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.'"

Comments

Re:Why not just use Pinyin?

[pegdhcp]

I know this is a painful subject for some Chinese: Isn't it time that Chinese became an alphabetic language?

From the experience: No, never... In Turkey we switched from Arabic Script to Latin, nearly 80 years ago. A more simpler switch than your proposed "from characters to letters" switch. We lost all written history overnight. Yes, there are lots of people who still can read Arabic, but not the general population, I cannot read notes behind photos of my grandparents, I cannot read registration papers of our ancestral family home... It was a political decision back then, justified by the ease of learning Latin alphabet, but more harm done than benefits.

Re:Ummmm

[Ecuador]

Oh, that's rich. A suggestion from a Westerner on how Asians can improve their culture.

Actually, that's the whole problem right there. The only reason to keep the spectacularly inefficient Chinese writing system is to consider it part of the culture. Yes, language is always part of the culture, but the writing system is viewed by most of the rest of the world as a tool for recording the language. If your tool is woefully inefficient and takes a lifetime of studying to use it correctly, well, I suspect those are pretty good indications that you should change it. Sure the fact that it looks pretty and/or elaborate compared to other writing systems means it is easier to categorize as part of your culture, but how about leaving it to the few who are interested in studying culture and adopting a more efficient system that is easier to learn thus can increase the literacy level?
And I am not exactly another "Westerner" who doesn't know what culture is saying this. In fact I come, from another really old culture and I can read 2500 year old texts as they are pretty close to the language I speak now, including a similar alphabet. How is this a counter-example if my own language has kept the same alphabet for thousands of years? Well, it hasn't. The earliest Greek (at least the earliest identified) was written in the Linear B script which is part syllabic, part ideographic. Around the 9th century B.C.E. the Ancient Greek alphabet was adopted, probably because the Hellenic people of the time recognized that the Phoenicians had developed a much better writing system and so they adapted it to their language. This is the earliest alphabet I can hope to read, however apart from some letters being dropped due to misuse, it continue to adopt advances in writing systems. So, it quickly became left to right instead of left->right->left (boustrophedon) etc, then it started to have spaces between words, then it got the lower case variant and so on.
Now you might say that I am proposing to the Chinese what felt right to my ancestors. However I have good experience of most current writing systems as it was my job at some point to implement text entry in most of the worlds writing systems, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean ..even Klingon. And that actually brings me to Korean. Koreans are an example of people who used the chinese writing system. Well, over 500 years ago they decided they had enough and invented Hangeul, which is a really interesting writing system. In fact, the Korean writing system is alphabetic, with the letters arranged in syllable squares. The result is that they still look nice, perhaps even similar to Chinese for the untrained eye, yet they have all the benefits of the alphabetic scripts, plus my Korean friends swear that the syllable arrangement allows them to read even faster than if they were arranged in a line.
Wow, I went off course somewhere but the point is that considering an improvement of your writing system as a violation of your culture is really a handicap. You won't destroy millennia of Chinese culture by starting to use something simple for every day communication. It is not just my opinion, many other cultures agree, including cultures that already used the Chinese alphabet, so there might be some truth to that.