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I don’t think I agree with your conclusion. Taiwan had a higher degree of literacy than China in spite of traditional characters, yet most Chinese and Taiwanese
by baby 3y ago
I don’t think I agree with your conclusion. Taiwan had a higher degree of literacy than China in spite of traditional characters, yet most Chinese and Taiwanese people seem to have a hard time remembering characters. Indeed in China people just use pinyin mostly now to type, which uses the latin alphabet.
The best thing you can do today if you want quick adoption of a language is to use the latin alphabet.
- adastra22 3y agoTaiwanese mostly use BoPoMoFo input schemes, btw. The thing about "forgetting the characters" is recognition vs. production. Those are different skills supported by different parts of the brain, and if you only practice one then the other atrophies. Most people these days only write Chinese on a keyboard, so the computer does the work of transforming the phonetic input (BoPoMoFo in the case of Taiwan) into the correct character, saving the typist the trouble. Someone who forgot how to write a character will have no trouble entering it into an IME and selecting the right option. They'll know it when they see it. If anything this just reinforces my original point: people consume written text more than they produce it, so we should optimize for that.
- baby 3y agoI agree with you up until the last point, they do produce it as well and most Chinese speakers are resorting to pinyin to produce, which uses the latin alphabet :D