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:Ummmm

[Ecuador]

Wow, you really addressed my post well. You must be a master debater? :)
Let me make things a little clearer to you.
I WROTE A HUGE EFFING post about how the problem is that some consider the alphabet as a big part of the culture, when it should be a tool for the language (which itself is a big part of the culture) and you come back with arguments of the type "clean up your own culture" and crap like that.
It is obviously not a matter of "incomprehensibility" to others.
When your writing system needs over a decade of study to master, it automatically excludes poor population that cannot afford that much time. It means that you should seriously consider whether everyone has to learn this system just to be able to read their mail.
And obviously nobody else (and most certainly not I) can impose such a thing. It was simply an observation of how holding on to tradition for too long and for not really good reasons can have negative effects (in this case to literacy and efficiency of communication in general). Hopefully some people in the right places will realize it (because there already are Chinese people who realize it) and try to do something about it. You know, if they don't simply adopt something like latin/pinyin for their daily communication but instead invent something (see Koreans in gp post), wouldn't it be *adding* to the culture for those who consider writing part of it?
Oh, and cheers for trying some ethnic name calling tactics in your post - I hope you are not over 15 years old...

Re:Ummmm

[Ecuador]

Average length of an english word: 5 letters. Each letter fits easily in 5 bits. So, 25 bits total.
Average length of a chinese word: 2.2 hanzi. I will be kind and make that 2 hanzi. You need knowledge of over 3000 hanzi just for simple texts, if you want more technical or classical etc you need more than 6000. That takes 13 bits for each character.
Compression can be applied to both, this was just a quick raw comparison.
So, you mistakenly assume 1 alphabetic character = 1 ideographic character when it obviously is not. It takes much more time to draw, much more space to store and much, much, MUCH more time to learn. You should be considering hanzi = half word and not letter.
Also homonyms is not script dependent. There are languages with alphabetic scripts that have few or no homonyms (or homographs which is what you mean here). Plus, there is the reverse problem with ideograms, e.g. Kanji have multiple pronunciations (on, kun...).
The only thing efficient about ideographic scripts is that after you have invested in learning them, reading might be faster for you, however for both alphabetic & ideographic scripts you can train to reach speeds that start to be faster that what you can comprehend.