Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
I started off with reading the last three sentences of your post and it reminded me of century-old racist propaganda.
Then I read back a bit and realised that actually it had the Politically Correct upgrade applied, with the same purpose of preserving an underclass but selecting a different collection of unfortunates.
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]
Cursive is useless.
If written with care, it is readable and beautiful. The only argument that people seem to have for it is the potential speed. If you write it out in speed, it /literally/ comes out as a squiggle with irregular bumps or loops. Completely unintelligible.
I didn't fail to learn it. I outright refused. I took zeroes. My teachers were pissed off about it, but guess what? It doesn't seem to have mattered any.
I'd even risk being an ignorant asshole when I say "if it's in cursive, it's not worth my time reading it." - I know it's wrong to say that, but damn does it feel good.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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!
My wife has cursive that is next to unintelligible, even for herself. When she writes a shopping list, it's just annoying and occasionally comedic. The problem is that lives hang daily on her written word, because she's a paediatric oncologist.
My writing has improved markedly since I quit being a doctor because I don't feel the pressure to spew it onto the page as fast as possible because the paperwork is consuming valuable time that I could be using to do something useful. On the other hand, I type a hell of a lot faster than I ever wrote. But if I need something to be 100% legible, I print. In blocks.
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.
I'd even risk being an ignorant asshole when I say "if it's in cursive, it's not worth my time reading it." - I know it's wrong to say that, but damn does it feel good.
It must be depressing to outright refuse to read thousands of man-years worth of original mathematical, scientific, medical and philosophical works because they used ink and joined letters together. "You historians may have made the effort to carefully collect, preserve and scan these works, but they're just remnants of a past(*) age until you also type them up for me!"
And I'm sure in the current fashion of style-over-substance you fit right in telling the kids you're not going to look at their technically excellent work because they dared to use a pen rather than master LaTeX (or *cringe* Word - which, unlike TeX, rarely if ever produces something even as neat as fair handwriting).
(*) To any child, 20 years ago is a "past age".
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."
I agree with you. It doesn't add anything to what you're writing. I just makes it look "prettier". Knowledge is not better just because you're writing it/reading it in cursive.
I actually tried to get good marks in school when I had calligraphy. I never got past 4.5 or 5 on a 1 to 7 mark scale (being 7 the best, and getting below 4 is failing). I honestly tried. My hand is not made for cursive writing. And I actually have very good fine motor skills, I just fail on writing. Eh. As long as people can understand my print handwriting, I don't care.
I wouldn't go as far as saying it's not worth my time if it's in cursive, since for some people is really easy to write that way. Just don't ask me to do the same!
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.
Except the letters ain't the "substance" of a old work on mathemathics. Unless the subject is caligraphy, the actual letters *are* the style while the content is the substance.
Yeah, I'll take a machine-written copy over the original handwritten manuscript any day -- precisely BECAUSE it allows me to focus on the substance, rather than wasting my time trying to read the handwriting.
Doctors' Scrawl is truly a special type of written language, worldwide.
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'll take a machine-written copy over the original handwritten manuscript any day -- precisely BECAUSE it allows me to focus on the substance
So, are you offering to do the typing out? I agree that it's harder to read old handwritten works than their typeset equivalents, if the typesetting is good, but I consider being able to read a useful skill - and "to be able to read" has meant, before the last couple of decades, being able to decipher varying and unclear letter forms from a host of sources, not just taking in the neat, predictable fonts of typesetting.
You are quite honestly declaring that you don't think you should have to learn to read, except in a limited sense.
Except the letters ain't the "substance" of a old work on mathemathics.
This also is often wrong. The development of notation is an incredibly important part of the development of mathematics, and you'll probably become a better mathematician by understanding how notation evolved and bounced between descriptions, words, word-like squiggles, discrete symbols and diagrams. You may also miss a lot of the spirit of an old work by looking at a neatly edited and typeset version.
Unless you are doing original research in history (either general history or history of some subject like maths) and handling primary sources, then no, you should never actually need to handle original manuscripts. Even most time in history research is actually spent on secondary sources - which naturally means some paper already written and typeset by somebody else. Many times the earlier notation is that way simply because it is the first clumsy attempt to present a new idea that is not yet understood fully - and it's abandoned because it was found out to be unclear and misleading.
And citing your self "how notation evolved and bounced", "the spirit of an old work" - these are terms that do not apply to the research in a subject, but apply only to research on history of the subject, the people in the subject and other 'feelgood' style-over-substance issues that are not actually relevant to the subject at hand.
For example, it is undoubtedly better and more efficient to learn geometry from a modern textbook instead of a direct translation of Euclides - by deliberately throwing away the original notation and the spirit of the work we are actually getting better understanding of the science.
Cursive is useless. .... The only argument that people seem to have for it is the potential speed.
No they do not, writing in cursive is slower because you write more. If you want to follow someone speaking, write in block letters.
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
"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.
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.
Speed?! I always wrote faster in print than cursive.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Hm. Take a look at Leibniz' cursive, Martin Luther's, Leonardo da Vinci's? Even someone who obviously spent a lot of effort at a beautiful script, like George Washington, can be tricky to read for modern eyes.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
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.
Actually cursive is faster, because you seldom have to lift the pen. It's like the difference between touch-typing and hunt and peck. You can probably write perfectly acceptably with block letters, but to get up to proper speed, you need to stop lifting the pen up after every character.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
It must be depressing to outright refuse to read thousands of man-years worth of original mathematical, scientific, medical and philosophical works because they used ink and joined letters together.
Uh, I wasn't planning to read thousands of man-years worth of original material. The most I could possibly consume is a hundred man-years' worth or so. So no, I don't find it that depressing. Frankly, cursive is stupid, and people who use it today are just trying to make themselves look erudite. The simple truth is that the useful information is the data, not the presentation; if the presentation is relevant then the writer failed, because it's not supposed to be. Mathematicians too lazy to recopy their work? Someone else can interpret them. I'm hardly pushing the boundaries of mathematics.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
you should never actually need to handle original manuscripts
You should probably not be handling the original manuscripts because they are old, delicate, valuable, etc. But you may want to refer to scans or copies of manuscripts which have been badly typeset, overly edited or not typeset at all.
Many times the earlier notation is that way simply because it is the first clumsy attempt to present a new idea that is not yet understood fully
That's the sometimes naive first impression, yes. Another possibility is that the concepts were looked at in a different way, or that the notation (and, sometimes, lack of notation) reflects how people thought about the problem rather than today's drive to syntactic uniformity at the expense of understanding. Klein warned in his pedagogical work about modern mathematics becoming mindless symbol manipulation, and - looking at the way mathematics is taught in the classroom today - he was right to do so. See also the failure of Semantic MathML.
these are terms that do not apply to the research in a subject, but apply only to research on history of the subject, the people in the subject and other 'feelgood' style-over-substance issues that are not actually relevant to the subject at hand.
You couldn't be more wrong. Mathematics, for example, is the application of the human mind to pattern / relationship recognition. This is a human activity and you will achieve much more as a mathematician if you don't just know the facts but also refine your thought processes. One of the best ways of doing this is to study how other good mathematicians think and find out how their ideas have evolved.
For example, it is undoubtedly better and more efficient to learn geometry from a modern textbook instead of a direct translation of Euclides
I completely disagree. I have gained the most insight into Euclidean (!) geometry by reading Euclid's Elements with commentaries. This includes studying elucidations of the deficiencies in Euclid which motivated other geometries - information any school textbook on Euclidean geometry is far too vague in the first place to pick apart.
And, while I'd "learnt" it before from modern textbooks, the most helpful elucidation of non-Euclidean geometry from the PoV of actually being able to do interesting work with it was reading Lobachevsky's Geometrische Untersuchungen - though I will admit to having an English translation to hand. It's the difference between having a reference to some piece of technology and enjoying a dialogue with the inventor. If you can't see the value of the latter, please think.
Try it yourself and be amazed. The short lifts are quicker then the additional moves cursive requires.
Keep in mind that I am still young so maybe cursive is faster for old people.
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
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.
Leibniz was well-known for being not only messy but also making silly mistakes. It was greatly assuring to find out he made sign errors as trivial as the ones I make, but it required a faithful reproduction of his works to find out that the errors were his and not some editor's.
We're so compartmentalised with our knowledge today that we may be able to describe the function of every part of a tree without having the first idea how to plant a forest. Reading original works (often by those who may have lacked the skills for the former) helps with the latter, I think.
Things seem to be changing if you are trying to learn Japanese as a foreign language as well. I've read some discussions that say that it is better to memorize kanji and then let the computer do most of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to writing them out. Granted this is still very controversial but who knows where things may be in a couple of years.
No. I'm saying that though it's useful to be able to read handwriting, it's generally often a waste of time to do it -- particularily in the case of old classical scientific works. Sure, you can read this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Constitution_Pg1of4_AC.jpg rather than a good-quality transcript of the US constitution.
But doing so *will* mean you spend more time, and that time is spent on superficial items. The quality of the handwriting, is *not* the reason why people consider the US constitution a interesting document to study. (okay, so maybe for a few, but at a guess, 99%+ of the ones who ARE interested in the consititution are NOT interested in the handwriting)
Sure, it's useful to be able to read poorly readable sources. (though a lot LESS useful than it used to be, since a diminishing proportion of sources are handwritten)
But nevertheless, if given the CHOICE between a poorly readable scan, and a high-quality typeset version of the same text, and your interest is to learn what is in the text. Then most of the time, scanning the handwritten scan, is a waste of time.
Exactly, what if (horror of horrors) they change to an alphabet based written language??
-Xen
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.
I happen to have been one of the many people who suffered from the mindless teaching of equations while at school. I found that almost all of my classmates had no trouble picking up topics like fractions, trigonometry and angles, yet for some reason I struggled to understand them for years. This was further compounded when I did my A-Levels (qualifications needed to get into University) and found that my previous math teachers hadn't even attempted to teach me a basic understanding of calculus which I now needed. In all, it took me until halfway through my comp-sci degree, at which point I wrote a game engine in openGL with simple newtonian physics, to appreciate the meaning of vectors, matrices, angles expressed in radians, fractions and differentiation and integration. For a while I pondered why it had taken me so long to learn all of this when it didn't seem to be all that complicated, and I realised that throughout my life in school the mathematics I had been taught had completely lacked any meaningful context, and so I was not able to grasp its usefulness.
"Cursive is useless."
Block letters are useless for handwriting, you can as well just type and print. Cursive is much nicer to write by hand. It's so nice and flowing.Cursive is useless.
I write in cursive in 3.5 languages, and in fact, I have a problem _remembering_ the form of glyphs. However, if I sit down and start writing, I can draw them without any problem. Motor memory for the win!
Indeed, I haven't written cursive in many years, and stopped using it as soon as it was allowed to do so. By high school I simply printed. What I have found also is that the "cursive" they teach is also dead wrong. You can write in a much more beautiful and legible script if you simply have good careful printing, and then simply don't lift your pen.
Additionally, all of the old, beautiful script was written for a purpose - one-off documents couldn't be done with a printing press even. And such documents were done for posterity. Beautiful script isn't written quickly, as the argument for cursive goes. Beautiful script was generally a slow thing, although of course scribes could get pretty quick at writing beautiful script. Another purpose of that beautiful script was to signify the formality and authenticity of documents, along with signatures and seals. Generally only a notary was capable of producing a document in the correct form with nicely-formed, legible script. This function has been entirely replaced.
I'm not necessarily convinced that what we've got now is any better, although it certainly is more accessible.
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.
Reading original manuscripts is a useful skill, sure, but it's not one that everyone needs. Just like not everyone needs to be able to be able to do their own plumbing, or fix their own car. We need a small number of professional historians who can read original documents, but it's a waste of time to teach it to absolutely everyone during school.
This also is often wrong. The development of notation is an incredibly important part of the development of mathematics, and you'll probably become a better mathematician by understanding how notation evolved and bounced between descriptions, words, word-like squiggles, discrete symbols and diagrams.
That's simply not true - look at the history of the calculus. For over a century you had the quite different Newtonian and Leibnitzian notations - but turns out (of course) you do exactly the same calculations in either, and can translate any given proof back and forth. Even though the Newtonian notation is a bit clumsier (which is why it has now died out), it was perfectly adequate and any number of theorems were proved using it.
I am trolling
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.
Cursive is an idealization that has, just like you said, little use because it only exists in the classroom. Noone writes cursive as taught; those who insist write much slower than they otherwise would. Handwritten notes are typically for one's own perusal. For communication with others, one better print or type; when printing capitalization can be had by scaling the letters.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Back at school, I had to write a lot of texts in English. I wrote it in block letters (since that was what we've learned).
Then we started studying German and the first thing they've taught us was the German cursive. So I switched from block letters to cursive for English as well. Made my writing MUCH faster.
Maybe you should just type everything. These days one can get a tiny inkjet printer like Kodak Diconix (batteries fit into the main roller) for nothing, and the cartridges will last for a while. All you need, then, is a custom app that will position the paper based on your swiping motions, and then print what you need printed. I'm sure it can be done to be at least as effective as any handwriting.
An alternative is to print. If you practice, printed letters can come out pretty quickly.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I was wondering when someone was going to make a nonsense reference to 1984. You'd think Slashdotters had only ever read one book.
I abandoned cursive writing somewhere around 8th grade. Cell phones and the internet did not exist (in the public mind, anyway). My cursive writing looked terrible, I thought. My printing, on the other hand, had a nice round shape to it. So I just did that. Now, as you note, my writing is a combination of printing and cursive. But it's readable, and I still like how it looks.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I agree. The calligraphy and the archaic language are just barriers to entry, and can be entirely dispensed with without diminishing the value of the original work. The only use of such obstacles IMHO is to instill the sense of superiority in people who went over such hurdles, for no good reason, really. Those are completely mindless barriers that are well past their prime. Feynman had the rational view of this, and I agree with him:
The next paper selected for me was by Adrian and Bronk. They demonstrated that nerve impulses were sharp, single-pulse phenomena. They had done experiments with cats in which they had measured voltages on nerves.
I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors, the gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I hadn't the foggiest idea of where they were located in relation to the nerves or to the cat. So I went to the librarian in the biology section and asked her if she could find me a map of the cat.
"A map of the cat, sir?" she asked, horrified. "You mean a zoological chart!" From then on there were rumors about some dumb biology graduate student who was looking for a "map of the cat."
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"
"Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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!"
I couldn't agree more.
I switched from cursive — 'cause that's how I was taught how to write in primary school — to script midway through high school, and I have to say that things have been much better since then... Well, actually, over the years, it has become somewhat of a mix between cursive and script, but still — switching between those two styles helped me write faster and more legibly that my friends who are stuck with "curse-ive."
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
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.
Point is, I learned cursive. I practiced it a great deal, because I went to a Waldorf-Steiner school, and they are a bit hung up on stuff like that.
They also made us write at least four pages every day as homework, basically recounting from memory and keywords everything the teacher talked about yesterday. Like for doctors, all that writing made my handwriting steadily decline, and I had to "re-learn" cursive - getting back into the habit of writing legibly - at least twice. My handwriting is currently legible, but the most irregular of anyone I know.
For all that effort, it would still be hours of work for me to decrypt, say, my great-grandmother's letters. It's a specialised skill. Knowing how to write in cursive myself doesn't help appreciably. Not everyone needs to learn it.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
We're in the same boat. It seems that there is a particular class of learners, to which we both belong (seemingly Feynman did, too), that cannot learn without being able to apply the knowledge somehow. This is the context you speak of. I can, usually, look at that context and try to figure out the underlying mechanisms (the "theory"), but going the other way without the context is pretty much pointless.
This lead me to many unforgettable "aha!" moments in grad school. I was taking an extremely well prepared course in applied linear algebra. At one point, there was an assignment where we had to show that the Fourier basis was in fact one, and also was orthogonal. Demonstrating it takes a couple of lines, once you know how to check for orthogonality in a vector space of functions. At that point my thought was: "so that's really why we can do Fourier transform (and its inverse), and all that -- it's just a way of finding components of a vector!". I was lucky: the course was two quarters long, and coincided with me starting the grad school. It was an incredibly useful foundation that came very handy in a lot of engineering. I've learned some applied calculus later while taking two quarters of a numerical methods course. I recognized that a lot of it I tried, in vain, to learn while taking undergrad physics. It was no fun back then.
The calculus and some elements of linear algebra that were taught in high school were pretty much useless -- they aspired to take you to a higher level, trying to get you to memorize various techniques for integration, etc. What was the use of it -- I don't know. It's not like it's one's everyday work to just integrate weird functions that you pretty much don't get to see anywhere else but in an undergrad-level calculus course. Never mind that the techniques were always peddled as gospel, with no explanation of where they came from. It was frowned upon for a student to come up with an alternative way of doing things. I remember getting a particularly poor grade on one test in high school, where I used iterative anti-derivation to integrate. I came up with the technique on my own -- this was before you could just look such things up online. My mind was somehow revolting against memorizing a bunch of techniques and tricks I didn't understand, it was less work to come up with a scheme that worked, and where I could prove that the results were in fact correct.
All symbolic derivation I really care for in a career in engineering can be done using maple, mathematica or, to some extent, maxima. When it comes to real life equations, say, in robot kinematics, doing symbolic work by hand is a sure way of driving an expensive robot arm into the floor (hopefully in simulation, but still). It's pointless -- if you need to work on such equations, symbolic math software is a requirement. Whatever problems you end up solving on a test/exam in class are artificially simplified so that the test will fit in the time allotted, and the grader won't have to find mistakes in pages of derivations. IIRC, a simple thing such as the Jacobian of the kinematic matrix in a real-life universal industrial manipulator may run a couple of pages when printed out. You can't even copy it by hand without likely making a mistake or two; forget about having to actually derive it -- it's not worth it. Not that it cannot be done, but it's simply not worth it, and it's pointless.
Even taking an elasticity course (again, I was lucky: the course was extremely well prepared, by a great teacher), I could base most of my work on very basic calculus and linear algebra. Knowing how to deal with simple trig functions and polynomials is all it ever took, it seems. Only in numerical methods things got a little more interesting, but then it was still entirely applied and the proof was always in the pudding: either the numerical algorithm worked, or it didn't. Sometimes just proving that it worked was a challenge, and I loved it. A course where getting a 60% grade earned you an A, but then homework was essentially a side job (think 20+ hours per week).
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
What about the people who use cursive just because it's convenient? All this "cursive is stupid" whining makes me think that there's some sort of jealousy involved. Either that or first rate studpidity. Don't think that your cultural background is universal (i.e. that there is no country on earth in which cursive isn't the norm). I should know: I've never seen one handwritten document (homework, quizzes, etc.) that was not written in cursive. Sometimes badly, but always readable. Or to say it another way: For some people on this earth writing cursive is as natural as carrying a loaded gun is for others. It just depends on where you're coming from ...
The problem is, we teach Palmer Script, which is an ergonomic and legibility anti-pattern if there ever was one.
If we taught a roughly connected italic, we'd all write in a legible script.
Reading original manuscripts is a useful skill, sure, but it's not one that everyone needs.
You're talking about the skill of reading. You're arguing that not everyone needs to be able to read, where reading means deciphering word-forming symbols on a page which look similar but not necessarily identical to symbols you have learnt. Have I walked into some sort of alternative reality where nerds are posting that the skill of reading is archaic? And that only a "small number of professional historians" need to do it?
As for understanding the message, it is true that sometimes certain domain-specific skills are needed to study original documents in a particular subject, or at least to perform the most fruitful study. But anyone reasonably educated can get something out of reading an original. To take one extreme, any man can read a facsimile of the original US Constitution and get something out of it, but a legal scholar or historian could get more out of it. For a middle ground, Newton's Opticks is extremely readable to the layperson with very little technical skill required. As is some Darwin. And an annotated set of extracts of Newton's Principia is a much better introduction to Newtonian mechanics than any annoying high school "here is a list of Newton's 3 laws". I mean "every action has an equal and opposite reaction" - you can repeat it to the end of days and sound smart, but what the hell is that supposed to mean? And "F=ma" is neat and concise but conveys much less meaning than Newton's albeit far more wordy formulation.
For over a century you had the quite different Newtonian and Leibnitzian notations - but turns out (of course) you do exactly the same calculations in either, and can translate any given proof back and forth.
If you're only differentiating wrt/ one variable, yes. But you're missing the point with Leibniz notation that you can do cunning manipulations with the symbols directly. It's like CS freshmen proudly announcing, "Well all computers are the same cos they're Turing complete!" Uhuh.
It turns out that the different notations reflected two different ways of looking at the calculus which in turn reflected two different ways of looking at mathematics, the battle between which has been a significant part of mathematical development since. The notations also camouflaged the nonsense inherent in both versions of the calculus that was the infinitesimal quantity, which then in no resolvable way represented both something and nothing and had to wait for Cauchy et al. to come to the rescue.
Also, Newtonian notation remains less cumbersome where appropriate, as well as conveying the original physical landscape for it was developed. I've read and used it often. Furthermore, take the dot, shift it to the right and leak it down the page a bit to give you...
I don't know why schools still teach cursive. My children are learning it, but I believe it to be a waist of time. For the rest of their lives writing anything of length greater than a form will be typed on a computer. For anything else they will need to print legibly for forms. Part of my engineering schooling was drafting courses. Learning to draft characters so they are uniform and legible is a valuable skill, learning cursive, not so much. Good print penmanship is still important.
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?
The skill of reading, i.e. recognising repeated patterns in adjacent word-forming symbols, is not the same as the act of memorising the anatomy of a cat.
The value of understanding the motivations and thought processes of the inventor of some concept or piece of technology by reading his original words is not the same as the act of memorising the anatomy of a cat.
Your cat is made of straw.
There's a poster above you who explained quite clearly that Feynman was keen to understand context and application, which is what I am trying to promote.
it would still be hours of work for me to decrypt, say, my great-grandmother's letters. It's a specialised skill.
How do you think people read anything beyond published books for the past few hundred years? It is not a "specialised skill" unless you're considering production and study of calligraphy for its own sake.
The simple truth is that the useful information is the data, not the presentation
Information is useless if it is not presented in an understandable way, and information is better processed when it is better presented. "Better" depends on the circumstances.
Every time I wonder why Apple and Google are doing so well I recall just how fucking stupid most geeks are not to recognise this.
I'm hardly pushing the boundaries
And you will continue to not push the boundaries while you expect everyone to Reader's Digest the world for you.
Do you consider learning correct spelling to be a waist of time as well?
What about the people who use cursive just because it's convenient?
Convenient for who? There's no point writing anything that won't be read later, and anything which will be read later should be written as legibly as possible, thus disqualifying cursive writing when compared to good old Latin script designed to be readable at a distance.
All this "cursive is stupid" whining makes me think that there's some sort of jealousy involved.
I used to be able to write very nicely in cursive, but even then I could more quickly make characters which would later be legible by simply handprinting. Today I print in small caps style for readability. Many people have commented on the neatness of my writing, especially as compared to other men, which I find amusing.
Either that or first rate studpidity.
You'll have to draw your own conclusions there.
Don't think that your cultural background is universal (i.e. that there is no country on earth in which cursive isn't the norm).
But cursive isn't the norm in my country any more. The more I try to make your comment make sense the more confused I get, which is usually a sign of a failed sentence. I could read the newspaper before I was three, and not have to ask for any definitions (although I would occasionally look one up. I had a full set of encylopedias and a pretty good dictionary.) I can detect the screams of a tortured sentence a paragraph away.
I should know: I've never seen one handwritten document (homework, quizzes, etc.) that was not written in cursive.
You've never seen a single handwritten document which was printed? I have produced a number of them, I could perhaps fax you something; since you seem to be living in some remote fantasy world I am concerned about email delivery.
Sometimes badly, but always readable.
Sentence fragment.
Or to say it another way: For some people on this earth writing cursive is as natural as carrying a loaded gun is for others. It just depends on where you're coming from ...
And yet, printed letters are still more readable.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In grad school, a large group of biology students were talking about the GRE, the required standardized test to get into grad school. Before you can take it, you need to write out a paragraph along the lines of "I promise not to cheat," only you were supposed to do it in cursive.
None of us getting our PhDs in genetics or cell biology knew how to write in cursive. We all had tried, and then quickly either given up and written in normal characters without lifting up the pen, or just made squiggles for the rest of the lines.
I always wondered if that was just some devious way to throw the test taker off his or her game. That's the closest thing I could think of to a rational explanation. Second was somehow some old nun, hellbent on preserving something she had worked her whole life for, wormed her way onto the board of whoever made the tests, and decreed that it would require a display of cursive.
By the way, I'd like to give a big FU to Sister Marie for making me waste my precious 3rd grade time learning a writing system that did absolutely nothing for me. These days I can't even read it.
Anyway, the same seems like it could be true of Kanji (chinese characters) for the japanese. They have a phonetic alphabet. Two in fact. They really don't need to use chinese characters. I don't speak japanese, but I'd wager that it's easier to type out the phonetic hirigana letters than it is to type them out and then convert to the correct kanji. I'd be a little surprised if in 50 years, it was as widely used as it is now.
We will all be 010000100110100101101110011000010111001001110011 soon
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Oh boy, whoosh. We're both promoting the same thing. It's pointless to read original manuscripts in cursive. That's what I said.
You think I say that reading original texts is useless in general. What I say is that dealing with silliness like someone's handwriting and his mistakes is stupid. The typeset, edited versions are there for a reason. If I want to read Newton, I won't even bother with the original typeset versions, I want something that has been proofread, edited and doesn't bother me. I have read both Newton's and Euler's texts, but I just didn't bother with originals, the latter were detracting me with technicalities of period's typesetting, symbolics, and what not.
Nowhere did I say that reading skills are useless. I said that learning how to read someone's obsolete handwriting is useless. The transcriptions, especially edited transcriptions, are there for a reason. If I were a high-schooler who wanted to learn calculus from say Leibniz's manuscripts, I'd be also tripping on mistakes in his manuscript. So not only I'd have to overcome the hurdle that is the reading of his chickenscrawl, I'd also have to deal with his mistakes. This is useless in itself: you're just repeating the work that has been done by a qualified editor, more than once.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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
We're both promoting the same thing. It's pointless to read original manuscripts in cursive.
This may be true for the average reader providing someone else has created a sufficiently good typeset version. But, because that only applies in a small number of documents vs the number of scribbled documents that have ever been produced and are being produced right now, it is important to know how to read.
If I were a high-schooler who wanted to learn calculus from say Leibniz's manuscripts, I'd be also tripping on mistakes in his manuscript.
Why wouldn't a high schooler want to see mistakes? Of course it is valuable to be read with an accompanying commentary which highlights them, but I would still want them there. I want to know where people went wrong, both in trivial and conceptual terms, so I can see how thought has developed and what excellent human minds are able (and not able) to do.
People like to elevate the greats of science and mathematics to some position of heroic infallibility. They turn education into the recitation of certain precise formulations of their work (more precise than the person who actually put in the creative effort could manage), without the requirement to really understand it. People are put off really learning anything. You can help avoid this by taking people as close to the source as possible, warts and all.
Frankly, cursive is stupid, and people who use it today are just trying to make themselves look erudite.
I use cursive sometimes because it is faster than printing block letters (for me) and is legible (to me). I am not just trying to make myself look erudite. Stop being so obnoxious with your opinions.
Queens of the Stone Age - they rule
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.
Printing* is not typing. I can write perfectly legibly without using cursive, and so can millions of others... and it's not a recent innovation either.
* the writing style, not typesetting or modern ink/toner printing.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I never learned latin (I can generally decipher the meaning of it but I couldn't write or speak it) and I can honestly say I come across latin words and phrases far more often than I have to read cursive writing, does that mean we should all learn latin as well? It's very rare these days that I'll have to read anything hand-written (and not because I have any real trouble with cursive unless it's particularly rushed or scribbled, we were never taught it at school and I can read it just fine), I'd guess this applies to most people. If the amount of time spent learning, and re-learning because it will fade with underuse, to read cursive is likely to be much greater than the time spent fumbling over a particularly bad case then you'll waste less time by just not bothering.
... as well? You say that like it's comparable to what he just said, when it's not.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agence_France-Presse
Agence France-Presse (AFP) is a French news agency, the oldest one in the world, and one of the three largest with Associated Press and Reuters.[citation needed]
When I was at school, physics was the one subject I enjoyed the most, because I felt that there was a lot of underlying context for the math that I was using. Because I took math and physics some of the course material overlapped, meaning that at one point in my math course I already knew alternative solutions to the course material. I still remember the derisive snorts from the equation regurgitating elite as I solved a ball trajectory problem in front of the class using the equations of motion instead of using sines and cosines (wow my memory is bad, I forget exactly what equations we were actually supposed to use) and got the correct result. The cool thing was that the maths teacher then took my workings and made some substitutions to the equations and got back the method he was teaching. Sadly, that didn't happen very often, and I never really engaged with any math teachers at school.
Y0u'/3 +@1k!49 @b0u+ +h3 $k!11 0f /3@d!49. Y0u'/3 @/9u!49 +h@+ 40+ 3\/3/y043 433d$ +0 b3 @b13 +0 /3@d, vvh3/3 /3@d!49 rn3@4$ d3(!ph3/!49 vv0/d-f0/rn!49 $yrnb01$ 04 @ p@93 vvh!(h 100k $!rn!1@/ bu+ 40+ 43(3$$@/!1y !d34+!(@1 +0 $yrnb01$ y0u h@\/3 13@/4+. H@\/3 ! vv@1k3d !4+0 $0rn3 $0/+ 0f @1+3/4@+!\/3 /3@1!+y vvh3/3 43/d$ @/3 p0$+!49 +h@+ +h3 $k!11 0f /3@d!49 !$ @/(h@!(? @4d +h@+ 041y @ "$rn@11 4urnb3/ 0f p/0f3$$!04@1 h!$+0/!@4$" 433d +0 d0 !+?
Yeah.
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.
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
Maybe it's because I've been on the 'net through the late '90s, (maybe because I just wrote it,) but I could read that with no problem. Even if I wasn't aware of leetspeak, it would be one of the most trivial things to interpret - probably because I know how to read which means knowing how to decipher symbols which are similar to but not quite the same as I'm used to, and I've done enough cryptography as part of mathematical training to "see" a letter substitution cipher of plain English. No "special training" required.
This was just discussed at my daughter's fifth grade back-to-school night.
The teachers stated the students will be required to do practically all graded work in cursive.
They quoted a study in which students who used cursive on the SAT, on average, received higher grades.
Googling for supporting details identified the follow:
"Essays written in cursive received a slightly higher score (7.2 for cursive, compared to 7.0 for those printed)."
source: http://www.collegeboard.com/press/releases/150054.html
An explanation the teachers suggested for the higher cursive average scores was that perhaps the cursive handwriting was less disruptive means to capture to a stream of thought.
I offer this as someone who's use of cursive is almost exclusively limited to my signature. Between my printing handwriting style and keyboard, I make no other use of cursive.
Yes, I would say that it's worth learning Latin (during your early school years). You won't remember all the words through adulthood but you'll get a good grounding in general language principles, all Romance languages and half of English.
And you'll be able to read some of the classics without the rhythm and subtleties lost in translation.
You can read it, but it's irritating as hell.
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
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.
It's a specialized skill today, because we don't produce and consume the enormous amounts of handwritten text that our grandparents did.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
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.
You used a general way of solving a problem instead of memorizing a contrived way of solving a particular example. Cool in my book!
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I agree that the "greats" of science were no heroes, and made mistakes (duh). But the problem is that their writings in original, raw form, are no teaching materials -- at least for someone who tries to understand that material for the first time.
I'd spend hours on some homework problems that had typos in them (or in the solutions at the end of the book, in some cases) -- I'm the one to blame my own mistakes before giving up, so it'd take a lot of work to verify things this way and that to finally be pretty damn sure that I did it right, and the text was wrong. This is of course a useful experience, but not everyone has virtually unlimited time to do things this way. Some college kids have to work more than one job, you know.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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?
I'd spend hours on some homework problems that had typos in them
Me too. And sometimes it was because I was too stubborn to read the errata until I'd absolutely proven that the text/question/answer must be flawed. But I'm not recommending that beginners should read originals without a commentary, nor that they should be as stubborn as I was/am.
Of course, sometimes a commentary is misguided, and as you advance you'll have fun challenging that.
Some college kids have to work more than one job, you know.
That's an administrative problem, not an academic one. Some people have no money/time for university at all, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's something wrong with the concept of university study.
The way you're defining it, yes. I might as well define "reading" to mean "reading hieroglyphics", and at that point I imagine you'd agree with the statement.
Sure, the ability to read means more than being able to recognise one particular font, but the forms have diverged far enough that you can be perfectly capable of reading modern printed English without being able to read 16th century handwriting. And while the former skill is vital, the latter is - yes, archaic. It's an interesting skill, but not one that everyone needs.
It turns out that the different notations reflected two different ways of looking at the calculus which in turn reflected two different ways of looking at mathematics, the battle between which has been a significant part of mathematical development since.
I think you're reading too much into it. They were just the notations two people happened to choose, and because of historical factors both saw some use. If you want to learn about the history of a mathematical idea, you'd do better to read a book on the subject than try to derive it from the choices of notation in the early manuscripts.
I am trolling
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.
Not on a Kindle they didn't!
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
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
For some of us, cursive is the only writing system we have learned to write. At school block capitals and cursive were the only writing systems that were taught to us. Some other students seemed to learn to write using lower case block letters without being taught it, but I never learned it except some symbols that were common in mathematics or physics (like letter e). That is why I usually use cursive if I have to write something by hand (and using capital block letters if I want be 100 percent sure that others will be able to interpret my handwriting correctly without any mistakes).
To be fair, I'm pretty sure your 10-year old self refused because you were a stupid 10-year old, not because you wanted to take some principled stand in favor of logomechanical efficiency.
Honestly, I found that Washington sample to be nearly trivial to read, and if the image had had a better resolution, I would have had no problems whatsoever. I didn't bother with the others, since I don't speak Italian (Vinci), Latin/French (Leibniz), or German (Luther).
So if your point was that it's hard to read handwritten Washingtonian script, I counter with: 12 years of public school have served me well, I guess.
What the hell? Did you just get straight Fs in English growing up? Of course presentation is relevant to prose and poetry! And it's definitely relevant to mathematics and physics!
Are we talking about the same thing here? Cursive "is any style of handwriting that is designed for writing notes and letters quickly by hand." Are you saying people should intentionally opt for a writing style that is less mechanically efficient?
Have you ever tried otherwise? After I changed to writing block letters I was able to write at least almost as fast and the characters were always legible. With cursive my hand would hurt faster, I would actively have to avoid ambiguities (even going as far as crossing out words multiple times till I was completely happy) and it looks butt-ugly if I try to write with any speed. And this is coming from someone who learned cursive script at six years old, used it all through school and the better part of his life since.
You're probably right, but the excuse I told myself, my teachers, and my parents was "this is pointless, I'll never use this."
My statement still holds true 15 years later.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Writing evolves over generations. What it looks like depends on the tools used and the motivations of the writer. Some of it looks beautiful, much of it doesn't.
Most of history however didn't use what we currently call "cursive", but simply an alphabet with strokes that were adapted to writing with a quill.
But the cursive scripts we teach 8 year olds today can't be written with a quill. And written with a fine-tipped pen they look really ugly too.
Don't get me wrong, there's a place for cursive scripts. It just isn't the classroom. It's not worth putting the simplified writing systems that were conceived by elementary school teachers some time in the last century on a pedestal.
Obviously it would be best if everyone put some thought into their own writing style, but most just unquestioningly continue to use the system that was indoctrinated to them since they were 6.
For some of us, cursive is the only writing system we have learned to write. At school block capitals and cursive were the only writing systems that were taught to us.
Really? What decade?
In the 1970s-80s, they taught us 'print' (upper and lower case) and 'writing' (cursive). Hated cursive for its deliberate illegibility, and was glad to never use it once I left school. The fact that keyboarding become more important for literacy in the early 90s helped immensely too.
But I'm surprised to hear that you were taught block capitals but not lower case. I'm sure they started us on lower case first. Was there a sea change in writing education sometime before the 1970s?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I believe his comment was meant to point out that it is spelled "waste of time" not "waist of time."
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
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]