5 ms·

English won. The Chinese youth struggle to write their own calligraphy characters they can read now. Typing favors English.

rahimnathwani 2y ago
It's easy and fast to type Chinese sentences using a keyboard.
throwaway519 2y ago
The pendulum already turned back. The current generation under 20 grew up with touchscreens. That obseletes input with pinyin; many don't care if the device has no keyboard.
- thenthenthen 2y ago
  Input is so interesting in China, basically a sorta t9 but just single letters and picking the right characters, with common/frequently used characters first, using pinyin. For example to say “ How are you?” You just type “nhm” (Ni Hao Ma) and 你好吗 shows up as suggestion/autofill. You can make surprisingly long sentences using this method.
- olalonde 2y ago
  > That obseletes input with pinyin Uh? Pinyin input is by far the most popular input technique in China. I rarely see anyone using handwriting input. That being said, it has nothing to do with English winning. It's just a Chinese input technique that uses the latin alphabet. English fluency in China is not very common, especially spoken English.
  - eru 2y ago
    Just like German is written with almost the same alphabet as English, but that doesn't give you English fluency.
  - syndeo 2y ago
    My father-in-law here in China uses handwriting input, but everyone else I've seen here uses Pinyin, and it's totally fast and natural for them. And very true about the English. With some exceptions (of course), folks here maybe know a handful of words at best, and even then, pronunciation is usually pretty rough. People here really aren't using it; they are perfectly comfortable with their Chinese, and why wouldn't they be? Anyone saying otherwise clearly hasn't been here to see it firsthand.
- pertymcpert 2y ago
  What? Only people I've seen use the writing input mode was old people.
- anticensor 2y ago
  If only Unicode decomposed Chinese characters on a per basic stroke basis: it would be so much easier to have keyboards following that.
  - ezst 2y ago
    This has nothing to do with Unicode and everything to do with input methods, of which there are a variety. Some methods are indeed shape-based like you suggest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_method#Shape-based https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_method#Shape-bas... By the looks of it, Pinyin (a phonetic one) won by a landslide, which I suspect this is the result of a long effort by the Chinese government to install Mandarin as the official language of China, above regional dialects (different regions would write similar characters but pronounce them differently, and defaulting to Pinyin has this "nice" effect of having people "think of how it would be pronounced in Mandarin first", even when the result are characters that would be read by a Cantonese speaker).
-__---____-ZXyw 2y ago
Source? This smacks of "I saw a headline once"-itis. Especially the fact that you refer to the Chinese characters as "calligraphy characters", as if that were the general term or something.
- Jarwain 2y ago
  These are probably the headlines they're thinking about, https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/747853.shtml https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/747853.shtml https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-28599392 https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-28599392 Or more recently this one about character amnesia https://globalchinapulse.net/character-amnesia-in-china/ https://globalchinapulse.net/character-amnesia-in-china/ None of these really mean that English has won, though. Rather that phonetics-based writing systems are easier to remember and use, especially in conjunction with digital systems that make it easy to map sound and context to symbols. I wouldn't be surprised if characters are faster to read though. In English we have all these subconscious shortcuts like looking at the shape of the word, first and last letters, etc. But I think symbology can convey more at a glance. Thus the popularity of emoji
  - -__---____-ZXyw 2y ago
    Ah no, I know myself that there have been headlines here and there. I'm pretty sure there was some controvery in the linguistic blogging community even at some stage over the last couple of years, with someone writing an essay claiming the Chinese character system was in some sense less advanced and maybe on the way out, and this leading to a serious response or two, the usual fiery academic affair. I can't locate it this instant though. I moreso meant for OP's low-effort dramatisation to not go unanswered. Framing it as "winning" some sort of language battle is particularly silly. Your musings are interesting though, and the topic certainly is a fascinating one. Languages that use morphemes for writing are wild. Symbology is a cool word also - surely there has to be a lisp blog somewhere with that word in the title.

rahimnathwani 2y ago

It's easy and fast to type Chinese sentences using a keyboard.

throwaway519 2y ago

The pendulum already turned back. The current generation under 20 grew up with touchscreens. That obseletes input with pinyin; many don't care if the device has no keyboard.

thenthenthen 2y ago
Input is so interesting in China, basically a sorta t9 but just single letters and picking the right characters, with common/frequently used characters first, using pinyin. For example to say “ How are you?” You just type “nhm” (Ni Hao Ma) and 你好吗 shows up as suggestion/autofill. You can make surprisingly long sentences using this method.
olalonde 2y ago
> That obseletes input with pinyin Uh? Pinyin input is by far the most popular input technique in China. I rarely see anyone using handwriting input. That being said, it has nothing to do with English winning. It's just a Chinese input technique that uses the latin alphabet. English fluency in China is not very common, especially spoken English.
- eru 2y ago
  Just like German is written with almost the same alphabet as English, but that doesn't give you English fluency.
- syndeo 2y ago
  My father-in-law here in China uses handwriting input, but everyone else I've seen here uses Pinyin, and it's totally fast and natural for them. And very true about the English. With some exceptions (of course), folks here maybe know a handful of words at best, and even then, pronunciation is usually pretty rough. People here really aren't using it; they are perfectly comfortable with their Chinese, and why wouldn't they be? Anyone saying otherwise clearly hasn't been here to see it firsthand.
pertymcpert 2y ago
What? Only people I've seen use the writing input mode was old people.
anticensor 2y ago
If only Unicode decomposed Chinese characters on a per basic stroke basis: it would be so much easier to have keyboards following that.
- ezst 2y ago
  This has nothing to do with Unicode and everything to do with input methods, of which there are a variety. Some methods are indeed shape-based like you suggest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_method#Shape-based https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_method#Shape-bas... By the looks of it, Pinyin (a phonetic one) won by a landslide, which I suspect this is the result of a long effort by the Chinese government to install Mandarin as the official language of China, above regional dialects (different regions would write similar characters but pronounce them differently, and defaulting to Pinyin has this "nice" effect of having people "think of how it would be pronounced in Mandarin first", even when the result are characters that would be read by a Cantonese speaker).

-__---____-ZXyw 2y ago

Source? This smacks of "I saw a headline once"-itis. Especially the fact that you refer to the Chinese characters as "calligraphy characters", as if that were the general term or something.

Jarwain 2y ago
These are probably the headlines they're thinking about, https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/747853.shtml https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/747853.shtml https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-28599392 https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-28599392 Or more recently this one about character amnesia https://globalchinapulse.net/character-amnesia-in-china/ https://globalchinapulse.net/character-amnesia-in-china/ None of these really mean that English has won, though. Rather that phonetics-based writing systems are easier to remember and use, especially in conjunction with digital systems that make it easy to map sound and context to symbols. I wouldn't be surprised if characters are faster to read though. In English we have all these subconscious shortcuts like looking at the shape of the word, first and last letters, etc. But I think symbology can convey more at a glance. Thus the popularity of emoji
- -__---____-ZXyw 2y ago
  Ah no, I know myself that there have been headlines here and there. I'm pretty sure there was some controvery in the linguistic blogging community even at some stage over the last couple of years, with someone writing an essay claiming the Chinese character system was in some sense less advanced and maybe on the way out, and this leading to a serious response or two, the usual fiery academic affair. I can't locate it this instant though. I moreso meant for OP's low-effort dramatisation to not go unanswered. Framing it as "winning" some sort of language battle is particularly silly. Your musings are interesting though, and the topic certainly is a fascinating one. Languages that use morphemes for writing are wild. Symbology is a cool word also - surely there has to be a lisp blog somewhere with that word in the title.