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Wired Youths In China & Japan Forget Character Forms
eldavojohn writes "The AFP brings a story of a growing concern that children in China and Japan suffer from 'character amnesia' when asked to write the complex characters they are so used to inputting via alphabet-based systems. The article claims this is a growing problem. In China, they have a word for it: 'tibiwangzi,' which means 'take pen, forget paper.' China Youth Daily polled 2,072 people and found that 83% have problems writing characters (although there's no indication if that was an online poll or not). A young woman who was interviewed explained her workaround: 'When I can't remember, I will take out my cellphone and find it (the character) and then copy it down.'"
where is that Æ again?
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I have a similar problem with writing anything with pen and paper. My handwriting was never very pretty, but now not only is it ugly, I also feel very awkward and uncomfortable whenever I have to actually write anything.
The only way to learn how to write Chinese is to write it out for years on end, from kindergarten until university. It ain't much fun.
Since I am a bit older than this and like to write at least basic chinese in this lifetime I am just letting the computer pick the characters for me when I type.
My brain then tells me which of the offered characters feels "right" ; but it does that by looking at the overall shape, not the individual strokes.
Actually, tibiwangzi, means "forget the word when you pick up the pen" (literally: pick up pen, forget word)
'...(although there's no indication if that was an online poll or not)...'
I should hope so, or else the subjects might have had trouble writing down their responses on paper.
These are some complex languages to write/read in..
I've learned several languages in my lifetime. But i kinda gave up on most of the asian character based languages..
They're just far more complex and don't equate well to english... Which is the language i was born to.
The same thing is true in America. Kids even young adults can not write in cursive. They just had a study and the best teachers can get out of them is a mixture of printed and cursive lettering. And that study did not take into account the dropout rates.
So why are we complaining about deporting all the illegal aliens when so many kids don't graduate from high school.. They may not want to work in a hotel or swing a hammer but that is all they are fit to do. Most of them are not even fit to do that.
And no amount of money you throw at them will make a difference.
If you ask my mother to spell a word, she often can't. If you ask her to write it, she'll spell it correctly. If you ask me to write a word, I may not be able to spell it, but I can type it with the correct spelling[1]. This isn't a problem for me, because I type more words in a typical day than I write with a pen in a typical year. It wasn't a problem for her, because being able to spell words aloud is not actually a useful skill (except in the USA).
This study is showing the exact same thing. That people forget skills that they don't use is not news. The only question is whether this is a particularly useful skill for them to be retaining. To answer that, I'd point out that Korea went from the nation in south-east Asia with the lowest literacy rate to the nation with the highest within a few decades of abandoning the Chinese ideographic writing system in favour of a phonographic one.
[1] Owing to an immutable law of nature, this post is now guaranteed to contain at least one embarrassing typo.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Maybe it's time to make some change in these cultures.
Either forget the alphabet based systems or the one based upon "complex" glyphs.
This already happened several times in the world history, both on the east and the west.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Face it... their system is too complex. It's natural that young minds would turn away from it when exposed to a better system.
Is it a travesty that I use Arabic numerals instead of Roman ones?
These ideogram writing systems will die out and be replaced by alphabetic systems.
Perhaps then this is an indication you need to simplify your written language?
Seriously, languages are living, changing, things. We shouldn't stick with something in a language just because "That's how it's always been." There are things in languages that are silly, and changing them can be a good thing. Now I realize something as complected as the character set used isn't a thing you can change overnight, but it is something to work towards. Work on simplification.
A simple example of a language that did that is German. They had a 27th character called the es-zett which looks like a beta. It was used for a dual s. It has been deprecated, and now you just use two s characters instead.
There is really something to be said of a Latin-like character set where you don't have a whole lot of characters, and they are fairly distinct (though there are a few Latin characters that could use improvement in that regard).
More or less if we are finding things that kids are having trouble with in terms of penmanship, the answer isn't to try and force a lot more penmanship training on them, since it really isn't that useful in life these days. The answer is to look at trying to modify characters to make them easier to write. After all, that really should be the point. Our language is just a means for us to communicate ideas. Shouldn't it be made as simple and as clear as practical?
"A young woman who was interviewed explained her workaround: 'When I can't remember, I will take out my cellphone and find it (the character) and then copy it down.'""
i do the same thing whenever i cant remember a kanji. often times i know the correct kanji usage but i forget how to draw it. to me reading is fundamental. 95% of my writing is done via computer so i worry very little about character drawings.
I have been living in China for some years now and I hardly ever handwrite characters. I can recognize them and read (some) but it's a real relief to use input methods instead of handwriting. Despite what you may have heard, Asian input methods are quite good these days and the age of 5 words per minute for an experienced typist are long past. One one hand, it's a relief as writing is by far the most tedious and non-fun part of learning Chinese. I'm glad to skip it and concentrate on other fields. Typically adult learners of Chinese sit and fill pages upon pages of notebooks with characters written again and again. Listening, speaking, reading, and writing would be my ranking of the four skills. It's I know several people who can speak quite well but can't read, as well as some people who have quite nice penmanship but can barely speak. It's actually a pity as calligraphy is part of traditional Confucian culture. Every man of wealth and taste is supposed to sit in his garden and write with a paintbrush in his spare time, along with playing Go, writing poetry, and the other Four Olds that the government stamped out back in the days of culture-annihilating socialism.
For what it's worth, my English handwriting isn't that good either. How often do I even write English these days? Not much!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If texting is any indication, most American youth suffer from a similar issue.
brb, lol.
My sister in law, who is japanese born and bred, still has trouble reading some newspapers due to the complexity of the characters. She even needs to use multiple dictionaries (3?) to properly understand what she's reading.
Add that to the fact that, as the article points out, everything now it typed (let alone the Chinese using simplified characters), it's no surprise that they're forgetting it. But, hey, look on the bright side: just like Latin, it'll evolve into easier, more coherent languages.
Writing is technology, and like any technology, it underwent many incremental improvements and adaptations to different media.
The Latin character set evolved initially for stone carving. Germanic rules evolved to be chiselled in wood. Sanskrit's Devanagari script evolved to be written in soft clay. The script used in Malayalam is an unrecognisable derivative of devanagari, evolved to suit a population etching their texts onto banana leaves.
So yes, writing is a technology, and technology is not culture. The Amish community say they reject technology as it degrades their culture, but that is not true. They have simply "frozen" the evolution of technology at one point. The cart-building and barn-raising techniques they use are (in historical terms) fairly sophisticated and efficient examples of engineering. They could improve on that engineering by incorporating newer technologies.
Giving an Amish family a solar-powered flourescent lamp would not be imposing our culture on them, it would be providing them with a tool to improve their lives. Similarly, in providing Chinese kids with a more efficient tool to write (a phonemically regular alphabet), we are not imposing a culture, just providing a technology.
In fact, by claiming that the alphabet is a cultural imposition, you are encouraging the suppression of technology in the east, which will stunt their potential for intellectual and economic growth.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
School leavers handwriting skills are getting worse year on year based on what I have seen - in the past month I have met with 4 17 year olds who have handwriting that I would expect from a 10 year old, yet they can type quite well.
Modern Chinese has a HUGE Vocabulary, which is based on phonetically similar/equal "words" (= 1 Chinese Character), which is used in different contexts. Chinese Characters eliminate the ambiguity of the spoken language (better: ask Japanese!) and are a breeze/pleasure to read for native speakers (even at a young age). There are countries like Vietnam and Korea that did away with Chinese Characters, and of course the language is still alive, but I think its save to say that Chinese Characters have not turned out to be the obstacle to widespread literacy as which they were perceived of by the modernists in the late 19th and early 20th century.
If anything, the arrival of the digital age means, that more persons can write chinese easier and faster, by outsourcing the "recall" part of the memory process to the recognition part (pinyin input gives you possible characters combinations, you read them and select the one that represents what you wanted to say). THAT is the evolutionary step the language has taken, and which the article is talking about, and I wouldn't consider it especially worrisome.
By the way, the German sz is fine and alive, the reform only reduced its frequency of usage, but didn't eliminate it completely.
they have a word for it: 'tibiwangzi,' which means 'take pen, forget paper.'
I always wonder how they can express n words with n (or < n) syllables!
This phenomenon is well known in Japan, with the problem extending to both children and adults. Sadly, in my writing class last semester (at a particularly prestigious Japanese university in Tokyo), the teacher had problems writing even the most basic Kanji; she would have us look up the word in our electronic dictionaries and then copy from the screen onto the blackboard. I didn't learn much in that class...
Whenever I explain this problem to someone who hasn't heard of it before I liken it to misspelling a word in English; you can probably still read it, but something just isn't 'right'. I've noticed that this problem is already affecting me and many of my friends, we all tend to have trouble recalling how to write kanji that we can read easily. Whenever we 'write' kanji it's by typing it into our phones or word processors, so we learn the reading and what it generally looks like, but never the specific strokes.
Elders always complain about youth not knowing history or spelling or this and that. That's how it's always been and that's how it's always gonna be. People just need to realize that even if youth are forgetting to write characters they are gaining other skills i.e. The ability to quickly navigate between the entries of a pop-up menu, or the ability to input text fast via a mobile-phone keypad. You lose something you gain something. Society is changing/evolving and the fact that youth are changing too is not a bad thing.
I know this is a painful subject for some Chinese: Isn't it time that Chinese became an alphabetic language?
I've had Chinese friends and acquaintances who have complained about the complexity of the writing. I've also had Chinese friends and acquaintances who reacted negatively when using an alphabet was suggested; they believe that the Chinese character system is associated with their national identity.
Does Pinyin work? What are the problems with using Pinyin? Quote from the Wikipedia article: "In 1954, the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China (PRC) created a Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Written Language."
This hardly a new phenomenon. In Japan it was noted ever since Japanese-language word processors began to be widely used, so much so that a term: 'waapuro-baka' was coined for them. Literally meaning 'word processor-stupid', it refers to someone whose kanji-writing ability has suffered due to over-reliance on the kanji conversion systems used to input Japanese text in a word processor or computer. I can imagine that waapuro-baka can only have gotten more prevalent in recent days, and perhaps might be a driver for orthographic reform in the countries that use the Han characters. The Koreans have all but abandoned the use of the Han characters (Hanja) in favor of their phonetic Hangul script and their use is now very much limited (and in North Korea has been completely forbidden). The Japanese have more inertia, from the looks of things, as it seems they have even recently increased the number of general-use kanji taught in their schools, rather than reducing their use in favor of the kana syllabaries instead. The Chinese don't have any native alternatives, and so what direction their orthographic reform will take is unclear.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
good for them. it's a good system, easy to learn, and it serves the purpose they need it for (communicating). what took them so long? reminds me of that Seinfeld joke, "the chinese farmer wakes up, eats his breakfast rice with some chopsticks, and then goes out to work on the field with a pitchfork". now if only english started making sense phonetically, life would be so much easier.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
I know this will be modded as flamebait, but I'm being serious: This is why having an actual alphabet of limited characters is superior to a writing system that basically revolves around ideograms. China and Japan are holding themselves back with this primitive writing style.
"We lost all written history overnight." Hasn't the written history been translated? It seems that providing translations is not a big problem.
"... more harm done than benefits."
My understanding is that Turkey is doing very well, and is a strong and positive leader in the region. From the Wikipedia article about Turkey: "Turkey is a founding member of the United Nations (1945), the OECD (1961), the OIC (1969), the OSCE (1973), the ECO (1985), the BSEC (1992) and the G-20 major economies (1999)."
Another quote: "The GDP growth rate from 2002 to 2007 averaged 7.4%, which made Turkey one of the fastest growing economies in the world during that period."
Could you explain more about the harm? Overall, Turkey seems to be doing very, very well.
Serbian.
actually micheloß pronounced michelossenglish could do with a spelling revamp . 42 phonemes and 1400 different spellings .
Deleted
Now, how long do our kids need to be online to forget what an "a" looks like?
no, I don't have a sig
an Anglo-Saxon tale like Beowulf
A nitpick about literature heritage, the earliest copy of Beowulf is a translation written in Anglo-Saxon, not Anglo-saxon itself. So it is Anglo-saxon or English literature only the same way that Ibsen is.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I have a similar problem with writing anything with pen and paper. My handwriting was never very pretty, but now not only is it ugly, I also feel very awkward and uncomfortable whenever I have to actually write anything.
You beat me to it. In the country I come from (like many other countries) we had daily calligraphy sessions for the duration of elementary and part of middle school. My calligraphy was decent and was already a trained typist (when we used to train people to use mechanical type writers).
But things have been going down the hill for the last 13 years (started avidly using/working with computers since 1992). My calligraphy has gone down hill, and what is more stressing, when I write by hand I'm starting to write letters out of order. Say I want to hand write "literacy", I end up writing "ilterayc" or something like that. My hand-written notes are full of black outs and corrections because of this. This has never happened before, at least as far as I can remember from my pre-computer times (I was already an adult writing by hands for years before my "dark" path into the computer world.)
I doesn't stress me out, but it does makes me wonder. And this news from China and Japan makes me even the more curious about this and the effect of computers in daily hand writing. Be it kanji or latin, heavy computer usage certainly seems to have a negative effect in basic writing skills.
Auggh! Exodia! Nobody's been able to write him!
Why, is that because it's so rare?
No, it's because nobody can figure out how to do it.
They have pinyin. As well as being a romanisation of Madarin Chinese, it's also used to teach children pronunciation of Chinese characters and as a computer input method.
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
This is actually a much larger and different issue than what is presented by many posters. Language is only a minor symptom. As human beings augment themselves in the physical world, they will lose proficiency, capability, and skill.
Think about the percentages of people with eyeglasses. Think about the percentage of people that currently cannot walk 15 miles in a day and do it for several days. The wheel, the car, clothing, access to fire, all of these changed the skills and physical abilities (not necessarily potential, but actual avergae strength, stamina, manual dexterity, etc) of average humans significantly.
The modern world provides us with opportunities for augmentation that are going to significantly change the way we move, think, and communicate as a species.
O wai ds dat snd fmilr?
What is AFP? I keep thinking Australian Federal Police but that can't be right.
I can remember the first spell checkers coming in. I was writing my PhD in the early eighties. Writing a big chunk of text with consistent and if possible 'correct' spelling rooted out a number of very long-term spelling errors. I also became aware of differences such '-ize' versus '-ise', and 'different to or from or than'. It didn't make my spelling perfect. I have recently got a diesel car, and found I could happily read the word, but had probably spelled it wrong. In the old days, I would have looked at 'deisel' or 'diesil', maybe crossed out, maybe left it in.
I type almosty everything. has my handwriting gone to pot? Well, it is pretty illegible, but if I actually get out a fountain pen with the right sort of nib, and get it running nicely, then I can write as I used to. You don't forget stuff like that. But I won't go back to a fountain pen. If I pick up a pen, I want to draw or doodle or write maths, or something. I would write a shopping list, but not an essay.
I do not envy the Chinese. I learned Japanese for six years and the Kanji fell out of my head as fast as I tried to stuff them in. If I had to draw a picture of the monster that ate itself for the word 'greed', or worse try and look up a character in a stroke dictionary, then I would probably read and write much less. These people have now got a useful character checking tool on their mobiles, and I bet they are making less errors because of this. And people still complain.
Lets face it, there's a reason that most writing systems aren't ideographic any more. Perhaps it's just time for the Chinese language to adapt.
English speakers could find a similar use for this term, describing people who have forgotten (or never learned) how to spell due to relying on spell-checkers.
I found myself "forced" into online banking because writing checks became tedious. It was the only writing I had to do on a consistent basis and when I grouped my bill paying at the end of the week I would find my hand cramping or oddly, my thinking about the actual writing skewed my handwriting. I could feel the oddness of the pen in my hand. If I focused I could write very nice script, but it felt like work. I am not even a fan of signing my name when I pay by CC
I cannot imagine writing a reply to a message board using a pen input device. Perhaps that is one reason many don't miss the pen or writing recognition programs that some claimed missing from the iPad.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
actually "tibiwangzi" means you forget how to write the word as soon as you lift up the pen. zi(4) is word, zhi(3) is paper.
English has come to Japan and China recently compared to how long their culture has practiced their kanji!
Give it a few more years, they will adopt english not only because of economic reasons, but also ease of use compraed to remembering 1000s of characters for 1 language. I know many will not like hearing that the english language is #1 business language, but it's like gold, everyone knows its value on the global markets. When we start to push a little more reform in countries like china and india to
promote them using our language, that will be 2 billion people using the language, and that is just in their countries...
Outsourcing and overseas production is a big game, and their buyers are usually english, so go where the money goes.
My ancestors are from Norway - the Vikings used to write in Runes, a language of symbols not all together different than Kanji in that each character had a unique shape.
Guess what? No one, aside from a few historic scholars, reads or writes Runes anymore. Is it the end of the world? Nope. Has Norway fallen into the sea? No. Has Norway undergone a total disruption of their cultural identity? No.
Runes fell into disuse, because the alphabet is superior. It's just that simple. Kanji script and other writing forms will likely follow suit, as a re-useable alphabet is not only easier to learn and teach, a person who has never heard a word can use phonics to sound out the word. In the end, the superior format usually wins.
Chinese and Japanese symbols are a brutal inefficiency. The cost of learning them is so many times higher than the possible benefits, that it put the users of these languages at a disadvantage. In time, ruthlessly competition with users of other languages will mean the end of such inefficiencies. Natives of these languages naturally tend to cut corners when they can. Soon a mobile phone camera will be able to automatically subtext the symbols with their pronunciation, in real time. Then you won't really have any longer any reason to learn them. In a couple of generations more, knowing the symbols will be seen as terribly uncool by the youngster, in a couple more, they will be dead, nostalgia notwithstanding. Well, make it ten generations in Japan, perhaps :o), but I don't think it'll be more.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
There is another way.
Although I used the Japanese version rather than the Chinese, both are available. And there is an online version here: http://kanji.koohii.com./
The Heisig Method breaks characters down into smaller components which creates, in effect, an alphabet.
When studying Japanese, my instructors actively dissuaded me from using this method, so I never gave it a second look. But after ten years of brute force and only marginal success, I created my own method. I researched it and discovered that Heisig had invented it decades before, and it was now a fully mature system with books in their fourth addition. I use Heisig's method exclusively now.
As a benchmark, I completed all 2042 characters in 6 weeks time despite having a full-time job. That's approximately 50-100 characters a day, 6 days a week. I spent at least two hours a day during the work week, and eight hours on Saturdays.
The result is that I had 100% retention after one month and approximately 80% retention after one year with no substantial review.
I do not use Japanese that often, but I recently decided to refresh my memory. At present, I have approximately 50% retention after three years of only superficial usage. More importantly, I am finding that the characters are easily regained because the associations need only be refreshed.
The highest number of characters that I had been able to retain with the brute force method was about 500, and that was with constant, active studying. At present, I can go through the Jouyou kanji and identify and write over a thousand characters without breaking a sweat. With a week of solid preparation, I'm confident that I could regain 100% accuracy.
-Hope
Just instead of using their system, move to the phonographic one (sp?).
It's spelled "phonemic". But phonemic writing systems such as those of Korean and Spanish tend to obscure homophones.
Does that mean your illiterate?
The Chinese "dialects" are different languages, as different from each other as Italian, French, and Portuguese. The only reason they aren't considered such is because of the strong desire of the central government to unify the country under a single cultural banner.
It's like if you forced all speakers of Romance languages to read and write in Latin. Sure, they'd be able to do it eventually, but it's much easier to give them a phonetic writing system (i.e. what they actually have) and they can all learn a common language (French, English) to communicate with each other. Similarly, in China, you could institute a phonetic alphabet or tonal syllabary for each language, but also make sure everyone also learns Han (which from what I understand, they do anyway).
when I write by hand I'm starting to write letters out of order. Say I want to hand write "literacy", I end up writing "ilterayc" or something like that. [...] I doesn't stress me out, but it does makes me wonder.
You're not alone, I'm doing the same thing myself. Albeit not on every line down the page, but certainly a few times on each page. It's very peculiar. Perhaps it's because writing is a slower process by hand than by keyboard, and we've become so accustomed to the new speed that, when handwriting, we "outthink" our hand and get a sort of "frame drop" or hiccup in the buffer? I'm sure it's something along those neurological lines...
And this news from China and Japan makes me even the more curious about this and the effect of computers in daily hand writing. Be it kanji or latin, heavy computer usage certainly seems to have a negative effect in basic writing skills.
I had a different thought: every now and then, there's debate whether or not "lol", "l33t", and so on should become part of the formal vocabulary since they are already part of the informal vocabulary -- taking this a step further, maybe it's time the Chinese should reconsider their use of that obviously very complicated glyph system, and maybe switch to something simpler (say, romulan)? I've got nothing personal against the chinese, but TFA was about their type of writing specifically. We've been optimising the hell out of everything else, so why not writing systems as well?
"Good news, everyone!"
English pronunciation also varies widely. So much so that somebody with a strong New England accent would be unlikely to be able to understand someone with a deep Southern accent without great difficulty. In the company where I work, I heard this all the time from Yankees that had to take classes from our training center in Atlanta. And there are many deep accents all over the world: Scottish, Cockney, "BBC English", and the accent belonging to each individual former English colony.
While the advent of modern media has decreased these differences markedly, but they have always been strong enough that English has never been phonetically spelled. Yes, there are some minor regional spelling differences, but they are not so great as to markedly affect understanding.
That's not "paper", that's "character".
I hate grammar Nazi's.
I agree. I absolutely don't know how to lay down most cursive letters that aren't in my signature. The only application for cursive handwriting in my lifetime has been its required use in elementary school and for my legal signature. And, I guess reading the occasional Xmas card from my grandmother. Otherwise I use a pen so infrequently, even my standard print is almost illegible. If I have to write more than one line it looks like a 6 year old did it. I wish that my teachers had just focused on programming me with one good font instead one that's terrible and one that's missing letters.
And don't get me started on the incredible difficulties my brother faced due to this gibberish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D'Nealian
The article mentions that the Chinese youth rely heavily on pinyin (to those who don't know what it is, it is Roman script with tone markers).
I read once that it takes six months at least to learn how to search a word in a traditional dictionary (in: Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. The Chinese youth, having the technology at their fingertips, prefer the new, quicker way (pinyin look up).Thus, it's not only the lonely learner form the West who think pinyin is good - their own youth depend on it!
It would be greatly beneficial for trade and cultural exchange if, in this century, the Chinese authorities make pinyin "official", that is, accept it in print. Of course, there's the problem that there are many "spoken Chinese", the tones differing in places and even numbers (5 for mainland, 9 for Hong Kong?, for instance, is that it?). But countries in Europe went through the same unification. In Germany and Italy, what we now take as "official" was but one of the dialects. Having a single language for the country does not mean dialects will go away, though. For instance, the Wikipedia lists Nnapulitano, Occitan, Piemontèis and Plattdüütsch as tier-2 languages.
This is just about the only way Chinese will become a language the world will want to learn. Traditional Chinese script, though beautiful, is too hard and counterproductive for commerce and scientific exchange (*)
All it takes is a government decree... ;-)
(*) (But I'll 'fess up that I'm an Esperanto fan - I have free weekly lesson with an 84 year-old dame - so learning Chinese, Russian, Japanese, German, Arabic all look like madness for global communication to me. I think that the endless iteration in translating Wikipedia articles is a wasted effort - and proper English is too damn hard, irregular, unpronounceble for most world citizens, and a moving target (*)). Plus, there's the problem that, with natural languages - as opposed to auxiliary languages - the person born into it is always an expert, and the second-language speaker is always in an inferior position. And not to speak of the politics of languages, often associated with "colonialism" or cultural domination (i.e., English and the way business deals kills local film and music).
My dad taught me to write before I started at school. And I was left handed and did great. But at school the nuns wouldn't have none of that sinister writing and forced me to relearn with my right hand. Which led to what I guess would be called learning disability these days.
Fortunately, a guy in my bike club figured this out (he was a writer) and got me to try typing. I got a big 3/4 ton Adler and went to town. It solved a lot of left / right hemisphere problems.
So I've been a touch typist before I got my first computer (Apple IIe). And stuck with the Adler through University.
My hand writing is not as good as it used to be. But I also fill notebook after notebook. Reams of data. I take notes at meetings, phone conversations, etc. A lot of times, I have to copy out by hand the text I am trying to learn. When I'm cracked on a coding problem, I often write out my code by hand or it's to the window with the dry erase pens.
Over the years, I've gone from being left brain / right brain to pure amygdala. It seems that switching it up gets the whole brain working again. To me, it's like how artists switch medium to get their creativity driving again.
But the amnesia part of the story hit home. I hate the forgetting part. For example, I do some coding in python. I'd say I am a medium to experienced coder in the language. Well, I probably wouldn't but that's what the brainbench test said. I usually feel like I suck.
But anyways, hadn't used python for a week. Went back to a project and could not remember Idle. Just stared blankly at the screen saying ACK!! like Bill the cat.
Thankfully Google brought it back. Made me wonder what outsourcing our memory to Google will do to the species. Will it dumb us down and smarten us up like text did?
Your Wiki link led me to Hesig's Remembering_the_Hanzi
My daughter, and by extension I as well, is learning Mandarin now. I will look into his work.
Thanks again!
We will all be 010000100110100101101110011000010111001001110011 soon
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Try listening to their dictation!
My mom did dictation for a neurosurgery department for more than a decade.
Listening to these people's stream-of-consciousness ramblings was...terrifying.
Remember, these are people who root around in your head for a living.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
...'When I can't remember, I will take out my cellphone and find it (the character) and then copy it down.'
So, it's the Chinese equivalent of running a spellchecker.
It does highlight the pitfalls of a written language that relies on symbols as opposed to a phonetic alphabet.
Proverbs 21:19
If Japanese made a radical change to their language like the Koreans did*, they'll lose an important distinguishing cue that kanji provides in differentiating homophones and in word selection-- remember, the big three East Asian languages don't use spaces. Unless I'm mistaken, Hangul has the advantage that you can easily differentiate words, but Japanese doesn't do that because it's understood that the writer would also use kanji. If they went full-on kana, they would need to incorporate spaces in addition to the usual punctuation.
True, some Heian-era poetry and some epic writings like The Tale of Genji were written exclusively with hiragana, so one can make the argument that Japan can dump kanji and just go all kana. But the former was deliberately done to take advantage of puns and similar literary devices (these were essentially the equivalent of Shakespearean love sonnets), and the latter was written by someone with no knowledge of kanji (as women were not expected to study kanji-- i.e., to educate themselves-- until the early 20th century)-- one can just as easily make the argument that just because Japan can dump kanji doesn't mean that they should dump kanji-- The Tale of Genji, in its original form, is incredibly difficult to read, even for Japanese scholars.
* The Japanese "don't mess with the status quo" mentality, in addition to the impression that dumping kanji would mean admitting defeat, makes such a change impossible.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_(memory)
I've been studying Chinese off and on for 16 years; living in the region for 10 years. I speak fluently, I read at an advanced level and I input characters at a good pace on the computer. But, I write like I'm still in primary school.
Our brains are literally offloading the recall function to external computational devices. But, as we play video games, watch TV and read, our recognition systems are tuned and trained to a fine degree.
Look forward to what cognitive studies come out of this. I doubt we'll see a total loss, but if we lose the assistance, it'll be interesting to see how humans cope as the skill gap between recall and recognition gets wider.
In fact, "it's easy to input them with a word processor nowadays" was one of the arguments in favor of increasing the number of general-use kanji in Japan, to me implying that it's not seen as very important to be able to write them all by hand anymore.
If they went full-on kana, they would need to incorporate spaces in addition to the usual punctuation.
I don't get it. If you could actually get the Japanese to abandon kanji in favor of kana, why would throwing in some extra spaces present much of a problem? And the homophone problem is greatly overstated. Some writing styles would certainly need to change a bit, but you can hardly be arguing that Japanese people can't hold a normal conversation without resorting to kanji.
Actually, its because "Chinese" is actually multiple different languages. The speakers themselves tend to view them as different dialects of the same language, but linguistically, thats not quite true.
"Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue."
- Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Language).
The cleverness of the Character based writing system employed for these various different but similar languages, is that a newspaper (for instance) written anywhere in the country can be read by anyone else anywhere else in the country apparently). The difficulty is in acquiring the knowledge of the characters in the first place.
I dunno why anyone is surprised though, without wanting to sound like some old codger, I have yet to see a person under 25 who can spell worth crap. I work with some who have essentially no ability to spell out street names for instance. Their spelling is as bad as the foreign guys I work with, who at least have the excuse of not actually speaking English for very long.
I agree it will likely die out in the long run, American English will dominate every other language eventually, because American culture is being pushed aggressively/shoved down everyone's throats aggressively.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
In China, they have a word for it: 'tibiwangzi,' which means 'take pen, forget paper.'
I don't know who did this translation, but it actually means 'take pen, forget characters.' If you want to verify it, Google the characters for tibiwangzi, mingzi de zi, and you will find a ton of hits for that phrase. Search tibiwangzhi (where zhi means paper) and you won't find any hits. I would put the characters in here but /. doesn't allow them.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
As a student of Japanese, I quickly realized that handwriting was a next-to-worthless skill and redirected my efforts towards improving my reading skills. Now I'm able to read about 90% of Japanese text, and I don't miss my writing skills at all.
Most never really learn cursive writing because they dont write letters or school papers any more. And their printing looks like a six-year-old's scrawl all life long.
Even I find printing or mechanical typing more than a few sentences annoying because I cannot quickly revise my thoughts.
Question: in general, is there a significant difference in the cognitive effort required to memorize a new ideogram versus memorize a new latin root? (Assuming that you can't derive the meaning from radicals / sub-ideograms within the ideograms or similar words.) The only serious problem I see in using technological interfaces and consequently forgetting how to write characters is when people have to take a test (be it college entrance examinations or job tests, etc.) and are forced to complete a writing section by hand. A big problem I see in suggesting that the Chinese and Japanese romanize or hangul-ize their alphabets is what other people have suggested: there's a shitton of human culture and history that will be lost. It would be awful. Also, as others have pointed out, once you're fluent in Japanese or Chinese, it's possible to absorb a lot of information very quickly when you look at ideograms. Some linguist or psychologist should do some tests to verify or test that hypothesis.
There is one point about the Chinese language and the role of writing. There are many dialects of spoken Chinese but only one way of writing Chinese. The differences of spoken Chinese are much more profound than the differences between English as spoken in Britain, the American South, Midwestern American etc. With a bit of effort, people from the the different English speaking regions can USUALLY have a conversation. This is often not true in China. They can still communicate through writing because a character might sound different in the different dialects but the meaning is the same. An entirely phonetic system of writing is not possible.
I hate it when I have to write out a check and I have a capital Q or Z to write. In my haste I usually cheat and I scribble a curvy Q or Z then continue on. Maybe 10% of the time I stop and look at the internet. This would probably never happen if I had a landlord named Quinn or Zach.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
That's the same sort of counselor bullshit like yelling at people to give 110%. Throughout highschool I had to put up with a barrage of meaningless bullshit like this, and it did not positively influence my personality. I will never be motivated by trivial shit like this, and god help anyone that tries.
Fun note, I had to google how to spell barrage. "Birage" isn't close enough apparently. I think the same thing that's happening with Chinese is happening with english and grammar. Use it or lose it, and anything that helps is a crutch. Spell-checking and GPS included. My reaction, meh.
I learned about 1000 Chinese characters when I was actively studying Japanese, which was just as software input methods were first becoming available.
The amount of mental energy and practice necessary to keep it up was untenable, and I eventually switched to correct recognition as input systems became nearly ubiquitous.
I've lost about 2/3 of the characters in the intervening years, but I can still pick up a book and read with my old dictionary handy for the confusing parts.
With writing there are some even more confusing issues, because there are a number of similar-looking characters. You wouldn't confuse them reading (because of context) or in typing (because the input method is based on pronunciation) but they would be a big bugaboo for hand writing. So not having to deal with that type of confusion leaves your brain with more cognitive space to deal with other issues.
Here's a link showing a bunch of the similar characters: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Easily_confused_Chinese_characters
That list doesn't include the first one I encountered: claw and melon. Melon has a claw, but claw doesn't.
http://www.manythings.org/kanji/d/722a.htm
http://www.manythings.org/kanji/d/74dc.htm
Most japanese have this issue. I lived with a japanese family for a year, and two years in sapporo- this is the modern norm that every single person I talked to. Most japanese use their phones for everything, and the autocomplete feature along with 2200 or so characters to remember for daily use led to this problem. The sheer amount of memorization needed for pictographic languages like japanese and chinese naturally leads to this result- they were meant to be input by hand labourously, and you simply have to memorize each one. The character memory is embedded for only the ones you use on a regular basis. I see this as an inevitability in the modern input era.
The Japanese call people who forget how to write characters "waa puro baka" which is a short way to say "Word Processor Idiocy".
However, even if today's youth are forgetting how to write on paper; the Japanese government has decided to revise the list of kanji Japanese citizens must learn to be considered literate. Thanks to IME's (input method editors) Japanese are starting to use hard to write Kanji more and more thanks to modern input systems.
Indian languages derived from Sanskrit are built phonetically. Once one learns to read and write the language, there is no concept of mispronunciation while reading or misspellings while writing. A writer using an Indic script is converting the sound syllables into a phonetic description on paper. This is reversibly true, in that, a reader encountering a new word will be able to instantly and completely construct the sounds just by parsing.
Consider the following about English: each consonant has a different number of vowel sounds. The problem arises that there is no suitable method of representing these variations in the script.
A writer of Hindi (for example) has 30 consonants and 12 vowel sounds which can be applied to every consonant. Of course this is not unique to Indian languages. In conversations with native speakers of East-African languages, i've gathered that most of their languages are similar in these respects though with only 9 vowel sounds. But the universal theme is that in all (or perhaps almost all) cases of phonetic languages, one is able to derive a uniform matrix of sounds where each sound is well-represented by the script of the language.
So powerful are phonetic languages that Gmail's initial support for transliteration had support for five Indian languages--and no others. The service has since been expanded to support even more phonetic languages.
It is my opinion that many of the NLP problems which remain problematic for western languages will be first solved for phonetic languages due to the relatively low complexity and the richness of the scripts.
Cheers.
Disclaimer: I am not a linguist. Though i have worked on some language translation problems and have, over the years, gained accidental exposure to many languages, though to unequal extents.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
For Japanese, base kanji understanding is what,10,000 characters, fairly high comprehension is upwards of 40,000. (I thought I read somewhere there's over 70,000 in all?) That's just way too much. The written language is just too out of date to use.
Japanese has Kanji and then Kana. I assume Kanji is on par with written chinese for character count, with kana simplified basically as phonetic, and is what, 46 characters? Funny thing there though, newspapers etc written in kana are considered somewhat embarrassing to be seen reading, they assume you're dumb because you don't know your kanji. But that's where it needs to be going. The time of needing to know 40,000 different characters to read and write fluently in a language is OVER. (someone please correct me here where needed, my memory on these numbers is very fuzzy) I also recall reading somewhere that characters require usually between 4 and 7 keystrokes to draw a character, but those represent entire words, not letters, so typing speed I suppose is about on par, it just requires a good chunk of memory.
Does chinese even have a phonetic variation for written language?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
take pen, forget CHARACTER. not paper.
The first two are writing systems using syllabaries where vowels* are paired with consonants (but not all of them which leads to certain words in English not being renderable in Japanese.
Kanji uses the Chinese style of character formation and is an incredibly hefty system of writing. The major advantage is/was that a Kanji is the same and carries the same meaning throughout the entire continent regardless of how its actually pronounced in the myriad dialects.
Thus the Kanji for "house" is the same in Chinese, (regardless of whether its spoken in Mandarin, Manchurian or any of the hundred or so dialects,) Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean and so on across the breadth of the continent.
But that kind of cross-cultural understandability is a hefty price to pay. The average peasant was illiterate and the "learned" classes only had to really learn a few thousand Kanji to get ahead in life. A public service exam consisted of writing poetry because that proved that the applicant knew Kanji.
The Chinese didn't mind paying because in the infancy of the empire communications often took weeks to cross China. There was no need to rush. It didn't matter that it took years to build up a written vocabulary as large as one's spoken one.
Now with communications occurring in fractions of seconds instead of weeks, with the rise of the mass media and with the rise of the internet, Kanji is showing itself to be a hindrance to rapid written communication.
* the usual five: a, e, i, o, & U but in a different order: a, i, u, e & o.
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Mod parent up. Very interesting.
I had a different thought: every now and then, there's debate whether or not "lol", "l33t", and so on should become part of the formal vocabulary since they are already part of the informal vocabulary -- taking this a step further, maybe it's time the Chinese should reconsider their use of that obviously very complicated glyph system, and maybe switch to something simpler (say, romulan)? I've got nothing personal against the chinese, but TFA was about their type of writing specifically. We've been optimising the hell out of everything else, so why not writing systems as well?
Just because something is simpler, it doesn't mean it is optimized. Alphabets are optimized for almost one-to-one correspondence with phonemes; syllabaries and abugidas to syllables; and logograms to morphemes. With the later, the price of memorization is counterbalanced with the efficiency in coding semantic meaning.
Plus the advantage of switching to a different writing system is dubious compared to the cost of replacing the social artifacts and benefits derived from the existing writing system. One great problem with replacing standardized Chinese writing into something else (say, Latin) it will completely break the ability to communicate between different (not mutually intelligible) Chinese dialects. A Hakka speaker can read the writings of a Cantonese or Mandarin speaker and vice versa. In a nation like China, that would make the adoption of an alphabet or syllabary unpractical.
I think your usage of the word "ideogram" points to a fundamental misunderstanding. Your assertion that it's "possible to absorb a lot of information very quickly when you look at ideograms" points in the same direction (even if you're not the originator of it). Maybe the question is better phrased as "is there a significant difference in the cognitive effort required to memorize a new ideogram versus memorizing the spelling of some obscure english word?". Chinese characters are not words in themselves, and using the term "ideographic" to describe them is - it could be argued - wrong.
Basically, it's my understanding that the line between "ideographic" and alphabetic writing systems is thinner than you'd think. If you are interested in the subject I would recommend browsing around a bit at this site, in particular The Ideographic Myth might be of interest, an excerpt from a book by John DeFrancis. It's a much better source of information than my short rant above.
I have MS so I'm utterly without fine motor control.
That means my handwriting has deteriorated from what the nuns taught me until I have no use for the Mont Blanc pen I got as an award.
During that time (since 1975) my handwriting has NEVER been challenged on a cheque. They blithely ignored everything but the amount. Thank god I never wrote a post-dated cheque. (Yes, I'm Canadian though I now live in NJ. That's they way I've always spelt it :-)
I once had an identity theft perpetrated on mew and I was able to prove it WASN'T me because of the difference in the way I write dates compared to how an US citizen writes dates. That and the fact that the signature was identical (the forger was repeating his forgery exactly on ALL the cheques while I can't ever repeat anything even if I try.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
"... I think that the hanzi [Chinese characters] are a wonderful part of Chinese culture..."
If Pinyin is used, the Chinese characters would not disappear. They would just not be used for most writing.
Is the wonder worth the huge amount of effort for every Chinese student to become well-educated? Couldn't young Chinese do something more productive with their time? Are there other reasons to use Chinese characters besides the romantic notions of those who have already done the work to learn?
> Kanji uses the Chinese style of character formation and is an incredibly hefty system of writing. The major advantage is/was that a Kanji is the same and carries the same meaning throughout the entire continent regardless of how its actually pronounced in the myriad dialects. Thus the Kanji for "house" is the same in Chinese, (regardless of whether its spoken in Mandarin, Manchurian or any of the hundred or so dialects,) Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean and so on across the breadth of the continent.
This is not really true; each of the larger countries have had revisions of their official characters over time. Korea has its own completely different writing system. China re-standardized and simplified its characters in the last century. Japan has had its own slight drift over the thousand+ years since they adopted the Chinese writing system, and at the very least did NOT make the same changes that China has in recent years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Local_developments_and_divergences_from_Chinese has some examples. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language#Differences_between_North_Korean_and_South_Korean has some Korean examples of very recent divergence. And I don't know much about Vietnamese, but after that quick look at Korean I would not be surprised if Vietnamese has diverged a lot from Chinese. There were also other sections I skimmed over that mention differences in grammatical structure.
And then there's the issue of drift in the meaning of some characters, where the writing hasn't changed but the character is used in different nuanced ways in different places.
Dizi zle i have japan friends
You said, "Parent is a quaint breed of reactionary and has no clue what he is talking about."
Did you mean to say, "Grandparent..."? Because mine was the parent comment, and I was only asking for a description of any harm done.
I don't really know how sustainable Chinese characters are in Mainland China, especially after Comrade Mao simplified their etymologies out, believing the Western bullshit that they were too hard. In any case, they have been in use for a few thousand years if that means anything.
In Japanese at least, literacy is steadily increasing. Twenty years ago, with 8-bit computers, kanji were appearing to be on their way out. However, as soon as IME and modern OSes appeared people started using more kanji even if they never could have written them by hand. And that means more kanji regular people can read. Recently, the number of kanji considered to be needed for basic literacy was increased to account for that.
Handwriting is suffering(The only real usage cases in modern Japanese society are resumes[=], paperwork[vv], and kanji quizes/exams[^]), but kanji themselves are here to stay.
10 little-endian boys went out to dine, a big-endian carp ate one, and then there were -246.
why u need to write?
writing is a tool to record or so-called communicate
when we have some better tools.........why u still need an ancient old way to do something that is to be replaced?..........
r u human trying to undo the evolution?.......
Perhaps those who have little or no Chinese should be careful about reproducing putative translations of Chinese phrases - 'tibiwangzi' (unfortunately, this site does not permit the Chinese glyphs to be reproduced) says nothing at all about paper, but rather means '[after]lifting the pen, [realising that one has] forgotten the glyph (character)', which makes much more sense in this context. As to whether the Chinese (and the Japanese) should adopt a phonetic alphabet, this debate started about 150 years ago and was most intense during the first half of the last century ; as far as I know, the subject is no longer current....
Henri
To expand on the parent for anyone not familiar with the Japanese IME (Input Method Editor, the system used to type Japanese characters) it works by you entering a word phonetically and then the IME converts it to the correct complex character. Often there are a few options (like how in English you get words that sound the same - great and grate, whether and weather etc.) in which case if the first guess the IME makes isn't right you can select from a drop-down list.
It is a bit like texting on a mobile phone in English. What you enter is automatically converted and cleaned up.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Chinese character simplification was underway for a hundred years before Chairman Mao. But it's now used as a sort of anti-PRC complaint in spite of the fact that the government has made enormous progress in literacy in China since 1949. Also Mao advocated the elimination of the characters and the use of roman characters. The excellent pinyin system developed by the PRC is rational, phonetic (unlike English) and now universally known amongst Chinese. Traditionalists won out over Mao. And he could not have anticipated that computers would largely solve the problem and level the playing field with the West. Some scholars lament the loss of character ability (especially the traditional forms) because modern students often cannot even find titles of well-known historical texts in a library.
Literacy is unrelated to character complexity or Communism. Cubans before Castro were illiterate, so were most Japanese people before the Emperor rose to power in 1868. When people in power invest in education people learn to read, well duh.
It is certainly unrelated to Mao mangling the characters or else Taiwanese people wouldn't be able to read anything even now.
The Japanese mangled some characters as well, but the Chinese mangling is worse. Simplification is okay as long as it is done in a logical way, else you lose important information. Merging unrelated characters and radicals breaks the system.
I read a science fiction story — I think it was Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge — in which literacy (or perhaps just writing) became a rarer ability due to ubiquitous iconography, augmented reality, and voice-based computing. Nobody bothered to learn to read (or write) because there was no need. The topic of this article an example of a step in that direction.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]