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Character amnesia in China

• ggm 2y ago
  Mao and the party nearly adopted pinyin as the national alphabet but stepped back from the brink. I remember the great Peking->Beijing uplift. Reading "China reconstructs" magazines there were suggestions it was coming, and then it just went away. BBC newsreaders explained it was the new official look. Like Turkey-> Türkiye. I suspect all syllabery/ideogram scripts have this latent problem. At 2,500 ideograms for "literate" there's a lot of potential to lose non core elements. "Educated" means over 5,000 heading to 10,000 and the complete set is north of 40,000 from what I understand. I can't imagine the investment in time to get there.
  • lazide 2y ago
    China is highly competitive, with a history of using ‘merit’ based admission tests. The system/barriers were setup (as one’s always are) by incumbents, and the way they did it (while continuing to present it as ‘merit’ based) was to lean heavily on tests that require extensive memorization and tutoring, because only the wealthy can afford it. This is one obvious sign of that. After all, who has time to memorize 40k different characters?
    • looping__lui 2y ago
      That seems a bit made up tbh. I’ve worked with a fair number of Chinese overachievers (both in domestic China and abroad) and family background/affluence weren’t even remotely as much of a factor compared to the US or India (except for the IITs). Also, I noticed there were many many cases of brilliant young people rising through the ranks of the academic system in China compared to India for example where teachers often simply would not show up in public schools. Personal background: I worked and studied in the US, I worked in China and I studied in India
      • lazide 2y ago
        Made up how? It’s still more merit based and class mobile than caste anything. But the tests are the tests and require massive prep, eh? And the tests require massive amounts of memorization and time to prep for, compared to western tests - even now. Historically it was orders of magnitude worse though.
        • looping__lui 2y ago
          Kid’s ability to make it through the ranks of academia in my personal anecdotal evidence depends less on financial ability or social standing in China compared to the US or India. I agree that it is merit driven above anything else - not sure I would agree that this is favoring wealthy kids/certain social class in a more disproportionate way than what we see in India or the US. Now, I will say that neither university nor high school in China or India imho prepare kinds for success in life or the corporate world. Europe (with a hands-off “you get no help and will just struggle your way through life and learn quick”) and the US (“here are actual experts dedicated to help you succeed) seem imho to produce capable graduates for the corporate world.
          • lazide 2y ago
            Eh, see alephnerds comment above - that lines up with my experience as well.
            • looping__lui 2y ago
              Ok, the point being though (it seems): advantages are not universal geographically across China; I agree, that I also observed that.
              • lazide 2y ago
                In that geographical advantages are expressly tied to income and ‘official ness’ in an area (the Hukou system)? If one is a poor rural immigrant in an otherwise high end area, you don’t get to send your kids to the nice schools.
    • nneonneo 2y ago
      Once you get to ~5000 characters you can read most common texts. Vanishingly few people will know ~40,000 characters; a large fraction of those are obscure or ancient characters that only show up in historical texts.
      • lazide 2y ago
        That is rather the point I was making, wasn’t it?
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • otabdeveloper4 2y ago
    There are only about 200+ Chinese ideograms. Certainly not in the thousands.
    • nneonneo 2y ago
      This is comically incorrect. Even the article plainly states that you need to know ~1500 characters to be considered literate in Chinese, with sixth graders required to learn ~2500 characters. A quick perusal of practically any Chinese-language website (e.g. https://zh.wikipedia.org/ https://zh.wikipedia.org/) will quickly disabuse you of the notion that there are "only 200+ Chinese ideograms". You might be conflating "ideogram" with "radical", i.e. components of characters. There's probably a few hundred of those defined, but they're more like pieces of characters rather than whole ones. Combining radicals produces very different characters that have totally different meanings; learning the radicals alone buys you very little. There are thousands of characters, and you have to know thousands. There are tens of thousands of characters in existence, although only highly educated folks will know anywhere near 10000 characters.
      • otabdeveloper4 2y ago
        The vast majority of Chinese characters aren't ideograms.
    • orwin 2y ago
      I'd say thousands of ideograms composed by hundreds of logograms, and you can be both right (this is actually a very reduced view of what logogram is, but English is quite imprecise on this).
    • vitus 2y ago
      Um, no. If you're talking about radicals (of which there are generally considered to be 214), yes, but you can't read / write in general if you only know those. Also, of those 214, a good chunk aren't standalone words. You're never going to see 疒 or 丶 by itself. You won't have the words for "I" or "you". You might be able to read "melon" but not "fruit". You could read "papaya" and "corn" but not "vegetable". You could read "beef" or "lamb" but not "chicken". You could read "small" but not "few". You wouldn't be able to read "hello" or "goodbye", "happy" or "sad". But you'd be able to count 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, 18, 20...
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • Terr_ 2y ago
    > nearly adopted pinyin as the national alphabet Some years ago I saw street-signs in China that had both Mandarin characters and also alphabetical versions, and I couldn't understand why they would go so far and then omit the accent marks. I wonder if it's been fixed since.
    • emmelaich 2y ago
      Maybe the same reason English road signs omit punctuation.
      • Terr_ 2y ago
        No, those are not the same, because Chinese is a tonal language. [0] Taking Pinyin [1] and erasing the accent-marks creates ambiguity between several different words. The English sign-equivalent would be... Well, something so dumb that nobody does it. Like perhaps deleting the ascenders and descenders of letters dbqp so that they look like oooo, which doesn't even help with horizontal space. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
        • poincaredisk 2y ago
          English equivalent would be writing something like "Aldwych", "Leicester Square" or "River Thames" on a sign, and expecting me, a foreigner, to pronounce it correctly.
          • Terr_ 2y ago
            No, because without tones it can be ambiguous even for native speakers. If you still don't believe me--or those Wikipedia links I already provided--you test it yourself by finding a native Mandarin speaker. Ask them to decisively determine the meaning and pronunciation of certain Chinese words only from their pinyin with the accents stripped out, such as ma or hua. There's a store with snacks and produce. Do you want to eat lizi, or do you want to eat lizi? (Don't bother squinting, it's the same letters.)
  • jannesan 2y ago
    Official standard defines around 8k characters in modern usage. I’d guesstimate native highly educated speaker recognizes maybe 6-7k at most. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Commonly_Used_Standard_Chinese_Characters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Commonly_Used_Standa...
  • mik09 2y ago
    iirc, the official story from the mainland was that during around 1957 in order to boost literacy the govt simplified the characters, something like that... today i learnt
• jim-jim-jim 2y ago
  The Heisig method, which recursively breaks down Chinese characters into patterns with arbitrary meanings, can help you sidestep this problem. You're never dealing with shapes anymore, but rather reconstructing stories from these stroke/meaning pairs. Since patterns consist of subpatterns, you can tweak the level of granularity until a sensible narrative emerges. Just recite that story as you move your pen. It's a lifesaver as an adult foreign learner, but I don't really see anything preventing native writers of Chinese and Japanese from benefitting from this general process as well. I've wondered if the guys who pass those truly insane 6,000+ character exams have to fall back on some sort of hack at that point.
  • eloisius 2y ago
    As another adult Chinese learner, does something like the Heisig method really help with language acquisition or just memorizing characters? I’m skeptical because of the immense amount of time it takes to learn even without elaborate story construction for each character. I’ve kind of resigned to being a word processor idiot, and only memorizing characters in handwriting as a bi-product of usage.
    • mbivert 2y ago
      It may be anecdotal, but I once involuntarily trained my memory by trying to recall what I've been doing each day. After a few weeks, my memory noticeably improved. That's to say, the task may feel insurmontable at first, but if you give time to your body to adjust, it should become easier.
      • graeme 2y ago
        That's very interesting. Did the memory boost persist? If so do you do any maintenance exercises like the original ones or have you noticed other effects?
        • mbivert 2y ago
          It's difficult to say: I think shortly after this "incident", I started doing more maths/physics on my free time, which must have help this boost to persist. Thinking about it, this recalls me of a Leonardo quote (pertaining visual memory then): > « I myself have proved it to be of no small use, when in bed in the dark, to recall in fancy the external details of forms previously studied, or other noteworthy things conceived by subtle speculation; and this is certainly an admirable exercise, and useful for impressing things on the memory. » I remember reading about similar observations regarding visual memory, where students trained to memorize visual information would outperform their peers (observations perhaps in the 1800s/early 1900s, IIRC a woman was in charge of this).
• kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago
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• ksp-atlas 2y ago
  I've seen Chinese input methods where instead of keys corresponding to sounds in Pinyin, they correspond to strokes in characters, I wonder if this could help with character amnesia.
  • vitus 2y ago
    They do exist, but as far as I'm aware, wubi and cangjie are very uncommon relative to zhuyin and pinyin. Even so, my experience is that you end up just memorizing chords for typing particular characters, as opposed to regularly deriving from first principles how a given character is constituted. Meanwhile, if you remember how the character is pronounced and can identify it in a lineup, it's far easier to use the phonetic approaches. (Even if your input method doesn't auto-correct the word based on context, experienced typists will also memorize the position of common words, so even they don't need to stop and look at the individual candidates in most situations.)
  • rahimnathwani 2y ago
    Right but it seems slower for people who are comfortable with pinyin. If I want to reply to a friend saying "I'm on my way and will be there soon", I can tap 'msll' and the input method will show 马上来了 as the first suggestion. 5 taps in total to enter 4 characters.
  • rgovostes 2y ago
    There's a related paper from Chen & Chuang (2008), Experience with a computer word-entry method in processing Chinese characters by fluent typists ( https://escholarship.org/content/qt2s84m9t0/qt2s84m9t0.pdf https://escholarship.org/content/qt2s84m9t0/qt2s84m9t0.pdf) that has an unsurprising finding: If you type with a phonology-based input method, you can more easily recall (transcribe) a character by its sound. If you type with an orthography-based input method, you can more easily recall it by sight.
• QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
  We have this too! It’s not just treble clefs and ampersands- while everyone can read both forms of g, what fraction of people can draw both forms of g? Of course it doesn’t have the cultural baggage in the US.
• anon-3988 2y ago
  Does Arabs and Sanskrit have the same problem to some extend? AFAIK, characters can sometimes combine and not.
  • dwheeler 2y ago
    Arabic is still fundamentally phonetic. The article mentions thus is only a Chinese and Japanese problem.
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    No one uses Sanskrit anymore. Thar said, South Asian languages are phonetic so similar problems to Chinese do not exist. The best comparison for character amnesia in Chinese would probably be Japanese.
  • w0de0 2y ago
    Arabic is an adjad, so of course not. The "combination" you're thinking of is akin to cursive - stylistic.
• ilaksh 2y ago
  If people normally enter characters in their phone or computer rather than actually handwriting, then there is no reason to keep remembering all of the character details. Just like it doesn't matter that I frequently am uncertain about spelling for some words because we have spell check built into everything. Do Chinese usually use pinyin to enter characters or what is the normal method? Whatever it is, they don't need to remember the character strokes apparently.
  • nneonneo 2y ago
    Some older folks, particularly those with regional accents or less Pinyin education, stick with handwriting input (which was surprisingly good even ~20 years ago) - drawing the characters with a stylus or a finger. Most folks these days use Pinyin. The T9 input method (Pinyin, but using a nine-key telephone pad) is popular with folks who grew up using dumbphones. Finally, voice input is really popular in China. Lots of folks send texts (on WeChat) as short voice messages. WeChat even has a feature to auto-transcribe these voice messages.
    • euroderf 2y ago
      But Pinyin is based on pronunciation, which varies across China. So Pinyin is based on Putonghua ? So Pinyin reinforces the role of putonghua as a project of national unification ? And the pre-eminent role of Beijing ?
      • throw-the-towel 2y ago
        Exactly.
  • joshdavham 2y ago
    > Do Chinese usually use pinyin to enter characters or what is the normal method? In mainland China, it’s pinyin, but in Taiwan, they often use Bopomofo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
    • 2y ago
• vitus 2y ago
  This discussion wouldn't be complete without a mention of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_..., which AIUI was initially constructed as an argument against Romanization. In short, it's the same nominal sound with varying tones ("shi", which is closer in pronunciation to "shirr" than "she"), repeated about a hundred times, which is of course meaningless in spoken form (since there's not enough context to differentiate between the various forms), but actually conveys a story in written form. With the shift toward typing and (especially mobile) computerization in the recent era, it's really not surprising (to me, at least) that Chinese society is moving in a direction where literacy no longer extends to recall of individual characters, and only encompasses recognition, since recall is no longer as necessary of a skill in day-to-day life.
  • vlz 2y ago
    Thanks for the interesting link! Nitpicking a bit, but if I understand this page (linked from the wikipedia article? see point 3) https://pinyin.info/readings/zyg/what_pinyin_is_not.html https://pinyin.info/readings/zyg/what_pinyin_is_not.html correctly however, the text was not meant as an argument against romanization but as a playful example of how pinyin are unfit for classical rather than modern vernacular chinese.
    • vitus 2y ago
      I'd accept that interpretation. To be more precise, I view it as a demonstration of information loss from replacing classical characters entirely with romanization, as opposed to a forceful argument against any form of adoption of romanization.
  • DonaldFisk 2y ago
    The poem is written in Classical Chinese, which was spoken over 2000 years ago, and back then would have been intelligible to a listener because the words would have sounded different. Even today, they sound different in e.g. Cantonese. There's a close relative of Mandarin (Dungan) which is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. The spoken language is tonal, but tones aren't used in the written language because written words are polysyllabic, and if you know how to speak Dungan, you can reliably infer the tones. https://www.omniglot.com/chinese/dungan.htm https://www.omniglot.com/chinese/dungan.htm
• howlingfantods 2y ago
  “Sneeze” or “喷嚏” is a pretty difficult word to write in Chinese in terms of number of strokes and its internal components. I’m not surprised people wouldn’t know it off the top of their heads. It’s like if someone asked you to spell “unnecessary.”
  • teractiveodular 2y ago
    The other dimension is that the second character 嚏 in particular is obscure: it's virtually never used in any other word than 喷嚏. In Japanese, it's a hyogai kanji not taught in school, meaning most people would spell it phonetically. Alas, this is not a practical/socially acceptable option in Chinese. The first, 喷 "erupt", is not exactly common either but is at least used in a few other compounds like 喷水 "fountain".
    • NoInkling 2y ago
      喷 is included in HSK 5 and Heisig's version of the most common ~3000 characters, it can't be that infrequent.
  • pessimizer 2y ago
    I don't think anybody is proposing that Chinese people are not normal humans making normal mistakes. The difference is that if somebody asked people to spell "unnecessary", there would only be three common mistakes they would make (based on whether letters are arbitrarily duplicated or not), and all would be easily understood by readers if written. English orthography is terrible (i.e. a single vowel can be a half-dozen letters), but there's a limit to how complicated it can be to write a word that one knows how to say.
    • wizzwizz4 2y ago
      Wiyul I took migh yot to Luffbruh (acting az a cooryer surviss), I inshored my dissertacion woz cerrect bye revuwing the seilerfoan musick. Suddenly, their was a laud noys. I rush't too the sighed of the bote, but I sore the wartre fludding inn. "Quick! Sumbody hasta seel the hoal!" I cryde. Fourtuneatley, the glew oonder the bought's scin maid the holl cloaze up, sow we kepped floting, butt we terned arowned buy mesteak. Immajin mie shock wen wee woshed up in Lossymuth! Eye wonet fourget thatt deigh enny thyme sune, that's fore shur. (I'm pretty sure this isn't eye dialect: I consulted the rhyming dictionary a lot, to make sure I was swapping spellings between two words with the same phonemes. I also tried to avoid reanalysis, though some of these words might not quite achieve that.)
• Cerium 2y ago
  In English I find that I frequently cannot spell words without typing them. I wonder if there is actually some other related computer use effects.
• joshdavham 2y ago
  > Chinese people are increasingly forgetting how to write characters by hand. For those who can’t read Chinese here, I’ll just note that this is basically the equivalent of forgetting how to spell certain words in English. For example, I can read just fine, but there are still words I’m not good at spelling. I’m just noting this so that this problem doesn’t seem totally exotic or specific to Chinese(/Japanese).
  • mlinhares 2y ago
    Completely common problem. Anyone that speaks multiple languages sees this everyday, there are many words in Portuguese/Spanish/English I need the spellchecker for (or even translation) to write because I don't use it as frequently in that specific language. That is happening a lot with cooking, as I started to take it much more seriously when I moved to the US and now my cooking vocabulary in English is much better/wider than it is in my native Portuguese, so I'll frequently use words in english for stuff I should know in portuguese but don't remember.
  • timlatim 2y ago
    Even the Chinese Character Heroes competition mentioned in the article seems a lot like the spelling bee in the US, doesn't it? I wonder if the anecdote about the PhD students has a cultural dimension in addition to language proficiency — could the students have refused not because they don't know the characters, but because they aren't fully confident they wouldn't make a mistake?
  • nabla9 2y ago
    The severity of the problem seems exotic. > However, this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character. Highly literate people are forgetting how to write the characters in words like ‘kitchen’ (厨房), ‘lips’ (嘴唇), ‘cough’ (咳嗽), and ‘broom’ (扫帚). Victor Mair (2014) provides a striking example of the severity of the character amnesia problem. The following image is of a shopping list hastily written by a social science researcher from the PRC. The writer of the list struggled to remember the characters in ‘egg’ (鸡蛋), ‘shrimp’ (虾仁), and ‘chives’ (韭菜), and simply resorted to Pinyin.
  • 2y ago
• chvid 2y ago
  When I compare my handwriting to my father's I can see nearly 100% computer / phone use for writing has had its effect. With a gigantic number of characters, it would obviously be worse. It always struck me that a phonetic alphabet for writing rather was much simpler and easier to learn than a system based on pictograms. So much that a society could achieve the same level of literacy with much lower cost if they adapted a phonetic system. But I wonder if that is actually true? Has there been comparative studies of what mainland China did compared to Taiwan (which kept the traditional system) or Vietnam (which adopted latin letters) and its effect on literacy. Obviously hard to do ...
  • layer8 2y ago
    It certainly doesn’t help literacy in general, but one advantage of a writing system divorced from phonetics is that you can still read old written material even after the phonetics have changed over time.
    • DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
      Another advantage of using pictograms is that people who speak completely different versions of Chinese can still communicate in writing. They may pronounce the characters completely differently, but the characters still mean the same thing.
  • numpad0 2y ago
    I think "complicated" is one way to describe pictogrammic(ideogrammic) languages, and "offloading OCR to geometric sub-systems" is another. Formal Hanzi writings are grid aligned so it's probably more suited for batched processing too.
  • int_19h 2y ago
    I don't think you can truly do a proper comparative study for something like this - there's just too many other factors. That said, you can look at Korean for a historical example of how a well-designed alphabet can fare when replacing a historical Chinese-based system. It actually spawned whole new literary genres by making writing more accessible to large segments of the populace that were effectively excluded before.
• meindnoch 2y ago
  Sounds like a losing battle to me. Handwriting in general is doomed to go the way of the dodo. The difference is that with Latin characters, you can at least "draw" them fairly easily from memory.
  • edgarvaldes 2y ago
    You write in school, then you take notes at work or at home, even brief annotations count.
    • meindnoch 2y ago
      I haven't written by hand in years.
• markus_zhang 2y ago
  It's simply people stop writing stuffs on paper. Nothing too surprising. I myself cannot spell some English words because I rely too much on auto-correction.
• PerilousD 2y ago
  I got a little more than halfway into this long article, so I apologize if this was answered at some point. So what? Many native English speakers can't pick up a pen and paper and write intelligibly and would be in real trouble if they lost their phones; an increasingly annoying number TALK into their phones, not even pretending to type and just spewing auto-corrected crap out into the world.
  • mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    Doctors have messy handwriting, but I don't think I've ever met a native English speaker who completed elementary school who would pick up a pen and pause, completely uncertain of how to draw a letter of the alphabet. They might make minor spelling mistakes, but I don't think that's closely analogous to the phenomenon the author is talking about.
    • MarkusQ 2y ago
      The "Doctors have messy handwriting" trope derives from the fact that prescriptions often contain a large fraction of Latin terms, chemical names, abbreviations and acronyms that don't parse (and thus seem sloppy/illegible) if you are trying to "decipher" them as English. Doctors don't have significantly messier handwriting compared to similar populations (esp. now that drafting isn't as emphasized in architecture, engineering, and similar programs)
      • cyberax 2y ago
        Please. I still have my medical charts from my childhood, back before the computers. I can barely read the handwriting there, and it's not because of medical terms. Apparently, it became slightly better recently, now that doctors spend less time scribbling things and mostly type them instead.
      • staticman2 2y ago
        >>>Doctors don't have significantly messier handwriting compared to similar populations I'm skeptical of this claim. My family doctor had bad handwriting, and one time the hospital worker had to call him to ask if he ordered a x-ray or Ct scan.
• smitty1e 2y ago
  Suddenly the woes of English spelling seem slight.
• transfire 2y ago
  They really should let it go for common communication. It’s beautiful and culturally significant, and that will never be forgotten. But it doesn’t fit well with modern writing.
• suchire 2y ago
  At one point, apparently it was fashionable amongst teens to type characters by using pinyin and always selecting the first character in the list of options, regardless of the intended actual character. That was essentially phonetic writing, but as a result, texts were incomprehensible to parents (the desired outcome).
  • whoisburbansky 2y ago
    If the texts were incomprehensible to parents, how were they comprehensible to their intended recipients?
    • oasisaimlessly 2y ago
      Read the nonsense text aloud and then listen. Presumably with practice, you don't actually to actually speak aloud, and your 'inner monologue' voice is sufficient.
    • neaden 2y ago
      It sounds like the Chinese version of 1337speak.
    • raincole 2y ago
      The real answer to your question: the most commonly used Chinese input method allows you to type the first pinyin letters only, and the algorithm will figure out the most likely Chinese characters you want. It's not "the parents" can't read it. It's that people who don't use electronics have a harder time reading it.
      • raincole 2y ago
        (I misread the top comment)
    • olalonde 2y ago
      I think it's just easier for beginners (or teenagers) to go from phonetic to meaning. I guess advanced Chinese readers don't even read the words out loud in their head and go directly to meaning. I'm beginner/intermediate at Chinese and surprisingly, I noticed that my pinyin often seems better than many Chinese natives.
• kens 2y ago
  The article lumps together writing characters slightly incorrectly and failing to come up with the character at all. For instance, the game show contestant wrote the word "烹" with one extra stroke, while the writer of the shopping list writer gave up entirely on the characters for "egg" and "chives". (This is analogous to the difference between misspelling an English word and not being able to think of the word at all.) In the story of three PhD students who couldn't write the characters for "sneeze" (打喷嚏), it's entirely unclear if they were completely stuck, or if they just made small mistakes. My question is if "character amnesia" describes trivial errors or if people are forgetting characters to a significant extent. In other words, is this article genuine or is it the equivalent of claiming English writers suffer from "word amnesia" because they sometimes need to look up a spelling?
  • mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    > In the story of three PhD students who couldn't write the characters for "sneeze" it's entirely unclear if they were completely stuck, or if they just made small mistakes. The article says "all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment", which in context, reads clearly to me that they were embarrassed for not knowing where to start, not that they wrote them down with minor errors that they were embarrassed about after checking a dictionary. The rest of the article strongly reinforces this interpretation. For example: "‘lift the pen, forget the character’... this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character..."
  • animal_spirits 2y ago
    Further in the article he discusses the 'virtuous cycle'; connections between writing, speaking, and reading. With phonetic alphabets, the way something is spoken reinforces the way that it is read, the way it is read reinforces the way that it is written, the way that it is written reinforces the way that it is spoken (for the most part, even English fails this cycle sometimes). However, with character sets the cycle is broken, and the speaker has to learn 3 different memorization techniques. Regarding your question, there is a difference between not knowing how to write a word and not knowing how to spell a word. If someone in English doesn't know how to spell 'sneeze' or any other word, they can at least come close enough and convey information 'fuzzily' via text using an incorrect spelling. Now that I'm writing this, though, I suppose with character sets like Chinese if you know characters that are close enough you potentially could use other characters to convey the information, like mouth-fart for sneeze or something along these lines. But I don't speak the language, so that is just a theory. Do Chinese speakers use the language this way if there is a character they don't know how to write?
• mannyv 2y ago
  Does this happen in Japanese as well?
  • gramie 2y ago
    I remember almost 25 years ago, when I was teaching English in Japan, one of my adult students couldn't remember how to write the kanji (i.e. Chinese characters) for "police". Text input is now universally phonetic, and young people have a lot of trouble remembering how to write words. Add to this the enormous (and increasing) use of English words, written either in katakana or actually in Roman letters, and it's plain that Japan is further down the road of losing its writing identity than China is.
• cat_plus_plus 2y ago
  It's not a problem, just transition to new writing instruments. I completely forgot how to write in my birth language (Russian) while my English handwriting is slow and messy. Doesn't affect me in any way. There is a valid need to leave a note when technology is not handy, sounds like pinyin solves this problem. Although, unless we are talking scratching out a message with a sharp stone, ballpoint pen and paper is also complex technology. There is nothing wrong with being sentimental, I lift heavy weights, collect vinyl and do film photography because I like the aesthetic of these activities. But let me force my own kids to learn whatever I think they should learn just like me at home rather than everyone forcing everyone else's kids in school.
  • throwaway313373 2y ago
    How long have you been living outside of a Russian-speaking county?
    • cat_plus_plus 2y ago
      Over 3 decades :-)
• kleton 2y ago
  This has been a perennial "story" for at least 15 years on English language internet, but for actual Chinese it's not really a thing.
• Jun8 2y ago
  Many people here may not be familiar with David Moser, the author of this article. He’s frequently mentioned in Douglas Hofstadter’s book Le Ton Beau le Marot (fantastic book on language and translation BTW) in regards to matters related to Mandarin. He was a well known (as Mo Dawei) in China’s xiangsheng scene (a verbal comedy routine, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangsheng#:~:text=Xiangsheng%2520(traditional%2520Chinese%253A%2520%E7%9B%B8%E8%81%B2%253B,popular%2520elements%2520in%2520Chinese%2520culture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangsheng#:~:text=Xiangshen....) and is probably one of the most knowledgeable foreigners on Mandarin. He started learning it in college in mid 80s.
• James_K 2y ago
  It would be rather interesting if technology simply caused people to start writing in the roman alphabet. Phonetic spelling is certainly the superior option, so perhaps that will simply be what people arrive at through inevitable statistical pressure.
  • unit149 2y ago
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• e63f67dd-065b 2y ago
  I think a helpful analogy here for the non-chinese is recalling the names of pieces of music from hearing a short part and vice versa. I'm classically trained, and in my circles I can probably hum out a short piece of music that'll have other musicians go "I know the piece but am drawing a blank on the name" and vice versa. I know I'm not the only one to have had that happen to pieces I'm actively practicing :) Anecdotally, I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half). I guess this is analogous to only remembering the main themes of a piece and forgetting how the rest of it goes. I'll recognise it when I hear it, but can't recall it off the top of my head.
  • deleted 2y ago
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• nuc1e0n 2y ago
  Unicode has stroke and radical counts for over 75000 characters. As this article states, most Chinese written text on computers is actually typed using pinyin.
• drivenextfunc 2y ago
  As a relatively well-educated Japanese native speaker, I too experience this problem when writing Japanese on paper - being unable to write many kanji characters by hand. I am no exception among Japanese native speakers. While the author seems to interpret this problem as something crucial, I question whether it truly is. The orthography of Mandarin and Japanese includes an alphabet consisting of thousands of characters, the majority of which comprise dozens of strokes. Although East Asian people have higher IQ scores on average, we are not superhuman - our memory capacity is bound by human limits, and the decreased frequency of actually writing kanji on paper has naturally resulted in our forgetting how to write many of them. Is this surprising? Furthermore, orthography is not part of language in a fundamental sense - it's merely a useful tool that accompanies a language. Therefore, I do not see the writing system becoming less stable as a significant issue. Consider Korea as an example: they used to use kanji in their orthography but have almost completely eliminated it with virtually no adverse effects. While laypeople often assume orthography is an integral part of a language, this is just not the case from the linguistic perspective.
  • bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
    > Although East Asian people have higher IQ scores on average Citation needed.
    • alkyon 2y ago
      Maybe parent was referring to the studies by Lynn, a self-declared "scientific racist". I think that despite lower IQ scores on average South Korea has been consistently beating Japan in go in the recent years, and more importantly they get rid of hanja (Korean version of kanji) from their writing system.
      • cubefox 2y ago
        [flagged]
        • alkyon 2y ago
• kragen 2y ago
  If this seems oddly familiar, you may actually have read it before, and no plagiarism is involved. Moser wrote the beginning of this article in the middle of his classic essay, ”Why Chinese is So Damn Hard” https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html > 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"?? This page is from 02004: http://web.archive.org/web/20040811151534/http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://web.archive.org/web/20040811151534/http://pinyin.info.... Possibly the rest of the article is not simply an excerpt from it.
  • MichaelZuo 2y ago
    That’s a pretty good point… if I saw ‘three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard’ forget how to write ‘sneeze’, I would assume they were lunatics pretending, not that they genuinely forgot how to write the word. Does that imply learning the advanced literary culture, that is usually associated with prestige academia, has a vastly higher threshold in Chinese than in English? It’s pretty disturbing for language itself to be a potentially retarding force on learning.
    • shrimptho 2y ago
      All three PhD's were perfectly capable of communicating the word for sneeze and also recognize it in writting. They just couldn't write it exactly. I don't think it has a slowing effect. Except maybe by adding annoying/useless classes for mid/primary students - which is just par for course everywhere else. I can name 3 objectively completely useless classes from my european youth (plus one in college) that were only there because 'culture'.
• FpUser 2y ago
  >"Can the Education System Solve the Problem..." I think the question is rather: should it? Is there a real benefit for average Joe to memorize insane amount and complexity (at least to my untrained eye) of such characters? I think my brain would just explode. I'd rather use my memory for something more creative.
• yejanll 2y ago
  The Greeks and the Romans got it right; a small set of characters that can be combined to form any word. Complexity from the composition of simpler elements, not inherent. Computer interaction via keyboard makes the superior design all the more obvious. Those guys were ahead of their time. Ave imperator, morituri te salutant.
  • w0de0 2y ago
    I believe you mean the Ugarites, Phoenicians, & other northwest Semitic peoples. They developed from cuneiform syllabaries the abjad which the Greeks subsequently adopted (being their language's second written form, preceded by Linear B before an interlude of illiteracy). The Greeks added only non-diacritic vowels.
  • lucidguppy 2y ago
    There are benefits to both systems. Western readers have a hard time reading older writing - while eastern readers have no problem with very old texts. On the other hand - western scholars can understand what the spoken word sounded like - but eastern readers have a much harder time what ancient words sounded like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rime_dictionary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rime_dictionary Western writing systems "decay" faster. Look at french writing - the spellings are phonetic for the time they were first put to paper - but they sound nothing like the current pronunciations.
    • bsder 2y ago
      > Western readers have a hard time reading older writing - while eastern readers have no problem with very old texts. That's simply not true. Ancient Chinese calligraphy and language is so different that you have entire PhD fields about it. By contrast, as someone who has studied basic Latin in high school, I can read stuff from the walls of Pompeii without issue. I can directly read Latin texts from 700AD or so with the standard difficulty of reading handwriting. See: http://www.edr-edr.it/edr_programmi/view_img.php?lang=en&id_nr=154179 http://www.edr-edr.it/edr_programmi/view_img.php?lang=en&id_... Now, perhaps if I were Chinese, I could read ancient graffiti on the Great Wall, but nobody seems to have ever mentioned that.
• numpad0 2y ago
  I think this is not as complicated as it sounds; it's same as how NN classifiers aren't always built to do label to image, only image to label. Being able to do former through a parallel pipeline helps(that's like GAN), but that ability isn't required in training or in inference. Your OCR engine in the brain might generate "𰻞" for 'zh_hant_適' if reversed, doesn't mean it can't recognize the latter.
• staplung 2y ago
  The BBC produced a great series, The Secret History of Writing. There's a segment where you can watch some Chinese speakers experiencing this while being prompted to write mildly uncommon words like "cough" or "embarrassment". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3seWGtZ3DQ&t=3035s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3seWGtZ3DQ&t=3035s The whole series is worth a watch if you're into writing.
• thanhhaimai 2y ago
  > The orthography may be inconsistently phonetic, as is the case with English spelling, or highly consistent, such as the Korean Hangul system. No writing system is perfectly phonetic. But phonetic systems enable the native speaker, with just a few dozen symbols, to reliably write whatever they can speak, and read out loud anything they can read. I'm not sure if the author has studied Vietnamese. I'm a native Vietnamese, and I believe the language is perfectly phonetic. If I hear a word, I can write it. If I see a word, I can pronounce it, regardless of whether I understand the meaning. It's interesting that among the 4 countries (China/Japan/Korea/Vietnam), it's the only one that completely reinvented the language into Latin based. I think that refactor addressed the phonetic issue well enough. When I was there, there was also no TV program for "spelling bees" or something like that. Even a third grader could read/write almost any word (even when they don't understand the text yet) Edit: adding to this original post to reply a common theme people brought up in multiple posts. I think bringing up dialects and provincial accents is not convincing. There is one official way "gia đình" should be pronounced. It's taught in school, even in the South. Pronouncing it as "da đình" can still be understood, and it doesn't retract from the point that the language is phonetic. In other words, assuming I know nothing about the meaning of the word, if I hear "da đình" I can correctly write down it as so. I wouldn't know that in Saigon that also means "gia đình". But I definitely can write it down exactly. I don't think using provincial speaking accent is a good line of argument here. Otherwise, no language in the world can satisfy the phonetic requirements. Any group of people can have different accents, different tones, different sound length and pauses.
  • maianhvu 2y ago
    > If I hear a word, I can write it. Not if you account for variations of pronunciation in dialects. Not even the most phonetically accurate accent, the Hanoian Northern accent which I am a native speaker of, is perfect. For example, you could hear Northern Vietnamese people say "dổ", "dá" instead of "rổ", "rá". Morning dew is pronounced "xương" but is written as "sương". These characters are pronounced with greater clarity in the Central and Southern regions, but they have their own peculiarities too. Til' this day I still find it iffy they call someone named "Diễm" as "Yỉm". Unless you have seen the correct way to spell those words before, you can't say for sure. Even now as a working adult I find myself referring to the dictionary to make sure my accent doesn't embarrass me in official emails. In a perfect world, we can have one single Vietnamese accent that aims to pronoun all these words true to the intended way of the alphabet, but it isn't practical. That being said, one can get pretty far in Vietnamese when encountering new words.
• prng2021 2y ago
  China should make another attempt at simplifying their written language. Yes it’s a monumental task, but Korea managed to mostly transition off of Chinese characters.
• dj_gitmo 2y ago
  I wanted to write in cursive a few years ago and realized I had completely forgotten. It didn’t take long to remember with the help of a cursive alphabet, but I was still completely unable to get started without it.
  • cbhl 2y ago
    Apparently Gen Z didn't learn to write in cursive at all, since it had been removed from the curriculum. Some US states have since started adding it back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32884213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32884213 (2022)
• deleted 2y ago
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• derekhsu 2y ago
  Yes, I endorse his research. As a Taiwanese, I use Traditional Chinese daily in Taiwan, primarily on computers and mobile phones, but I can’t write many of the Chinese characters he mentioned in the article. I can share a more personal story: after spending a year studying abroad in Britain, I almost forgot how to write Chinese characters—even my own name—since I hadn't written any for over a year! However, when I returned to Taiwan, I was able to recall most of them within minutes. I consider this a temporary phenomenon that fades quickly with focus and a bit of practice.
• est 2y ago
  Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. It's like an intermediate language (IL) of mind. Many studentds in China can understand a subject but had the pronouciation completely wrong. In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were. Chinese characters also had the benifits of photographic memory, presumably you are trained with the right method. The key is to detach the "listening/speaking" phonetics from the characters, wire your brain directly to visual ideograms along with reading/writing. Plus the grammar don't have conjugation nor declension, without the tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness and shit, which makes the scripts very fast to parse. I'd argue reading a paragraph of text is extremely fast in Chinese. You can grasp the general meaning from a large chunk of text without sequencially reading every word. It's like one of these novel apps that hightlight important vowel from English sentences for fast reading but still, you have to go to the translation layers of recall - sound - meaning process. Sadly this art is lost because ideograms are fading in favor of PinYin in cyber world. The rise of shot-vids make literacy an expensive skill.
  • dehrmann 2y ago
    > Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. It's like an intermediate language (IL) of mind. I realized this in Taiwan when I started being able to recognize characters, know what it means in English, and have absolutely no idea what the word is in Mandarin. The written language is almost orthogonal to the spoken one.
    • saithound 2y ago
      > The written language is almost orthogonal to the spoken one. I'm almost certain that this is true of Chinese script (after all, it was and is used for writing many languages!), but it might not be deducible based on this sort of experience. I say thus because I had a very similar experience after I had to spend a month in the UAE. Thanks to frequent bilingual signs, I started recognizing common Arabic words, but I had no idea what the words are in Arabic or how to say them. But as far as I know, written Arabic is not at all orthogonal to spoken Arabic, every word is written exactly as it sounds.
• almaight 2y ago
  katakana! This is true in mainland China, but not in Taiwan. There, katakana is used as pinyin, and words can be composed by katakana.
  • throwaway313373 2y ago
    Wikipedia says [0]: > After Japanese administration ended, the system soon became obsolete. Now, only a few scholars, such as those who study the aforementioned dictionary, learn Taiwanese kana. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_kana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_kana
    • brendyn 2y ago
      Manny people mistakenly recognise Bopomofo as katakana. I use bopomofo and get this reaction a lot, it just have to mention its actually bopomofo/zhuyin and then they know what it is.
    • almaight 2y ago
      This is not true. If you need to type on your phone, everyone needs to know that the mainland used the Wubi input method, which is Katakana, and now uses Pinyin typing. Taiwan has always used the original Katakana input method. Pinyin typing was invented later.
      • jxy 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
• jacksonLiu89 2y ago
  it is quite common, since chinese people use hand write not a lot as previous time.The computer and internet will make this more common after serveral decades.
• raalyt 2y ago
  I decided to practise some “千字文” in fountain pen calligraphy after mind struggling as well for the character ”嚏“
• throwaway313373 2y ago
  I understand that the topic of writing systems is touchy because it involves people's national identity and national pride. That's why all the comments that mention efficiency of different writing systems are heavily downvoted. But if we think about writing systems' evolution as an optimization problem that optimizes for "efficiency" (whatever that means. It is pretty hard to define so I'm not even going to try) we could easily imagine some systems being stuck at a local minimum. Or maybe even all of them being stuck at different local minimums some of which are smaller than the others.
• gverrilla 2y ago
  Would someone kindly explain what the authors means in the last paragraph with "There is a bit of irony in all this: the digital technology is both a cause of and a solution to the problem." ? How is it a solution?
  • mlaci 2y ago
    Pinyin
• shanghaikid 2y ago
  In China, children start studying at the age of 6 and continue until they graduate from university at around 23. They have a large amount of homework and exams that require handwriting. There's nothing to worry about.
• DeathArrow 2y ago
  Chinese writing system is a language in itself. You can translate Mandarin, Cantonese and even English to that language. To learn that language is harder because it has to support more than one spoken language. Using an alphabet would make things far more easier, but then how would people from different parts of China understand each other?
  • School-Cotton 2y ago
    I suppose advocates of alphabetic writing imagine everyone in China (outside Hong Kong and Macau) will be speaking standard Mandarin in a few generations anyway due to standardized public education.
    • GranularRecipe 2y ago
      I would argue that alphabetisation would increase the use of regional languages because it would be possible to write down your speech, instead of relying on Mandarin or phonetical transcription with Chinese characters.
  • GranularRecipe 2y ago
    It's not a language. It's a writing system used to write Classical Chinese for 3000 years and Mandarin for 150 years. When I was in Hong Kong, I was surprised that the written language is Mandarin (in traditional form).
    • DeathArrow 2y ago
      It's a language in the same sense math notation is a language. It's understood by both a Chinese and an American mathematician.
      • GranularRecipe 2y ago
        Math notation consists of symbols and syntax (order of symbols). How to arrange the Chinese characters (syntax) is very different between different languages.
• tho2342343434 2y ago
  In Japan, they call them "wapuro-baka" (idiot who's forgotten how to write stuff because he's only using WADO-PUROCESSA).
• cynicalpeace 2y ago
  This is actually one of the main reasons I don't think China will become a global hegemon. English, with all its flaws, is far easier to speak, read, and write. Languages are the walls between cultures.
  • ak_111 2y ago
    Could argue this works in exactly the opposite way. This "wall" makes the west an open book to china, while for the west it is hard to crack the Chinese. For one thing, think of the implications on recruiting people to spy or interpret intercepted messages from china or on espionage in general. Also the impact of this "problem" on running a well-functioning highly-productive and scientific powerhouse society is highly exaggerated and easily refuted by empirical facts. Just think of what Japan and China managed to accomplish in engineering and scientific accomplishment in the last 50 years and they both use character-based languages.
    • cynicalpeace 2y ago
      This is true. I learned Chinese and then hitchhiked China in 2018 for exactly this reason. Everyone was yapping about how important China had become, but China was a black box to me. After months of hitchhiking I came back home unconcerned. I think the fact that it's a black box makes us overhype China.
  • jampekka 2y ago
    I don't think English is particularly easy to speak, read nor write. The pronounciation is highly irregular and the writing system is very non-phonetic. E.g. "spelling bees" don't make any sense in most languages. Chinese also seems to be moving to the very phonetic and regular Pinyin that (for Mandarin) doesn't suffer from character amnesia. I do agree that languages are walls between peoples and should be taken down with a global language. Maybe in few decades the kids speak some kind of Chinglish.
    • cynicalpeace 2y ago
      "Easier" I didn't say easy. It's a relative comparison. Spanish and ASL are easy languages, but they won't help Peru or the Deaf community become hegemons for their own reasons. We already have the global language. It's called English lol
• ilamont 2y ago
  OTOH, the pinyin-based typing systems on computers and phones has been a godsend to students of Chinese. I started to learn Chinese in the 80s at my high school and then in the 90s in Taiwan and was laughably bad at writing. Literally, people would laugh at my characters not only because they looked terrible, but also because I was using the wrong stroke order. Now, it is possible for me to get away with not knowing how to write characters or the stroke order. Using pinyin and recognizing the characters (or certain radicals) is enough to take me very far in social media, texting, etc. For instance, for one of the phrases in the article ti2bi3wang4zi4 knowing the last character (zi, 字) and kind of remembering wang is enough to recognize the entire colloquialism when I type in the pinyin tibiwangzi: 提筆忘字 In Taiwan they have a TV game show featuring college students, basically like a crossword featuring 4-character colloquialisms and other phrases that have obscure characters. It's quite fun for the audience to watch, almost everyone is writing characters in the air in front of them as they try to remember the hard characters.
• clarle 2y ago
  My hot take - this isn’t that much different than English speakers not being able to write in cursive anymore. It’s just not something that’s as practiced as much now that we have digital input methods.
• hsfzxjy 2y ago
  Meanwhile, another trend among Chinese teenagers is the use of Pinyin initials to replace Chinese words. For example, 永远的神 (pinyin: Yǒngyuǎn de shén), a meme used to praise something, is often written as "yyds." These teens have become accustomed to reading and writing sentences composed of such acronyms, and they even use them in real-life conversations—much to the annoyance of cultural conservatives. This phenomenon highlights how online communication can influence offline speech patterns.
• nextworddev 2y ago
  It’s a highly inefficient writing system, that’s why it was godly that Korea moved away from it with Hangul.
• MisterTea 2y ago
  I wonder is the increase in external input from a growing world that is full of distraction competes with storage for these kinds of things. Such an intricate writing system might have been easier to contain in the mind before it was bombarded with limitless electronic entertainment and communication. How many people actually sit down and put a pencil to paper these days?
• benbini 2y ago
  Can't figure out if Moser misspelling "abacus" as "abacas" in the final paragraph was some sort of joke - regardless, extremely ironic given the argument that phonetic systems are better suited for accurate active textual reproduction.
• namelosw 2y ago
  The phrase "Tibiwangzi" (Character amnesia) was popular long before the digital age. Back when I was a child in the 90s, middle-aged and old people often found themselves unable to recall specific characters. I somehow kept the habit of handwriting for years. But as a guy in my early 30s, I do notice characters fade away from my brain from time to time, which wasn't a thing at all in the 20s. And to my surprise, some of the characters are fairly frequently used - I was just completely stuck when I was trying to recall them. Probably that's how brains and organs peaked and will slowly break down over the following decades just like hard drives.