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Wired Youths In China & Japan Forget Character Forms
eldavojohn writes "The AFP brings a story of a growing concern that children in China and Japan suffer from 'character amnesia' when asked to write the complex characters they are so used to inputting via alphabet-based systems. The article claims this is a growing problem. In China, they have a word for it: 'tibiwangzi,' which means 'take pen, forget paper.' China Youth Daily polled 2,072 people and found that 83% have problems writing characters (although there's no indication if that was an online poll or not). A young woman who was interviewed explained her workaround: 'When I can't remember, I will take out my cellphone and find it (the character) and then copy it down.'"
where is that Æ again?
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I have a similar problem with writing anything with pen and paper. My handwriting was never very pretty, but now not only is it ugly, I also feel very awkward and uncomfortable whenever I have to actually write anything.
The only way to learn how to write Chinese is to write it out for years on end, from kindergarten until university. It ain't much fun.
Since I am a bit older than this and like to write at least basic chinese in this lifetime I am just letting the computer pick the characters for me when I type.
My brain then tells me which of the offered characters feels "right" ; but it does that by looking at the overall shape, not the individual strokes.
Actually, tibiwangzi, means "forget the word when you pick up the pen" (literally: pick up pen, forget word)
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...
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.
The "sharp s" or "eszett" ß, HTML character entity "ß", is very much alive in German, along with 6 more "out of the ordinary" characters, the umlauts ä, ö, ü, Ä, Ö, Ü. Some orthography rules have changed which used to force ß instead of ss in certain places. In other places, the ß still makes a clear difference over ss: The latter makes the preceding vowel short, the former makes it long.
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'
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.
Perhaps then this is an indication you need to simplify your written language?
Perhaps, perhaps not.
Computers have introduced something quite extraordinary and unexpected into written language technology -- asymmetric input and output.
While alphabetic writing has always been considered more economical in terms of learning and ease-of-use, pictographs have always been more efficient in terms of space. When the Romans invented the codex (book, more or less), they didn't reduce the need for paper, but they found a way to make large amounts of paper more manageable. The Chinese, on the other hand, were still using scrolls and the like and needed to keep the bulk down, so stuck with the more space-efficient writing method.
In a computer, data is cheap (at the Unicode level, anyway), so what's your benchmark of efficiency now? Ease of reading would suggest alphabet, but screen real-estate favours ideographs. And on mobile phones, data isn't so cheap -- isn't SMS the world's most expensive data transfer? -- so ideographs are massively more efficient to the consumer.
With Latin entry and ideograph display, we get the best of two worlds -- efficient production for the writer, efficient display for the device. Is this asymmetry more efficient overall? We'll just have to wait and see....
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'
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.
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.
AFAIK, the Romans had no trouble with Latin. And it's actually not a bad language as they go for coherence - once you get the idea that to change the meaning of (most) words you just change the ending, it's probably more regular than most modern Western languages. For instance:
There's a whole bunch of verbs which follow the exact same pattern: -are, -o, -as, -at etc etc. And to change the tense - make it "I/you/he loved/will love" - it's another set of endings. Probably the most complicated thing is that there are three other variants on this set of endings depending upon which group the verb falls into, but seeing as the endings are subtly different for all groups it's fairly easy to figure out which group a given verb will fall into.
It's the same with nouns - the ending changes depending on if you're talking about the nominative, accusative, dative, accusative or ablative form of the noun - and there are masculine and feminine nouns which have different endings. It follows that you don't really have much in the way of prepositions because you don't need them - instead you alter the ending of the word. So the "Romanes Eunt Domus" scene in Monty Python's "Life of Brian" was based on pretty accurate latin. Not much of a surprise considering most of the Python team were classically educated.
The only thing you have to look out for is the occasional word that doesn't follow these patterns - the irregular verbs, for instance. Interestingly, the verb "to be" is irregular in virtually all languages.
Doctors' Scrawl is truly a special type of written language, worldwide.
I know this is a painful subject for some Chinese: Isn't it time that Chinese became an alphabetic language?
From the experience: No, never... In Turkey we switched from Arabic Script to Latin, nearly 80 years ago. A more simpler switch than your proposed "from characters to letters" switch. We lost all written history overnight. Yes, there are lots of people who still can read Arabic, but not the general population, I cannot read notes behind photos of my grandparents, I cannot read registration papers of our ancestral family home... It was a political decision back then, justified by the ease of learning Latin alphabet, but more harm done than benefits.
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.
If you only wanted to become basically proficient at reading it (not writing it, or reading at speed), Arabic script isn't that hard to learn, is it? A couple of weekends, perhaps. And going to a Latin alphabet makes your country much more accessible for others who use Latin script (and correspondingly more difficult for those who use Arabic script, but I believe that was Ataturk's point). Written Chinese takes ages to learn well, so presumably there's a real advantage on the learner's end to switching.
"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.
My mother stormed into my school about 23 or so years ago and gave them a right rollicking. They were marking me down for bad handwriting, but I always got top-marks for the right answers. Her reasoning was thus: it wasn't a handwriting test, the work wasn't for display, the writing was legible enough for them to tell I had the right answer and the right working-out (they had marked it correct, after all) and I was one of the best students in the class academically. Did it REALLY matter what my handwriting looked like? She was hardly going to claim that the school had failed in my education just because my handwriting was a bit messy.
They never bothered me again until secondary school where we had exactly the same thing happen all over again.
To write neatly TAKES TOO LONG - for me and a lot of other people. My brain is already on the next question by the time I'm halfway through writing out the answer. Seriously - I never used more than half of the time available in an exam from primary school to university, and at least 50% of the time I *did* use was due to using a damn pen rather than a keyboard. Handwriting was always slowing me down and making me lose my concentration and place. My writing, technically, was perfect - grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. were all present but the handwriting was a little messy and scrunched because I was trying desperately to NO..T..... WRI.... TE.... AT... A... SNA....IL'... S.... PAC...E and then lose what I actually wanted to say by the end of the sentence.
How many *authors* who want to knock out a 500-page novel still use pen and paper for even the first drafts? Very few, and they don't do that because they use the classic typewriter or a computer which takes away the tedious business of transcribing their thoughts and lets them get on with the thoughts themselves. It's handy to scrawl some notes with a pen on a computer printout, it's handy to write tiny memos with them, but anything longer than a few sentences and you're better off doing it on a keyboard. I can't even *remember* the last time I had to write something down - possibly an insurance claim form some months back.
We have a viable, widely-available, cheap, more efficient, more accurate and faster method of transcription now - I work in schools and even in the poorest UK primary schools it's mandated to have one computer per three children, or thereabouts. Every topic must have some IT work in it, too. No wonder the kid's handwriting is deteriorating - damn right, as well. But these kids can touch-type before they move into secondary school. Handwriting's only advantage is that it needs no additional hardware past the most basic and crude (a stick of some kind that makes a mark), and kids can *still* do that if necessary - writing things on the back of your hand will never go out of fashion. It just won't be neat, but in those cases the ONLY people to ever read the message will be themselves, so neatest doesn't matter.
Handwriting is not a necessary skill any more. Hasn't been for at least 23 years, probably a lot more. It's *nice* to be able to do, sure. Convenient at times, but it's basically an artform. How many people today can write with a proper quill? Not many. Why? Because it's an outdated technology that has enormous downsides with the only real upside being the simplicity of the equipment and the artistry of the finished product. In 50 years time, handwriting will be "quaint" and you'll only use it for love-letters or artworks.
I also note that you labor under the misinformation that German has 27 characters when it actually has umlaut-a, umlaut-o, and umlaut-o
I assume you mean u? That would be ä, ö and ü - slashdot doesn't strip all the non-US characters. I guess the counting depends on whether they're considered accented vowels or separate letters.
To take an example from Norway, we have 29 letters including æøå. The last looks like a+circle but it's a separate letter, while say à is considered simply a variant of a.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What is this then? Romanes eunt domus, "People called Romanes they go the house"?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
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.
Yes, there are lots of people who still can read Arabic, but not the general population, I cannot read notes behind photos of my grandparents, I cannot read registration papers of our ancestral family home... It was a political decision back then, justified by the ease of learning Latin alphabet, but more harm done than benefits.
Nonsense. If you really care about those things, you can hire a translator fairly cheaply to translate them for you. The fact that you haven't bothered means that those things have no real value to you. Losing information which you have some vague attachment to is a small price to pay for progress.
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.'"
Oh, that's rich. A suggestion from a Westerner on how Asians can improve their culture.
Actually, that's the whole problem right there. The only reason to keep the spectacularly inefficient Chinese writing system is to consider it part of the culture. Yes, language is always part of the culture, but the writing system is viewed by most of the rest of the world as a tool for recording the language. If your tool is woefully inefficient and takes a lifetime of studying to use it correctly, well, I suspect those are pretty good indications that you should change it. Sure the fact that it looks pretty and/or elaborate compared to other writing systems means it is easier to categorize as part of your culture, but how about leaving it to the few who are interested in studying culture and adopting a more efficient system that is easier to learn thus can increase the literacy level? ..even Klingon. And that actually brings me to Korean. Koreans are an example of people who used the chinese writing system. Well, over 500 years ago they decided they had enough and invented Hangeul, which is a really interesting writing system. In fact, the Korean writing system is alphabetic, with the letters arranged in syllable squares. The result is that they still look nice, perhaps even similar to Chinese for the untrained eye, yet they have all the benefits of the alphabetic scripts, plus my Korean friends swear that the syllable arrangement allows them to read even faster than if they were arranged in a line.
And I am not exactly another "Westerner" who doesn't know what culture is saying this. In fact I come, from another really old culture and I can read 2500 year old texts as they are pretty close to the language I speak now, including a similar alphabet. How is this a counter-example if my own language has kept the same alphabet for thousands of years? Well, it hasn't. The earliest Greek (at least the earliest identified) was written in the Linear B script which is part syllabic, part ideographic. Around the 9th century B.C.E. the Ancient Greek alphabet was adopted, probably because the Hellenic people of the time recognized that the Phoenicians had developed a much better writing system and so they adapted it to their language. This is the earliest alphabet I can hope to read, however apart from some letters being dropped due to misuse, it continue to adopt advances in writing systems. So, it quickly became left to right instead of left->right->left (boustrophedon) etc, then it started to have spaces between words, then it got the lower case variant and so on.
Now you might say that I am proposing to the Chinese what felt right to my ancestors. However I have good experience of most current writing systems as it was my job at some point to implement text entry in most of the worlds writing systems, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean
Wow, I went off course somewhere but the point is that considering an improvement of your writing system as a violation of your culture is really a handicap. You won't destroy millennia of Chinese culture by starting to use something simple for every day communication. It is not just my opinion, many other cultures agree, including cultures that already used the Chinese alphabet, so there might be some truth to that.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Then - just like in English - there are many words which sound the same but have different meanings (like "there"/"their"/"they're" to use a simple example). Those have different characters in written language. You might think people can easily infer that from context in spoken language, but that's not true - if someone speaks with a strong accent or not very clearly, then meaning will get lost. When I'm watching TV in Taiwan, there are always Chinese subtitles on the Chinese-language soap opera programs.
You also have to consider the enormous significance of the Chinese script for Chinese culture. One way to get an insight into that, is to visit the Palace Museum in Taipei (well worth the visit) and see how much of the exhibits are either calligraphy or at least strongly tied to the Chinese script. Even the painting styles are closely linked to the style of writing. Abandoning the writing system would be akin to a second cultural revolution - just much worse.
Yes it's difficult to learn Chinese script, however there are advantages to it, as well. I'm always amazed with the speed with which my wife is able to read books - I think a trained reader can absorb written text in Chinese characters at much higher speed than someone using an alphabetic script.
Lastly - I think it's somewhat absurd to change something as significant as a written language, solely to accommodate technical solutions which in all likelihood won't last particularly long. Yes we use keyboard a lot, right now - but that's getting replaced by touch screens currently (not that I believe that's useful, but there you are). New input systems will come along, and they likely won't be as focused solely on the needs of the USA as they were in the past.
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.
Well, I'm not a learner of Chinese (although the same applies to Japanese I guess, sort of), but - as far as I know - being able to read modern Chinese does not mean that you are able to make perfect sense of classical written Chinese. So, you need to study either way. Maybe the amount of study needed is less if you are familiar with the modern character usage, but it still takes effort to appreciate the really old written history.
As languages evolve, I guess this is kind of universal. On that basis, I'm not sure your argument is a good one.
"I think a trained reader can absorb written text in Chinese characters at much higher speed than someone using an alphabetic script."
bullshit.
And if you read Beowulf, not the cluster, the c1000 year old English poem it was named after, then you see that English has evolved so much in that time that it may as well be another language.
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/19.html
Yes, there are lots of people who still can read Arabic, but not the general population, I cannot read notes behind photos of my grandparents, I cannot read registration papers of our ancestral family home... It was a political decision back then, justified by the ease of learning Latin alphabet, but more harm done than benefits.
Nonsense. If you really care about those things, you can hire a translator fairly cheaply to translate them for you. The fact that you haven't bothered means that those things have no real value to you. Losing information which you have some vague attachment to is a small price to pay for progress.
That is pretty ridiculous to say. Hire a translator every time you find an old photo, or an old graffiti or a love letter from great grand dad? I do agree that maybe "lose all written history" is a bit of an overstatement, but the truth is if our entire written language were replaced in a single generation, the fallout would be profound to the familial culture. I can look at a picture of my grandfather in uniform holding a newspaper that says "VE Day: IT'S ALL OVER" and it brings tears to my eyes. If when I found that picture it said IIIIJIJIJJIIIJJII I probably wouldn't think much of it, probably wouldn't even get it translated because I wouldn't have even known that it had an important meaning.
when I write by hand I'm starting to write letters out of order. Say I want to hand write "literacy", I end up writing "ilterayc" or something like that. [...] I doesn't stress me out, but it does makes me wonder.
You're not alone, I'm doing the same thing myself. Albeit not on every line down the page, but certainly a few times on each page. It's very peculiar. Perhaps it's because writing is a slower process by hand than by keyboard, and we've become so accustomed to the new speed that, when handwriting, we "outthink" our hand and get a sort of "frame drop" or hiccup in the buffer? I'm sure it's something along those neurological lines...
And this news from China and Japan makes me even the more curious about this and the effect of computers in daily hand writing. Be it kanji or latin, heavy computer usage certainly seems to have a negative effect in basic writing skills.
I had a different thought: every now and then, there's debate whether or not "lol", "l33t", and so on should become part of the formal vocabulary since they are already part of the informal vocabulary -- taking this a step further, maybe it's time the Chinese should reconsider their use of that obviously very complicated glyph system, and maybe switch to something simpler (say, romulan)? I've got nothing personal against the chinese, but TFA was about their type of writing specifically. We've been optimising the hell out of everything else, so why not writing systems as well?
"Good news, everyone!"
English pronunciation also varies widely. So much so that somebody with a strong New England accent would be unlikely to be able to understand someone with a deep Southern accent without great difficulty. In the company where I work, I heard this all the time from Yankees that had to take classes from our training center in Atlanta. And there are many deep accents all over the world: Scottish, Cockney, "BBC English", and the accent belonging to each individual former English colony.
While the advent of modern media has decreased these differences markedly, but they have always been strong enough that English has never been phonetically spelled. Yes, there are some minor regional spelling differences, but they are not so great as to markedly affect understanding.
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...
Iv sumone mispels Inglish wurds u can stil undrstand em.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
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.
Around here we normally just say "whoosh" and move on to other more important things, like not reading the articles.
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.
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]
And if you read Beowulf, not the cluster, the c1000 year old English poem...
Sorry to go a bit off-topic, but I love being part of a community where this distinction is necessary.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Not to mention that Turkish has 8 vowels as well as vowel harmony and Arabic has only three vowels and two dipthongs that in many cases are considered optional and are omitted when writing. It definitely sucks that there was a huge break in written history, but it has resulted in one of the most consistent orthographies in the world (something we native English speakers ought to be jealous of ;-) ). I suppose there were political motivations for the change as well (and also political motivations for writing in Arabic script in the first place!), but the fact is that it led to a dramatic rise in literacy, going from 11% in 1927 to 40% in 1960. I'm not sure about the specifics of the situation in China and Japan, but to paraphrase Einstein, writing systems should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Take Germany, for example. I was there last Christmas and the people I was celebrating with had an old Bible open that was written using Fraktur script. Even though I speak German, I was unable to read it because the script was so flowery and ornate that I couldn't make out the letters. This type of printing used to be pretty much the norm for complete documents, but now is mostly used for decorative titles, etc, which I think is a *good* thing since it allows people to understand what the heck is being talked about, which is the point of writing something down in the first place.
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.