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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.'"
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)
It was terminated by Americans when we stopped spelling things like encyclopædia.
== Jez ==
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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.
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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...
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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Correction: it was terminated by American Quakers who thought that the "a" and "e" were not leaving enough room for the Holy Spirit.
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?
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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 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.
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