23 ms·

I used to know how to write in Japanese

• 4ensic 1y ago
  3 years of Japanese in high school and I can still read hiragana 48 years later.
  • adastra22 1y ago
    This isn’t about the kana though.
    • Philpax 1y ago
      They're joking that despite their three years of study, they've only retained hiragana.
• prokopton 1y ago
  I have no trouble reading but writing kanji has become a problem. I never need to do it and I can’t remember how to write kanji I have no trouble reading. It’s Japanese people too, to a lesser degree. My own Japanese wife has to pause to remember how to write something every now and then.
  • dmoy 1y ago
    This happens in Chinese too Grocery lists will be a mish mash of characters and pinyin https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/jiaozi.gif https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/jiaozi.gif 鸡, get halfway through writing 蛋, forget how to do it without a computerized pinyin input, give up, scribble it out and write dan
    • bloak 1y ago
      Thanks for that example. Would a Chinese person ever write the tone in pinyin when writing something for themselves?
      • dmoy 1y ago
        Not when doing fragments in obvious context like that. For one, tone doesn't disambiguate anyways. There's 10+ common characters with pinyin 'dan', and only 4 (5) tones in Mandarin. But also when the context is super obvious there, there's no need.
  • gramie 1y ago
    This was happening to people I knew when I lived in Japan 30 years ago. Many people were using wa-puro (word processors that let you type in the phonetic form and choose from the appropriate kanji). I imagine the effect is far more common now. I remember one time when a university engineering professor couldn't remember how to write the kanji for "police". He didn't seem embarrassed asking someone else. I don't know if they still do, but they would often demonstrate by writing out the character with their index finger like a pen in the other hand's palm.
• ti42o34j234234 1y ago
  This is probably why Japan still adamantly emphasizes writing. Written resumes/ fax machines ... remain the norm, and while this may seem anachronistic for the rest of the world (pretty much all of which uses either (semi-) phonetic scripts derived from Aramaic or from Brahmi), it makes sense after you come across the Chinese characters.
  • pezezin 1y ago
    No, it's because Japan is a deeply conservative country, really adverse to change, because change means taking risks. If you ever had to deal with Japanese you would know, layers upon layers of convoluted procedures for no real reason. But hey, at least now I can get the "my number card" to get my hanko certificate from the convenience store. Maybe in 30 years I will be able to use the card directly to prove my ID without needing the stupid hanko!
• tdeck 1y ago
  A similar thing happens with all kinds of iconography, from flags to logos. People can easily recognize many logos, but when asked to draw them they often can't come very close. https://magazine.adler.co.uk/promotional-idea/we-asked-100-people-to-draw-famous-logos-from-memory-here-is-what-they-drew/ https://magazine.adler.co.uk/promotional-idea/we-asked-100-p...
  • vintermann 1y ago
    Not just logos, but also shapes of everyday objects. Bikes, famously.
  • mock-possum 1y ago
    That’s a fun little article, thanks for sharing that.
• roxolotl 1y ago
  This reminds me of one time I mentioned to someone I had aphantasia and their response was “how do you spell!?” Seems wild to me that some people see words in their head to spell them but I guess at least one person does. I do wonder if that means they’d have better kanji recall for writing.
  • sixothree 1y ago
    It’s real. I didn’t know it was a thing until a few years ago then suddenly everything made sense. I’m glad people are talking about it.
    • apt-apt-apt-apt 1y ago
      What is aphantasia, specifically? I don't consider myself to have aphantasia. If I close my eyes and try to 'see' with my eyes the letter 'm' or an apple, all I see is the back of my eyelids– pitch black. If I then try to 'see' with my mind the letter 'm', I can imagine the shape and drawing the shape, but it never appears in a physically visual manner. I can trace its lines with my eyeballs, but try as I may to hallucinate an image, it's still only pitch black always. The closest I come to seeing it is being very confident that I know exactly what 'm' looks like, and that I could take that mental model and draw it exactly on paper immediately. Do some people have such a clear and strong mental image that they can effectively inspect, zoom in and manipulate a mental image as well as a real visual image, and that's considered not-aphantasia?
      • sixothree 1y ago
        How are you with reading fiction? Easy or a struggle?
        • apt-apt-apt-apt 1y ago
          It's easy, the experience isn't very visual though. More about the plot and emotions I'd say.
      • 1y ago
• optiot 1y ago
  Is ワープロ馬鹿 really a term used by native Japanese speakers? As far as I can tell it only really shows up in Japanese->English dictionaries and English forums (see https://www.google.com/search?q="ワープロ馬鹿"+-a+-the https://www.google.com/search?q="ワープロ馬鹿"+-a+-the). edit: s/word/term
  • syncsynchalt 1y ago
    > Is ワープロ馬鹿 really a word used by native Japanese speakers? You probably mean idiom. ワープロ (word processor) and 馬鹿 (baka: idiot) are individually both words used by Japanese speakers. Japanese speakers would be more likely to say 漢字健忘 (kanji amnesia) to refer to the phenomenon though.
• vehemenz 1y ago
  I enjoyed this read, but I am noticing that people who claim to have aphantasia seem to write about themselves and their experiences an awful lot. I doubt the phenomenon is real. Some people doubt that sun-sneezing is real, so I can entertain the possibility of being wrong. But sun-sneezing is trivial to demonstrate to doubters, and it doesn’t confer any “I’m special points.” No one would pretend to have it, unlike aphantasia.
  • ehnto 1y ago
    I would find it more surprising if the brain did not have quirky versions like this, given how complex it is and given how often our genes are not perfectly copied.
  • HeatrayEnjoyer 1y ago
    Given the amount of literature on the matter, what durable evidence is there that it actually doesn't exist?
• lyall 1y ago
  When learning Japanese, I purposely chose to _not_ learn how to write any of it by hand. As the author notes, writing (by hand) is in fact a separate skill from reading. So I decided I would not invest my limited time, motivation, or brain space to writing. Overall it's been a successful approach, and I recommend it to new learners unless they have a particular interest in being able to write by hand or they feel strongly that writing the characters helps them remember them. It's only rarely that I have to write anything other than my own name in Japanese. I've practiced my address but writing it in English is fine in 99% of situations. Being able to write properly would save a little embarrassment, but I still believe my language learning time would have a much higher ROI in other areas.
  • dodos 1y ago
    The one thing I noticed when I was focusing on learning to write is that it helped me a lot with differentiating between similar characters when reading. I forget which ones now, but there are many characters that differ by a single radical and have similar meanings, knowing how to write each one helped me quite a bit there, but overall I rarely write anything other than my name and address now that I live in Japan.
    • jwrallie 1y ago
      Even if you cannot recall and have to type in your phone first (as natives do often for unusual ones), at least you can write it much faster because you are not just copying. I think it’s useful to do RTK with SSR and, once you finishes, you only need about 15 min of maintenance per day to keep it in memory.
  • xdfgh1112 1y ago
    I can confirm this. I passed N1 without learning to write. I later learned how to write all of the kanji, and all it does it help you distinguish very similar kanji without context. I tried learning all the compound words (i.e. which kanji to use for every word) but gave up a few thousand Anki cards in. It was time consuming and impractical. (Wanted to pass Kanken 2) Props for anyone who put in the work though.
• solidsnack9000 1y ago
  Perhaps if there were fewer radicals this would be less of a problem. Many thousands of characters could probably be generated from a small number of radicals.
  • Macha 1y ago
    It would make some more of the choices of radicals more arbitrary and hurt recall in other ways though
  • anigbrowl 1y ago
    32 radicals are enough for ~75% of characters though. My biggest problem with writing is that I default to writing fairly small so if I have to do a character with more than 12-15 strokes it's either way too big or hard to read later.
• larsiusprime 1y ago
  If native speakers are starting to have character amnesia too, does that suggest in the long run you would expect the writing systems to simplify towards the phonetic syllabaries? Or is the fact that we have computers as a mediating tool going to forestall that and just make things weird?
  • aarroyoc 1y ago
    I'm just a Chinese student from the West so take it as just my two cents but I don't think it will evolve to phonetic syllabaries. Chinese has a lot of homophones so it's useful while reading to have an extra semantic meaning. They also say that once you're used to it, you read faster but at my level I can't confirm it. So with modern input devices you're basically simplifying the hard part of the characters, which is writing, and keeping the reading part where they're better than pure phonetic systems.
  • Macha 1y ago
    IMEs have actually caused the opposite a little in Japanese, because you type the phonetic pronounciation and get a list of possible kanji, then with computer use "writing" kanji really means "recognising" and so people will use kanji that they never would have bothered with remembering how to handwrite.
• timr 1y ago
  Being able to read but not write Kanji is so common that it's a meme amongst Japanese people -- to the point where it's a game. For example, here you can watch some Japanese television people play a game where they compete to write words in 10 seconds or less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQQqLno9hw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQQqLno9hw I (and every other learner) have the same problem. It's not special, and has nothing to do with aphantasia.
  • sovietswag 1y ago
    Hm, the author explicitly pointed out the same: > What confuses me is that other people can form images in their minds. Are all those with character amnesia also aphantasic? That can't be, given that aphantasics amount to less than 5% of the population, while a much larger number of people forget how to write (70% of teenage participants in a Chinese TV show were unable to write the word "toad"!). They were discussing their aphantasia as a precursor to other very interesting points, e.g. about how "seeing" a character in your mind isn't enough to be able to draw it, --> verbatim traces and gist traces.
  • anigbrowl 1y ago
    Completely off topic but that is the shakiest camera work I have ever seen, and I learned to shoot before gimbals were cheap and easily available. For that matter, it's been easy to automatically correct that sort of thin in post for years now. How were they not embarrassed to upload something so unwatchable?
• wrp 1y ago
  > In other words, what feels like a single, monolithic "literacy" ability is actually two distinct skills, each exercised in different instances and each capable of improving and decaying on its own. This dissociation has been used to test theories of hemispheric specialization. A good overview is in Neurolinguistic Aspects of the Japanese Writing System by Michel Piradis (1985).
• wintercarver 1y ago
  Nice post! Enjoy your blog's overall aesthetic too. Perhaps correlation in sense of style, though, as I also used RTK to learn to write Kanji, loved it, and now, ~15 years after that escapade, am kind of in a similar bucket (can write some characters, but mostly just read). I still think RTK great overall method and would do it again! Also, shoutout to Fabrice, creator of Kanji Koohii -- that was my first foray into SRS back in ~2007/2008, after which I found Anki (pre-mobile).
• curtisszmania 1y ago
  [dead]
• ehnto 1y ago
  Very interesting, definitely the first step towards writing a character for me is picturing it in my head. If it's particularly challenging I might, still in my head, project it onto the page and that seems to give my brain the spatial data to begin translating it to real world movements with the pen. But even still I also can barely write maybe 5% of the kanji I can read. As well words are often made of multiple kanji, but if you showed me the kanji separately I don't always recognise them as part of a word I do know. Recalling a kanji into my minds eye doesn't seem to be part of the skillset of reading, maybe just a by-product of long term repeat exposure.
• bapak 1y ago
  A system fails when its natives don't know how to use it. So time to sunset the system, surely? I don't know why so many countries are so obstinately hanging onto something so difficult. Do it like Korea if you don't want to go the Vietnamese way.
  • kusokurae 1y ago
    long reply here bc this is a Special Interest of mine. I'm going to put aside the "so difficult" thing here mostly, because the perceived difficulty is partly modern teaching practices not updating beyond "just write the kanji 100000 times ok" (this is a failure of people, not the writing system), and people actively choosing to not write anything at all, which isn't necessarily a problem because nowadays recognition is more important, and I don't see people panicing about how many people don't know how to spell many english words anymore. Alternatives would be nightmarish and culturally destructive to implement in the modern day. Further, people confuse poor implementation with complexity being the cause of the problem. Taiwan and HK both have high literacy rates despite using traditional characters, yet simplified characters were apparently necessary to increase literacy? It doesn't compute. Just under 50% of Japanese words are loanwords from Chinese. Recognising characters allows a ton of written nuance and extra vocabulary which the Japanese take full advantage of. There's at least 10 separate words for "kou kai". Even when not fully-remembered, Kanji allow mental mapping of multiple homophones without issue. We're really talking about a vocabulary mass exctinction event. Back in the ancient times Korea didn't have such a wide-ranging and culturally-mixed set of words as now. If the Japanese do this it'll be cutting off the vast majority of their cultural history. Seems unideal considering the butchering the French did, did exactly that to Vietnam's literary culture and basically cut the people off from much of it. Chinese doing this would be insane. Mao was tempted to use roman characters instead of the simplification they rolled out, which from a system design perspective only made a worse and more difficult/confusing system with more exceptions to rules than before, and poorer phonosemantic consistency/relations with other characters. Further because as research has proven many times over, it's harder to recognise many excessively simple & similar characters compared to more unique and specific forms. Thankfully Stalin advised him against it. We really are talking about doing something similar to a total spelling reform of english and just throwing the last 1000 years of literature, written records etc away. Only in the case of especially Chinese, you're throwing away a system that was developed and specifically tailored to the languages using it, which have due to its relative robustness to change as compared with latin letters, led to writing surviving many many difficult periods, regime changes, wars, famines etc over 3000 years. If you've ever compared Beowulf with Gawain, with Shakespeare and then modern English, you'll understand what a total overhaul a language can undergo if unchecked -- Chinese characters have enabled a comparatively stable orthography. Less than 800 years and it becomes gibberish.
• nneonneo 1y ago
  This is very common in Chinese now. The older generation, many of whom didn’t learn pinyin, just use voice input to send messages; the younger generations just use pinyin input and similarly can’t handwrite beyond the simplest characters. The phenomenon of forgetting how to write is called 提笔忘字 (tíbǐwàngzì - to pick up the pen and forget the character). It was previously covered here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41959256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41959256
  • tgv 1y ago
    That is a very melancholic name.
  • nojs 1y ago
    To people who think this is surprising, it’s not that different to forgetting how to spell rare English words
    • bananalychee 1y ago
      Not really. Even in English there are only a few possible ways to spell out a given sound. With Chinese characters that mostly goes out the window, making speaking and writing more or less orthogonal skills. Not entirely since there are classes of characters that are related by sound, but to a much greater extent than alphabetic languages. Personally if I forget a spelling in English or a related language I realize that my approximation looks wrong and can correct it by elimination, whereas with Chinese characters it's common for people to simply not have a clue how to even write the first stroke of a word they've heard and read before.
      • nojs 1y ago
        > it's common for people to simply not have a clue how to even write the first stroke of a word they've heard and read before. It’s much more common to remember most of the character, or accidentally substitute it for a similar character that sounds the same.
  • thaumasiotes 1y ago
• insane_dreamer 1y ago
  Writing out Chinese characters definitely helped me learn to read them as well (not surprising, since engaging multiple senses helps one retain information better), even though in practice I never had opportunity to write them out because I always used either a phone or computer. Unlike the author, I found most of the mnemonics as much trouble to learn as the characters themselves, and soon stopped using that approach. It just didn't work for me.
• theoa 1y ago
  > This is also why I believe that language is a bottleneck for thought. Most of what you remember is nothing like an approximate copy of the things you experienced in real life—even in the specific case of text, memory is not even remotely like a paraphrase of previously read words. Many of our thoughts happen in a highly abstracted and distilled form, interacting and connecting with each other as a network that simply cannot be faithfully converted into a sequence of words, however long. Perhaps the most interesting quote in an interesting article. Leaves me speechless or something
• vunderba 1y ago
  I spent years in Taiwan studying traditional Chinese and even at the height of my proficiency there were plenty of rarer logographs that I'd frequently stumble over - only able to draw "blurry approximations" of them depending on my familiarity. Coming from a phonetic language with only 26 letters, it was such a surreal feeling being able to effortlessly read a character but be unable to reproduce it.
  • djtango 1y ago
    My understanding (which may have been in the previous HN discussion on the topic) is that Chinese people just substitute with a homophone if they're really stuck and native readers can guess by context what the writer meant. Much like fudged spelling like when Americans mix up do and due
  • BrtByte 1y ago
    Also wild how quickly the writing ability fades without regular use
• vunderba 1y ago
  From the article: > On the surface, this atypical trait seems to explain quite well why I can draw a blank when asked to write the kanji for "plant" (植) from memory. I don't see the character in my mind, so it makes sense that I can't reproduce it on paper. While the author's aphantasia may have posed some recall issues - it wouldn't explain why they had ever been able to reproduce 植. Kanji has the concept of radicals AND stroke order. One could make the case that perhaps the author's motor cortex is simply storing the equivalent of LOGO programming language instructions for reproducing the logograph. Take away your mind's ability to find and chunk (木, 十, 具) by showing them "radical"-less characters and I'm sure it would be even more difficult.
  • vidarh 1y ago
    As someone with aphantasia, I'm also not convinced that is the cause. I can draw better than average from memory, and used to be quite good but haven't practiced for many years. There are also animators and artists with aphantasia[1]. My spatial recollection is particularly good - I can sketch out precise diagrammatic drawings from memory much better than I can do artistic drawings. So while it's not impossible that not having aphantasia would've been a benefit to him, I don't think there's much evidence that it's has any big effect on the ability to draw - something that also fits Ed Catmull's experience on surveying his old employees in the article mentioned. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47830256 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47830256
    • Klonoar 1y ago
      My wife has aphantasia, is fluent in Japanese, and writes the language better than many of our friends who still live there. She was just forced to learn the stroke order, etc when learning the language. Aphantasia causes many odd issues for her but the ability to write complex languages or draw are not one of them.
  • dionian 1y ago
    Writing characters without knowing the radicals is kind of like spelling without really clearly understanding the alphabet. The stroke order is easy to remember, the radicals make the full characters easier to remember.
• hintymad 1y ago
  What drove me crazy when I started to learn Japanese was that a Kanji characters can have so many different pronunciations. The most egregious example is 煙草, whose pronunciation is the really just tabacco(tabako, or タバコ). I knew the etymologies and the historical context on why Japanese evolved like that, but it's nonetheless hard for me to remember all the pronunciations, at least initially. Also, I find that knowing Kanji is essential in appreciating part of Japanese culture. Take their addresses, for example: Kinukawa is really meaningless, but 鬼怒川 is such a amazing name. Similarly, Akihabara means little if all we know is the pronunciation, yet its Kanji 秋叶原 is such a beautiful and poetic name that invokes complex emotions.
  • happa 1y ago
    It's Kinugawa, and Akihabara is written as 秋葉原.
    • hintymad 1y ago
      Yeah, I mixed up my input and chose simplified Chinese
• GaggiX 1y ago
  That's why I focus on learning words rather than individual kanji characters. Kanji characters have so many different readings, and the Japanese language is full of exceptions that it's not worth the time unless you're passionate about it, eventually you will pick up the readings of most common ones and you will be able to guess new words automatically, writing them no thank you, I barely write in my own language without a keyboard.
  • BlarfMcFlarf 1y ago
    I tried this, but I couldn’t really tell the differences between even quite obvious characters until I sat down with them individually.
• PrimeDirective 1y ago
  "I still do. But I used to, too." -Mitch Hedberg
  • setay11 1y ago
    A favorite joke of mine with a similar structure was Dave Attell's "I used to do drugs waaaay baaaack - there!" And he points to the side of the stage.
• bloak 1y ago
  If you're doing an exam in China or Japan, do you write on paper, or use a computer?
  • gaoryrt 1y ago
    In China, paper
  • gyomu 1y ago
    In Japan, paper
  • aikinai 1y ago
    Almost always paper. The people who forget are adults who don't write anything by hand anymore except the occasional form or sticky note.
  • klausa 1y ago
    Not the question you asked; but something that actually surprised me, as someone who has taken multiple language tests in the EU: The (semi-official) Japanese language tests do not test language production in _any_ way, even on the highest levels. You don't need to speak a single word, nor write a single character to pass the exam, it's all single-choice answers. AFAICT, the equivalent exams for Chinese and Koreans do include writing, at least on the higher levels; but still don't have a speaking portion.
    • mastermage 1y ago
      I have recently had the experience of Labguage School in Japan and they also realy heavily lean into having just circle the correct parts or do somethign like insert correct Particle here. While I have tremendous respect for the Japanese Language and people. The Japanese in all my exposure to it do not know how ot tech languages. Be it their own to people that do not know it or English to their own people.
    • TheDong 1y ago
      > The (semi-official) Japanese language tests do not test language production in _any_ way, even on the highest levels. This is simply not true. The Kanji Kentei is probably the most popular Japanese language test Japanese people might take outside of school, and it tests writing heavily. If you're talking about the JLPT, that's a test meant only for non-native speakers. > all single-choice answers. Not even multiple choices? Maybe they should reconsider that one.
• gyomu 1y ago
  When I reached upper level Japanese classes (N2/N1), my native Japanese teachers would regularly (maybe once a week or so) have to look up a character they were writing on the board during class. It definitely made me feel better.
• boxedsound 1y ago
  I have experienced this for simplified Chinese. I studied some Chinese while studying computer science in China. The classes would have us learn writing, reading, speaking and listening (sensibly so for a Chinese language class). Being able to write characters was handy whenever I came across documents that needed to be filled, but since leaving China I never had the need to write characters again. I now just input them using pinyin on keyboards, and I can easily recognise and read / input the correct characters. It is a strange feeling trying to write the characters I once knew, but now have forgotten, yet being able to read them instantly... I would like to recommend dong-chinese, a language app I came across when I prepared for my stay over there. It taught things in a very efficient manner. At this point I would like to recreationally increase my vocabulary so I have started working on a game called LingoRogue. My goal is to make it addictive to play, with a sneaky vocabulary-increasing effect. In other words a game that is "learnified" rather than a learning software that is gamified.
  • BrtByte 1y ago
    It's like the muscle memory for writing just evaporates, even though the recognition part stays perfectly intact
• BrenBarn 1y ago
  I mean, this is not a politically correct statement, but I think one line of reasoning from this is to say that Chinese characters (which is what kanji are) are not a great way to write down language for practical purposes. A friend of mine in grad school irreverently referred to the Chinese writing system as "a really huge, really inefficient syllabary", and I think there's some truth to that. The characters no doubt have a certain beauty and their history is interesting, but a system where the meanings and pronunciations have to be learned totally separately seems to be inherently cumbersome in some ways. Even in a language like English which abuses the Latin alphabet in a notoriously messy manner, the amount of phonetic information that can be gleaned from the written form is fairly high, which gives two paths to the word (via memorized whole-word recognition or incremental sounding-out).
  • aikinai 1y ago
    It also affects the learning curve. English-speaking children can read far more advanced books earlier than equivalently educated Japanese. They probably don't outweigh the disadvantages, but there are some small benefits. Once fluent, I think I remember Japanese to be slightly faster to read because of the more unique shapes. And you can make more flexible and elegant graphic text designs and tables (like in Excel) given the compact words and natural vertical writing.
    • numpad0 1y ago
      Is that so? Deducing definition of an unknown kanji word isn't that difficult. I never had issues with "advanced kanji" as far back as I can recall.
      • aikinai 1y ago
        My children are Japanese-English bilingual and can read far more advanced books in English. Initially I took this as an imbalance and suggested they read the same books (or something very close) in Japanese. But their native Japanese language teachers said, no, because of the different learning curves you can't expect them to read the same level of Japanese texts; the equivalently educated/advanced Japanese reader will be behind, at least in the elementary school years. Japanese as a whole are extremely avid readers, so I don't think there's a gap at the top, only the shape of the learning curve.
• xenodium 1y ago
  If you're a beginner (like me), I built a little space-invaders-like game to help me practice the kana https://xenodium.com/mochi-invaders-now-on-the-app-store https://xenodium.com/mochi-invaders-now-on-the-app-store It's free (no ads nor funny business).
  • inatreecrown2 1y ago
    nice little game!
• mastermage 1y ago
  Mw out here in Japan being barely able to rrad any kanji but being able to hold reasonable small talk in Japanese. Spoken Communication yes written forget it.
• victorp13 1y ago
  Small nuance, but the term ワープロ馬鹿 actually is unrelated to software like MS Word, and refers to the at one point ubiquitous ワープロ (Word Pro) dedicated hardware device that many Japanese people owned in the 80s/90s to write letters. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor#Japanese_word_processor_devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor#Japanese_word_p... Interestingly the English Wikipedia page above only mentions Japanese word processor devices in a small section, but the Japanese version of that page is almost entirely dedicated to these hardware devices: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3%83%97%E3%83%AD%E3%82%BB%E3%83%83%E3%82%B5 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3... I was lucky enough to live with a Japanese family in the early 90s and used one to learn how to type Japanese but also write letters home in my own language. I guess you had to live through this age to understand the difference of how Word Pro is used and the hardware association it has in Japanese.
  • movedx 1y ago
    Thanks for sharing this part of your life. That’s so cool.
  • Tor3 1y ago
    A Toshiba Rupo word processor (found in both links) is safely stored in the backyard shed, together with some floppies and documentation. That'll be my winter project next year.
  • oracel 1y ago
    The other weird thing about that term is that it's somewhat uncommon to see 馬鹿 actually written out in kanji, as those characters mean horse and deer with no direct association with 'idiot' (the proposed etymology is a reference to Chinese history and/or a Sanskrit loanword). I guess in a way the kanji form is a word processor autocomplete tell.
• jongjong 1y ago
  I'm convinced that different people process handwriting (and movement) differently. This is true with latin languages as well. I think this may explain the difference between recognizing shapes versus drawing them for some people. I remember when I was in school, some people had really neat handwriting, they could write fast and all their letters looked exactly the same with apparently little effort. On the other hand, I had to focus hard to ensure that my letters were all the same style, shape, size and slope... Also, I didn't have a single 'handwriting style' I could write in a number of different styles. I couldn't have both speed and nice looking, consistent letters; it was one or the other. The interesting thing though is that I was always quite good at drawing... Conversely, I noticed that the people who had beautiful, effortless handwriting would typically be quite bad at drawing... They were the kinds of people who had to start out every drawing as a bunch of circles, triangles and crosses before joining them together to form the final drawing. I feel like these people automate their hand to some extent. It's like a reflex to them. It lets them render common shapes without much thinking or effort. It reminds me of that time I did a drawing class and the teacher kept reminding students to "stop thinking in symbols and just draw the different shapes and shades as they appear." This probably has parallels in a number of areas like sports (e.g. tennis) where being able to offload certain movements to muscle memory can free up your brain for more strategic aspects of the sport. This also reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking fast and slow." I suspect it would be interesting to try to categorize people based on what kinds of mental activities they offload to system 1 vs system 2 thinking.
• jcims 1y ago
  What if we call this 'constructive recall', in which your mind needs to take a concept and generate the concrete manifestation of it, vs 'recognition', which is the obverse. There are many examples of this in life, aren't there? Imagine a song you used to love as a kid and knew by heart. Now try to write down the lyrics word for word. Typically quite difficult. Now play the song and sing along. You not only know all the words, your mind provides you a just-in-time recollection of all the nuance in the delivery, the pauses, the details of the music itself, nearly a perfect replay of the entire song is there in your mind...you just couldn't knit it together like you can when it's there in front of you. I've noticed something similar when listening to podcasts. If I'm out doing something, typically driving, while listening to a podcast episode for the first time, I will have these intrusive photographic recalls of what I was doing at that time if I listen to it again. At least if I do that within the first few weeks. Just seems like a general characteristic of the brain.
• NalNezumi 1y ago
  Don't worry it's common for natives too. Not born & raised in Japan but went to Saturday school for Japanese in Europe and I was excited to be able to read (and understand) the newspaper for the first time at middle school, because my Kanji caught up. From there it's usually very quick how much Kanji you can learn. But now, 20 years later? When I need to go to fill forms I flip up my phone and search for Kanji all the time. And I know I'm not alone (although probably very bad by Japanese standards), but I can navigate Japan just fine. I always struggled to explain this to my European friends. "I can read and talk fluently without any issue, but writing not so much. Unless on keyboard". The best analogy I've come up with is "If I ask you to imagine an apple or a Motorbike, you can do it right. When you see one, you'll instantly recognize what it is. But if I ask you to paint an apple, or a motorbike, you might not fare too well; people might mistake your painting of a motorbike for a bicycle. It's something like that. Using keyboard is like googling for images and copying it in to your PowerPoint slides"
  • nachteilig 1y ago
    Is it this way for Hiragana and Katakana for you too? I just started and have not moved on to Kanji yet, and I already struggle to write them.
    • anigbrowl 1y ago
      nta but that is just a matter of practice. Just write every day and i will become automatic after a few months.
    • coffeeling 1y ago
      A lot of Japanese learners do hate katakana (personally, a lot of fonts could stand to be clearer about ツシンソ ), because most writing is in kanji+hiragana so they have less practice with katakana. But kana ability is really just exposure. Use it to get used to it. Same reason people say kana-only writing (like in old videogames for example) is hard to read: People competent at reading any language don't spell things out in detail, even when we subvocalize we first recognize the shape of the scribbles and our brain has a shortcut from a certain set of scribbles to certain morphemes/words, where the solid feeling of meaning comes from. Every competent reader of Japanese is first and foremost used to the kanji-hiragana mixed script, and has shortcuts for the kanji forms of words and the sounds of those words. The hiragana only forms? Not so much. So when they complain about hiragana only being hard to read, they're not lying. It really is harder. But it's not harder due to any inherent defect in a hiragana-only script, it's just about a lack of exposure to form those shortcuts that make reading feel easy.
• h2zizzle 1y ago
  I find myself having trouble remembering the spelling of certain words, now that autocomplete is almost ubiquitous. It sometimes takes writing them out and looking at the result ("Is it 'beleive'? No, definitely 'believe'.") to remember the correct spelling. Chinese character recall is probably closesly associated with that than with romaji recall.
• nottorp 1y ago
  > Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet. No but when I last tried to hand write a long text in the latin alphabet, my hand hurt after a while. Skills atrophy when not used, more complex skills may atrophy faster.
• gchamonlive 1y ago
  > How is it possible for you to "see" the text in your mind and not be able to replicate it with a pen? Even if the mental image is faint and fuzzy, surely you can sketch it out roughly at first, then refine it until it settles into its exact form? Apparently, that is not how mental images work, either. That's really not how it works. I draw as a hobby and I love to study human anatomy. I can conjure in my mind people in many poses with detail, in different clothes and colour. Still the act of drawing without a reference is a world in itself. If I try to sketch from memory without a reference, it quickly falls apart. It's not that the mental image is incomplete, wrong or an illusion. Is just that knowing it and reproducing it are two very different things.
• kayodelycaon 1y ago
  > I believe that language is a bottleneck for thought. I think this various from person to person because I don’t think in language.
• koakuma-chan 1y ago
  "is point is that learning kanji presents two obstacles: remembering what the shapes mean and remembering how they are pronounced." How is this different from English words? How is conscientiousness pronounced? Not to mention rendezvous.
  • xandrius 1y ago
    The difference is that for most words you can easily get 90% there in English and, even if you don't read it properly, the listener can somewhat get what you are trying to say. And say you don't know how to read "conscientiousness" but you know how to read "con" and "ousness" you can try to go for con-shu-tiouness and at least you're somewhere. It's not the case with Kanjis, sure you might know one part of a word but you might be wrong. Also similar looking kanji don't read similarly at all, so even that is out of the window. And don't get me started on the approach of applying memoization techniques purely on the strokes of a kanji, that's gonna hurt more than not. Simple examples: - 末 and 未 - 大 and 犬 - 千 and 干
    • numpad0 1y ago
      It actually works the same way in Japanese. Radicals give rough clues about meanings as well as pronunciation. Similar looking kanji do read similarly. It's just... you can read pronounce "brochures" in either French style or in Southern American, and which one is more appropriate depends. edit: Simple examples: - 臆 and 億 - 誤 and 語 - 諦 and 締
      • xandrius 1y ago
        Not always, as I wrote in another comment this is because of the Japanese script reform for "modernising" and simplifying the script. So sometimes kanji look similar but are not. More info at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform#Mazegaki https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform#Mazeg...
        • numpad0 1y ago
• leelin 1y ago
  Years ago I asked my teacher what percent of street merchants or high school kids would know how to write some of the more complicated, uncommon characters from the advanced textbooks. She replied street merchants maybe 50%, but high school students 100% -- during high school every student will be at their lifetime peak literacy, because they will be cramming and memorizing how to write every possible character in preparation for the college entrance exams. I tell locals I can "speak, read, and type", but only have 1st grade writing abilities in Mandarin. The key is typing -- you can chat on Line, WeChat, email, or any mobile apps to accomplish day-to-day tasks. But the typing is phoenetic either via Roman pinyin, zhuyin, romaji, etc. So yes, this problem only comes up in languages where drawing the characters are mostly independent of the pronunciation. You don't need to type individual words, you can type phrases and the input tool presents choices sorted by most commonly used. Therefore, even sending communication is closer to a reading exercise rather than a writing exercise.
• yubblegum 1y ago
  "I used to know how to write code in ${language} but not anymore, though I can still read it. There is even a term for it: LLM baka (LLM馬鹿), meaning LLM idiot"..
• makeitdouble 1y ago
  This is a fascinating subject, that would merit some input from other languages IMHO. > Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet. In alphabetic languages with separate pronounciation (French, English etc.) people forget spelling instead. And of course we recognize spellings we know, even if we couldn't recall it cold from memory. Another point: the article defines kanji as images, but each character can be parsed as a composition of base blocks (radicals), and people primarily remember those. Put in computer terms, kanji are not bitmaps but overlayed vectorial blocks. That I think makes a world of difference for how we handle them, foreigner and native alike.
  • Razengan 1y ago
    Learning about radicals was a massive Level Up in my Japaneseability. THey're like protocols/interfaces on OOP classes ^^ or more accurately, like "tele" and "phone" in "telephone", "icon" in "iconography" and obviously many more words in English made up of bits and pieces of other words. Once you recognize the parts, you'll be able to able to guess/infer what the word means even if it's your first time seeing it. Same with radicals in Kanji.
• pazimzadeh 1y ago
  Interesting topic but a lot of the articles on this blog reads like undeclared LLM slop: > This is also why I believe that language is a bottleneck for thought. Most of what you remember is nothing like an approximate copy of the things you experienced in real life—even in the specific case of text, memory is not even remotely like a paraphrase of previously read words. Many of our thoughts happen in a highly abstracted and distilled form, interacting and connecting with each other as a network that simply cannot be faithfully converted into a sequence of words, however long. The fact that people can fail even at something as basic as sketching a kanji or a vehicle they've seen hundreds of times before is just another example of the same phenomenon. A pet peeve of mine is when someone uses their personal datapoints to generalize for humanity. Every sentence here should say “for me”. What they said doesn’t even support the idea that language is a bottle-neck for thought, it actually argues against it. If language can’t capture the complexities of thought, then that’s the opposite point as language is a bottle-neck for thought. I read the linked article https://aethermug.com/posts/the-beautiful-dissociation-of-the-japanese-language https://aethermug.com/posts/the-beautiful-dissociation-of-th... and it clearly is comprised of a lot of LLM slop. “In techie terms, the Chinese script doesn't support the structure of languages like English and Japanese. It doesn't have what it takes.” That’s not techie that LLM slop “Sometimes, instead of using them for their meaning, they used them for (gasp!) their pronunciation. By ignoring the original content of a kanji, they could string them together to form almost any sound.” I’m becoming allergic (gasp!) to this kind of writing
• bitbasher 1y ago
  I can relate a lot to this post. I learned Japanese around the same time (2010~). I even lived in Japan and studied at a Japanese university. To this day I have a hard time recalling Japanese on the spot. However, when I hear Japanese or see it written, I can read and understand well. Even kanji I haven't seen in a decade. It's kinda strange. I'm pretty sure if I re-studied Japanese I would learn very quickly as I re-activate that part of my brain... something that has been on my todo list for a long time!
• snozolli 1y ago
  I had a friend in college whose mother was an immigrant and whose father had grown up bilingual and spent years in the mother's county. My friend was able to hear and understand the mother's tongue with apparent fluency, but had an extremely difficult time forming real sentences in the language, even though he'd heard and understood it for his entire life. I think there's a significant difference between consuming language and producing it, whether that's written or spoken. It might explain the number of people I see these days who don't understand basic English grammar and make words plural by slapping on an apostrophe and an s.
• hi41 1y ago
  >> This is also why I believe that language is a bottleneck for thought I am not sure I agree with this. We think our thoughts using language. I don’t language is the bottleneck.
  • 93po 1y ago
    i think you're missing the point. imagine this: you're walking down a beautiful waterside bridge in kyoto during cherry blossom season. there's really delicious smelling grilled eel from the store next to you. there's a swedish lady walking by you with a cute accent. your skin feels slightly sticky from humidity. what i just wrote doesn't even begin to encapsulate the entirety of that moment. there were a million other details your brain can form about that moment: the style of brick on the bridge, the other people around you, the sun being in your eyes, that you're smelly bc you forgot deodorant that morning. to put it shorter: a picture is worth a thousand words. and the author is saying that by having to use language to describe pictures, we have a huge bottleneck
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• tines 1y ago
  Not sure if someone else has already commented on this, but this is the fate of people who primarily use LLMs to code. They’ll be like second-generation children of immigrants, who can vaguely understand the meaning of their parents’ native tongue, but lack the ability to produce utterances on their own. The ultimate goal of AI companies imo is to disincentivize people from pursuing programming as a career by loss-leading with low LLM prices until nobody actually knows how to code without an LLM, and then jack up the prices.
• Abimelex 1y ago
  when I learned Japanese in university I learned writing with the exact method by James W. Heisig. So I didn't used Japanese for about 20 Years since, I forgot almost everything I learned, except the Kanji. I can still remember most of them. It's crazy!
• joshdavham 1y ago
  This article actually hits on a pet peeve of mine where I feel people sorta “mystify” kanji/hanzi unnecessarily. The truth is that there’s actually nothing particularly weird about being able to read some kanji but not be able to write them… You actually get close to my point here: > Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet. Yes! But have you ever heard of someone forgetting how to spell certain words in a language that uses the Latin alphabet (e.g., English)? I can use myself as an example here: while writing this comment, I forgot how to spell “peeve” in “pet peeve” (I thought it had an ‘a’ in it) and I also forgot how to spell “unnecessarily” (I thought it had one n and two c’s). The western equivalent of being able to read some kanji but not write them is simply called bad speling. No need to mystify kanji in particular.
  • jaylaal 1y ago
    Nice comparison. When I was living in China, I'd encounter someone who forgot how to write the characters for a word on a weekly basis. I think the difference is that with Latin alphabets you can still misspell something, and having gotten it down on paper, still rely on phonetics to convey your meaning.
    • taeric 1y ago
      This is an area where the modern insistence that English isn't phonetic baffles me.
      • superjan 1y ago
        It’s probably more phonetic than Chinese but significantly less phonetic than Dutch.
        • taeric 1y ago
          The term that would cover what you mean here is regular. And that is only in regards to correct spelling. Is obviously complicated when considering that we don't have official pronunciation across all dialects for the same word. Even if we do agree on a spelling. But it is a complete non-sequitur to lead to the modern idea that English isn't phonetic.
• littlekey 1y ago
  I went through Heisig's book THREE times, writing out each character and reviewing them multiple times each in Anki. I had several notebooks like the one in the OP article. I still can't write most kanji. The fact is that you simply cannot learn to write without practicing writing (in real contexts, outside of the notebooks); there is overlap, but it's the same thing as learning the "theory" of a math problem and then blanking once you're asked to solve a problem on a test. If I try to visualize a word/character that I know, I often end up with a vague picture of the most salient lines, but missing some of the finer detail that would be required to write it out accurately. And I think this is largely fine, as handwriting characters isn't a very important skill anymore. Especially in Japanese where you can always fall back on kana and be understood. I do still think "learning" the kanji is helpful because there is a system behind it, and understanding that system helps to learn words. To give an example, learning the 教/kyou in 教育/kyouiku (education) helps you make a connection to 教室/kyoushitsu (classroom), and helps you distinguish it from 勉強/benkyou (study) where you'd really think the kyou would be 教, but it isn't! But crucially, this is all a visual recognition problem, nothing to do with producing the characters yourself. So I think the ideal learning approach is word-first but with some attention to the characters in the word, especially how they relate to other words with those characters/radicals or with the same readings.
• anigbrowl 1y ago
  This thread is reminding me that I desperately want a way to way to have different font sizes for different languages. I like my English text small, but kanji/Chinese characters are obviously more visually dense. So I default to 10/12 point for latin alphabet but I need somewhere between 20-25 point to read Japanese comfortably. Where the two are mixed, like in this thread or on social media (where maybe half my feed is Japanese) it's a massive pain in the ass.
  • inatreecrown2 1y ago
    agree this would make a nice accessibility setting in browsers. or maybe there exists a browser extension?
• kameleonic 1y ago
  You'd be surprised how many Japanese people themselves forget. Predictive text changed everything.
• BrtByte 1y ago
  I've noticed the same thing (not with Japanese), but even after learning to write in Korean, my ability to handwrite faded way faster than my reading skills. I figured it was just laziness, but it makes sense that reading and writing use totally different parts of the brain.
  • coffeeling 1y ago
    How do you lose the ability to handwrite in Korean? That sounds weird to me.