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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.'"
Actually, tibiwangzi, means "forget the word when you pick up the pen" (literally: pick up pen, forget word)
The "sharp s" or "eszett" ß, HTML character entity "ß", is very much alive in German, along with 6 more "out of the ordinary" characters, the umlauts ä, ö, ü, Ä, Ö, Ü. Some orthography rules have changed which used to force ß instead of ss in certain places. In other places, the ß still makes a clear difference over ss: The latter makes the preceding vowel short, the former makes it long.
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.
"The biggest challenge I found when learning (very) basic Mandarin was the almost complete disconnection between the sound of a word and how its written."
I (still) have the same problem with English. It's generally impossible to determine how a word is pronounced from its written form in English. And that was a problem, since I learned English mostly from reading books and talking in web forums.
Why 'general' but 'gear'? Or 'chair' but 'chlorine'? 'Put' but 'putty'? How the hell "Eugene Delacroix" is pronounced? Etc.