productive_ time is wasted ;)
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    A lot, I'm sure. I have no experience with Japanese but my wife is a native Chinese speaker. 1) In a language like English if you know a word and are faced with it's written form that you do not know you can probably figure it out. In Chinese knowing how to say it gives you no guidance in figuring out the written form, literacy takes years to learn. I have watched two literate Chinese speakers stumped by an unknown character and not even realize it was actually Japanese, not Chinese. (I knew because of the context, not from being able to read it.) 2) It appears to take my wife longer to write something in Chinese (and she's not a word-processor idiot by any means, when she's putting something into the computer she uses handwriting recognition, she's never learned the new ways) than it would take me in English--more strokes and they are less connected than even printing, let alone cursive. 3) Chinese lacks the concept of alphabetizing. I've watched her with her dictionary (we've been together since the 80s) and it's a process of looking stuff up in tables to get you close to your target and then a manual search once you're there. I can find a word in an English->Chinese dictionary far faster than she can find one in a Chinese->English dictionary. That being said, I'm not going to call someone a word processor idiot because maintaining a skill like that costs time--it simply isn't worthwhile for most people. Many years ago I chose to abandon cursive when I realized that if I wanted to be able to write it decently I would have to deliberately practice--and I would say I write maybe a dozen words a month. Practicing would be a time sink, not a time saver. (Not to mention most of those words are on a whiteboard, too large to do in cursive.) Look it up is a perfectly good answer in most cases, only an issue for emergency type skills.
- kurthr 4y ago
  Just so people know how most of this typing is done in Japan, it's on cell phones and it's pretty amazing because there are only 5 vowels and 10 "consonant" sounds so you can put it on a standard keyboard by just flicking lf-dn-rt-up (for ee-oh-eh-u) or pressing for "ah" to get all the hiragana (well except for accent marks). Everything fits in 12 buttons so it's been used since flip phones. Then based on the hiragana phonetics you can get predictive kanji (or katakana for foreign words). It's really important to put kanji in, because a lot of words in hiragana are homonyms and the meaning can be unclear. Japanese already really like terse contextual conversation so that's critical. However... sometimes the right Kanji isn't there until you type more hiragana, at least hopefully. And Japanese names have lots of weird Kanji which you really need to use since that's polite. Here's a native demonstrating typing on an iPhone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q204SYyfEJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q204SYyfEJY On a standard computer keyboard (Japanese IME in Windows) the prediction is even better, but standard hiragana are multiple romaji (roman character) keypresses. There are also direct hiragana keyboard mappings, but kanji keyboards are mostly for humor value. See below for a 500 key version from Alps: https://twitter.com/LanguageCrawler/status/1134460840697053184 https://twitter.com/LanguageCrawler/status/11344608406970531...
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    I've always wondered why the latin alphabet doesn't have a keyboard like that. It would totally work. With 26 letters (plus additional letters in some languages), you could assign the 10 most common letters to each key, then assign the lesser-used letters to swipes. Capital letters would work as shown in the video: tap the letter, then tap the "capitalize" button to transform it to a capital letter. A T I del O E S space cap N ,.?! enter Obviously you would have to learn the layout, but I don't think it would take very long to get proficient. I've experimented with using traditional T9 with predictive text on my smartphone (Samsung phones have it pre-installed, you just need to enable it), and for typing sentences it can be incredibly quick, but it completely falls down as soon as you can't rely on the prediction system, such as for passwords and URLs. So I always end up switching back to the cramped QWERTY keyboard.
    - 4y ago
pxc 4y ago
How many WPM can the average Japanese adult write by hand? Are kanji more efficient to write out than phonetic writing systems, or is proficiency with them more valued for tradition's sake? Is almost everyone a word-processor idiot these days? When I think of writing things by hand in English, it's hard to ever really want to do it. I type literally 10x faster than I can write, and when I write I cramp super quickly. In my life, at least, handwriting is obsolete.
- throwanem 4y ago
  > I type literally 10x faster than I can write, and when I write I cramp super quickly. Because you don't do it enough to keep those muscles in training, and because you use the wrong tools when you do. A $20 Pilot Metropolitan is more than enough to discover how pleasant longhand can be when done with a tool that's designed specifically for that purpose, in a way ballpoints and pencils are not. It'll teach you to stop ramming the point into the paper, too, which is the other reason why writing makes your hand hurt.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    I find roller ball pens to be almost as good, but easier to maintain (my fountain pen at work would be dry after leaving it cap-on over the weekend).
    - throwanem 4y ago
      Use a different pen, maybe, or add an O-ring to the section or something. A capped pen should take weeks to dry out, not days. Rollerballs are a decent second best - I keep them for lenders and for backup in case I'm caught without a spare cartridge. That said, they definitely don't come close to my Decimo or E95s.
  - HaltingPoint 4y ago
    I always use good ol' mechanical pencils, particularly Twist Erase or BiC with 0.7 lead.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I have a new nickname! ワープロ馬鹿 I should be a doctor, with my handwriting. TBF, my handwriting sucked before I started using computers, but they didn't help. My entire family has awful penmanship (and it's an Ivy-league family). I used to dread trying to decipher my mother's notes.
- wirthjason 4y ago
  This isn’t about quality or legibility of handwriting. When wiring 馬鹿 on a computer you type the 4 characters “baka” (or the two character ばか” if your phone supports Lana input) and get an autocomplete drop-down with the kanji.
roomey 4y ago
I recently found out cursive (aka. joined up writing aka. running writing aka. .... Handwriting) isn't thought in US schools any more. This blew my mind. I understand the reasoning behind dropping it from the curriculum, but hearing that students couldn't do cursive really, blew my mind. And I'm not even sure why it surprised me so much!
- extrememacaroni 4y ago
  What? US students don't write by hand anymore? ...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - smnrchrds 4y ago
    The print, i.e. write detached letters, not attached letter like cursive.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      I think there is a fair argument to be made that handwriting !== cursive, and that equating the two is needlessly confusing. Handwriting is an action, whereas cursive is a form of writing. Do we call handwriting Japanese "cursive"? Of course not.
      - Izkata 4y ago
        Not the usual kind, but a cursive form does exist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_script_(East_Asia) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_script_(East_Asia)
        Dalewyn 4y ago
        I'm aware, but the only people who write that today are calligraphers and monks. You think finding an average American that does cursive is hard, finding an average Japanese that does cursive is even harder. :V
kylecazar 4y ago
Somewhat relatedly, I recently went on a months long mission to reacquaint myself with cursive. I hadn't used it since grade school, and had almost totally forgotten many characters. It was fun, and felt good to accomplish something so useless.
- throwanem 4y ago
  Hardly useless. Over something like three thousand pages of work notes and personal diary since I discovered the habit in 2018, I've learned there's something to the idea that longhand writing eases access to a somewhat unique mode of thought. There's craftsmanship to it, too. It's not something I anticipated, but I do enjoy for its own sake not being the anglophone sort of wāpurobaka any more.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  Cursive as taught in American schools was never very practical, for a lot of reasons. But writing by hand is an important skill, and the block letter style they teach kids isn't really up to the task of writing long passages. I recommend learning the Getty-Dubay italic style. It's a bit like block letters but with strokes and joiners designed for both legibility and speed. I spent a good two months with the book some 20 years ago and the before-and-after of my handwriting, while not dramatic, is clear to me, and I write faster. https://handwritingsuccess.com/write-now/ https://handwritingsuccess.com/write-now/
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    I'm not an expert, but that looks very much like the handwriting I was taught at primary school in England in the 1990s. I think we started learning it when we were 7-8 years old, and could be trusted with a cheap fountain pen. Before that, it was printing with a pencil.
Avlin67 4y ago
reminds me geo location idiots that are lost because of gps use
wirthjason 4y ago
Can’t remember the last time I saw baka written in kanji and not katakana.
userbinator 4y ago
Also somewhat amusing is that "idiot" breaks down into the characters "horse deer".
- KhoomeiK 4y ago
  Wiktionary says 馬鹿 is "probably originally a transcription of Sanskrit मोह (moha, “folly”), used as a slang term among monks".
  - userbinator 4y ago
    Interesting that it's a different etymology but ended up with the same structure as this other two-animal insult: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schweinehund https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schweinehund
  - glandium 4y ago
    Japanese wikipedia lists 7 different hypothetized origins, none of them having real decisive evidence.
- atahanacar 4y ago
  It is an ateji: the characters' meanings are unimportant, they are chosen for their sound.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    I’m sure they had more options than ‘horse’ and ‘deer’ though.
theGeatZhopa 4y ago
I have two write modes. Write and not write. Two shades of gray. But I have a cursive world of words. I paint the air with my ability to temporarily change the density of the surrounding medium "air" through and by means of generating waves at arbitrary, sometimes repetitive patterned, frequencies, which ever started reach their destination, usually a opening of an ear, or the wall, sometimes. That must be enough.
ssnistfajen 4y ago
China is seeing a somewhat similar phenomeno too. The ubiquity of pinyin-based digital input methods is causing a lot of younger generations to lose the ability to write Chinese characters by hand without looking them up online. Abbreviated acronyms due to a mix of censorship/laziness is also becoming common making a lot of online messages look rather cryptic to anyone who doesn't know the lingo.
- KMag 4y ago
  My experience from living in Hong Kong for 10 years was also that hand-written forms were often some kind of cursive/shorthand. I'm familiar with both traditional and simplified characters, but I'd often encounter written forms that were more a shorthand/cursive form of traditional characters. I'm not sure if there was an official system, but reading handwriting was much different than reading my textbooks.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > I'm not sure if there was an official system, but reading handwriting was much different than reading my textbooks. There is an official system. I don't know what it is and I can't read Chinese handwriting either, but I am assured that there is a system and, for example, it's possible for a Chinese person to view an unfamiliar handwritten character and be able to look it up by its standard form.
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      There is a formal, correct way to write characters, and common "cursive" doesn't follow it. Reading handwriting isn't quite so bad as the stereotypical doctor's handwriting in the west (or is that just an American thing?) but it definitely takes some practice getting familiar with the differences.
      - xvilka 4y ago
        Doctors' handwriting in China is as unreadable to mere mortals as everywhere else. Thankfully, nowadays everything is digital or printed.
glandium 4y ago
When you read word-processor, you probably think Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, not Xerox 6016 Memorywriter (thanks wikipedia) or any other type of electronic typewriter. Maybe it's a generational thing, but the only use of ワープロ I know of is for the latter (do a google image search for ワープロ, and compare to a google image search for word processor). I'd say the expression ワープロ馬鹿 is probably very outdated.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  It's generational, I think. I've always understood, both as an American and Japanese, the likes of Microsoft Word as word processing programs. This phenomenon also goes beyond Microsoft Word too, it's typing in general because the IME handles kanji conversions from hiragana/romaji.
  - glandium 4y ago
    I mean I don't think ワープロ is used to designate word processor programs. ワープロソフト (literally word processor software) might, but not ワープロ. The expression ワープロ馬鹿 has probably never been used in the context of software. Nowadays, the phenomenon itself is largely driven by smartphones.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      I’m not sure what you are trying to say? That the term must have originated in the earliest word processors that had IME? Or that someone just stuck a few good sounding words together to describe a modern phenomenon?
      - glandium 4y ago
        That the term is probably more than 30 years old, and probably unheard of nowadays. Googling for it, in fact, yields more stuff in English than in Japanese.
        deleted 4y ago
ilyt 4y ago
Not really surprised. The most I write during month: * the logbook for keys for when I leave office last * signature when receiving mail/package. and... that's about it for a month. Few lines at most. But I was diagnosed with agraphia (i think that's how its called in english) as kid (something about eye-hand coordination IIRC) so my hand-writing always been fucking ugly even when I wrote a lot during school, so I don't particularly care about it
29athrowaway 4y ago
Over here we have the digital clock idiots, that cannot read an analog clock. This constitutes a higher level of idiocy than not being able to write kanji (knowing each kanji stroke order, having good calligraphy).
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  With the way things are going, reading analogue clocks is about as useful as reading Roman numerals. Something culturally relevant that's taught (and probably should be taught) to everyone in school, but not something that's actually useful in real life. Don't blame kids and the younger generations for the bad education their elders have given them. Reading analogue clocks is hardly a difficult test, but it's impossible to expect someone who's never been taught to to just "know" that clocks are three rudimentary base-12 progress bars how far along the current half of the day we are; it's just not intuitive. It's like IT people complaining that kids these days don't even know how to fax anymore, society is moving on and old skills will disappear and become niches as a result. It's a shame for the Japanese/Chinese culture that this relatively unique cultural aspect is disappearing, but I'm also quite surprised it has taken so long since the introduction of foreign alphabets.
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    Many analog clocks have roman numerals.
  - Falkon1313 4y ago
    On the contrary, I find analog clocks more intuitive. They graphically and clearly represent locations within the cycle of time. I just wish 24-hour clocks/watches were more common. I think much of the confusion some people have must come from abbreviating it to 12 hours that each happen twice a day, which is obviously nonsense.
    - Izkata 4y ago
      Likewise here. I tell the time by the shape of the hands, not by reading what they're pointing to. I can glance at an analog clock and instantly tell how long it is until something, but it takes a moment to actually translate the current time to something I can say to another person. Also because I use the shape instead of the numbers, I sometimes have trouble with digital clocks, and have to mentally translate the numbers into an analog clock face before I understand what it's telling me.
arrakeen 4y ago
similarly, i recently discovered that the japanese equivalent for a CLI one-liner is 一行野郎, or "one line bastard". which i think is a very fitting description
AlexCoventry 4y ago
This is good, right? Having to learn all those characters seems like a dead-weight loss, from the outside.
Reptur 4y ago
Pretty offensive to people with a real disability called Dysgraphia. Dysgraphia is a neurological disorder of written expression that impairs writing ability and fine motor skills. It is a learning disability that affects children and adults, and interferes with practically all aspects of the writing process, including spelling, legibility, word spacing and sizing, and expression.
- msla 4y ago
  > Pretty offensive to people with a real disability called Dysgraphia. Japanese people are less than sensitive to those who don't fit into a normative cultural mode? Say it ain't so!
livinglist 4y ago
If you go ask a native Chinese speaker from China nowadays, I can most likely guarantee you that nine out of ten of them don’t know how to write the second character in the word “sneeze” (喷嚏）
antsam 4y ago
I feel called out
Daub 4y ago
Self-professed English speaking word-processor idiot speaking. Before I was introduced to writing with a computor, my handwriting was illegible even to me, and my spelling was execrable.
Nadya 4y ago
This Japanese is (just barely) legible and makes for a great example of what the OP is talking about. And since Japanese is a surprisingly popular language for HN posters - if you are able to read Japanese - I challenge you read this: https://imgur.com/a/lse8JR0 https://imgur.com/a/lse8JR0 It was written by a JP native - using a mouse - but her handwriting is typically this bad so having to write using a mouse only made it very slightly worse than usual. It made me feel better about my own handwriting. I don't sweat the details at all - writing better than natives might get me minor praise but doesn't really benefit me in the long run vs expanding my vocabulary or learning how to read more kanji by spending less time focusing on writing them. I only write kanji nowadays to help with memorization of new kanji and to make sure I can still write the first few "grade levels" of kanji for how natives learn.
- numpad0 4y ago
  Orca scribble is something else. I wouldn't be surprised if she would have visual cortex issues in lines perpendicular to the baseline and/or lines intersecting. I'm not a doctor but hers is bad as considered an LD bad.
- samus 4y ago
  The computer mouse is good for point-to-point movements, but pretty bad for drawing precise shapes. Even cool drag&drop workflows feel annoying if repetitive or if the target areas are very small.
KTallguy 4y ago
Apparently the vernacular these days is 「スマホ馬鹿」, “Smart Phone“ idiot. Same principle, different device.
johnea 4y ago
This same phenomenon is present in western languages. Except instead of being unable to write difficult characters, the sufferers are just generally idiots. They have no knowledge of navigation in the citries they grew up in, they have reduced ability in face-to-face human interaction, they suffer major inability in understanding that the physical world is the universal host of all of their "virtual" reality including the corporate products they concieve of as "community" and the chatbots they think of as "friends". In general, the internet idiot...
- johnea 4y ago
  That being said, writing chinese characters is a unique skill, separate from being able to read them.

163 points by acadapter 4y ago

This affliction is now near-universal in Japan. A friend of mine was recently ribbed for forgetting how to handwrite an admittedly somewhat complex but still very common character (橋 hashi, "bridge") in her own name.

ApolloFortyNine 4y ago
I wonder how much time is collectively 'wasted' due to kanji/Chinese characters. Each of these characters also have a certain order to the way they should be drawn, and from what direction. And at least in Japanese, each one has at least 2 readings (and sometimes much more), a Chinese reading and a Japanese reading, but which one is used doesn't always follow the 'rules'. A lot of this is likely learned through simple exposure for listening and speaking, but it makes reading and especially writing rediculous.
- Transfinity 4y ago
  I've heard that the Kanji make Japanese and Chinese much easier to scan quickly once you're fluent.
  - vharuck 4y ago
    I've only learned Japanese as far the N4 test (second of five levels of the standardized tests), but my experience backs this up. Those tests preferred syllabic symbols instead of kanji, and that just made them harder to read for me.
  - munchbunny 4y ago
    Chinese doesn’t have a writing system that mixes different sets of pictographs. It has traditional and simplified versions of the writing system but they’re not intermixed the way Japanese does it.
    - samus 4y ago
      Such mixing is simply not required in Chinese since words in all Chinese varieties are not inflected. There are some particles that are quite common (like 了 and 子), but they are very easy to write. The Simplified Characters are further optimized for writing speed. Most importantly 儿 for 兒 and 个 for 個, since these characters are very common in Modern Standard Chinese.
- bsnnkv 4y ago
  Anyone interested in this train of thought (pro or against) should read the Chrysanthemum Dynasty series by Ken Liu.
  - recuter 4y ago
    I mean, I'm interested but I don't know I am that interested. Can you just tell me the conclusion and I'll read Liu based on that? :)
- crispinb 4y ago
  > I wonder how much time is collectively 'wasted' due to kanji/Chinese characters. There's probably research on this in Chinese educational literature. Pinyin, though now used primarily for computer input and foreign language learning, was originally conceived for use in teaching literacy to native Chinese speakers. Mass literacy in China was a particularly hard nut to crack because of the huge challenge of learning thousands of characters as compared to a small phonetic alphabet. The ambition of replacing characters with pinyin never really developed momentum for native Chinese speakers. But the increasing use of computer input, I believe, has reduced the emphasis on years of character-writing memorisation drills in Chinese schools.
- tokinonagare 4y ago
  Probably not that much, at least when comparing to French or English orthographies. Those two are very complex, and it's easy to forget about it because we used them for decades. But try teaching reading, then writing a beginner in those languages and you'll see for yourself how complex they actually are. Also communication with less educated people (in my company internal docs and code are riddled with mistakes in both languages) is revealing in that matter. I myself have to check very often if a letter is doubled or not, if a 'e' or 'a' is used in word like dependent and it doesn't help that cognates existing in French and English are often written slightly differently, which adds to the possible confusion.
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    > Also communication with less educated people (in my company internal docs and code are riddled with mistakes in both languages) ...but you are still able to make out the meaning without all that much difficulty and without much of a chance of misinterpretation, i.e. these language are quite robust in the face of transmission errors. How does this work for ideographic scripts like Japanese Kanji or Chinese? When people make the sort of mistakes made by those less educated people mentioned above does their writing end up similarly readable, i.e. are ideographic scripts similarly robust in the face of transmission errors?
    - thfuran 4y ago
      >...but you are still able to make out the meaning without all that much difficulty and without much of a chance of misinterpretation, i.e. these language are quite robust in the face of transmission errors Well, sometimes. There are plenty of single-character errors in English that could change meaning though: Presence of absence of a comma, asymptomatic vs symptomatic, bat vs bet, etc.
      - pclmulqdq 4y ago
        Look no further than the US constitution, particularly its second amendment, to see how much a single punctuation mark can matter. Also sentences like: "the Google party featured two strippers, Larry and Sergei." Are the founders of Google the two aforementioned strippers or VIP guests?
- bluquark 4y ago
  In the reading direction, it has similar strengths and weaknesses as irregular English spellings. Faster to scan given there's more variety in glyph shapes to take cues from. Preserves etymology and relationships between words, so new words can actually be faster to learn at an intermediate level of fluency. Personally I often can guess the meaning of new words from kanji + context, but if I only hear the pronunciation I have no idea, so I always turn on closed captions on Japanese TV. In the writing direction, it's both time-consuming to learn initially and time-consuming to write every time, but it does carry a certain satisfaction and delight. So the current trend to learning exclusively how to read and type them seems economically productive, but the loss of aesthetic enjoyment of calligraphy in daily life is regrettable.
- muyuu 4y ago
  no more time than it's spent in spelling and accurate grammar kanji is useful training for visual memory and can be used to provide memory pegs
- quicklime 4y ago
  In my experience with Japanese, kanji is more work to learn how to write, but it makes it easier for others to read - not just compared to romaji but even hiragana and katakana. I'm not really sure it's time "wasted". > rediculous In a lot of ways, it's like spelling in English ;)
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    >kanji is more work to learn how to write, but it makes it easier for others to read - not just compared to romaji but even hiragana and katakana. The reason for this, which I think most westerners won't immediately understand, is because Japanese (and Chinese scripts in general) doesn't use spaces nor capitalization. What do I mean by "doesn't use spaces no capitalization"? Think of English, but without either: canyoureadthiseasily?ididn'tthinksoeither.nobodywriteslikethisinenglish. A sentence written purely in hiragana reads like that. Kanji serves the same function spaces and capitalization does for us, they distinguish individual words from each other. Some words are written entirely in hiragana for brevity or style, but generally speaking the purpose of hiragana is to string the kanji together and add contextual information so the sentence flows well. On that note, all foreign words are written in katakana, and katakana is also used for emphasis, similar to ALL CAPS or bold writing in English.
    - soldehierro 4y ago
      > canyoureadthiseasily?ididn'tthinksoeither.nobodywriteslikethisinenglish This is very legible for a native english speaker
      - munchbunny 4y ago
        It’s legible, but it takes a bit of active effort which makes it tiring to read more than a few sentences in a single sitting.
        frosted-flakes 4y ago
        Spaces weren't always used. If you look at old greek/roman engravings everything is jammed together without spaces. I think you could eventually become quite good at reading spaceless text, even though spaces definitely aid in comprehension.
- TT-392 4y ago
  >each of thrse characters also have a certain way they should be drawn I have been learning japanese for a few years now, and kanji stroke order was honestly one of the easiest things to get right. there are exeptions, but in general, after having practiced like 50 characters, you pick up on patterns and are able to guess stroke order pretty easily. I highly doubt learning that specific aspect causes a significant amount of time wasted.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    It also doesn’t truly matter. It just generally leads to being able to fit the parts together fairly easily.
    - TT-392 4y ago
      And it becomes easier to read if people have bad handwriting. Cause badly written characters with the same stroke order will look similar to each other, therefore it will be easier be easier to read for people used to reading japanese handwriting.
- logbiscuitswave 4y ago
  There’s a stroke order but the rules are pretty easy to learn. Outside of calligraphy, nobody will likely care if you get the order wrong. There’s also shorthand ways to write kanji called ryakuji. Yeah, kanji can have lots of readings. There are some rules around when you use an on’yumi vs kun’yomi. A kanji paired with a hiragana is always a kun’yomi reading, but if there’s no kana you just have to know which reading to use. You can only pick that up through context and exposure. Of course any one kanji can have multiple on’yomi and kun’yomi readings. (And then there’s the concept of rendaku which can modify pronunciation based on neighboring syllables.) There’s nothing easy about it, but it is what it is. The you’re serious about learning Japanese it’s something you just have to get used to. But nevertheless, kanji has many positives. It can make it much faster to read things because they can wrap complex things into a single character. If you have an unfamiliar character, understanding its components can often times provide a hint as to its meaning. Think of it kind of like reading a conversation entirely in emoji. You may not get the whole meaning, but you can generally pick up the gist. And with far fewer words than it would take to write it out in full.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Does the terseness help with typing too? Or does it come out to more or roughly the same number of key presses to express things?
    - escapedmoose 4y ago
      Kanji take a few more key-pressed to type. You start by typing the phonetics, and your keyboard/word processor will suggest the kanji that fit the word, which you select with arrows or space bar.
      - logbiscuitswave 4y ago
        This picture from the Japanese IME article on Wikipedia is a pretty good demonstration on typical use: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IME_demonstratie_-_Matsuo_Bashou_-_Furu_ikeya_kawazu_tobikomu_mizuno_oto.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IME_demonstratie_-_Mats...
- numpad0 4y ago
  There's no way a language with that kind of major "deficiencies" have survived past 2k years, and especially the postwar media development. It's all just creative quirks, guaranteed to fit well within the computational budget of a human brain. Similar kind of criticism can be made up against English: English is such an inefficient language, there are only 26 symbols, 52 if you count "capital" letters but those cannot be used for better compression, and so you cannot just remember a letter but 2-3 sequences of letters as meta-symbols, and those meta-symbols would have tons of special cases when it comes to pronunciation, and and ... Most books in most languages compress into similar sizes of zip files, it's not like there is always one version that gets to just 512 bytes and the other that's always 50MB. I would think that "all languages are explicitly equal" is a stance too dogmatic to hold, but clearly all our human languages are quite close against each others even just looking at that.
- idiocrat 4y ago
  I am "shocked" how much human collective time is wasted on inefficient software and configurations, including: - UI animations sliding/folding (e.g. 1Hz interactivity vs 120Hz interactivity). - MS Windows default keyboard settings with slowed down key repeat rate. - corporate firewalls configured to DROP instead of REJECT the LAN traffic. - latency to access office documents in the cloud. - MS Teams bugs frustrations. - increased number of mouse clicks in WIN11 to reach common functions. - other software bugs/annoyances we cannot fix, c.g Jonathan Blow.
  - idiocrat 4y ago
    - Multi-threaded UI updates, where the elements being shifted from the expected position (after a background update), causing the mouse clicks to miss the expected element. Need to delay the clicks and wait until the UI updates are settled, before clicking on an element.
    - LorenPechtel 4y ago
      No--you have it backwards. The problem comes from delayed clicks, it won't be cured by delaying clicks. You click the spot you want and something more loads causing the control to move before the click is processed. I'm not sure how to do it but the clicks need to be processed against the state of the display when the click was done rather than against the state when the click was processed. The only way to do this that comes to mind is to snapshot the hot zones on the screen before doing anything that will disrupt the screen and any click received during or within 300ms (configurable, I'm figuring a minimum reaction time) after the screen update should be processed against that map, not against the current state.
      - idiocrat 4y ago
        It still will be a timing game. What if I want to click on the new object in 300 ms time period? I need to wait 300 ms to do so, this is a flow issue. If 1 billion current MS Windows users would make daily 1000 UI operations, but each time wait 100 ms for UI animations, the collective wasted time on the animations would be 3000 years of collective wasted time. Fortunately most are just watching movies and shopping online, so not much collective _productive_ time is wasted ;)
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  A lot, I'm sure. I have no experience with Japanese but my wife is a native Chinese speaker. 1) In a language like English if you know a word and are faced with it's written form that you do not know you can probably figure it out. In Chinese knowing how to say it gives you no guidance in figuring out the written form, literacy takes years to learn. I have watched two literate Chinese speakers stumped by an unknown character and not even realize it was actually Japanese, not Chinese. (I knew because of the context, not from being able to read it.) 2) It appears to take my wife longer to write something in Chinese (and she's not a word-processor idiot by any means, when she's putting something into the computer she uses handwriting recognition, she's never learned the new ways) than it would take me in English--more strokes and they are less connected than even printing, let alone cursive. 3) Chinese lacks the concept of alphabetizing. I've watched her with her dictionary (we've been together since the 80s) and it's a process of looking stuff up in tables to get you close to your target and then a manual search once you're there. I can find a word in an English->Chinese dictionary far faster than she can find one in a Chinese->English dictionary. That being said, I'm not going to call someone a word processor idiot because maintaining a skill like that costs time--it simply isn't worthwhile for most people. Many years ago I chose to abandon cursive when I realized that if I wanted to be able to write it decently I would have to deliberately practice--and I would say I write maybe a dozen words a month. Practicing would be a time sink, not a time saver. (Not to mention most of those words are on a whiteboard, too large to do in cursive.) Look it up is a perfectly good answer in most cases, only an issue for emergency type skills.
kurthr 4y ago
Just so people know how most of this typing is done in Japan, it's on cell phones and it's pretty amazing because there are only 5 vowels and 10 "consonant" sounds so you can put it on a standard keyboard by just flicking lf-dn-rt-up (for ee-oh-eh-u) or pressing for "ah" to get all the hiragana (well except for accent marks). Everything fits in 12 buttons so it's been used since flip phones. Then based on the hiragana phonetics you can get predictive kanji (or katakana for foreign words). It's really important to put kanji in, because a lot of words in hiragana are homonyms and the meaning can be unclear. Japanese already really like terse contextual conversation so that's critical. However... sometimes the right Kanji isn't there until you type more hiragana, at least hopefully. And Japanese names have lots of weird Kanji which you really need to use since that's polite. Here's a native demonstrating typing on an iPhone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q204SYyfEJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q204SYyfEJY On a standard computer keyboard (Japanese IME in Windows) the prediction is even better, but standard hiragana are multiple romaji (roman character) keypresses. There are also direct hiragana keyboard mappings, but kanji keyboards are mostly for humor value. See below for a 500 key version from Alps: https://twitter.com/LanguageCrawler/status/1134460840697053184 https://twitter.com/LanguageCrawler/status/11344608406970531...
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  I've always wondered why the latin alphabet doesn't have a keyboard like that. It would totally work. With 26 letters (plus additional letters in some languages), you could assign the 10 most common letters to each key, then assign the lesser-used letters to swipes. Capital letters would work as shown in the video: tap the letter, then tap the "capitalize" button to transform it to a capital letter. A T I del O E S space cap N ,.?! enter Obviously you would have to learn the layout, but I don't think it would take very long to get proficient. I've experimented with using traditional T9 with predictive text on my smartphone (Samsung phones have it pre-installed, you just need to enable it), and for typing sentences it can be incredibly quick, but it completely falls down as soon as you can't rely on the prediction system, such as for passwords and URLs. So I always end up switching back to the cramped QWERTY keyboard.
  - 4y ago

pxc 4y ago

How many WPM can the average Japanese adult write by hand? Are kanji more efficient to write out than phonetic writing systems, or is proficiency with them more valued for tradition's sake? Is almost everyone a word-processor idiot these days? When I think of writing things by hand in English, it's hard to ever really want to do it. I type literally 10x faster than I can write, and when I write I cramp super quickly. In my life, at least, handwriting is obsolete.

throwanem 4y ago
> I type literally 10x faster than I can write, and when I write I cramp super quickly. Because you don't do it enough to keep those muscles in training, and because you use the wrong tools when you do. A $20 Pilot Metropolitan is more than enough to discover how pleasant longhand can be when done with a tool that's designed specifically for that purpose, in a way ballpoints and pencils are not. It'll teach you to stop ramming the point into the paper, too, which is the other reason why writing makes your hand hurt.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  I find roller ball pens to be almost as good, but easier to maintain (my fountain pen at work would be dry after leaving it cap-on over the weekend).
  - throwanem 4y ago
    Use a different pen, maybe, or add an O-ring to the section or something. A capped pen should take weeks to dry out, not days. Rollerballs are a decent second best - I keep them for lenders and for backup in case I'm caught without a spare cartridge. That said, they definitely don't come close to my Decimo or E95s.
- HaltingPoint 4y ago
  I always use good ol' mechanical pencils, particularly Twist Erase or BiC with 0.7 lead.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I have a new nickname! ワープロ馬鹿 I should be a doctor, with my handwriting. TBF, my handwriting sucked before I started using computers, but they didn't help. My entire family has awful penmanship (and it's an Ivy-league family). I used to dread trying to decipher my mother's notes.

wirthjason 4y ago
This isn’t about quality or legibility of handwriting. When wiring 馬鹿 on a computer you type the 4 characters “baka” (or the two character ばか” if your phone supports Lana input) and get an autocomplete drop-down with the kanji.

roomey 4y ago

I recently found out cursive (aka. joined up writing aka. running writing aka. .... Handwriting) isn't thought in US schools any more. This blew my mind. I understand the reasoning behind dropping it from the curriculum, but hearing that students couldn't do cursive really, blew my mind. And I'm not even sure why it surprised me so much!

extrememacaroni 4y ago
What? US students don't write by hand anymore? ...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- smnrchrds 4y ago
  The print, i.e. write detached letters, not attached letter like cursive.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    I think there is a fair argument to be made that handwriting !== cursive, and that equating the two is needlessly confusing. Handwriting is an action, whereas cursive is a form of writing. Do we call handwriting Japanese "cursive"? Of course not.
    - Izkata 4y ago
      Not the usual kind, but a cursive form does exist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_script_(East_Asia) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_script_(East_Asia)
      - Dalewyn 4y ago
        I'm aware, but the only people who write that today are calligraphers and monks. You think finding an average American that does cursive is hard, finding an average Japanese that does cursive is even harder. :V

kylecazar 4y ago

Somewhat relatedly, I recently went on a months long mission to reacquaint myself with cursive. I hadn't used it since grade school, and had almost totally forgotten many characters. It was fun, and felt good to accomplish something so useless.

throwanem 4y ago
Hardly useless. Over something like three thousand pages of work notes and personal diary since I discovered the habit in 2018, I've learned there's something to the idea that longhand writing eases access to a somewhat unique mode of thought. There's craftsmanship to it, too. It's not something I anticipated, but I do enjoy for its own sake not being the anglophone sort of wāpurobaka any more.
cratermoon 4y ago
Cursive as taught in American schools was never very practical, for a lot of reasons. But writing by hand is an important skill, and the block letter style they teach kids isn't really up to the task of writing long passages. I recommend learning the Getty-Dubay italic style. It's a bit like block letters but with strokes and joiners designed for both legibility and speed. I spent a good two months with the book some 20 years ago and the before-and-after of my handwriting, while not dramatic, is clear to me, and I write faster. https://handwritingsuccess.com/write-now/ https://handwritingsuccess.com/write-now/
- Symbiote 4y ago
  I'm not an expert, but that looks very much like the handwriting I was taught at primary school in England in the 1990s. I think we started learning it when we were 7-8 years old, and could be trusted with a cheap fountain pen. Before that, it was printing with a pencil.

Avlin67 4y ago

reminds me geo location idiots that are lost because of gps use

wirthjason 4y ago

Can’t remember the last time I saw baka written in kanji and not katakana.

userbinator 4y ago

Also somewhat amusing is that "idiot" breaks down into the characters "horse deer".

KhoomeiK 4y ago
Wiktionary says 馬鹿 is "probably originally a transcription of Sanskrit मोह (moha, “folly”), used as a slang term among monks".
- userbinator 4y ago
  Interesting that it's a different etymology but ended up with the same structure as this other two-animal insult: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schweinehund https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schweinehund
- glandium 4y ago
  Japanese wikipedia lists 7 different hypothetized origins, none of them having real decisive evidence.
atahanacar 4y ago
It is an ateji: the characters' meanings are unimportant, they are chosen for their sound.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I’m sure they had more options than ‘horse’ and ‘deer’ though.

theGeatZhopa 4y ago

I have two write modes. Write and not write. Two shades of gray. But I have a cursive world of words. I paint the air with my ability to temporarily change the density of the surrounding medium "air" through and by means of generating waves at arbitrary, sometimes repetitive patterned, frequencies, which ever started reach their destination, usually a opening of an ear, or the wall, sometimes. That must be enough.

ssnistfajen 4y ago

China is seeing a somewhat similar phenomeno too. The ubiquity of pinyin-based digital input methods is causing a lot of younger generations to lose the ability to write Chinese characters by hand without looking them up online. Abbreviated acronyms due to a mix of censorship/laziness is also becoming common making a lot of online messages look rather cryptic to anyone who doesn't know the lingo.

KMag 4y ago
My experience from living in Hong Kong for 10 years was also that hand-written forms were often some kind of cursive/shorthand. I'm familiar with both traditional and simplified characters, but I'd often encounter written forms that were more a shorthand/cursive form of traditional characters. I'm not sure if there was an official system, but reading handwriting was much different than reading my textbooks.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > I'm not sure if there was an official system, but reading handwriting was much different than reading my textbooks. There is an official system. I don't know what it is and I can't read Chinese handwriting either, but I am assured that there is a system and, for example, it's possible for a Chinese person to view an unfamiliar handwritten character and be able to look it up by its standard form.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    There is a formal, correct way to write characters, and common "cursive" doesn't follow it. Reading handwriting isn't quite so bad as the stereotypical doctor's handwriting in the west (or is that just an American thing?) but it definitely takes some practice getting familiar with the differences.
    - xvilka 4y ago
      Doctors' handwriting in China is as unreadable to mere mortals as everywhere else. Thankfully, nowadays everything is digital or printed.

glandium 4y ago

When you read word-processor, you probably think Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, not Xerox 6016 Memorywriter (thanks wikipedia) or any other type of electronic typewriter. Maybe it's a generational thing, but the only use of ワープロ I know of is for the latter (do a google image search for ワープロ, and compare to a google image search for word processor). I'd say the expression ワープロ馬鹿 is probably very outdated.

Dalewyn 4y ago
It's generational, I think. I've always understood, both as an American and Japanese, the likes of Microsoft Word as word processing programs. This phenomenon also goes beyond Microsoft Word too, it's typing in general because the IME handles kanji conversions from hiragana/romaji.
- glandium 4y ago
  I mean I don't think ワープロ is used to designate word processor programs. ワープロソフト (literally word processor software) might, but not ワープロ. The expression ワープロ馬鹿 has probably never been used in the context of software. Nowadays, the phenomenon itself is largely driven by smartphones.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    I’m not sure what you are trying to say? That the term must have originated in the earliest word processors that had IME? Or that someone just stuck a few good sounding words together to describe a modern phenomenon?
    - glandium 4y ago
      That the term is probably more than 30 years old, and probably unheard of nowadays. Googling for it, in fact, yields more stuff in English than in Japanese.
      - deleted 4y ago

ilyt 4y ago

Not really surprised. The most I write during month: * the logbook for keys for when I leave office last * signature when receiving mail/package. and... that's about it for a month. Few lines at most. But I was diagnosed with agraphia (i think that's how its called in english) as kid (something about eye-hand coordination IIRC) so my hand-writing always been fucking ugly even when I wrote a lot during school, so I don't particularly care about it

29athrowaway 4y ago

Over here we have the digital clock idiots, that cannot read an analog clock. This constitutes a higher level of idiocy than not being able to write kanji (knowing each kanji stroke order, having good calligraphy).

jeroenhd 4y ago
With the way things are going, reading analogue clocks is about as useful as reading Roman numerals. Something culturally relevant that's taught (and probably should be taught) to everyone in school, but not something that's actually useful in real life. Don't blame kids and the younger generations for the bad education their elders have given them. Reading analogue clocks is hardly a difficult test, but it's impossible to expect someone who's never been taught to to just "know" that clocks are three rudimentary base-12 progress bars how far along the current half of the day we are; it's just not intuitive. It's like IT people complaining that kids these days don't even know how to fax anymore, society is moving on and old skills will disappear and become niches as a result. It's a shame for the Japanese/Chinese culture that this relatively unique cultural aspect is disappearing, but I'm also quite surprised it has taken so long since the introduction of foreign alphabets.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Many analog clocks have roman numerals.
- Falkon1313 4y ago
  On the contrary, I find analog clocks more intuitive. They graphically and clearly represent locations within the cycle of time. I just wish 24-hour clocks/watches were more common. I think much of the confusion some people have must come from abbreviating it to 12 hours that each happen twice a day, which is obviously nonsense.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    Likewise here. I tell the time by the shape of the hands, not by reading what they're pointing to. I can glance at an analog clock and instantly tell how long it is until something, but it takes a moment to actually translate the current time to something I can say to another person. Also because I use the shape instead of the numbers, I sometimes have trouble with digital clocks, and have to mentally translate the numbers into an analog clock face before I understand what it's telling me.

arrakeen 4y ago

similarly, i recently discovered that the japanese equivalent for a CLI one-liner is 一行野郎, or "one line bastard". which i think is a very fitting description

AlexCoventry 4y ago

This is good, right? Having to learn all those characters seems like a dead-weight loss, from the outside.

Reptur 4y ago

Pretty offensive to people with a real disability called Dysgraphia. Dysgraphia is a neurological disorder of written expression that impairs writing ability and fine motor skills. It is a learning disability that affects children and adults, and interferes with practically all aspects of the writing process, including spelling, legibility, word spacing and sizing, and expression.

msla 4y ago
> Pretty offensive to people with a real disability called Dysgraphia. Japanese people are less than sensitive to those who don't fit into a normative cultural mode? Say it ain't so!

livinglist 4y ago

If you go ask a native Chinese speaker from China nowadays, I can most likely guarantee you that nine out of ten of them don’t know how to write the second character in the word “sneeze” (喷嚏）

antsam 4y ago

I feel called out

Daub 4y ago

Self-professed English speaking word-processor idiot speaking. Before I was introduced to writing with a computor, my handwriting was illegible even to me, and my spelling was execrable.

Nadya 4y ago

This Japanese is (just barely) legible and makes for a great example of what the OP is talking about. And since Japanese is a surprisingly popular language for HN posters - if you are able to read Japanese - I challenge you read this: https://imgur.com/a/lse8JR0 https://imgur.com/a/lse8JR0 It was written by a JP native - using a mouse - but her handwriting is typically this bad so having to write using a mouse only made it very slightly worse than usual. It made me feel better about my own handwriting. I don't sweat the details at all - writing better than natives might get me minor praise but doesn't really benefit me in the long run vs expanding my vocabulary or learning how to read more kanji by spending less time focusing on writing them. I only write kanji nowadays to help with memorization of new kanji and to make sure I can still write the first few "grade levels" of kanji for how natives learn.

numpad0 4y ago
Orca scribble is something else. I wouldn't be surprised if she would have visual cortex issues in lines perpendicular to the baseline and/or lines intersecting. I'm not a doctor but hers is bad as considered an LD bad.
samus 4y ago
The computer mouse is good for point-to-point movements, but pretty bad for drawing precise shapes. Even cool drag&drop workflows feel annoying if repetitive or if the target areas are very small.

KTallguy 4y ago

Apparently the vernacular these days is 「スマホ馬鹿」, “Smart Phone“ idiot. Same principle, different device.

johnea 4y ago

This same phenomenon is present in western languages. Except instead of being unable to write difficult characters, the sufferers are just generally idiots. They have no knowledge of navigation in the citries they grew up in, they have reduced ability in face-to-face human interaction, they suffer major inability in understanding that the physical world is the universal host of all of their "virtual" reality including the corporate products they concieve of as "community" and the chatbots they think of as "friends". In general, the internet idiot...

johnea 4y ago
That being said, writing chinese characters is a unique skill, separate from being able to read them.