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> 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
by 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 agoCompletely 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 agoEven 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 agoThe 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.
- adastra22 2y agoExcept in German this is not a problem. The idea that you could say/hear a word and not know how to spell it doesn't even make sense in that context.
- zelphirkalt 2y agoI think Spanish is a much better example for write how you speak and still being correct, than German.
- Xenoamorphous 2y agoHmmm not so literate people (or just children) make a lot of mistakes writing Spanish because a bunch of letters are pronounced the same. And then the “h” when not preceded by a “c” is silent, which causes issues. What is true however is that of you learn the pronunciation rules you should be able to read a text correctly even if you have no clue what you’re saying. That’s not true of English for example.
- Maken 2y agoThere are a couple of rules that cause confusion: - b, v and sound like /b/, because v lost its original pronunciation and w was lent from other languages. - h lost its sound and became silent (used to be a soft /f/). - g can sometimes sound like /j/ (there was some pressure to remove these uses). - x can be an /s/ at the start of a word (due to Greek ancestry). Those are considered mistakes, but they do not change the pronunciation of the words. For the concrete rules: https://www.rae.es/ortograf%C3%ADa/valores-fonol%C3%B3gicos-de-los-grafemas-y-d%C3%ADgrafos-del-espa%C3%B1ol https://www.rae.es/ortograf%C3%ADa/valores-fonol%C3%B3gicos-.... You can see the exceptions to "one letter, one sound" are very few.
- School-Cotton 2y agoAlso, in Latin America (but not most of Spain) z and s are pronounced the same.
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- cubefox 2y agoThe article points out that, because Chinese is not a phonetic language, if you don't know how to write something, you might not be able to write it at all, while in phonetic languages you can always spell something that sounds the same. E.g. "snees" for "sneeze".
- almaight 2y agoThis is true in mainland China, but not in Taiwan. There, katakana is used as pinyin, and words can be composed by katakana.
- vunderba 2y agoI'm not sure where you've got this from, but I lived in Taiwan for years - you might be thinking of 注音 which does look similar to kana but is distinct and unrelated. And the authors article is referring to the writing of the logograph - 注音 is strictly for pronunciation.
- cubefox 2y agoSo the question is then whether writing "snees" instead of "sneeze" is like writing sneeze in pinyin (or in "注音"), or not.
- naming_the_user 2y agoStrongly disagree. If you can remember the word "chocolate" but not the spelling then you can guess it. You might write choklit or choclate or something but you can at least get close. If you forget what 警察 (police officer, jing3cha2) looks like then you're just completely screwed. Maybe you can remember a radical or two but it's still just going to be wrong and not meaningfully recognisable. I guess you could write down 景茶 (jing3cha2) and rely on the phonetics, or use a different word if you know one, but it's still wrong on a level that "choclit" just isn't.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Chathamization 2y ago> I guess you could write down 景茶 (jing3cha2) and rely on the phonetics, or use a different word if you know one, but it's still wrong on a level that "choclit" just isn't. If a non-native did this in their own way would likely look wrong, but Chinese natives do occasionally use phonics to write or to substitute some characters with others.
- naming_the_user 2y agoYeah I agree with this. It's also super common in Pinyin to just typo and choose the wrong character through autocomplete. I'm strictly referring to the handwritten language here, basically I don't think there is an analogue in alphabetic languages.
- shrimptho 2y agoThe counter-argument would be that the person could just use the pinyin or use a digital device to get them the characters. But as the article pointed out, those are both modern conveniences. Less than 100 years old both. The script absolutely gives no clues otherwise. Let's put it this way: We know what ancient might egyptian (most likely) sounds like because they gave their writting system the uniliterals, which are pronunciation guides for complex words. We know that they said waw, and we know what a waw sounds like. They did this probably so they would not to explode their character count from hundreds to thousands.
- keybored 2y ago> I’m just noting this so that this problem doesn’t seem totally exotic or specific to Chinese(/Japanese). English orthography is exactly that. Exotic. Imagine having such a strange spelling system that you have competitions where you try to recite spelling. Exotic.
- pulsarmx 2y agoMany people would consider Spanish, my native language, to be much more straightforward when it comes to spelling. We still have spelling contests at state and nation levels.
- marc_abonce 2y ago> 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. I can't read Chinese, but I think the article has a better analogy: "most people can easily recognise the musical symbol for treble clef (𝄞), but very few could draw it by memory."
- thinkingemote 2y agoI think the example of "ampersand" "&" is good. We have a word describing what it is, we have a symbol of how it looks, and we have a word of how it is pronounced "and". We also tend not to write ampersands down by hand. Its a more common symbol. However unlike the treble clef the meaning and the pronunciation is the same so perhaps the example isn't as good?