At one point, apparently it was fashionable amongst teens to type characters by using pinyin and always selecting the first character in the list of options, regardless of the intended actual character. That was essentially phonetic writing, but as a result, texts were incomprehensible to parents (the desired outcome).
It's the same logic as writing a sentence like this:
Y U gna be late
It's grammatically completely incorrect. But you can still understand it.
When it comes to chinese/japanese characters, many have the same phonetic reading. So you can do something similar, while selecting the wrong characters.
I think it's just easier for beginners (or teenagers) to go from phonetic to meaning. I guess advanced Chinese readers don't even read the words out loud in their head and go directly to meaning. I'm beginner/intermediate at Chinese and surprisingly, I noticed that my pinyin often seems better than many Chinese natives.
The real answer to your question: the most commonly used Chinese input method allows you to type the first pinyin letters only, and the algorithm will figure out the most likely Chinese characters you want.
It's not "the parents" can't read it. It's that people who don't use electronics have a harder time reading it.
Read the nonsense text aloud and then listen. Presumably with practice, you don't actually to actually speak aloud, and your 'inner monologue' voice is sufficient.
As a relatively well-educated Japanese native speaker, I too experience this problem when writing Japanese on paper - being unable to write many kanji characters by hand. I am no exception among Japanese native speakers. While the author seems to interpret this problem as something crucial, I question whether it truly is.
The orthography of Mandarin and Japanese includes an alphabet consisting of thousands of characters, the majority of which comprise dozens of strokes. Although East Asian people have higher IQ scores on average, we are not superhuman - our memory capacity is bound by human limits, and the decreased frequency of actually writing kanji on paper has naturally resulted in our forgetting how to write many of them. Is this surprising?
Furthermore, orthography is not part of language in a fundamental sense - it's merely a useful tool that accompanies a language. Therefore, I do not see the writing system becoming less stable as a significant issue. Consider Korea as an example: they used to use kanji in their orthography but have almost completely eliminated it with virtually no adverse effects. While laypeople often assume orthography is an integral part of a language, this is just not the case from the linguistic perspective.
If you consider that a lot of people using the Latin alphabet does use the cellphone autocomplete to check how to write a word used infrequently...
So I would say this text is biased by the "western" view of the writer, something that could be categorized as "Orientalism". A study about this phenomenon is valid, is important. But this post is not a good study.
But autocomplete even for basic words? My wife is Chinese. I'll never forget when she was helping her family write some formal letter in Chinese in Microsoft Word and she simply could not input the numbers 1, 2, and 3 in Chinese because she forgot how. And I know this may be apples and oranges because this is keyboard input versus writing on paper but as a programmer who can type at a moderate pace since I was a kid (~120wpm) this was perplexing for me! And similar to the article, she's an Ivy league grad. Similarly, when she's communicating with her family via WeChat half the time she simply sends audio messages instead of text messages. I'm pretty surprised this method is so popular instead of some voice-to-text google assistant type system.
I am not from Asia so I would trust more what our wife has to say than me.
But I would argue that it is common for people living in a country with different language from they native language to forget how to write or even say some simple words. There's a good active effort to learn a new language.
AFAIK (maybe someone can correct or confirm) it is essential for studying law in Korea. To avoid ambiguity with identically sounding words, Chinese characters are used in law.
It seems there's room for "legal innovation" there, by providing definitions early on in various texts to disambiguate, and then sticking to them throughout the text!?
I assume it's already done anyway for some terms. Why isn't this more widespread?
I'm studying Japanese at the moment and what struck me is how important context is, particularly in reading. You need to know where to read 1-3 letters ahead to read a word and interpret it. That's not really a thing in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way.
I think digital is a big crutch for Japanese/Chinese because you have input methods that help you write what you want to say, so you don't actually need to remember how to write kanji as much in daily life.
> You need to know where to read 1-3 letters ahead to read a word and interpret it. That's not really a thing in English
It happens in a English too, where you see a chunk of letters and mis-predict which word they represent in a way which affects its meaning [0], and sometimes that will also affect pronunciation. [1]
An example from the link:
> "The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families."
A reader linearly scanning along doesn't know whether "complex" is an adjective or a noun, and then whether "houses" is a noun or a verb. I'm pretty sure all human languages have similar problems where a certain amount of look-ahead or backtracking is necessary.
For another example to highlight pronunciation changes, consider the ambiguity of:
"I saw the rhino live in the zoo."
That could mean that the rhino was doing the verb of living, in which it rhymes with "give", or it could also mean that the speaker was seeing it in-person, in which case it rhymes with "drive".
Yes, this happens in English too, but to find examples like this you have to go to Wikipedia, or wrack your brain and see if you remember one. In Japanese, almost every other word is like this.
As is usual for Japanese, this sentence contains a mix of Chinese(-origin) ("kanji", e.g. 袋 小 路 文 法 的) as well as Japanese phonetic ("kana", e.g. ふくろこうじぶん) characters. Usually, when in a multi-kanji word, kanji are pronounced with (a time-changed version of) Chinese pronunciation. For example, 文法 is "bun-pou", not "fumi-nori" or something else. However, the first character of the article title (fukurokoubunji), 袋, is "fukuro" here despite being in a four-kanji word. Further, 小 is "kou" here, which is nonstandard enough that its dictionary entry does not even list it as a possible pronunciation! [1] Then 路文 are both in Chinese pronunciation (ji-bun), but this does not necessarily make sense because the word is not split in two down the middle, but instead as 袋-小路-文 (bag-lane-sentence, where bag-lane is English cul-de-sac / blind alley). [2]
Now fukurokoubunji is a bit of a specialised word, so it might not be a great example. But in the rest of the sentence, we find 文, which is always pronounced "bun" (sentence) here, even when appearing separately, but could also (though more rarely) have been "fumi" (letter) — nothing but semantical context helps distinguish. Then we have 正しい "tada-shi-i", where 正 could have been "sei" as in 正確 "sei-kaku" (accurate) or "shou" as in 正直 "shou-jiki" (honest), but it isn't just because しい come after. Similarly, 生 in 生じやすい is "shou"(-ji-ya-su-i), which is conjugated from the base form 生じる "shou-ji-ru" and could have been "u" (生まれる "u-ma-re-ru") or "sei" (先生 "sen-sei") or "i" (生きる "i-ki-ru") or more (生 is somewhat infamous for having many readings). And I could go on: 書 could be "syo" (文書 "bun-syo") but is "ka" (書き出して "ka-ki-da-shi-te" conjugated from 書く "ka-ku").
This is a bit like the comments elsewhere here noting that the Chinese word for "sneeze" is a bad example because it happens to have so uncommon characters in it — and then people point to examples like "onomatopoeia" and "diarrhoea" as similar tricky examples in English. I can't comment on Chinese, but existence does not necessarily say much about frequency.
[2]: This analysis of 袋小路文 is not completely etymologically honest. By the etymology ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B0%8F%E8%B7%AF#Etymology_... ), we see that the "kouji" pronunciation of 小路 is really a corruption of ancient "ko-michi", which is a consistent Japanese-Japanese reading of the two characters. However, because "ji" is also an (uncommon) Chinese reading of 路, if you don't know the etymology of the word, the re-analysis is appropriate in the context of how hard it is to read the written language.
> However, because "ji" is also an (uncommon) Chinese reading of 路,
It's not a Chinese reading at all (as you can tell because it's ... wildly out of place with the the actual Chinese-derived readings ろ・る, onyomi are supposed to have semi-regular correspondences with each other and with Chinese Chinese readings). It's really just rendaku of ち, the basic root of fossilized compound みち (with still-salient prefix "honorific" み).
But most importantly, you never really see either 袋 or 小路 and expect them to have any other readings; maybe you'd expect しょうろ if you don't know the latter, but unless you're already literate in a Chinese or are blindly memorizing kanji tables, the other reading of 袋 (たい) probably isn't even salient, because it's one of those kanji that almost always takes its kunyomi even in compounds.
Side note, the line about u-onbin kind of buries the implication that this is a loanword from western Japanese, which is the culprit of several quasi-systematic but unevenly distributed divergences from regular sound changes.
In English you have to know a word in order to pronounce it.
The “ou” diphthong in “hound” and “double” or “would” is pronounced differently. Or “ieu” in “lieutenant” vs “lieu”.
Or “oo” in “poor” vs “root”
Or “berry” in “berry” vs “strawberry”
I could go on forever. There’s no other western language I know of that behaves like that.
Fruit flies like a banana. English has its own ambiguity, so it isn’t really that different.
I can only write Chinese via an IME these days. For one, I’m left handed so writing characters was always a struggle since stroke order worked against me, but it’s mostly how I only use Chinese anyways.
I told my wife our kid should learn to write via an IME as well and she was just horrified about that, though. None of the teaching material really supports it.
And yet, given the definition and language of origin, most high-level spelling bee participants can make a pretty good guess at spelling a word they may have never seen before.
English is phonetic, it just borrows its pronunciation rules from many differing (and sometimes directly opposed) other languages.
Very true - and every demonstration of “English is hard to spell/pronounce” focuses directly on the exceptions which exaggerates the problem. One analysis I’ve seen puts it that with a single set of rules, 59% of a sample corpus of 5000 English words can be pronounced perfectly from the spelling (of course, there will be regional accent and dialect differences so that percentage will be a bit different for each one) and up to 85% can be pretty close with only slight errors.
Then there’s a percentage where they’re just direct borrowings from other languages and you need to have an idea of how that language pronounces words (especially French), so really only 10-15% or so of English words end up being true exceptions.
Oh hurrah, I think that link is what I've been looking for for nearly a decade. I ran across it, or something like it, a long time ago and could never find it again. I don't remember all the special syntax, I think the one I found was written more in plain English with more examples (and I don't think the one I found back then mentioned ghoti either), but can't be sure it's been so long - maybe it was just that page and I don't remember it. It does have around the same number of rules I remember though.
And you still only get 59% of the way to the correct pronunciation.
As a non native speaker of English, and a native speaker of a phonetic language, I strongly object to the notion that it's easy to guess English word pronunciation by just reading it.
Not so much in terms of meaning but in terms of pronunciation, sometimes you also need to read ahead in English to know how a certain word is pronounced. For example:
"I read a book yesterday."
and
"I read a book every night."
Depending on the context that follows, "read" is pronounced differently. The same thing happens for "present" and "record". Admittedly, these are exceptions to the rule.
Posted up above, here's a collection of English pronunciation rules that English speakers have internalized so well they can't generally explain them: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
"Ghoti" is mentioned a few times there, but basically "fish" is a nonsensical pronunciation that breaks several rules. There's a reason (well, a few reasons) why if you ask English speakers how to pronounce "ghoti" and they've never seen it before, they'll probably all guess some variation of "go-tee" or "go-tie".
I've been (very) casually learning Japanese for a couple years, and almost every time I think I find something "weird" that Japanese does, I almost immediately think of a very similar example in English.
The alphabet is a pretty awesome invention (alphabet > kana-style syllabary > kanji-style logography) but English writing is at least as complex as JP writing, just in different dimensions.
JP's phonetics, for example, are dead simple compared to English's, but they do a good job making up for it by having a few thousand Kanji.
Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. It's like an intermediate language (IL) of mind. Many studentds in China can understand a subject but had the pronouciation completely wrong. In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were.
Chinese characters also had the benifits of photographic memory, presumably you are trained with the right method. The key is to detach the "listening/speaking" phonetics from the characters, wire your brain directly to visual ideograms along with reading/writing. Plus the grammar don't have conjugation nor declension, without the tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness and shit, which makes the scripts very fast to parse. I'd argue reading a paragraph of text is extremely fast in Chinese. You can grasp the general meaning from a large chunk of text without sequencially reading every word. It's like one of these novel apps that hightlight important vowel from English sentences for fast reading but still, you have to go to the translation layers of recall - sound - meaning process.
Sadly this art is lost because ideograms are fading in favor of PinYin in cyber world. The rise of shot-vids make literacy an expensive skill.
> In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were.
This is, in fact, the default stance held by most non-CCP linguists. If you read what experts in the Chinese language family say, it's basically "Chinese languages are mutually unintelligible and more distinct than the Romance languages, but because the government of China says they're just dialects and we (as linguists) recognize that the line between dialect and language is basically arbitrary, we'll call them dialects so we can just study the languages and avoid getting sucked into nasty political discussions."
As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy—and this works both to define distinct languages that are otherwise mutually intelligible and to merge dialects that aren't.
> Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet.
Yes, they are. Modern Hanzi are a very bad phonetic alphabet.
While a minority of characters are indeed pure logograms (小，大，田，etc.), most modern Chinese words are two-syllabic. And syllables often don't have meaningful connection to the meaning of the word: 东西 （"east-west" literally, but means "a thing, object"), some characters have lost _any_ semantic meaning in most words (“子”), and many more characters can only be used as a part of another word ("bound forms", e.g. "据").
Classical Chinese was more logographic and less phonetic, but modern Chinese is not really close to it anymore.
alphabets, universally have one common property: they are sortable.
I challenge you to sort Chinese characters.
This is an idea from James Gleick's The Information. The Chinese may never be able to invent morse code alone, because encoding Chinese scripts is extremely hard, even today (think of all those massive code-points in CJK Unicode, with dups and errors)
Chinese text on the Internet may have some emulation of phonemes, but it's never systematically standarized. It just borrows some aspects here or there.
The sort order of the alphabet symbols is arbitrary, but since all of the words are composed of an ordered set of symbols then sorting the words relative to one another is trivial.
> Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. It's like an intermediate language (IL) of mind.
I realized this in Taiwan when I started being able to recognize characters, know what it means in English, and have absolutely no idea what the word is in Mandarin. The written language is almost orthogonal to the spoken one.
> The written language is almost orthogonal to the spoken one.
I'm almost certain that this is true of Chinese script (after all, it was and is used for writing many languages!), but it might not be deducible based on this sort of experience.
I say thus because I had a very similar experience after I had to spend a month in the UAE. Thanks to frequent bilingual signs, I started recognizing common Arabic words, but I had no idea what the words are in Arabic or how to say them. But as far as I know, written Arabic is not at all orthogonal to spoken Arabic, every word is written exactly as it sounds.
OTOH, the pinyin-based typing systems on computers and phones has been a godsend to students of Chinese.
I started to learn Chinese in the 80s at my high school and then in the 90s in Taiwan and was laughably bad at writing. Literally, people would laugh at my characters not only because they looked terrible, but also because I was using the wrong stroke order.
Now, it is possible for me to get away with not knowing how to write characters or the stroke order. Using pinyin and recognizing the characters (or certain radicals) is enough to take me very far in social media, texting, etc.
For instance, for one of the phrases in the article ti2bi3wang4zi4 knowing the last character (zi, 字) and kind of remembering wang is enough to recognize the entire colloquialism when I type in the pinyin tibiwangzi: 提筆忘字
In Taiwan they have a TV game show featuring college students, basically like a crossword featuring 4-character colloquialisms and other phrases that have obscure characters. It's quite fun for the audience to watch, almost everyone is writing characters in the air in front of them as they try to remember the hard characters.
Yes, I endorse his research. As a Taiwanese, I use Traditional Chinese daily in Taiwan, primarily on computers and mobile phones, but I can’t write many of the Chinese characters he mentioned in the article.
I can share a more personal story: after spending a year studying abroad in Britain, I almost forgot how to write Chinese characters—even my own name—since I hadn't written any for over a year! However, when I returned to Taiwan, I was able to recall most of them within minutes. I consider this a temporary phenomenon that fades quickly with focus and a bit of practice.
If this seems oddly familiar, you may actually have read it before, and no plagiarism is involved. Moser wrote the beginning of this article in the middle of his classic essay, ”Why Chinese is So Damn Hard” https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
> Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??
嚔 is an unusual character, though. Not just in that it's not often used, but also because it's construction is atypical. It would be like Ph.D. students forgetting how to spell "onomatopoeia," which, yes, wouldn't be surprising.
The sneeze example is contrived because in English, sneeze is both phonetic and a word with common occurence.
A better example might involve a common English word with a wierd, non-phonetic spelling. A word that you might imagine it forgivable for even someone who recieved an English PhD to misspell. After all Chinese is a seperate language from English and it is neccessary for it to be evaluated in its own context.
If you think this definetly couldn't happen in English, take a look again at this post -- for it contains eight outright, unambiguous, misspellings of common English words that I would not be surprised if even an English PhD from Harvard made on occassion, especially if your choice of three students were unlucky and they were having embarassingly bad days. (After all, English PhDs isn't the study of spelling, it's the study of literature).
It may be contrived, but it still highlights the key difference.
Even if sneeze was a word that you were taught once in school and hadn't used for 30 years, you would still likely get close to the correct spelling from the sound (sneaze, snease, sneeze), and seeing the misspelling also helps with recall and to self correct.
This is the "virtual circle" of speaking/listening -> reading -> writing -> referred to by the author, which is not possible with Chinese.
It's true that there are some weird non-phonetic English words that PhDs would likely misspell, but it's not 100% of the language and you still could at least make an attempt.
It's possible to just write Chinese in phonetic form (e.g. pinyin), which bypasses this issue, but you have a secondary problem, which is the extremely narrow range of syllables (~400 * 4/5 tones = 1600-2000), resulting in quite ambiguous text.
I don't think that Chinese people have problems knowing how to spell a character as different characters share the same pronunciation (more or less) if they have the same phonetic component[1]. So pinyin helps literally zero.
What is harder is to distinguish the meaning of all these characters. Let's take this set as an example: 里理哩鲤鯉俚娌悝锂鋰
Ok, they are all pronounced the same, but guessing or knowing all their meanings is a different game. "鲤" has to be a fish that's pronounced li3. That might still be easy, but the more abstract the meaning-giving character radical is, the harder it becomes to distinguish all of them.
> how many people drink an espresso every day and think it has an x in it.
Arguably, "espresso" isn't an english word, but spelling it with an "x" as "expresso" isn't as incorrect as you may think. There's two main theories behind which word to use: "espresso" meaning to "press out" the coffee, or "expresso" meaning "expressly made for the customer" as it's quicker to make than a filter coffee. This is further confused by the Latin root being "exprimire" meaning "to press or squeeze out".
Well in other comments, native Chinese speakers brought up that when you forget how to write a character you just write a homonym and readers can guess by the context - which is how Chinese speech works anyway.
Yes a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and well... diarrhoea is diarrhea
My point was addressing "tsinghua students..." and "Harvard students..." unless they were literary scholars or grammarians their wield of the language may be at the level of "educated" but still plenty fallible. I'm sure those of us who did any post grad would have met people who were smart in a given axis and otherwise very ordinary along the other axes.
This is not analagous. The sound of every English word give clues – and often precise guidance - on how to write it, but the sound of a Chinese word typically offers no hint of how to write it. If you give me some obscure English word, say "persiflage", I might have no idea what it means, but I can probably spell it. But if you give a Chinese speaker 馘 (góu) in context, almost no one will be able to write it, even if they know the precise meaning ("to cut off the left ear of the slain").
I would guess that most Harvard students could spell those misspelled words in your comment correctly if you asked them to directly. When reading we know what the word is supposed to be and we correct it in our mind to the intended spelling. If anything it’s a testament to the resiliency of phonetic alphabets - but more so it’s illustrative of how English pronunciation has deviated from spellings that were mostly set with the advent of printing in England. Most of the misspellings in your comment involve misplaced letters that are not directly pronounced.
Strictly in terms phonetics, why couldn’t “weird” be spelled “wierd” when English also has “tier”? I’m guessing the Normans are to thank for turning “wyrd” into “weird”.
Therein lies the resiliency of phonetic orthography: despite the misspellings the sound represented by the words did not significantly change thus most readers would never even notice.
If anything it’s a statement on how the orthography of English in particular doesn’t well match the phonetic structure of the language - something due to a confluence of factors in English several hundred years ago, including the rise of printing.
Even with the misspellings it's obvious what words you meant. If someone forgets how to write "嚔" are they just missing a few strokes but it's obvious what they actually meant? Or do they have zero clue what it's supposed to look like?
From what I've heard people say (and what I've seen), the most common way to handle it is to simply write another character that sounds the same. In other words, the characters can be used as phonetic elements when it's needed. It looks weird (in the same way that spelling words phonetically in English can look word), but it's doable.
That's for situations where they had to write something by hand but didn't have their phone with them to check (otherwise they can just spend a second to look at the character), which isn't a common occurrence.
It depends, but it's not uncommon to completely forget the entire character. If you sort of remember it, then the muscle memory in your hands often helps to finish the character correctly once you start, at least that's what I've found and heard from others.
Remember the english -> pirate translator? Simularily, per your graf, a "spell wrecker" tool, witch introduces mispellings and other errs, could be amusing.
I would honestly be astonished if a 4 English department PhD students who were all native speakers of English could all not spell onomatopoeia. I’d expect 2 of the 4 could in the absolute worst case.
Spelling is simply not as hard as remembering hanzi, even in English.
Would it not be possible that the three students did not want to embarrass the author by showing their knowledge? I sometimes get that behavior from Chinese and Japanese colleagues when I am supposed to know something but temporarily forgot it (or just cannot access it at the time).
I've seen my wife (Chinese) and her friends (also Chinese) have this same problem with the exact same word "sneeze", so I'm inclined to believe the author.
The fact that 嚔/sneeze is usually the go to example means it ends up becoming the exception that proves the rule. Most other characters are much more easily remembered.
If you learn languages you quickly notice that knowing the 99% most frequent words still means that you need to look up a word every paragraph or two and that you have trouble expressing yourself. To write Chinese you need to know several thousand characters, forgetting just a few dozen can be quite annoying when you try to write nontrivial texts.
Being able to write a character by hand, being able to type it up, and being able to read it are all different things. I doubt many Chinese would be thrown off from reading or typing 打喷嚏.
I actually did a deep dive into the issue of unfamiliar characters coming up when reading, and how people handle them. I won't go into all the details, but the general takeaway is:
1. Unfamiliar characters can actually be quite rare or quite common depending on the material you're reading.
2. It's not much of an issue for people either way.
The shrimp example is kind of strange. Like you said, it's an extremely common character, and not a difficult one either. But beyond that, if you look at it he got the radical, 虫, correct. The phonetic element, 下, is a fundamental character that I doubt anyone forgets to write.
It just seems like such an odd outlier example. Like talking about a friend that spells "been" as "bin." I'm sure it could happen, but it's not indicative of a broader trend.
The story was reported by Victor Mair, though, who is extremely opposed to using characters and often exaggerates the issues with them.
Personally, I've seen a lot of Chinese people's written notes, and I don't think I've ever seen them resort to pinyin, even among people that didn't go to college. I just asked a few Chinese friends about this, and they told me they never resort to pinyin either.
As a Chinese native speaker, I should admit that I forgot how to write them ("sneeze" characters 喷嚏) before I saw them just now. One of the reason, I think, is they are used quite often in oral Chinese, but rarely in written Chinese. And those characters are not easy to write, as you see.
No, they really just forgot the characters. I lived in Japan for the better part of a decade and it isn't at all uncommon. There were many times when I explicitly asked natives to recognize or help me with a Kanji and they struggled as well. I doubt everyone's been systematically lying when you genuinely ask for help.
The reason is just digital input really. Pinyin and Romaji typing have become so common that a lot of people write Hanzi/Kanji by hand less and less and it's so complicated of a skill there's really no other way to get it in your brain other than practice. I even notice it myself, I easily recognize 10x more characters than I can accurately write.
Happens all the time to Japanese people, too. There's a core set of characters that are well remembered, then there is a set of characters that you can remember most strokes of (so that someone else can read it) and then there's the stuff where you just have no idea.
Of course, you _can_ escape to Hiragana if you're so inclined, but then you would show that you don't know the character - so it's just avoided.
That’s a pretty good point… if I saw ‘three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard’ forget how to write ‘sneeze’, I would assume they were lunatics pretending, not that they genuinely forgot how to write the word.
Does that imply learning the advanced literary culture, that is usually associated with prestige academia, has a vastly higher threshold in Chinese than in English?
It’s pretty disturbing for language itself to be a potentially retarding force on learning.
All three PhD's were perfectly capable of communicating the word for sneeze and also recognize it in writting. They just couldn't write it exactly.
I don't think it has a slowing effect. Except maybe by adding annoying/useless classes for mid/primary students - which is just par for course everywhere else. I can name 3 objectively completely useless classes from my european youth (plus one in college) that were only there because 'culture'.
How does your assessment of the relative usefulness of ‘classes’ from youth relate to the possible existence of a retarding effect arising from language differences?
A better example than sneeze might be diarrhoea. In Chinese this is very easy - 拉肚子 - but I'm sure there are English speakers who might forget the spelling for diarrhoea if they're having a bad day.
English speakers perceive it as a native word, not a Greek one.
There are lots of examples of this, where English has a foreign-sounding word for something whereas German has a Germanic one. For example oxygen vs. Sauerstoff.
Mao and the party nearly adopted pinyin as the national alphabet but stepped back from the brink.
I remember the great Peking->Beijing uplift. Reading "China reconstructs" magazines there were suggestions it was coming, and then it just went away. BBC newsreaders explained it was the new official look. Like Turkey-> Türkiye.
I suspect all syllabery/ideogram scripts have this latent problem. At 2,500 ideograms for "literate" there's a lot of potential to lose non core elements. "Educated" means over 5,000 heading to 10,000 and the complete set is north of 40,000 from what I understand. I can't imagine the investment in time to get there.
Some years ago I saw street-signs in China that had both Mandarin characters and also alphabetical versions, and I couldn't understand why they would go so far and then omit the accent marks.
No, those are not the same, because Chinese is a tonal language. [0] Taking Pinyin [1] and erasing the accent-marks creates ambiguity between several different words.
The English sign-equivalent would be... Well, something so dumb that nobody does it. Like perhaps deleting the ascenders and descenders of letters dbqp so that they look like oooo, which doesn't even help with horizontal space.
English equivalent would be writing something like "Aldwych", "Leicester Square" or "River Thames" on a sign, and expecting me, a foreigner, to pronounce it correctly.
China is highly competitive, with a history of using ‘merit’ based admission tests.
The system/barriers were setup (as one’s always are) by incumbents, and the way they did it (while continuing to present it as ‘merit’ based) was to lean heavily on tests that require extensive memorization and tutoring, because only the wealthy can afford it.
This is one obvious sign of that. After all, who has time to memorize 40k different characters?
That seems a bit made up tbh. I’ve worked with a fair number of Chinese overachievers (both in domestic China and abroad) and family background/affluence weren’t even remotely as much of a factor compared to the US or India (except for the IITs). Also, I noticed there were many many cases of brilliant young people rising through the ranks of the academic system in China compared to India for example where teachers often simply would not show up in public schools.
Personal background: I worked and studied in the US, I worked in China and I studied in India
I think they mean historic (as in pre-1911 China).
And they aren't wrong, as even major China scholars like Yasheng Huang and Yuhua Wang point out that the Imperial Civil Service in China was stacked against merit due to structural issues that biased in favor of incumbents.
That said, similar issues continue to persist in China to this day due to the Zhongkao.
Specifically, if you didn't attend a academic high school (which only accepts around 45-55% of Zhongkao takers) you wouldn't be prepared for the Gaokao unless it was out of pocket at a cram school (which are now technically banned, but were anyhow exorbitantly expensive in a country where the median household income is $4,000). And if you couldn't pass the Gaokao, you couldn't attend university.
Furthermore, Academic High Schools tend to be few and far between, yet take the lion's share of resources unlike Vocational High Schools which most Chinese attend - but not the ones you meet in an air conditioned office unless you order from Meituan. In the vocational schools you see similar issues of teacher absence and lack of pedagogy.
The failure of the VET system in China has been a major sticking point in Chinese policymaking recently and a lot of domestic research is being done to understand why it failed [0][1][2]
In Germany only about 30% of high-school kids qualify academic high-school (merit-based) and are eligible to apply for university after two-years of exams that determine your final grade (and chances). There are literally only public schools.
I think you describe that it is very similar today in China after they banned the private tutoring a couple of years back. So, we are somehow back to “work hard on not to unequal grounds and your personal merit/luck will determine your future”.
Thanks for sharing additional detail and it resembles what I remember - but it does not seem to be “instrumented in a way to keep certain groups out of academia based on income or social standing”.
Imho a 30% ratio for university graduates is a sweet spot for society. We have great (free) vocational training programs in Germany that empower all those who did not go to university to make money quicker and they more often that not end up in financially better situations. University often pays off only for top university graduates once they pass 35/40 years of age.
> In Germany only about 30% of high-school kids qualify academic high-school (merit-based) and are eligible to apply for university
Overall 50% of the population are eligible to apply for university since completing higher tier education at a vocational school or completing specialized courses at "lesser" schools can also fullfill the acceptance requirements for related fields of study.
The main difference is Germany actually puts money in vocational education and values it socially.
China does not.
China's education spend is only 4.1% of GDP, and much of that is diverted to academic high schools and universities. Furthermore, vocational students are viewed as "bad students" and good faculty prefer to join academic high schools or private high schools due to a better salary and social standing. Furthermore, even SOE factories (the traditional hirer of vocational students) in China now prefer hiring college graduates instead of vocational students because of a glut of college graduates due to cultural shifts in the 2000s-2010s, anti-vocational student bias, and college graduates trying to get a stable "iron rice bowl" (to use the Korean term) government job.
> I think you describe that it is very similar today in China after they banned the private tutoring a couple of years back. So, we are somehow back to “work hard on not to unequal grounds and your personal merit/luck will determine your future”
I think that was the aim of the legislation, but in action it didn't help social mobility much, because upper income households just resorted to private or online tutoring, and everyone ignores it.
It's not like legislators send their kids to vocational schools - they also prefer to send them to academic or top private schools so that they can then attend university (either domestically or abroad).
> but it does not seem to be “instrumented in a way to keep certain groups out of academia based on income or social standing”.
In face value it doesn't, but in action urban academic high schools and primary schools get the lions share of funding, and until recently those are gatekept to people holding a hukou for that city.
This meant that urban migrants who weren't able to convert their rural hukou to an urban hukuo (because that meant losing their rural landholdings which is the only asset of worth they have), and their kids were stuck either in underfunded rural schools or crappy private primary schools in an urban area.
This has a significant impact on social mobility to this day, and is a major reason why China's median household income remains very low. Urban China's median household income is $6,000, but rural China's is around $3,000. This means the bottom half of urban society in China and much of rural China's society does not have much of a chance of upward mobility because they can't pay for private tutoring nor can they afford a good private high school if their kid fails the Zhongkao.
Kid’s ability to make it through the ranks of academia in my personal anecdotal evidence depends less on financial ability or social standing in China compared to the US or India.
I agree that it is merit driven above anything else - not sure I would agree that this is favoring wealthy kids/certain social class in a more disproportionate way than what we see in India or the US.
Now, I will say that neither university nor high school in China or India imho prepare kinds for success in life or the corporate world. Europe (with a hands-off “you get no help and will just struggle your way through life and learn quick”) and the US (“here are actual experts dedicated to help you succeed) seem imho to produce capable graduates for the corporate world.
Urban cities of course don't want to hand out urban hukou easily because they don't want an influx of migrants straining social services.
But conversely, a lot of rural hukou holders do not want to give up rural hukou because it gives retirement benefits at 55 and is a requirement in order to keep their rural landholding.
This is why you have migrants with a rural hukou working in urban China but not gaining an urban hukou.
The problem with hukou is fundamentally a social safety net problem - there is little to no social safety net in China, so the "migrant to urban area with rural hukou" is the least bad option out of multiple bad options (keep rural hukou and live in rural China barely eking a living or give up rural hukou and lose the only appreciating asset you had along with benefits at 55).
In essence, the lion's share of Chinese development is overly concentrated in a handful of urban agglomerations, and isn't spreading to rural China where 45-50% of Chinese still live to this day.
Just making urban hukou easier to adopt (which is something that multiple municipalities slowly started doing in the late 2010s) isn't enough to solve the social mobility issue.
Parents won't give up rural hukou if it also means losing your landholding and early retirement stipend benefits.
If you're a migrant worker from a rural household, you are most likely an unskilled laborer and are earning around $300/month, with dad working on a construction site or Meituan and mom working in a factory doing unskilled assembly or service job.
Around $150 is spent on incidentals because living in an urban area is expensive, an additional $100 is sent back to your family (grandma, grandpa, kids because the one child policy was largely ignored in rural China) back home in your rural town, and you might have $50 left over to save for retirement, healthcare, etc.
This is not enough to buy urban property, which is the asset class that appreciated the most in China, and this means the only large asset you have is your rural landholding. Furthermore, that early retirement benefit means you're earning an additional $15-20/month while continuing to work as a laborer or a Meituan delivery driver.
Fundamentally, salaries are too low in China and the social safety net is nonexistent, and this is what is causing the issues like overproduction, deflation, and sagging consumer demand which we are seeing nowadays.
The only way to solve this problem is to either expand the welfare system dramatically (thus incentivizing the bottom half to spend more by having to save less) or increase wages (thus incentivizing the bottom half to spend more by allowing them to save at the same rate while spending more). Working on increasing the quality of life in rural China would also help dramatically.
Sadly, Chinese leadership at the top level continues to ignore social welfare spending and rural China due to financial and moral concerns.
Given the collapsing demographics in China, many of those rural hukou holders are obviously not going to receive the promised retirement benefits. The surplus resources to fund those payments don't exist so either the retirement age will be raised or benefits will be cut (either officially, or unofficially by just not sending payments and ignoring any protests).
Retirement benefits are the last thing the CCP touches because tens of millions of Chinese heavily rely on it already.
China is authoritarian, but the CCP absolutely does take public sentiment into account, and policies that have the chance of causing mass protests and discontent do get rolled back.
Zero Covid is a perfect example of this, as it was hastily rolled back after the wave of protests following the apartment fire in Urumqi due to Xinjiang CCP's hard Zero Covid enforcement.
And this is why China had not raised the retirement age until in the past few weeks despite trying for decades, and anyhow kicked that can down the line to 15 years.
I understand the concern over public sentiment but where will the revenue come from to pay those benefits? The ratio of workers to retirees is inevitably going to go way down and it seems unrealistic to expect that the government can borrow its way out of the problem. The retirees will have to take a hit somehow.
> where will the revenue come from to pay those benefits
A mixture of bonds/borrowing, federal bailouts, and (painful) corporate tax reform.
This is a major reason why provincial law enforcement has recently begun cracking down on unpaid corporate back taxes recently, because social spend is largely devolved to the provincial level.
The property crisis in China is itself a result of the retirement fund issue, as until recently provincial government's only financial lever was land sales, and retirement funds are largely the domain of provinces following Deng's reforms.
Once you get to ~5000 characters you can read most common texts. Vanishingly few people will know ~40,000 characters; a large fraction of those are obscure or ancient characters that only show up in historical texts.
This is comically incorrect. Even the article plainly states that you need to know ~1500 characters to be considered literate in Chinese, with sixth graders required to learn ~2500 characters. A quick perusal of practically any Chinese-language website (e.g. https://zh.wikipedia.org/) will quickly disabuse you of the notion that there are "only 200+ Chinese ideograms".
You might be conflating "ideogram" with "radical", i.e. components of characters. There's probably a few hundred of those defined, but they're more like pieces of characters rather than whole ones. Combining radicals produces very different characters that have totally different meanings; learning the radicals alone buys you very little.
There are thousands of characters, and you have to know thousands. There are tens of thousands of characters in existence, although only highly educated folks will know anywhere near 10000 characters.
Um, no. If you're talking about radicals (of which there are generally considered to be 214), yes, but you can't read / write in general if you only know those. Also, of those 214, a good chunk aren't standalone words. You're never going to see 疒 or 丶 by itself.
You won't have the words for "I" or "you". You might be able to read "melon" but not "fruit". You could read "papaya" and "corn" but not "vegetable". You could read "beef" or "lamb" but not "chicken". You could read "small" but not "few". You wouldn't be able to read "hello" or "goodbye", "happy" or "sad". But you'd be able to count 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, 18, 20...
The fact that characters are made up of radicals does make them easier to learn, though. There are ~2000 characters in the core vocabulary, sure - but it's not like you have to learn to write every one of them individually, just like you don't have to learn the spelling of every English word from scratch. There's common patterns.
That's understating the actual number of distinct components you need to know, but even so, just memorizing the individual ideograms still isn't enough to allow you to read Chinese with meaningful fluency.
Since the sound changes that had taken place over the two to three thousand
years since the Old Chinese period have been extensive, in some instances,
the phono-semantic natures of some compound characters have been
obliterated, with the phonetic component providing no useful phonetic
information at all in the modern language. For instance, 逾 (yú; /y³⁵/;
'exceed'), 輸 (shū; /ʂu⁵⁵/; 'lose', 'donate'), 偷 (tōu; /tʰoʊ̯⁵⁵/; 'steal',
'get by') share the phonetic 俞 (yú; /y³⁵/; 'agree') but their
pronunciations bear no resemblance to each other in Standard Chinese or any
other variety.
Or, consider 亭 (ting2), 叮 (ding1), 成 (cheng2), 打 (da3) which all supposedly derive their sound from 丁 (ding1) per the analysis at https://github.com/cjkvi/cjkvi-ids/. You can't just memorize the components and read all of these as "ding".
And beyond that, that doesn't help with being able to write. You can't just say "oh, I don't remember exactly how to write this word, but I'm just going to throw in some ideograph with the right phonetic component next to the radical and my reader will just know what I mean." You can't just take 瓦 (pottery) + 平 (ping2) to invent the word for vase. 瓶 (ping2) instead uses 并 (bing1), not to be confused with 井 (jing3).
Learning the radicals is maybe the first 10% of the effort in learning how to read and write Chinese.
After that, you still have to learn how to combine the radicals in pretty much arbitrary ways to form several thousand characters. The way you combine them is sometimes related to the sound and/or meaning of the radicals, but it's not systematic at all.
The grandparent comment is massively downplaying the difficulty involved in learning to read and write Chinese.
I'd say thousands of ideograms composed by hundreds of logograms, and you can be both right (this is actually a very reduced view of what logogram is, but English is quite imprecise on this).
> Chinese people are increasingly forgetting how to write characters by hand.
For those who can’t read Chinese here, I’ll just note that this is basically the equivalent of forgetting how to spell certain words in English. For example, I can read just fine, but there are still words I’m not good at spelling.
I’m just noting this so that this problem doesn’t seem totally exotic or specific to Chinese(/Japanese).
If you can remember the word "chocolate" but not the spelling then you can guess it. You might write choklit or choclate or something but you can at least get close.
If you forget what 警察 (police officer, jing3cha2) looks like then you're just completely screwed. Maybe you can remember a radical or two but it's still just going to be wrong and not meaningfully recognisable.
I guess you could write down 景茶 (jing3cha2) and rely on the phonetics, or use a different word if you know one, but it's still wrong on a level that "choclit" just isn't.
The counter-argument would be that the person could just use the pinyin or use a digital device to get them the characters. But as the article pointed out, those are both modern conveniences. Less than 100 years old both. The script absolutely gives no clues otherwise.
Let's put it this way: We know what ancient might egyptian (most likely) sounds like because they gave their writting system the uniliterals, which are pronunciation guides for complex words. We know that they said waw, and we know what a waw sounds like. They did this probably so they would not to explode their character count from hundreds to thousands.
> I guess you could write down 景茶 (jing3cha2) and rely on the phonetics, or use a different word if you know one, but it's still wrong on a level that "choclit" just isn't.
If a non-native did this in their own way would likely look wrong, but Chinese natives do occasionally use phonics to write or to substitute some characters with others.
> However, this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character. Highly literate people are forgetting how to write the characters in words like ‘kitchen’ (厨房), ‘lips’ (嘴唇), ‘cough’ (咳嗽), and ‘broom’ (扫帚). Victor Mair (2014) provides a striking example of the severity of the character amnesia problem. The following image is of a shopping list hastily written by a social science researcher from the PRC. The writer of the list struggled to remember the characters in ‘egg’ (鸡蛋), ‘shrimp’ (虾仁), and ‘chives’ (韭菜), and simply resorted to Pinyin.
Completely common problem. Anyone that speaks multiple languages sees this everyday, there are many words in Portuguese/Spanish/English I need the spellchecker for (or even translation) to write because I don't use it as frequently in that specific language.
That is happening a lot with cooking, as I started to take it much more seriously when I moved to the US and now my cooking vocabulary in English is much better/wider than it is in my native Portuguese, so I'll frequently use words in english for stuff I should know in portuguese but don't remember.
> For those who can’t read Chinese here, I’ll just note that this is basically the equivalent of forgetting how to spell certain words in English.
I can't read Chinese, but I think the article has a better analogy: "most people can easily recognise the musical symbol for treble clef (𝄞), but very few could draw it by memory."
Nah, it's common in German too. For example, the first parts of "Widerspruch" and "wiedersehen" are said/heard the same, so you just have to learn the spelling. Many, many other examples... Although on the scale of languages German is indeed closer to phonetic spelling than some others.
But if you were asked to spell the words, you'd produce something close to what was expected, rather than drawing a blank. The question "how do you spell wiedersehen" contains in itself a lot of clues.
This feels more like "what's the Unicode character for 'full moon'?" I'd be able to recognize the result as correct, but if I don't know the answer, I just don't know.
(Of course, that goes too far in the other direction. I assume you can draw a few strokes to "get someone started" on a character and they'll pick it up, whereas most people wouldn't recognize the first half of a Unicode code point. As the grandparent poster said, it's an exotic problem that's hard to empathize with in phonetic languages)
> I assume you can draw a few strokes to "get someone started" on a character and they'll pick it up
In my experience this is not actually the case; I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half).
I guess there's several levels of character amnesia here, from "I remember half the character" to "I have no clue but I'll recognise it".
> In my experience this is not actually the case; I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half).
That one's just bizarre, since 虾 is also just the most intuitively obvious choice to form a substitute character if you do forget the right component. If anything, I don't think pinyin substitution is something you do unless you're a highly-educated computer user who deals regularly in Latin script. It's a striking "man bites dog" moment, but the one has been passed around since 2006 (cf. https://pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_refor...) and is not, as far as I can tell, indicative of any particular trend. Discreet literacy outliers in jobs where you'd expect it are ... a thing in English too: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43700153
(It's honestly weirder to see someone write jiu菜 than 9菜 too.)
I do not think that the example is good. "Wider" and "wieder" have different meanings, even if they are probably derived from the same word.
I do not know if this is true in all the German dialects, but at least some pronounce "wider" with short "i" and "wieder with long "i", so they are easy to distinguish when heard (like the difference in English between "fill" and "feel").
English and German appear to have had a similar semantic evolution for this pair of words, because "wider" means "against", while "wieder" means "again", so in both cases a single word has evolved to cover these two different meanings and the variants have become differentiated in pronunciation too.
I'm a native German speaker and i don't know of a dialect in Germany that would pronounce "Widerstand" with a short "i". Would you mind sharing which dialect you think of?
"ie" is always long. For "i" it depends on the splitting of the word, i think. I don't know if this is a concept in other languages too. I think the rule is that if the "i" is at a split, then it is long, but i'm not sure and there are always exceptions to every rule in German. Consider "Schnit|zel", "Lis|te" (short) vs "Bi|bel", "Wi|der|stand" (long).
I have worked for some time in Germany and this is how some coworkers pronounced it, but I do not know where were they from.
From what you say I assume that the literary pronunciation is also with long "i", which is good to know.
Perhaps they were influenced by the different spelling, because I have seen this phenomenon in other countries, where despite a mostly phonetic writing some words were spelled differently than pronounced, for etymological or other reasons, and then the pronunciation of those words by many people has shifted, matching the spelling and not the traditional pronunciation.
I don't know any German, so I can't comment on this, but I'll add that the concept of a spelling contest (like we have in English) wouldn't make sense in a lot of languages because the spelling of words are so obvious/consistent.
Finnish does this very well too. There is only a few tricky parts, but in general the spelling and pronunciation match. And if they don't, obvious solution is to write as word is pronounced. Which is a drift, but I think it is more desirable way.
If you need an example of a germanic language that has a very regular phonetic spelling I think Dutch is a better example than German. German has a lot of idiosyncrasies, because the spelling tries to preserve the etymology of the words. In Dutch they don't bother trying to preserve a word's history, everything is written as it sounds. (With a handful easy to memorize exceptions)
Hmmm not so literate people (or just children) make a lot of mistakes writing Spanish because a bunch of letters are pronounced the same. And then the “h” when not preceded by a “c” is silent, which causes issues.
What is true however is that of you learn the pronunciation rules you should be able to read a text correctly even if you have no clue what you’re saying. That’s not true of English for example.
Is it? There is a lot of historical spelling in Spanish, though not as much as English. German, on with the other hand, has its spelling routinely updated every few years.
The historical spelling is quite limited, and mostly for retro-compatibility. Spanish tries to be
understandable across a large number of countries and rules must accommodate old Spanish dating from the XV century.
We have a word describing what it is, we have a symbol of how it looks, and we have a word of how it is pronounced "and". We also tend not to write ampersands down by hand. Its a more common symbol. However unlike the treble clef the meaning and the pronunciation is the same so perhaps the example isn't as good?
Even the Chinese Character Heroes competition mentioned in the article seems a lot like the spelling bee in the US, doesn't it? I wonder if the anecdote about the PhD students has a cultural dimension in addition to language proficiency — could the students have refused not because they don't know the characters, but because they aren't fully confident they wouldn't make a mistake?
The article points out that, because Chinese is not a phonetic language, if you don't know how to write something, you might not be able to write it at all, while in phonetic languages you can always spell something that sounds the same. E.g. "snees" for "sneeze".
I'm not sure where you've got this from, but I lived in Taiwan for years - you might be thinking of 注音 which does look similar to kana but is distinct and unrelated.
And the authors article is referring to the writing of the logograph - 注音 is strictly for pronunciation.
The Heisig method, which recursively breaks down Chinese characters into patterns with arbitrary meanings, can help you sidestep this problem. You're never dealing with shapes anymore, but rather reconstructing stories from these stroke/meaning pairs. Since patterns consist of subpatterns, you can tweak the level of granularity until a sensible narrative emerges. Just recite that story as you move your pen.
It's a lifesaver as an adult foreign learner, but I don't really see anything preventing native writers of Chinese and Japanese from benefitting from this general process as well. I've wondered if the guys who pass those truly insane 6,000+ character exams have to fall back on some sort of hack at that point.
As another adult Chinese learner, does something like the Heisig method really help with language acquisition or just memorizing characters? I’m skeptical because of the immense amount of time it takes to learn even without elaborate story construction for each character. I’ve kind of resigned to being a word processor idiot, and only memorizing characters in handwriting as a bi-product of usage.
It may be anecdotal, but I once involuntarily trained my memory by trying to recall what I've been doing each day. After a few weeks, my memory noticeably improved.
That's to say, the task may feel insurmontable at first, but if you give time to your body to adjust, it should become easier.
That's very interesting. Did the memory boost persist? If so do you do any maintenance exercises like the original ones or have you noticed other effects?
It's difficult to say: I think shortly after this "incident", I started doing more maths/physics on my free time, which must have help this boost to persist.
Thinking about it, this recalls me of a Leonardo quote (pertaining visual memory then):
> « I myself have proved it to be of no small use, when in bed in the dark, to recall in fancy the external details of forms previously studied, or other noteworthy things conceived by subtle speculation; and this is certainly an admirable exercise, and useful for impressing things on the memory. »
I remember reading about similar observations regarding visual memory, where students trained to memorize visual information would outperform their peers (observations perhaps in the 1800s/early 1900s, IIRC a woman was in charge of this).
It surely helps. Mnemonics are a good tool for memorization. You don't have to remember elaborate stories, just something like: "歌" - "older brother lacks singing". It certainly doesn't work with all characters, but it helps.
It's designed for Japanese where it probably works better - pretty much all Kanji have multiple pronunciations that can be completely different to each other so it makes some amount of sense to ignore the sound and focus on the shape and the meaning. Much less relevant for Chinese where you can usually tie the character to a single sound and learn all three halves at the same time.
I did Heisig's Remembering The Kanji as my first step on my Japanese learning journey. It helped make the written language feel more accessible, and I took it on as a fun challenge, but in hindsight only learning to read is important and learning to write is mostly a waste of time. Learning to read is vital, but being a word processor idiot is how everyone is living their lives for the most part.
fwiw I studied Japanese, but I believe most of this still applies.
It's divide and conquer. When you are reading the book, you are indeed just learning the characters. It's a significant ~2-3 month investment that maybe doesn't make sense unless you plan on living and working in the country. But once you've gotten through it, it absolutely feeds back into vocab acquisition, since the characters are now completely unambiguous to you. Much like how Latin/Greek helps with English, you can also work out what entirely new words might mean if you are familiar with their characters.
I did RTK. I also learned to read around 3k kanji. Turns out it wasn't at all necessary to learn to write that additional 1k Kanji in order to become able to read / distinguish it.
The time is better invested in simply studying how to distinguish visually similar characters. That alone solves the problem directly.
I also did all three volumes and found the extra 1,000 to be a waste. Really polluted my Anki.
> The time is better invested in simply studying how to distinguish visually similar characters.
But you still have to know what you're distinguishing between, which might only arise after repeated mistakes. Heading off this frustration directly by studying characters may not have been the best use of my time in absolute terms, but it did wonders for my overall motivation and made me feel like I was doing more than treading water. Pre-Heisig I was reading specific books intended for foreign learners, while afterwards I was just reading the newspaper.
It's somewhat a shame there isn't heavily curated Anki decks for doing what I call "disambiguation study" where you focus on cards that help you distinguish similar things from one another. It'd really speed things up.
>But you still have to know what you're distinguishing between, which might only arise after repeated mistakes.
I'm learning Korean at the moment and it's particular brutal for this IMHO. Some words have taken a long time to properly understand due to repeatedly mistaking them for very similar words, and there are a lot of these in Korean.
You've got it backwards. The Heisig method is faster, and less work overall. It takes about 10 seconds or so to set an image in your mind of the scene for a character, then a handful of reviews over the following weeks. Then you never forget it.
Classical methods would have you drilling characters for hours upon hours of wasted time.
> It takes about 10 seconds or so to set an image in your mind of the scene for a character, then a handful of reviews over the following weeks. Then you never forget it.
As someone with experience using the Heisig method, I would strongly disagree. Yes, it is a helpful system to ease the burden of memorization, but it does not permanently embed this knowledge into your memory after "a handful of reviews over the following weeks". If this were true, there would be many, many more people who have memorized 4000+ Chinese characters, required for fluency.
Well, "it worked for me." Similar reports for many people who have done fast-track Heisig speed runs, such as Heisig himself. It takes about 10 seconds of initial study to fix a story in mind (which is actually quite long--seriously count out 10 seconds slowly and imagine that time spent fully focused on the character at hand), and a review sequence that gets it in your long-term memory.
There are in fact many people who have learned 4000+ Chinese characters, using this or other methods.
I mean to say that my current method mostly omits hand writing. I can use a keyboard or phone to write and I can recognize characters fine. But on top of just learning a language, is Heisig so effective that I will be able to also memorize handwriting each character? Or do people measure how useful it is by being able to memorize the strokes for many characters, yet fail to become fluent in the language otherwise?
Heisig will have you learn handwriting, yes. Because that is explicitly all you practice in that method.
Aside: Do you learn simplified or traditional? I learned traditional. I would have anyway because my wife is Taiwanese, but I advocate others to do the same because it is arguably the same difficulty if not easier. And going traditional -> simplified is tractable whereas the reverse is not.
Learning the Heisig method is similar: learning from a perspective of handwriting is easier, and you get the ability to read “for free.” It’s a better approach, even if you never need to write by hand.
So you have a reference point for this. When you learn a character by the Heisig method, you go from meaning -> writing. You don’t bother practicing reading -> meaning. It turns out that it’s very easy to go from writing to reading, much like going from traditional to simplified, but the reverse not so much.
I'm using something similar to Heisig, and I can already tell that while I can list all of the radicals and components in a character, I have no memory of their relative positions. I'm also not trying to learn them and I only using a pinyin input method, but I can't imagine really needing to be able to write by hand ever.
If you're not actually writing out the characters, you're not using Heisig. You wouldn't have that issue if you were actually writing them out. And it's not the wrote practice, it's the fact that you intrinsically must write one primitive at a time, which solidifies the order in the story. Most Heisig students end up developing slightly different primitive meanings for different placements, or an aspect of the story which controls the layout, for that reason.
Characters are not words. Most words are 2- or 4-character combinations. Individually they have fragments of meaning, so you may get a hint, but not enough to understand for sure unless you’ve learned the word.
I think a helpful analogy here for the non-chinese is recalling the names of pieces of music from hearing a short part and vice versa. I'm classically trained, and in my circles I can probably hum out a short piece of music that'll have other musicians go "I know the piece but am drawing a blank on the name" and vice versa. I know I'm not the only one to have had that happen to pieces I'm actively practicing :)
Anecdotally, I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half).
I guess this is analogous to only remembering the main themes of a piece and forgetting how the rest of it goes. I'll recognise it when I hear it, but can't recall it off the top of my head.
In short, it's the same nominal sound with varying tones ("shi", which is closer in pronunciation to "shirr" than "she"), repeated about a hundred times, which is of course meaningless in spoken form (since there's not enough context to differentiate between the various forms), but actually conveys a story in written form.
With the shift toward typing and (especially mobile) computerization in the recent era, it's really not surprising (to me, at least) that Chinese society is moving in a direction where literacy no longer extends to recall of individual characters, and only encompasses recognition, since recall is no longer as necessary of a skill in day-to-day life.
The poem is written in Classical Chinese, which was spoken over 2000 years ago, and back then would have been intelligible to a listener because the words would have sounded different. Even today, they sound different in e.g. Cantonese.
There's a close relative of Mandarin (Dungan) which is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. The spoken language is tonal, but tones aren't used in the written language because written words are polysyllabic, and if you know how to speak Dungan, you can reliably infer the tones.
The poem uses now-rare characters from classical Chinese but it was written in the 1930s and uses the modern Mandarin pronunciation of said characters. The whole point of the poem is to make everything "shi" in modern Mandarin pronunciation, to argue against switching from Chinese characters to Latin alphabet romanization.
You can also construct ridiculous sentences in English that no native speaker will understand [0].
In normal texts written in modern Chinese, this is not a problem. Nobody writes real texts like the "shi" poem. In cases where something can only be understood in written form, you can rephrase it to avoid homophones.
It would result in a pretty severe loss of fidelity.
You may think it’s not needed, because that information isn’t available in spoken Chinese. The same is true for written English - putting spaces between words, dividing texts into paragraphs, capitalizing them, differentiating between different pauses (a comma, period, semicolon, etc. all signifying what kind of pause something its), quotation marks, parenthesis, etc. - none of this is available in our spoken language, and we’re still able to understand it. In theory, we could get rid of them all and understand what’s being written. In practice, most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess.
The same goes for Chinese. Written languages, for the most part, are more than a simple transcription of spoken sounds.
> In practice, most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess.
Unless Chinese is somehow unique among all human languages, this isn't true. Chinese would be just as intelligible if written in a phonetic script (like Pinyin) as it is when written using the characters.
Now, it would be an incredibly shocking transition for Chinese people who have already spent their entire lives writing with characters. However, after the transition to Pinyin, especially for young people who wouldn't ever learn the characters, written Chinese would still be perfectly understandable.
That being said, I don't favor replacing the characters, because the transition would be extremely difficult and because the characters are very culturally important to China. They've been in use for a good 3000 years, and people are very attached to them. Phonetic scripts are technically superior, but the cultural and practical arguments for sticking with the characters are still stronger.
> Unless Chinese is somehow unique among all human languages, this isn't true.
I was talking about English in that paragraph:
> The same is true for written English - putting spaces between words, dividing texts into paragraphs, capitalizing them, differentiating between different pauses (a comma, period, semicolon, etc. all signifying what kind of pause something its), quotation marks, parenthesis, etc. - none of this is available in our spoken language, and we’re still able to understand it. In theory, we could get rid of them all and understand what’s being written. In practice, most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess.
In normal texts, that's correct. However, written Chinese does contains semantic information which the spoken language and Pinyin lack and, unlike English, has fewer distinct syllables, and seldom borrows words from other languages. So someone who's literate in Chinese would usually be able to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words when written down, as they would already know the meaning of all their component characters, but might struggle if they were written
phonetically. This is like having a good knowledge of Classical Greek when encountering words like nephropathy or myocarditis for the first time.
It still isn't a very good argument, though. Most English speakers get by without any knowledge of classical languages, and accept having to look up words in a dictionary.
Someone who's literate in Chinese would only be able to infer the meaning of an unfamiliar character if they already knew all of the surrounding characters. Then, you can guess the meaning of the character based on context, and possibly hints from the character itself about pronunciation and/or meaning (though this is very hit-or-miss, because many characters don't contain obvious hints). In order to reliably know all of the context surrounding a character, you need to know about 3000 characters total (that's the point at which you can recognize 99% of characters on a page). This is still a very tall order, which takes years of study to achieve.
The Chinese characters do indeed contain semantic information that Pinyin (the standard Romanization) does not, but in practice, you don't need that extra semantic information. If you write down a single word in Pinyin, it may have a few homophones, whereas the same word, written in Chinese characters, would be unambiguous. However, in written Pinyin texts, you would almost always be able to figure out which word is meant from context. In the few cases in which that would not be possible, the author could slightly rephrase the text to make it unambiguous.
Most languages on Earth (that have a writing system) are written using alphabets. Chinese is not so special that it could not be written using an alphabet as well. The reason why China hasn't switched to an alphabetic script is because of cultural attachment to the script, not because the Pinyin doesn't work just as well in a practical sense.
> Someone who's literate in Chinese would only be able to infer the meaning of an unfamiliar character if they already knew all of the surrounding characters.
In what I wrote, I was assuming there would be no unfamiliar characters, but there would be one or more unfamiliar words composed of two or more characters.
I was trying to put forward the best argument I could think of for retaining the characters, but like you, have decided it isn't worth the additional effort of learning thousands of characters up front to become literate when you can use a phonetic script and look up any unfamiliar words in a dictionary instead.
This argument is also used for Japanese, but I do not consider it valid.
This just proves that a phonetic writing is not sufficient, but it does not mean that the phonetic writing must be replaced with traditional writing.
To resolve the ambiguity of the phonetic writing, both in Chinese and in Japanese, where the ambiguity is much worse, it is enough to retain at most a couple hundred symbols to be used as semantic classifiers. It is likely that a great part of the traditional radicals would be suitable to be retained as classifiers, with perhaps a part of them omitted if redundant and a few other symbols added, if necessary.
Then the writing could be phonetic, but with classifier symbols attached to words, wherever the ambiguity makes them necessary.
This is not a new method. The oldest writing systems, like those of Egypt or Mesopotamia, also used classifier symbols (with meanings like: "a kind of human", "a kind of god", "a kind of animal", "a kind of stone", "a kind of wood", "a body part", "a kind of tool" and so on) attached to the words written phonetically, to avoid ambiguities.
If one would have to learn only 200 classifier symbols and with lower stroke counts than most symbols used now, that would be a great simplification.
Many of the Chinese characters are actually intended to be composed of two parts, a semantic classifier and a phonetic symbol, but this principle is applied too inconsistently and with too many variants, so the system can be greatly simplified by using a simple phonetic writing like Pinyin together with semantic classifiers inserted in the text only if they are necessary.
I think ambiguous homophones aren't actually much of a problem. There's usually only correct option that matches the surrounding context, so the correct inference is easy to make even with no characters at all . After all, there aren't subtitles when you're talking to other people, all the homophones still exist, and yet communication doesn't seem to be impeded.
correctly however, the text was not meant as an argument against romanization but as a playful example of how pinyin are unfit for classical rather than modern vernacular chinese.
I'd accept that interpretation. To be more precise, I view it as a demonstration of information loss from replacing classical characters entirely with romanization, as opposed to a forceful argument against any form of adoption of romanization.
The Greeks and the Romans got it right; a small set of characters that can be combined to form any word. Complexity from the composition of simpler elements, not inherent. Computer interaction via keyboard makes the superior design all the more obvious. Those guys were ahead of their time. Ave imperator, morituri te salutant.
I would argue that a system like the Japanese Hiragana or Katakana are a better system: they are each 56 letters that directly correspond to syllables. So "ha" is a single letter, as is "he", as is "be". With this nearly everything you say is directly translated both directions, and there are fewer complications (there are always a few, for example in Japanese one of those 56 letters is "n".. so no vowel, and in many dialects you say "s" for the "su" character if it is on the end of a word, and there are a few oddities around letters involving "y").
English, being the composite/mongrel language that it is has really complicated patterns for how you put letters together. For example the "i before e except after c as in neighbor and weigh" sort of thing (which does not cover all of the exceptions of course). This sort of thing has lead to the existence of spelling competitions in the English-speaking world (spelling bees). My Hungarian wife was surprised that such a thing existed. In Hungarian it is much closer to see-what-you say, with only a few exceptions (not that the rules are kind on English-speaking Hungarian learners like myself).
>I would argue that a system like the Japanese Hiragana or Katakana are a better system: they are each 56 letters that directly correspond to syllables.
No, they're really not. First, they have 46 characters (each), not 56, though there are another 36 combination characters like ちゃ. Regardless, the problem here is that number comes from the total number of allowed sounds in the entire language. Japanese has an extremely small number of total possible sounds in the language compared to most other languages, particular western ones, and almost all syllables are of the form consonant+vowel: there's basically no way to write, for instance, a word ending in a hard "t" sound, so when Japanese adopts such words, it adds a vowel ending like "tu", and does this for every syllable with a hard consonant without a following vowel. Because of this, loanwords can be really hard to recognize even if you're a speaker of the language that word was adopted from (usually English these days), because the sounds don't map over very well.
And because there's so few total possible syllables, there's a huge number of homophones. The main reason kanji is still around is because it resolves ambiguity and makes it much, much easier to read Japanese text: trying to read text that's all in hiragana (or katakana) is cumbersome, even if spaces are added (Japanese text doesn't normally have spaces).
I believe you mean the Ugarites, Phoenicians, & other northwest Semitic peoples. They developed from cuneiform syllabaries the abjad which the Greeks subsequently adopted (being their language's second written form, preceded by Linear B before an interlude of illiteracy). The Greeks added only non-diacritic vowels.
There are benefits to both systems. Western readers have a hard time reading older writing - while eastern readers have no problem with very old texts.
On the other hand - western scholars can understand what the spoken word sounded like - but eastern readers have a much harder time what ancient words sounded like.
Western writing systems "decay" faster. Look at french writing - the spellings are phonetic for the time they were first put to paper - but they sound nothing like the current pronunciations.
This is completely backwards and comically wrong. Japanese text looks very little like it did even 150 years ago; the characters have changed completely, and the language was highly standardized during the Meiji era. Try taking a native Japanese speaker to a museum with old Japanese texts or handwriting and see if they can read any of it; they generally can't understand much of it at all.
Modern Korean people can't even read stuff older than a century or so because the language changed from using Chinese characters to the home-grown Hangul character set, and that was only completed a few decades ago.
By contrast, English speakers can read Shakespeare just fine mostly, with a little difficulty understanding some words that are no longer used.
Japanese is not really the right example, because unlike Chinese the writing is really more phonetic than not (and when it isn't, as in kanbun texts, it's basically an idiosyncratic translation to a completely different language). I imagine that the reasonably educated Chinese should be able to read something like the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Stele from the 8th century just fine, given the regular typeface. English, from the same time period, has Beowulf, which is incomprehensible to any lay reader.
Once calligraphy/handwriting is involved, the situation on the Western side is not much better either. Modern Anglosphere children probably would struggle with 19th-century cursive like https://www.pinterest.com/pin/375276581427478862/ ; in Germanic countries, the handwriting system underwent deeper changes, so nobody apart from selected nerds and antiquarians can read Kurrent as in Goethe's letters - https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goethe_Brief_(nich... - or even the newer Sütterlin. Contra what some posters here claim, Roman cursive (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive) is right out. I don't think this should be conflated with the question of whether the writing system is understood by future readers - as an imperfect computer analogy, an ASCII text document is in some meaningful sense more futureproof than an Autodesk Animator .FLI, even if the former is on a five-inch floppy and the latter is on a USB thumb drive.
(As for the effects of the Japan's Chinese character simplification, I think they are a bit overstated. I accidentally bought a 旧字体 copy of Mishima's Haru no Yuki at a book sale once, and at least as an L2 speaker I didn't find it particularly more painful to read than I find unmodernised Shakespeare as an L2 speaker of English.)
That's a fair objection, but given the context I assume he was not actually having anything other than Chinese in mind. Otherwise one might as well bring up Vietnamese, which has a similar history and lexical makeup as JP/KR and is spoken about as far east, but is now written phonetically in Latin-based script with hardly any readers of the old Chinese-based writing system remaining.
Yes, Vietnamese is another great objection, as it's similar to Korean that way. Given that China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam are the 4 major "eastern" countries then, and only 1 of those might be true for his claim, then why did he say "eastern" instead of just "Chinese"? That's like claiming the American continents (North and South) use English because it's used in the United States. People in Quebec and almost every place south of Mexico will be quite offended, rightfully so.
Where did you get that idea from? I can read most books in Japanese, but probably not a word of most reasonably ‘old’ texts. I think most native speakers would struggle as much as English speakers do with, say, medieval-era English.
> Western readers have a hard time reading older writing - while eastern readers have no problem with very old texts.
That's simply not true.
Ancient Chinese calligraphy and language is so different that you have entire PhD fields about it.
By contrast, as someone who has studied basic Latin in high school, I can read stuff from the walls of Pompeii without issue. I can directly read Latin texts from 700AD or so with the standard difficulty of reading handwriting.
Yes, and when you strip out the vowels and squeeze the individual syllables together - the syllable almost becomes a chinese character or a llm token. Paleo-Hebrew (10th century BCE) was a century older then ancient Greek (9th century BCE). Like Phoenician (from which ancient Greek derived) it shared close roots with Proto-Sinaitic.
The Proto-Sinaitic alphabetic script is the oldest (1800–1500 BCE) and evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols. It contained simplified characters representing consonants,
The Phoenician alphabet came later, around 1050 BCE, evolving from Proto-Sinaitic. It became a widely used script with 22 consonantal characters and was highly influential, serving as a foundation for both the Paleo-Hebrew and Greek alphabet. The Etruskan alphabet was adapted from the Greek alphabet in the 8th centry BCE and the Roman alfabet was adapted from the Etruskan alphabet in the 7th century.
Alphabets with 20–30 letters seem to be close to a neurolinguistic optimum for balancing simplicity with expressiveness.
The Armenian script was designed by monk and linguist Mesrop Mashtots in the 5th century CE to enable the translation of the Bible into Armenian. With 39 letter it represents Armenian phonetics.
The Khmer alphabet with 74 characters evolved from the ancient Pallava script, which was developed in Southern India around the 4th century CE.
By the 7th century CE, the Khmer people had adapted the Pallava script, creating an early form of the Khmer script. This script was initially used to write Sanskrit and Pali, the languages of Hindu and Buddhist texts.
The article lumps together writing characters slightly incorrectly and failing to come up with the character at all. For instance, the game show contestant wrote the word "烹" with one extra stroke, while the writer of the shopping list writer gave up entirely on the characters for "egg" and "chives". (This is analogous to the difference between misspelling an English word and not being able to think of the word at all.) In the story of three PhD students who couldn't write the characters for "sneeze" (打喷嚏), it's entirely unclear if they were completely stuck, or if they just made small mistakes.
My question is if "character amnesia" describes trivial errors or if people are forgetting characters to a significant extent. In other words, is this article genuine or is it the equivalent of claiming English writers suffer from "word amnesia" because they sometimes need to look up a spelling?
> In the story of three PhD students who couldn't write the characters for "sneeze" it's entirely unclear if they were completely stuck, or if they just made small mistakes.
The article says "all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment", which in context, reads clearly to me that they were embarrassed for not knowing where to start, not that they wrote them down with minor errors that they were embarrassed about after checking a dictionary. The rest of the article strongly reinforces this interpretation. For example: "‘lift the pen, forget the character’... this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character..."
Further in the article he discusses the 'virtuous cycle'; connections between writing, speaking, and reading. With phonetic alphabets, the way something is spoken reinforces the way that it is read, the way it is read reinforces the way that it is written, the way that it is written reinforces the way that it is spoken (for the most part, even English fails this cycle sometimes). However, with character sets the cycle is broken, and the speaker has to learn 3 different memorization techniques.
Regarding your question, there is a difference between not knowing how to write a word and not knowing how to spell a word. If someone in English doesn't know how to spell 'sneeze' or any other word, they can at least come close enough and convey information 'fuzzily' via text using an incorrect spelling. Now that I'm writing this, though, I suppose with character sets like Chinese if you know characters that are close enough you potentially could use other characters to convey the information, like mouth-fart for sneeze or something along these lines. But I don't speak the language, so that is just a theory.
Do Chinese speakers use the language this way if there is a character they don't know how to write?
> Do Chinese speakers use the language this way if there is a character they don't know how to write?
I'm by no means an expert on the topic but one thing I have noticed in learning Chinese languages is that there are a huge number of homophones. That means there are probably 20 other characters with the same pronunciation for any given syllable that are considered different words (not to get into it here but the conception of a word in Chinese languages can be a bit odd too). It seems to be very common for people to use the character for a similar sounding word or syllable to write slang words or local dialect words that don't have an official character.
In the example at the start of the article, 烹, the contestant wrote "child" when the proper grapheme was "complete." That's a non-trivial error, even if it is only one stroke difference.
I don’t think so, no. English is phonetic and so some of those spelling errors can come down to your dialect pronouncing the word differently and forgetting the official spelling. That’s now how Chinese characters work though. It tells a story, and a story with “child” instead of “complete” is a vastly different story.
Well, but as far as I can tell there is no legitimate character created by replacing complete(了) by child(子) in 烹. It does not matter what "story" it tries to tell, if someone writes "boild eggs" I'm not going to conjure up a hypothetical German etymology that might have led to "boild" that later got borrowed into English; I will understand it as a typo of "boiled".
Even less of a difference. There's no equivalent character, so it's clearly 烹 written with an extra stroke. It's more like the difference between writing "deceive" and decieve."
The equivalent in English would be writing "ghyche" when trying to write the word, "fish". Yeah, that combination of characters/marks can make sounds equivalent to "f" "ih" and "sh" but it's so far off it's laughable.
> This is analogous to the difference between misspelling an English word and not being able to think of the word at all.
Part of the distinction is that you can always at least misspell the word when using an alphabet. That's why the shopping list used an alphabetic script.
If people normally enter characters in their phone or computer rather than actually handwriting, then there is no reason to keep remembering all of the character details.
Just like it doesn't matter that I frequently am uncertain about spelling for some words because we have spell check built into everything.
Do Chinese usually use pinyin to enter characters or what is the normal method? Whatever it is, they don't need to remember the character strokes apparently.
Some older folks, particularly those with regional accents or less Pinyin education, stick with handwriting input (which was surprisingly good even ~20 years ago) - drawing the characters with a stylus or a finger.
Most folks these days use Pinyin. The T9 input method (Pinyin, but using a nine-key telephone pad) is popular with folks who grew up using dumbphones.
Finally, voice input is really popular in China. Lots of folks send texts (on WeChat) as short voice messages. WeChat even has a feature to auto-transcribe these voice messages.
But Pinyin is based on pronunciation, which varies across China. So Pinyin is based on Putonghua ? So Pinyin reinforces the role of putonghua as a project of national unification ? And the pre-eminent role of Beijing ?
Either way it's phonetic; it's not based on either the radicals or the strokes. Even though there are input methods that use those, they are not commonly used.
There are other input methods such as Cangjie or Sucheng which are also popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong. They have much faster WPM since they are based on the structure of the characters. Pre-smartphone there was a Q9 input method with one stroke mapped to each of 8 numbers and a wildcard for if you forgot.
> Just like it doesn't matter that I frequently am uncertain about spelling for some words because we have spell check built into everything.
But it does matter that you don't know the spelling for some words. For one, you don't always have a computer to fix it for you. For two, the computer's spelling is often wrong and you need the human knowledge to fill that gap.
The interesting thing here is that nobody writes chinese one character at a time with pinyin; you almost always type out an entire phrase in pinyin, and usually there's only one meaningfully correct combination of those sounds in terms of characters and meaning (that's how the listener can tell what you're saying, after all, when listening) which will be the first choice in your input software (input software traditionally gives you a first choice with what it thinks the entire phrase is, and gets shorter with the 2nd choice onwards to partially match a phrase.)
The problem is not that people can't recognise the words; it's that we can't write them if given pen a paper. If the phone gets it wrong you just choose the nth choice instead of the first.
> For one, you don't always have a computer to fix it for you.
You can't be serious. I thought that the "you need to be good at algebra because you won't have a calculator in your pocket" argument died out naturally. I can't recall the last time I actually made hand-written notes.
> For two, the computer's spelling is often wrong and you need the human knowledge to fill that gap.
It happens to me once a month that the computer cannot recognize a correctly spelled word, and virtually never in English.
> You can't be serious. I thought that the "you need to be good at algebra because you won't have a calculator in your pocket" argument died out naturally. I can't recall the last time I actually made hand-written notes.
Then you are an extreme outlier. Most people write plenty of things down by hand in their day to day life. And there's no reason for the argument to die out, because it's completely correct.
> It happens to me once a month that the computer cannot recognize a correctly spelled word, and virtually never in English.
Again, this seems like an outlier. False positives and false negatives are both quite common in spell checkers.
If that were the case then the problem described in the article would be limited to just a few outliers like me. But it's not.
> Again, this seems like an outlier.
No u. The fact that you are on this website means that you most likely are educated, therefore you are likely to use uncommon words unknown to the spellchecker. Most people focus on just a handful of basic words needed for everyday life, and besides that, very few people actually care about correct spelling. All of my friends have at least college degree and 50% of them pay zero attention to correct spelling, I can only assume that average Joe cares even less.
This is actually one of the main reasons I don't think China will become a global hegemon. English, with all its flaws, is far easier to speak, read, and write.
I don't think English is particularly easy to speak, read nor write. The pronounciation is highly irregular and the writing system is very non-phonetic. E.g. "spelling bees" don't make any sense in most languages.
Chinese also seems to be moving to the very phonetic and regular Pinyin that (for Mandarin) doesn't suffer from character amnesia.
I do agree that languages are walls between peoples and should be taken down with a global language. Maybe in few decades the kids speak some kind of Chinglish.
"Easier" I didn't say easy. It's a relative comparison. Spanish and ASL are easy languages, but they won't help Peru or the Deaf community become hegemons for their own reasons.
We already have the global language. It's called English lol
Could argue this works in exactly the opposite way.
This "wall" makes the west an open book to china, while for the west it is hard to crack the Chinese. For one thing, think of the implications on recruiting people to spy or interpret intercepted messages from china or on espionage in general.
Also the impact of this "problem" on running a well-functioning highly-productive and scientific powerhouse society is highly exaggerated and easily refuted by empirical facts.
Just think of what Japan and China managed to accomplish in engineering and scientific accomplishment in the last 50 years and they both use character-based languages.
The BBC produced a great series, The Secret History of Writing. There's a segment where you can watch some Chinese speakers experiencing this while being prompted to write mildly uncommon words like "cough" or "embarrassment".
Sounds like a losing battle to me. Handwriting in general is doomed to go the way of the dodo. The difference is that with Latin characters, you can at least "draw" them fairly easily from memory.
> The orthography may be inconsistently phonetic, as is the case with English spelling, or highly consistent, such as the Korean Hangul system. No writing system is perfectly phonetic. But phonetic systems enable the native speaker, with just a few dozen symbols, to reliably write whatever they can speak, and read out loud anything they can read.
I'm not sure if the author has studied Vietnamese. I'm a native Vietnamese, and I believe the language is perfectly phonetic.
If I hear a word, I can write it. If I see a word, I can pronounce it, regardless of whether I understand the meaning.
It's interesting that among the 4 countries (China/Japan/Korea/Vietnam), it's the only one that completely reinvented the language into Latin based. I think that refactor addressed the phonetic issue well enough. When I was there, there was also no TV program for "spelling bees" or something like that. Even a third grader could read/write almost any word (even when they don't understand the text yet)
Edit: adding to this original post to reply a common theme people brought up in multiple posts.
I think bringing up dialects and provincial accents is not convincing. There is one official way "gia đình" should be pronounced. It's taught in school, even in the South. Pronouncing it as "da đình" can still be understood, and it doesn't retract from the point that the language is phonetic.
In other words, assuming I know nothing about the meaning of the word, if I hear "da đình" I can correctly write down it as so. I wouldn't know that in Saigon that also means "gia đình". But I definitely can write it down exactly.
I don't think using provincial speaking accent is a good line of argument here. Otherwise, no language in the world can satisfy the phonetic requirements. Any group of people can have different accents, different tones, different sound length and pauses.
Not if you account for variations of pronunciation in dialects. Not even the most phonetically accurate accent, the Hanoian Northern accent which I am a native speaker of, is perfect.
For example, you could hear Northern Vietnamese people say "dổ", "dá" instead of "rổ", "rá". Morning dew is pronounced "xương" but is written as "sương". These characters are pronounced with greater clarity in the Central and Southern regions, but they have their own peculiarities too. Til' this day I still find it iffy they call someone named "Diễm" as "Yỉm". Unless you have seen the correct way to spell those words before, you can't say for sure. Even now as a working adult I find myself referring to the dictionary to make sure my accent doesn't embarrass me in official emails.
In a perfect world, we can have one single Vietnamese accent that aims to pronoun all these words true to the intended way of the alphabet, but it isn't practical. That being said, one can get pretty far in Vietnamese when encountering new words.
Yeah, and because the "common" way of pronouncing these words/letters have become so entrenched in our minds, it often feels pretentious to hear people actively try to pronounce words in a way that they feel is "correct", for example trying to emphasize the "strength" of the tr/s/gi sounds as opposed to ch/x/d.
That's not quite true. There are many letters that sounds mostly/exactly the same, especially in everyday pronunciation. For example, "gia đình" vs "da đình", or "lý trí" vs "lí trí", or "xổ số" vs "sổ số", etc. If you don't know the word beforehand you wouldn't be able to write it down after hearing it.
Chinese writing system is a language in itself. You can translate Mandarin, Cantonese and even English to that language. To learn that language is harder because it has to support more than one spoken language.
Using an alphabet would make things far more easier, but then how would people from different parts of China understand each other?
I suppose advocates of alphabetic writing imagine everyone in China (outside Hong Kong and Macau) will be speaking standard Mandarin in a few generations anyway due to standardized public education.
I've seen Chinese input methods where instead of keys corresponding to sounds in Pinyin, they correspond to strokes in characters, I wonder if this could help with character amnesia.
They do exist, but as far as I'm aware, wubi and cangjie are very uncommon relative to zhuyin and pinyin. Even so, my experience is that you end up just memorizing chords for typing particular characters, as opposed to regularly deriving from first principles how a given character is constituted.
Meanwhile, if you remember how the character is pronounced and can identify it in a lineup, it's far easier to use the phonetic approaches. (Even if your input method doesn't auto-correct the word based on context, experienced typists will also memorize the position of common words, so even they don't need to stop and look at the individual candidates in most situations.)
There's a related paper from Chen & Chuang (2008), Experience with a computer word-entry method in processing Chinese characters by fluent typists ( https://escholarship.org/content/qt2s84m9t0/qt2s84m9t0.pdf) that has an unsurprising finding: If you type with a phonology-based input method, you can more easily recall (transcribe) a character by its sound. If you type with an orthography-based input method, you can more easily recall it by sight.
Right but it seems slower for people who are comfortable with pinyin. If I want to reply to a friend saying "I'm on my way and will be there soon", I can tap 'msll' and the input method will show 马上来了 as the first suggestion. 5 taps in total to enter 4 characters.
When I compare my handwriting to my father's I can see nearly 100% computer / phone use for writing has had its effect. With a gigantic number of characters, it would obviously be worse.
It always struck me that a phonetic alphabet for writing rather was much simpler and easier to learn than a system based on pictograms. So much that a society could achieve the same level of literacy with much lower cost if they adapted a phonetic system.
But I wonder if that is actually true? Has there been comparative studies of what mainland China did compared to Taiwan (which kept the traditional system) or Vietnam (which adopted latin letters) and its effect on literacy. Obviously hard to do ...
It certainly doesn’t help literacy in general, but one advantage of a writing system divorced from phonetics is that you can still read old written material even after the phonetics have changed over time.
Another advantage of using pictograms is that people who speak completely different versions of Chinese can still communicate in writing. They may pronounce the characters completely differently, but the characters still mean the same thing.
I think "complicated" is one way to describe pictogrammic(ideogrammic) languages, and "offloading OCR to geometric sub-systems" is another. Formal Hanzi writings are grid aligned so it's probably more suited for batched processing too.
We have this too! It’s not just treble clefs and ampersands- while everyone can read both forms of g, what fraction of people can draw both forms of g? Of course it doesn’t have the cultural baggage in the US.
I wanted to write in cursive a few years ago and realized I had completely forgotten. It didn’t take long to remember with the help of a cursive alphabet, but I was still completely unable to get started without it.
Apparently Gen Z didn't learn to write in cursive at all, since it had been removed from the curriculum. Some US states have since started adding it back.
In China, children start studying at the age of 6 and continue until they graduate from university at around 23. They have a large amount of homework and exams that require handwriting. There's nothing to worry about.
China should make another attempt at simplifying their written language. Yes it’s a monumental task, but Korea managed to mostly transition off of Chinese characters.
I think this is not as complicated as it sounds; it's same as how NN classifiers aren't always built to do label to image, only image to label. Being able to do former through a parallel pipeline helps(that's like GAN), but that ability isn't required in training or in inference.
Your OCR engine in the brain might generate "𰻞" for 'zh_hant_適' if reversed, doesn't mean it can't recognize the latter.
Unicode has stroke and radical counts for over 75000 characters. As this article states, most Chinese written text on computers is actually typed using pinyin.
It's simply people stop writing stuffs on paper. Nothing too surprising. I myself cannot spell some English words because I rely too much on auto-correction.
it is quite common, since chinese people use hand write not a lot as previous time.The computer and internet will make this more common after serveral decades.
I understand that the topic of writing systems is touchy because it involves people's national identity and national pride.
That's why all the comments that mention efficiency of different writing systems are heavily downvoted.
But if we think about writing systems' evolution as an optimization problem that optimizes for "efficiency" (whatever that means. It is pretty hard to define so I'm not even going to try) we could easily imagine some systems being stuck at a local minimum. Or maybe even all of them being stuck at different local minimums some of which are smaller than the others.
“Sneeze” or “喷嚏” is a pretty difficult word to write in Chinese in terms of number of strokes and its internal components. I’m not surprised people wouldn’t know it off the top of their heads. It’s like if someone asked you to spell “unnecessary.”
The other dimension is that the second character 嚏 in particular is obscure: it's virtually never used in any other word than 喷嚏.
In Japanese, it's a hyogai kanji not taught in school, meaning most people would spell it phonetically. Alas, this is not a practical/socially acceptable option in Chinese.
The first, 喷 "erupt", is not exactly common either but is at least used in a few other compounds like 喷水 "fountain".
I don't think anybody is proposing that Chinese people are not normal humans making normal mistakes. The difference is that if somebody asked people to spell "unnecessary", there would only be three common mistakes they would make (based on whether letters are arbitrarily duplicated or not), and all would be easily understood by readers if written.
English orthography is terrible (i.e. a single vowel can be a half-dozen letters), but there's a limit to how complicated it can be to write a word that one knows how to say.
Wiyul I took migh yot to Luffbruh (acting az a cooryer surviss), I inshored my dissertacion woz cerrect bye revuwing the seilerfoan musick. Suddenly, their was a laud noys. I rush't too the sighed of the bote, but I sore the wartre fludding inn. "Quick! Sumbody hasta seel the hoal!" I cryde. Fourtuneatley, the glew oonder the bought's scin maid the holl cloaze up, sow we kepped floting, butt we terned arowned buy mesteak. Immajin mie shock wen wee woshed up in Lossymuth! Eye wonet fourget thatt deigh enny thyme sune, that's fore shur.
(I'm pretty sure this isn't eye dialect: I consulted the rhyming dictionary a lot, to make sure I was swapping spellings between two words with the same phonemes. I also tried to avoid reanalysis, though some of these words might not quite achieve that.)
It would be rather interesting if technology simply caused people to start writing in the roman alphabet. Phonetic spelling is certainly the superior option, so perhaps that will simply be what people arrive at through inevitable statistical pressure.
Many people here may not be familiar with David Moser, the author of this article. He’s frequently mentioned in Douglas Hofstadter’s book Le Ton Beau le Marot (fantastic book on language and translation BTW) in regards to matters related to Mandarin. He was a well known (as Mo Dawei) in China’s xiangsheng scene (a verbal comedy routine, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangsheng#:~:text=Xiangshen....) and is probably one of the most knowledgeable foreigners on Mandarin. He started learning it in college in mid 80s.
I remember almost 25 years ago, when I was teaching English in Japan, one of my adult students couldn't remember how to write the kanji (i.e. Chinese characters) for "police".
Text input is now universally phonetic, and young people have a lot of trouble remembering how to write words.
Add to this the enormous (and increasing) use of English words, written either in katakana or actually in Roman letters, and it's plain that Japan is further down the road of losing its writing identity than China is.
It's not a problem, just transition to new writing instruments. I completely forgot how to write in my birth language (Russian) while my English handwriting is slow and messy. Doesn't affect me in any way. There is a valid need to leave a note when technology is not handy, sounds like pinyin solves this problem. Although, unless we are talking scratching out a message with a sharp stone, ballpoint pen and paper is also complex technology.
There is nothing wrong with being sentimental, I lift heavy weights, collect vinyl and do film photography because I like the aesthetic of these activities. But let me force my own kids to learn whatever I think they should learn just like me at home rather than everyone forcing everyone else's kids in school.
I think the question is rather: should it? Is there a real benefit for average Joe to memorize insane amount and complexity (at least to my untrained eye) of such characters? I think my brain would just explode. I'd rather use my memory for something more creative.
I got a little more than halfway into this long article, so I apologize if this was answered at some point. So what?
Many native English speakers can't pick up a pen and paper and write intelligibly and would be in real trouble if they lost their phones; an increasingly annoying number TALK into their phones, not even pretending to type and just spewing auto-corrected crap out into the world.
Doctors have messy handwriting, but I don't think I've ever met a native English speaker who completed elementary school who would pick up a pen and pause, completely uncertain of how to draw a letter of the alphabet. They might make minor spelling mistakes, but I don't think that's closely analogous to the phenomenon the author is talking about.
The "Doctors have messy handwriting" trope derives from the fact that prescriptions often contain a large fraction of Latin terms, chemical names, abbreviations and acronyms that don't parse (and thus seem sloppy/illegible) if you are trying to "decipher" them as English. Doctors don't have significantly messier handwriting compared to similar populations (esp. now that drafting isn't as emphasized in architecture, engineering, and similar programs)
>>>Doctors don't have significantly messier handwriting compared to similar populations
I'm skeptical of this claim. My family doctor had bad handwriting, and one time the hospital worker had to call him to ask if he ordered a x-ray or Ct scan.
Please. I still have my medical charts from my childhood, back before the computers. I can barely read the handwriting there, and it's not because of medical terms.
Apparently, it became slightly better recently, now that doctors spend less time scribbling things and mostly type them instead.
The entire article is an argument to the contrary. It's fine if you disagree with the author's opinion on that point, but it's begging the question to just dismiss it on that basis. They even specifically mention that "this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character", which would be more like a spelling mistake.
What the author describes is a phenomenon like wanting to write the word "analogous" but having no idea how to even begin putting pen to paper. Not writing the word and ending up with "analagous" by mistake.
Do you read Chinese? I do. The examples given in the paper involve forgetting which radicals constitute a character. It very much feels similar to forgetting whether it is “through” or “thru”. They put the wrong component down. They did not forget how to write the set of components in common use.
There are cases, almost certainly overrepresented here, where a character has some truly unique variation that the writer forgets. They know it is different but forget how. In almost all other instances it is a matter of forgetting “is it heart or fire here?” as these two are very similar. It’s like spelling with an i instead of an e.
> After Japanese administration ended, the system soon became obsolete. Now, only a few scholars, such as those who study the aforementioned dictionary, learn Taiwanese kana.
This is not true. If you need to type on your phone, everyone needs to know that the mainland used the Wubi input method, which is Katakana, and now uses Pinyin typing. Taiwan has always used the original Katakana input method. Pinyin typing was invented later.
Manny people mistakenly recognise Bopomofo as katakana. I use bopomofo and get this reaction a lot, it just have to mention its actually bopomofo/zhuyin and then they know what it is.
At one point, apparently it was fashionable amongst teens to type characters by using pinyin and always selecting the first character in the list of options, regardless of the intended actual character. That was essentially phonetic writing, but as a result, texts were incomprehensible to parents (the desired outcome).
If the texts were incomprehensible to parents, how were they comprehensible to their intended recipients?
It's the same logic as writing a sentence like this:
Y U gna be late
It's grammatically completely incorrect. But you can still understand it.
When it comes to chinese/japanese characters, many have the same phonetic reading. So you can do something similar, while selecting the wrong characters.
I think it's just easier for beginners (or teenagers) to go from phonetic to meaning. I guess advanced Chinese readers don't even read the words out loud in their head and go directly to meaning. I'm beginner/intermediate at Chinese and surprisingly, I noticed that my pinyin often seems better than many Chinese natives.
It sounds like the Chinese version of 1337speak.
The real answer to your question: the most commonly used Chinese input method allows you to type the first pinyin letters only, and the algorithm will figure out the most likely Chinese characters you want.
It's not "the parents" can't read it. It's that people who don't use electronics have a harder time reading it.
(I misread the top comment)
Read the nonsense text aloud and then listen. Presumably with practice, you don't actually to actually speak aloud, and your 'inner monologue' voice is sufficient.
As a relatively well-educated Japanese native speaker, I too experience this problem when writing Japanese on paper - being unable to write many kanji characters by hand. I am no exception among Japanese native speakers. While the author seems to interpret this problem as something crucial, I question whether it truly is.
The orthography of Mandarin and Japanese includes an alphabet consisting of thousands of characters, the majority of which comprise dozens of strokes. Although East Asian people have higher IQ scores on average, we are not superhuman - our memory capacity is bound by human limits, and the decreased frequency of actually writing kanji on paper has naturally resulted in our forgetting how to write many of them. Is this surprising?
Furthermore, orthography is not part of language in a fundamental sense - it's merely a useful tool that accompanies a language. Therefore, I do not see the writing system becoming less stable as a significant issue. Consider Korea as an example: they used to use kanji in their orthography but have almost completely eliminated it with virtually no adverse effects. While laypeople often assume orthography is an integral part of a language, this is just not the case from the linguistic perspective.
If you consider that a lot of people using the Latin alphabet does use the cellphone autocomplete to check how to write a word used infrequently...
So I would say this text is biased by the "western" view of the writer, something that could be categorized as "Orientalism". A study about this phenomenon is valid, is important. But this post is not a good study.
But autocomplete even for basic words? My wife is Chinese. I'll never forget when she was helping her family write some formal letter in Chinese in Microsoft Word and she simply could not input the numbers 1, 2, and 3 in Chinese because she forgot how. And I know this may be apples and oranges because this is keyboard input versus writing on paper but as a programmer who can type at a moderate pace since I was a kid (~120wpm) this was perplexing for me! And similar to the article, she's an Ivy league grad. Similarly, when she's communicating with her family via WeChat half the time she simply sends audio messages instead of text messages. I'm pretty surprised this method is so popular instead of some voice-to-text google assistant type system.
I am not from Asia so I would trust more what our wife has to say than me. But I would argue that it is common for people living in a country with different language from they native language to forget how to write or even say some simple words. There's a good active effort to learn a new language.
People find value in the tradition of writing. If Japanese were to ditch kanji as Korea did, I think there would be some complaints.
Hanja still get used in some contexts --- had to memorize ~500 of them when I was studying Korean.
AFAIK (maybe someone can correct or confirm) it is essential for studying law in Korea. To avoid ambiguity with identically sounding words, Chinese characters are used in law.
It seems there's room for "legal innovation" there, by providing definitions early on in various texts to disambiguate, and then sticking to them throughout the text!?
I assume it's already done anyway for some terms. Why isn't this more widespread?
Innovation is quite often resisted by those who have mastered the hard way of doing things, though I have no idea whether this is the case here.
I'm studying Japanese at the moment and what struck me is how important context is, particularly in reading. You need to know where to read 1-3 letters ahead to read a word and interpret it. That's not really a thing in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way.
I think digital is a big crutch for Japanese/Chinese because you have input methods that help you write what you want to say, so you don't actually need to remember how to write kanji as much in daily life.
> You need to know where to read 1-3 letters ahead to read a word and interpret it. That's not really a thing in English
It happens in a English too, where you see a chunk of letters and mis-predict which word they represent in a way which affects its meaning [0], and sometimes that will also affect pronunciation. [1]
An example from the link:
> "The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families."
A reader linearly scanning along doesn't know whether "complex" is an adjective or a noun, and then whether "houses" is a noun or a verb. I'm pretty sure all human languages have similar problems where a certain amount of look-ahead or backtracking is necessary.
For another example to highlight pronunciation changes, consider the ambiguity of:
"I saw the rhino live in the zoo."
That could mean that the rhino was doing the verb of living, in which it rhymes with "give", or it could also mean that the speaker was seeing it in-person, in which case it rhymes with "drive".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)
seems like an opportune time to also talk about buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
Yes, this happens in English too, but to find examples like this you have to go to Wikipedia, or wrack your brain and see if you remember one. In Japanese, almost every other word is like this.
I went to the first link in your comment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence ), selected the Japanese version of the article, and took the first sentence:
> 袋小路文（ふくろこうじぶん）とは、文法的には正しいけれども、誤読が生じやすい書き出しで始まる文のことである。
As is usual for Japanese, this sentence contains a mix of Chinese(-origin) ("kanji", e.g. 袋 小 路 文 法 的) as well as Japanese phonetic ("kana", e.g. ふくろこうじぶん) characters. Usually, when in a multi-kanji word, kanji are pronounced with (a time-changed version of) Chinese pronunciation. For example, 文法 is "bun-pou", not "fumi-nori" or something else. However, the first character of the article title (fukurokoubunji), 袋, is "fukuro" here despite being in a four-kanji word. Further, 小 is "kou" here, which is nonstandard enough that its dictionary entry does not even list it as a possible pronunciation! [1] Then 路文 are both in Chinese pronunciation (ji-bun), but this does not necessarily make sense because the word is not split in two down the middle, but instead as 袋-小路-文 (bag-lane-sentence, where bag-lane is English cul-de-sac / blind alley). [2]
Now fukurokoubunji is a bit of a specialised word, so it might not be a great example. But in the rest of the sentence, we find 文, which is always pronounced "bun" (sentence) here, even when appearing separately, but could also (though more rarely) have been "fumi" (letter) — nothing but semantical context helps distinguish. Then we have 正しい "tada-shi-i", where 正 could have been "sei" as in 正確 "sei-kaku" (accurate) or "shou" as in 正直 "shou-jiki" (honest), but it isn't just because しい come after. Similarly, 生 in 生じやすい is "shou"(-ji-ya-su-i), which is conjugated from the base form 生じる "shou-ji-ru" and could have been "u" (生まれる "u-ma-re-ru") or "sei" (先生 "sen-sei") or "i" (生きる "i-ki-ru") or more (生 is somewhat infamous for having many readings). And I could go on: 書 could be "syo" (文書 "bun-syo") but is "ka" (書き出して "ka-ki-da-shi-te" conjugated from 書く "ka-ku").
This is a bit like the comments elsewhere here noting that the Chinese word for "sneeze" is a bad example because it happens to have so uncommon characters in it — and then people point to examples like "onomatopoeia" and "diarrhoea" as similar tricky examples in English. I can't comment on Chinese, but existence does not necessarily say much about frequency.
[1]: https://jisho.org/search/%E5%B0%8F%20%23kanji — Kun are the Japanese readings (chiisai, ko, o, sa), and On are the Chinese readings (only "shou" in this case)
[2]: This analysis of 袋小路文 is not completely etymologically honest. By the etymology ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B0%8F%E8%B7%AF#Etymology_... ), we see that the "kouji" pronunciation of 小路 is really a corruption of ancient "ko-michi", which is a consistent Japanese-Japanese reading of the two characters. However, because "ji" is also an (uncommon) Chinese reading of 路, if you don't know the etymology of the word, the re-analysis is appropriate in the context of how hard it is to read the written language.
> However, because "ji" is also an (uncommon) Chinese reading of 路,
It's not a Chinese reading at all (as you can tell because it's ... wildly out of place with the the actual Chinese-derived readings ろ・る, onyomi are supposed to have semi-regular correspondences with each other and with Chinese Chinese readings). It's really just rendaku of ち, the basic root of fossilized compound みち (with still-salient prefix "honorific" み).
But most importantly, you never really see either 袋 or 小路 and expect them to have any other readings; maybe you'd expect しょうろ if you don't know the latter, but unless you're already literate in a Chinese or are blindly memorizing kanji tables, the other reading of 袋 (たい) probably isn't even salient, because it's one of those kanji that almost always takes its kunyomi even in compounds.
Side note, the line about u-onbin kind of buries the implication that this is a loanword from western Japanese, which is the culprit of several quasi-systematic but unevenly distributed divergences from regular sound changes.
I stand corrected, you clearly know more about this than I do. :) (I'm only an intermediate learner.)
So perhaps my analysis of 袋小路文 wasn't very accurate at all. Yet I hope my point about 正, 生, 書, etc. stands.
It's only, oh, just about the worst writing system since the Hittites or so, yeah.
"I saw the rhino live in the zoo"
Might also mean; "Noted native-American zoologist 'I Saw The Rhino' lives at the zoo"
In English you have to know a word in order to pronounce it.
The “ou” diphthong in “hound” and “double” or “would” is pronounced differently. Or “ieu” in “lieutenant” vs “lieu”. Or “oo” in “poor” vs “root” Or “berry” in “berry” vs “strawberry”
I could go on forever. There’s no other western language I know of that behaves like that.
> “ieu” in “lieutenant” vs “lieu”
> “berry” in “berry” vs “strawberry”
Am I misunderstanding the point you are making or is my pronunciation just off? I would pronounce both parts of both examples the same.
That's mostly an British English vs American English distinction:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/lieut...
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/straw...
Strawberry is often pronounced as Strawbry. Sou the 'e' becomes silent. And Lieutenant as Lutenant (or leftenant in Britain)
Fruit flies like a banana. English has its own ambiguity, so it isn’t really that different.
I can only write Chinese via an IME these days. For one, I’m left handed so writing characters was always a struggle since stroke order worked against me, but it’s mostly how I only use Chinese anyways.
I told my wife our kid should learn to write via an IME as well and she was just horrified about that, though. None of the teaching material really supports it.
I agree that Chinese/Japanese has it worse, but any language where "Spelling Bee" is a thing cannot be considered phonetic in a conventional sense.
And yet, given the definition and language of origin, most high-level spelling bee participants can make a pretty good guess at spelling a word they may have never seen before.
English is phonetic, it just borrows its pronunciation rules from many differing (and sometimes directly opposed) other languages.
Very true - and every demonstration of “English is hard to spell/pronounce” focuses directly on the exceptions which exaggerates the problem. One analysis I’ve seen puts it that with a single set of rules, 59% of a sample corpus of 5000 English words can be pronounced perfectly from the spelling (of course, there will be regional accent and dialect differences so that percentage will be a bit different for each one) and up to 85% can be pretty close with only slight errors.
Then there’s a percentage where they’re just direct borrowings from other languages and you need to have an idea of how that language pronounces words (especially French), so really only 10-15% or so of English words end up being true exceptions.
1. https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
Oh hurrah, I think that link is what I've been looking for for nearly a decade. I ran across it, or something like it, a long time ago and could never find it again. I don't remember all the special syntax, I think the one I found was written more in plain English with more examples (and I don't think the one I found back then mentioned ghoti either), but can't be sure it's been so long - maybe it was just that page and I don't remember it. It does have around the same number of rules I remember though.
> a single set of rules, 59% of a sample corpus of 5000 English words can be pronounced perfectly from the spelling
To do this you need to know 56(!) rules.
I think this actually demonstrates how complex English pronunciation actually is.
And you still only get 59% of the way to the correct pronunciation.
As a non native speaker of English, and a native speaker of a phonetic language, I strongly object to the notion that it's easy to guess English word pronunciation by just reading it.
Maybe it's the right time to once again quote this poem :
https://jochenenglish.de/misc/dearest_creature.pdf
The joy of English pronunciation
George Nolst Trenit´e (1870–1946)
1 The text
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it’s written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say—said, pay—paid, laid but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
But be careful how you speak,
Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak,
Previous, precious, fuchsia, via,
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
Woven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.
Say, expecting fraud and trickery:
1
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,
Missiles, similes, reviles.
... (7 pages of pain follow) ...
and the the Oxford and US pronunciation (at the time, it has changed since) in phonetic.
"ough" has at least 9 different possible pronunciations, how is that phonetic?
>That's not really a thing in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)
Not so much in terms of meaning but in terms of pronunciation, sometimes you also need to read ahead in English to know how a certain word is pronounced. For example: "I read a book yesterday." and "I read a book every night." Depending on the context that follows, "read" is pronounced differently. The same thing happens for "present" and "record". Admittedly, these are exceptions to the rule.
> in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way
Some context-dependent examples: "read": /ɹid/ vs. /ɹɛd/; "lead": /lid/ vs. /lɛd/ (plumbum); "desert": /ˈdɛz.ɚt/ vs. /dɪˈzɝt/.
For more examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)
> in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way
Are you sure about that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
Posted up above, here's a collection of English pronunciation rules that English speakers have internalized so well they can't generally explain them: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
"Ghoti" is mentioned a few times there, but basically "fish" is a nonsensical pronunciation that breaks several rules. There's a reason (well, a few reasons) why if you ask English speakers how to pronounce "ghoti" and they've never seen it before, they'll probably all guess some variation of "go-tee" or "go-tie".
shure!
reads like it would be pronounced with an aspirated -s- not sh.
When teaching reading and English, learning about context clues is one of the ways students are taught to figure out the meaning of words.
I think you’ll find all of those things are true of English too.
I've been (very) casually learning Japanese for a couple years, and almost every time I think I find something "weird" that Japanese does, I almost immediately think of a very similar example in English.
The alphabet is a pretty awesome invention (alphabet > kana-style syllabary > kanji-style logography) but English writing is at least as complex as JP writing, just in different dimensions.
JP's phonetics, for example, are dead simple compared to English's, but they do a good job making up for it by having a few thousand Kanji.
> JP's phonetics, for example, are dead simple compared to English's
I'm not so sure about that. Do you know about pitch accent?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent
Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. It's like an intermediate language (IL) of mind. Many studentds in China can understand a subject but had the pronouciation completely wrong. In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were.
Chinese characters also had the benifits of photographic memory, presumably you are trained with the right method. The key is to detach the "listening/speaking" phonetics from the characters, wire your brain directly to visual ideograms along with reading/writing. Plus the grammar don't have conjugation nor declension, without the tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness and shit, which makes the scripts very fast to parse. I'd argue reading a paragraph of text is extremely fast in Chinese. You can grasp the general meaning from a large chunk of text without sequencially reading every word. It's like one of these novel apps that hightlight important vowel from English sentences for fast reading but still, you have to go to the translation layers of recall - sound - meaning process.
Sadly this art is lost because ideograms are fading in favor of PinYin in cyber world. The rise of shot-vids make literacy an expensive skill.
> In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were.
This is, in fact, the default stance held by most non-CCP linguists. If you read what experts in the Chinese language family say, it's basically "Chinese languages are mutually unintelligible and more distinct than the Romance languages, but because the government of China says they're just dialects and we (as linguists) recognize that the line between dialect and language is basically arbitrary, we'll call them dialects so we can just study the languages and avoid getting sucked into nasty political discussions."
As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy—and this works both to define distinct languages that are otherwise mutually intelligible and to merge dialects that aren't.
> Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet.
Yes, they are. Modern Hanzi are a very bad phonetic alphabet.
While a minority of characters are indeed pure logograms (小，大，田，etc.), most modern Chinese words are two-syllabic. And syllables often don't have meaningful connection to the meaning of the word: 东西 （"east-west" literally, but means "a thing, object"), some characters have lost _any_ semantic meaning in most words (“子”), and many more characters can only be used as a part of another word ("bound forms", e.g. "据").
Classical Chinese was more logographic and less phonetic, but modern Chinese is not really close to it anymore.
> Modern Hanzi are a very bad phonetic alphabet
alphabets, universally have one common property: they are sortable.
I challenge you to sort Chinese characters.
This is an idea from James Gleick's The Information. The Chinese may never be able to invent morse code alone, because encoding Chinese scripts is extremely hard, even today (think of all those massive code-points in CJK Unicode, with dups and errors)
Chinese text on the Internet may have some emulation of phonemes, but it's never systematically standarized. It just borrows some aspects here or there.
> alphabets, universally have one common property: they are sortable.
Isn't this just an arbitrary order? Why could I not assign numbers to chinese characters and sort them? I know next to nothing about Chinese.
The sort order of the alphabet symbols is arbitrary, but since all of the words are composed of an ordered set of symbols then sorting the words relative to one another is trivial.
> Isn't this just an arbitrary order
yeah but there are very limited number of alphabetical letters and commonly agreed order as a convention.
There's no such a thing in Chinese. For example, you can't easily sort names by A-Z in Chinese except PinYin (or Unicode codepoints for what matters)
> I challenge you to sort Chinese characters.
Chinese characters are in fact definitely sortable. There are multiple keys, the most popular ones being by stroke or by sound.
Example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke-based_sorting
good luck dealing with duplicates and hand-written variants.
> Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. It's like an intermediate language (IL) of mind.
I realized this in Taiwan when I started being able to recognize characters, know what it means in English, and have absolutely no idea what the word is in Mandarin. The written language is almost orthogonal to the spoken one.
> The written language is almost orthogonal to the spoken one.
I'm almost certain that this is true of Chinese script (after all, it was and is used for writing many languages!), but it might not be deducible based on this sort of experience.
I say thus because I had a very similar experience after I had to spend a month in the UAE. Thanks to frequent bilingual signs, I started recognizing common Arabic words, but I had no idea what the words are in Arabic or how to say them. But as far as I know, written Arabic is not at all orthogonal to spoken Arabic, every word is written exactly as it sounds.
OTOH, the pinyin-based typing systems on computers and phones has been a godsend to students of Chinese.
I started to learn Chinese in the 80s at my high school and then in the 90s in Taiwan and was laughably bad at writing. Literally, people would laugh at my characters not only because they looked terrible, but also because I was using the wrong stroke order.
Now, it is possible for me to get away with not knowing how to write characters or the stroke order. Using pinyin and recognizing the characters (or certain radicals) is enough to take me very far in social media, texting, etc.
For instance, for one of the phrases in the article ti2bi3wang4zi4 knowing the last character (zi, 字) and kind of remembering wang is enough to recognize the entire colloquialism when I type in the pinyin tibiwangzi: 提筆忘字
In Taiwan they have a TV game show featuring college students, basically like a crossword featuring 4-character colloquialisms and other phrases that have obscure characters. It's quite fun for the audience to watch, almost everyone is writing characters in the air in front of them as they try to remember the hard characters.
Yes, I endorse his research. As a Taiwanese, I use Traditional Chinese daily in Taiwan, primarily on computers and mobile phones, but I can’t write many of the Chinese characters he mentioned in the article.
I can share a more personal story: after spending a year studying abroad in Britain, I almost forgot how to write Chinese characters—even my own name—since I hadn't written any for over a year! However, when I returned to Taiwan, I was able to recall most of them within minutes. I consider this a temporary phenomenon that fades quickly with focus and a bit of practice.
If this seems oddly familiar, you may actually have read it before, and no plagiarism is involved. Moser wrote the beginning of this article in the middle of his classic essay, ”Why Chinese is So Damn Hard” https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
> Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??
This page is from 02004: http://web.archive.org/web/20040811151534/http://pinyin.info.... Possibly the rest of the article is not simply an excerpt from it.
嚔 is an unusual character, though. Not just in that it's not often used, but also because it's construction is atypical. It would be like Ph.D. students forgetting how to spell "onomatopoeia," which, yes, wouldn't be surprising.
The sneeze example is contrived because in English, sneeze is both phonetic and a word with common occurence.
A better example might involve a common English word with a wierd, non-phonetic spelling. A word that you might imagine it forgivable for even someone who recieved an English PhD to misspell. After all Chinese is a seperate language from English and it is neccessary for it to be evaluated in its own context.
If you think this definetly couldn't happen in English, take a look again at this post -- for it contains eight outright, unambiguous, misspellings of common English words that I would not be surprised if even an English PhD from Harvard made on occassion, especially if your choice of three students were unlucky and they were having embarassingly bad days. (After all, English PhDs isn't the study of spelling, it's the study of literature).
It may be contrived, but it still highlights the key difference.
Even if sneeze was a word that you were taught once in school and hadn't used for 30 years, you would still likely get close to the correct spelling from the sound (sneaze, snease, sneeze), and seeing the misspelling also helps with recall and to self correct.
This is the "virtual circle" of speaking/listening -> reading -> writing -> referred to by the author, which is not possible with Chinese.
It's true that there are some weird non-phonetic English words that PhDs would likely misspell, but it's not 100% of the language and you still could at least make an attempt.
It's possible to just write Chinese in phonetic form (e.g. pinyin), which bypasses this issue, but you have a secondary problem, which is the extremely narrow range of syllables (~400 * 4/5 tones = 1600-2000), resulting in quite ambiguous text.
Pinyin should be approximately as ambiguous as the spoken language, i.e. not very (especially if whitespace is used to denote word boundaries)
I don't think that Chinese people have problems knowing how to spell a character as different characters share the same pronunciation (more or less) if they have the same phonetic component[1]. So pinyin helps literally zero.
What is harder is to distinguish the meaning of all these characters. Let's take this set as an example: 里理哩鲤鯉俚娌悝锂鋰
Ok, they are all pronounced the same, but guessing or knowing all their meanings is a different game. "鲤" has to be a fish that's pronounced li3. That might still be easy, but the more abstract the meaning-giving character radical is, the harder it becomes to distinguish all of them.
[1] https://hanzicraft.com/lists/phonetic-sets
As mentioned in another comment, English has its share of words like that too. For example I'm sure diarrhoea can catch people out.
And how many people drink an espresso every day and think it has an x in it.
I knew plenty of elite students who would make classic English blunders like "expresso" or "pacifically"
> how many people drink an espresso every day and think it has an x in it.
Arguably, "espresso" isn't an english word, but spelling it with an "x" as "expresso" isn't as incorrect as you may think. There's two main theories behind which word to use: "espresso" meaning to "press out" the coffee, or "expresso" meaning "expressly made for the customer" as it's quicker to make than a filter coffee. This is further confused by the Latin root being "exprimire" meaning "to press or squeeze out".
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/espresso-vs-expresso...
Or even more classic English blunders, like not being able to choose correctly between e.g. “their”, “there”, or “they're”.
Except most people will get close enough for most other people to understand. English is rather flexible
Not ti mention spelling differences and even all the unique words in different English countries. Or within the uk
Well in other comments, native Chinese speakers brought up that when you forget how to write a character you just write a homonym and readers can guess by the context - which is how Chinese speech works anyway.
So it turns out that humans are rather flexible
Are those blunders or accents? From my point of view you spelled diarrhea incorrectly, unlike how our lord and savior Noah Webster taught us.
Maybe language is fine if it conveys the intended meaning.
Yes a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and well... diarrhoea is diarrhea
My point was addressing "tsinghua students..." and "Harvard students..." unless they were literary scholars or grammarians their wield of the language may be at the level of "educated" but still plenty fallible. I'm sure those of us who did any post grad would have met people who were smart in a given axis and otherwise very ordinary along the other axes.
This is not analagous. The sound of every English word give clues – and often precise guidance - on how to write it, but the sound of a Chinese word typically offers no hint of how to write it. If you give me some obscure English word, say "persiflage", I might have no idea what it means, but I can probably spell it. But if you give a Chinese speaker 馘 (góu) in context, almost no one will be able to write it, even if they know the precise meaning ("to cut off the left ear of the slain").
I would guess that most Harvard students could spell those misspelled words in your comment correctly if you asked them to directly. When reading we know what the word is supposed to be and we correct it in our mind to the intended spelling. If anything it’s a testament to the resiliency of phonetic alphabets - but more so it’s illustrative of how English pronunciation has deviated from spellings that were mostly set with the advent of printing in England. Most of the misspellings in your comment involve misplaced letters that are not directly pronounced.
Strictly in terms phonetics, why couldn’t “weird” be spelled “wierd” when English also has “tier”? I’m guessing the Normans are to thank for turning “wyrd” into “weird”.
Something like Wednesday or was it Wensday, Wendsday, Wednsday, Wedensday, Wednseday, Wednesdy, Wednesay, Wedsday, Wednseday, or, Wendseday?
I vote for wedensday as it is the closest to the originating Woden's day.
Therein lies the resiliency of phonetic orthography: despite the misspellings the sound represented by the words did not significantly change thus most readers would never even notice.
If anything it’s a statement on how the orthography of English in particular doesn’t well match the phonetic structure of the language - something due to a confluence of factors in English several hundred years ago, including the rise of printing.
Woops, I thought I’d post this comment and it never posted.
Even with the misspellings it's obvious what words you meant. If someone forgets how to write "嚔" are they just missing a few strokes but it's obvious what they actually meant? Or do they have zero clue what it's supposed to look like?
From what I've heard people say (and what I've seen), the most common way to handle it is to simply write another character that sounds the same. In other words, the characters can be used as phonetic elements when it's needed. It looks weird (in the same way that spelling words phonetically in English can look word), but it's doable.
That's for situations where they had to write something by hand but didn't have their phone with them to check (otherwise they can just spend a second to look at the character), which isn't a common occurrence.
It depends, but it's not uncommon to completely forget the entire character. If you sort of remember it, then the muscle memory in your hands often helps to finish the character correctly once you start, at least that's what I've found and heard from others.
Remember the english -> pirate translator? Simularily, per your graf, a "spell wrecker" tool, witch introduces mispellings and other errs, could be amusing.
Well done. I spotted weird on its own but I had to go looking for the others.
>It would be like Ph.D. students forgetting how to spell "onomatopoeia,"
A (native) PhD student forgetting how to spell onomatopeia might be normal, but 3 I would say is statistically unlikely.
The fact there are two variants of 嚔 (嚏 and 嚔) implies that even ancient chinese people found it difficult and they misspelled it.
You can spell as onomatopia and people will understand you just fine. You can't do that in Chinese.
I would honestly be astonished if a 4 English department PhD students who were all native speakers of English could all not spell onomatopoeia. I’d expect 2 of the 4 could in the absolute worst case.
Spelling is simply not as hard as remembering hanzi, even in English.
Would it not be possible that the three students did not want to embarrass the author by showing their knowledge? I sometimes get that behavior from Chinese and Japanese colleagues when I am supposed to know something but temporarily forgot it (or just cannot access it at the time).
I've seen my wife (Chinese) and her friends (also Chinese) have this same problem with the exact same word "sneeze", so I'm inclined to believe the author.
The fact that 嚔/sneeze is usually the go to example means it ends up becoming the exception that proves the rule. Most other characters are much more easily remembered.
If you learn languages you quickly notice that knowing the 99% most frequent words still means that you need to look up a word every paragraph or two and that you have trouble expressing yourself. To write Chinese you need to know several thousand characters, forgetting just a few dozen can be quite annoying when you try to write nontrivial texts.
Being able to write a character by hand, being able to type it up, and being able to read it are all different things. I doubt many Chinese would be thrown off from reading or typing 打喷嚏.
I actually did a deep dive into the issue of unfamiliar characters coming up when reading, and how people handle them. I won't go into all the details, but the general takeaway is:
1. Unfamiliar characters can actually be quite rare or quite common depending on the material you're reading.
2. It's not much of an issue for people either way.
Of course, when I used the word „write“ I meant writing by hand.
Yeah, this particular character seems to cause people problems because it’s not really used anywhere else.
I think the shrimp meat example from the researcher daily notes was a bigger tell of the issue.
Because shrimp meat is something I see written out EVERYWHERE.
The shrimp example is kind of strange. Like you said, it's an extremely common character, and not a difficult one either. But beyond that, if you look at it he got the radical, 虫, correct. The phonetic element, 下, is a fundamental character that I doubt anyone forgets to write.
It just seems like such an odd outlier example. Like talking about a friend that spells "been" as "bin." I'm sure it could happen, but it's not indicative of a broader trend.
The story was reported by Victor Mair, though, who is extremely opposed to using characters and often exaggerates the issues with them.
Personally, I've seen a lot of Chinese people's written notes, and I don't think I've ever seen them resort to pinyin, even among people that didn't go to college. I just asked a few Chinese friends about this, and they told me they never resort to pinyin either.
As a Chinese native speaker, I should admit that I forgot how to write them ("sneeze" characters 喷嚏) before I saw them just now. One of the reason, I think, is they are used quite often in oral Chinese, but rarely in written Chinese. And those characters are not easy to write, as you see.
No, they really just forgot the characters. I lived in Japan for the better part of a decade and it isn't at all uncommon. There were many times when I explicitly asked natives to recognize or help me with a Kanji and they struggled as well. I doubt everyone's been systematically lying when you genuinely ask for help.
The reason is just digital input really. Pinyin and Romaji typing have become so common that a lot of people write Hanzi/Kanji by hand less and less and it's so complicated of a skill there's really no other way to get it in your brain other than practice. I even notice it myself, I easily recognize 10x more characters than I can accurately write.
Happens all the time to Japanese people, too. There's a core set of characters that are well remembered, then there is a set of characters that you can remember most strokes of (so that someone else can read it) and then there's the stuff where you just have no idea.
Of course, you _can_ escape to Hiragana if you're so inclined, but then you would show that you don't know the character - so it's just avoided.
Ambiguity is king in Japan.
Having read it, the rest of the article was new.
Thanks!
That’s a pretty good point… if I saw ‘three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard’ forget how to write ‘sneeze’, I would assume they were lunatics pretending, not that they genuinely forgot how to write the word.
Does that imply learning the advanced literary culture, that is usually associated with prestige academia, has a vastly higher threshold in Chinese than in English?
It’s pretty disturbing for language itself to be a potentially retarding force on learning.
All three PhD's were perfectly capable of communicating the word for sneeze and also recognize it in writting. They just couldn't write it exactly.
I don't think it has a slowing effect. Except maybe by adding annoying/useless classes for mid/primary students - which is just par for course everywhere else. I can name 3 objectively completely useless classes from my european youth (plus one in college) that were only there because 'culture'.
How does your assessment of the relative usefulness of ‘classes’ from youth relate to the possible existence of a retarding effect arising from language differences?
A better example than sneeze might be diarrhoea. In Chinese this is very easy - 拉肚子 - but I'm sure there are English speakers who might forget the spelling for diarrhoea if they're having a bad day.
Does English not have a native word? It would be „Durchfall“ in German, and the Greek word only be used if one wanted to be fancy.
English speakers perceive it as a native word, not a Greek one.
There are lots of examples of this, where English has a foreign-sounding word for something whereas German has a Germanic one. For example oxygen vs. Sauerstoff.
It just has, uh, diarroeha...yeah I can't spell it either
Mao and the party nearly adopted pinyin as the national alphabet but stepped back from the brink.
I remember the great Peking->Beijing uplift. Reading "China reconstructs" magazines there were suggestions it was coming, and then it just went away. BBC newsreaders explained it was the new official look. Like Turkey-> Türkiye.
I suspect all syllabery/ideogram scripts have this latent problem. At 2,500 ideograms for "literate" there's a lot of potential to lose non core elements. "Educated" means over 5,000 heading to 10,000 and the complete set is north of 40,000 from what I understand. I can't imagine the investment in time to get there.
Official standard defines around 8k characters in modern usage. I’d guesstimate native highly educated speaker recognizes maybe 6-7k at most.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Commonly_Used_Standa...
> nearly adopted pinyin as the national alphabet
Some years ago I saw street-signs in China that had both Mandarin characters and also alphabetical versions, and I couldn't understand why they would go so far and then omit the accent marks.
I wonder if it's been fixed since.
It's common. The Pinyin transcription is needed for foreigners to be able to recognize the directions, and so it doesn't need accent marks.
Yet then foreigners can't accurately repeat it, like "I'm at the corner of X and Y" or "The hotel is the one on Z road."
Even if they had the diacritics, it’s unlikely most foreigners could accurately reproduce the tones anyway.
Maybe the same reason English road signs omit punctuation.
No, those are not the same, because Chinese is a tonal language. [0] Taking Pinyin [1] and erasing the accent-marks creates ambiguity between several different words.
The English sign-equivalent would be... Well, something so dumb that nobody does it. Like perhaps deleting the ascenders and descenders of letters dbqp so that they look like oooo, which doesn't even help with horizontal space.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
English equivalent would be writing something like "Aldwych", "Leicester Square" or "River Thames" on a sign, and expecting me, a foreigner, to pronounce it correctly.
China is highly competitive, with a history of using ‘merit’ based admission tests.
The system/barriers were setup (as one’s always are) by incumbents, and the way they did it (while continuing to present it as ‘merit’ based) was to lean heavily on tests that require extensive memorization and tutoring, because only the wealthy can afford it.
This is one obvious sign of that. After all, who has time to memorize 40k different characters?
That seems a bit made up tbh. I’ve worked with a fair number of Chinese overachievers (both in domestic China and abroad) and family background/affluence weren’t even remotely as much of a factor compared to the US or India (except for the IITs). Also, I noticed there were many many cases of brilliant young people rising through the ranks of the academic system in China compared to India for example where teachers often simply would not show up in public schools.
Personal background: I worked and studied in the US, I worked in China and I studied in India
I think they mean historic (as in pre-1911 China).
And they aren't wrong, as even major China scholars like Yasheng Huang and Yuhua Wang point out that the Imperial Civil Service in China was stacked against merit due to structural issues that biased in favor of incumbents.
That said, similar issues continue to persist in China to this day due to the Zhongkao.
Specifically, if you didn't attend a academic high school (which only accepts around 45-55% of Zhongkao takers) you wouldn't be prepared for the Gaokao unless it was out of pocket at a cram school (which are now technically banned, but were anyhow exorbitantly expensive in a country where the median household income is $4,000). And if you couldn't pass the Gaokao, you couldn't attend university.
Furthermore, Academic High Schools tend to be few and far between, yet take the lion's share of resources unlike Vocational High Schools which most Chinese attend - but not the ones you meet in an air conditioned office unless you order from Meituan. In the vocational schools you see similar issues of teacher absence and lack of pedagogy.
The failure of the VET system in China has been a major sticking point in Chinese policymaking recently and a lot of domestic research is being done to understand why it failed [0][1][2]
[0] - https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/ET-09-20...
[1] - https://www.ewadirect.com/proceedings/lnep/article/view/9075
[2] - https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/125949173.pdf
Thanks for the additional details.
In Germany only about 30% of high-school kids qualify academic high-school (merit-based) and are eligible to apply for university after two-years of exams that determine your final grade (and chances). There are literally only public schools.
I think you describe that it is very similar today in China after they banned the private tutoring a couple of years back. So, we are somehow back to “work hard on not to unequal grounds and your personal merit/luck will determine your future”.
Thanks for sharing additional detail and it resembles what I remember - but it does not seem to be “instrumented in a way to keep certain groups out of academia based on income or social standing”.
Imho a 30% ratio for university graduates is a sweet spot for society. We have great (free) vocational training programs in Germany that empower all those who did not go to university to make money quicker and they more often that not end up in financially better situations. University often pays off only for top university graduates once they pass 35/40 years of age.
> In Germany only about 30% of high-school kids qualify academic high-school (merit-based) and are eligible to apply for university
Overall 50% of the population are eligible to apply for university since completing higher tier education at a vocational school or completing specialized courses at "lesser" schools can also fullfill the acceptance requirements for related fields of study.
The main difference is Germany actually puts money in vocational education and values it socially.
China does not.
China's education spend is only 4.1% of GDP, and much of that is diverted to academic high schools and universities. Furthermore, vocational students are viewed as "bad students" and good faculty prefer to join academic high schools or private high schools due to a better salary and social standing. Furthermore, even SOE factories (the traditional hirer of vocational students) in China now prefer hiring college graduates instead of vocational students because of a glut of college graduates due to cultural shifts in the 2000s-2010s, anti-vocational student bias, and college graduates trying to get a stable "iron rice bowl" (to use the Korean term) government job.
> I think you describe that it is very similar today in China after they banned the private tutoring a couple of years back. So, we are somehow back to “work hard on not to unequal grounds and your personal merit/luck will determine your future”
I think that was the aim of the legislation, but in action it didn't help social mobility much, because upper income households just resorted to private or online tutoring, and everyone ignores it.
It's not like legislators send their kids to vocational schools - they also prefer to send them to academic or top private schools so that they can then attend university (either domestically or abroad).
> but it does not seem to be “instrumented in a way to keep certain groups out of academia based on income or social standing”.
In face value it doesn't, but in action urban academic high schools and primary schools get the lions share of funding, and until recently those are gatekept to people holding a hukou for that city.
This meant that urban migrants who weren't able to convert their rural hukou to an urban hukuo (because that meant losing their rural landholdings which is the only asset of worth they have), and their kids were stuck either in underfunded rural schools or crappy private primary schools in an urban area.
This has a significant impact on social mobility to this day, and is a major reason why China's median household income remains very low. Urban China's median household income is $6,000, but rural China's is around $3,000. This means the bottom half of urban society in China and much of rural China's society does not have much of a chance of upward mobility because they can't pay for private tutoring nor can they afford a good private high school if their kid fails the Zhongkao.
Thanks! That’s a lot of additional information. I appreciate the effort!
Made up how?
It’s still more merit based and class mobile than caste anything.
But the tests are the tests and require massive prep, eh?
And the tests require massive amounts of memorization and time to prep for, compared to western tests - even now.
Historically it was orders of magnitude worse though.
Kid’s ability to make it through the ranks of academia in my personal anecdotal evidence depends less on financial ability or social standing in China compared to the US or India.
I agree that it is merit driven above anything else - not sure I would agree that this is favoring wealthy kids/certain social class in a more disproportionate way than what we see in India or the US.
Now, I will say that neither university nor high school in China or India imho prepare kinds for success in life or the corporate world. Europe (with a hands-off “you get no help and will just struggle your way through life and learn quick”) and the US (“here are actual experts dedicated to help you succeed) seem imho to produce capable graduates for the corporate world.
Eh, see alephnerds comment above - that lines up with my experience as well.
Ok, the point being though (it seems): advantages are not universal geographically across China; I agree, that I also observed that.
In that geographical advantages are expressly tied to income and ‘official ness’ in an area (the Hukou system)?
If one is a poor rural immigrant in an otherwise high end area, you don’t get to send your kids to the nice schools.
The issue with hukou is two-way.
Urban cities of course don't want to hand out urban hukou easily because they don't want an influx of migrants straining social services.
But conversely, a lot of rural hukou holders do not want to give up rural hukou because it gives retirement benefits at 55 and is a requirement in order to keep their rural landholding.
This is why you have migrants with a rural hukou working in urban China but not gaining an urban hukou.
The problem with hukou is fundamentally a social safety net problem - there is little to no social safety net in China, so the "migrant to urban area with rural hukou" is the least bad option out of multiple bad options (keep rural hukou and live in rural China barely eking a living or give up rural hukou and lose the only appreciating asset you had along with benefits at 55).
In essence, the lion's share of Chinese development is overly concentrated in a handful of urban agglomerations, and isn't spreading to rural China where 45-50% of Chinese still live to this day.
The hokou/education thing is pretty clearly one way though, correct?
Just making urban hukou easier to adopt (which is something that multiple municipalities slowly started doing in the late 2010s) isn't enough to solve the social mobility issue.
Parents won't give up rural hukou if it also means losing your landholding and early retirement stipend benefits.
If you're a migrant worker from a rural household, you are most likely an unskilled laborer and are earning around $300/month, with dad working on a construction site or Meituan and mom working in a factory doing unskilled assembly or service job.
Around $150 is spent on incidentals because living in an urban area is expensive, an additional $100 is sent back to your family (grandma, grandpa, kids because the one child policy was largely ignored in rural China) back home in your rural town, and you might have $50 left over to save for retirement, healthcare, etc.
This is not enough to buy urban property, which is the asset class that appreciated the most in China, and this means the only large asset you have is your rural landholding. Furthermore, that early retirement benefit means you're earning an additional $15-20/month while continuing to work as a laborer or a Meituan delivery driver.
Fundamentally, salaries are too low in China and the social safety net is nonexistent, and this is what is causing the issues like overproduction, deflation, and sagging consumer demand which we are seeing nowadays.
The only way to solve this problem is to either expand the welfare system dramatically (thus incentivizing the bottom half to spend more by having to save less) or increase wages (thus incentivizing the bottom half to spend more by allowing them to save at the same rate while spending more). Working on increasing the quality of life in rural China would also help dramatically.
Sadly, Chinese leadership at the top level continues to ignore social welfare spending and rural China due to financial and moral concerns.
Given the collapsing demographics in China, many of those rural hukou holders are obviously not going to receive the promised retirement benefits. The surplus resources to fund those payments don't exist so either the retirement age will be raised or benefits will be cut (either officially, or unofficially by just not sending payments and ignoring any protests).
Retirement benefits are the last thing the CCP touches because tens of millions of Chinese heavily rely on it already.
China is authoritarian, but the CCP absolutely does take public sentiment into account, and policies that have the chance of causing mass protests and discontent do get rolled back.
Zero Covid is a perfect example of this, as it was hastily rolled back after the wave of protests following the apartment fire in Urumqi due to Xinjiang CCP's hard Zero Covid enforcement.
And this is why China had not raised the retirement age until in the past few weeks despite trying for decades, and anyhow kicked that can down the line to 15 years.
I understand the concern over public sentiment but where will the revenue come from to pay those benefits? The ratio of workers to retirees is inevitably going to go way down and it seems unrealistic to expect that the government can borrow its way out of the problem. The retirees will have to take a hit somehow.
> where will the revenue come from to pay those benefits
A mixture of bonds/borrowing, federal bailouts, and (painful) corporate tax reform.
This is a major reason why provincial law enforcement has recently begun cracking down on unpaid corporate back taxes recently, because social spend is largely devolved to the provincial level.
The property crisis in China is itself a result of the retirement fund issue, as until recently provincial government's only financial lever was land sales, and retirement funds are largely the domain of provinces following Deng's reforms.
Once you get to ~5000 characters you can read most common texts. Vanishingly few people will know ~40,000 characters; a large fraction of those are obscure or ancient characters that only show up in historical texts.
That is rather the point I was making, wasn’t it?
There are only about 200+ Chinese ideograms. Certainly not in the thousands.
This is comically incorrect. Even the article plainly states that you need to know ~1500 characters to be considered literate in Chinese, with sixth graders required to learn ~2500 characters. A quick perusal of practically any Chinese-language website (e.g. https://zh.wikipedia.org/) will quickly disabuse you of the notion that there are "only 200+ Chinese ideograms".
You might be conflating "ideogram" with "radical", i.e. components of characters. There's probably a few hundred of those defined, but they're more like pieces of characters rather than whole ones. Combining radicals produces very different characters that have totally different meanings; learning the radicals alone buys you very little.
There are thousands of characters, and you have to know thousands. There are tens of thousands of characters in existence, although only highly educated folks will know anywhere near 10000 characters.
The vast majority of Chinese characters aren't ideograms.
Um, no. If you're talking about radicals (of which there are generally considered to be 214), yes, but you can't read / write in general if you only know those. Also, of those 214, a good chunk aren't standalone words. You're never going to see 疒 or 丶 by itself.
You won't have the words for "I" or "you". You might be able to read "melon" but not "fruit". You could read "papaya" and "corn" but not "vegetable". You could read "beef" or "lamb" but not "chicken". You could read "small" but not "few". You wouldn't be able to read "hello" or "goodbye", "happy" or "sad". But you'd be able to count 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, 18, 20...
The fact that characters are made up of radicals does make them easier to learn, though. There are ~2000 characters in the core vocabulary, sure - but it's not like you have to learn to write every one of them individually, just like you don't have to learn the spelling of every English word from scratch. There's common patterns.
The vast majority of Chinese characters are phonetic compounds, not ideograms. There are only a few hundred ideograms.
That's understating the actual number of distinct components you need to know, but even so, just memorizing the individual ideograms still isn't enough to allow you to read Chinese with meaningful fluency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...Or, consider 亭 (ting2), 叮 (ding1), 成 (cheng2), 打 (da3) which all supposedly derive their sound from 丁 (ding1) per the analysis at https://github.com/cjkvi/cjkvi-ids/. You can't just memorize the components and read all of these as "ding".
And beyond that, that doesn't help with being able to write. You can't just say "oh, I don't remember exactly how to write this word, but I'm just going to throw in some ideograph with the right phonetic component next to the radical and my reader will just know what I mean." You can't just take 瓦 (pottery) + 平 (ping2) to invent the word for vase. 瓶 (ping2) instead uses 并 (bing1), not to be confused with 井 (jing3).
Learning the radicals is maybe the first 10% of the effort in learning how to read and write Chinese.
After that, you still have to learn how to combine the radicals in pretty much arbitrary ways to form several thousand characters. The way you combine them is sometimes related to the sound and/or meaning of the radicals, but it's not systematic at all.
The grandparent comment is massively downplaying the difficulty involved in learning to read and write Chinese.
I'd say thousands of ideograms composed by hundreds of logograms, and you can be both right (this is actually a very reduced view of what logogram is, but English is quite imprecise on this).
> Chinese people are increasingly forgetting how to write characters by hand.
For those who can’t read Chinese here, I’ll just note that this is basically the equivalent of forgetting how to spell certain words in English. For example, I can read just fine, but there are still words I’m not good at spelling.
I’m just noting this so that this problem doesn’t seem totally exotic or specific to Chinese(/Japanese).
Strongly disagree.
If you can remember the word "chocolate" but not the spelling then you can guess it. You might write choklit or choclate or something but you can at least get close.
If you forget what 警察 (police officer, jing3cha2) looks like then you're just completely screwed. Maybe you can remember a radical or two but it's still just going to be wrong and not meaningfully recognisable.
I guess you could write down 景茶 (jing3cha2) and rely on the phonetics, or use a different word if you know one, but it's still wrong on a level that "choclit" just isn't.
The counter-argument would be that the person could just use the pinyin or use a digital device to get them the characters. But as the article pointed out, those are both modern conveniences. Less than 100 years old both. The script absolutely gives no clues otherwise.
Let's put it this way: We know what ancient might egyptian (most likely) sounds like because they gave their writting system the uniliterals, which are pronunciation guides for complex words. We know that they said waw, and we know what a waw sounds like. They did this probably so they would not to explode their character count from hundreds to thousands.
> I guess you could write down 景茶 (jing3cha2) and rely on the phonetics, or use a different word if you know one, but it's still wrong on a level that "choclit" just isn't.
If a non-native did this in their own way would likely look wrong, but Chinese natives do occasionally use phonics to write or to substitute some characters with others.
The severity of the problem seems exotic.
> However, this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character. Highly literate people are forgetting how to write the characters in words like ‘kitchen’ (厨房), ‘lips’ (嘴唇), ‘cough’ (咳嗽), and ‘broom’ (扫帚). Victor Mair (2014) provides a striking example of the severity of the character amnesia problem. The following image is of a shopping list hastily written by a social science researcher from the PRC. The writer of the list struggled to remember the characters in ‘egg’ (鸡蛋), ‘shrimp’ (虾仁), and ‘chives’ (韭菜), and simply resorted to Pinyin.
Completely common problem. Anyone that speaks multiple languages sees this everyday, there are many words in Portuguese/Spanish/English I need the spellchecker for (or even translation) to write because I don't use it as frequently in that specific language.
That is happening a lot with cooking, as I started to take it much more seriously when I moved to the US and now my cooking vocabulary in English is much better/wider than it is in my native Portuguese, so I'll frequently use words in english for stuff I should know in portuguese but don't remember.
> For those who can’t read Chinese here, I’ll just note that this is basically the equivalent of forgetting how to spell certain words in English.
I can't read Chinese, but I think the article has a better analogy: "most people can easily recognise the musical symbol for treble clef (𝄞), but very few could draw it by memory."
> I’m just noting this so that this problem doesn’t seem totally exotic or specific to Chinese(/Japanese).
English orthography is exactly that. Exotic.
Imagine having such a strange spelling system that you have competitions where you try to recite spelling. Exotic.
Many people would consider Spanish, my native language, to be much more straightforward when it comes to spelling.
We still have spelling contests at state and nation levels.
Except in German this is not a problem. The idea that you could say/hear a word and not know how to spell it doesn't even make sense in that context.
Nah, it's common in German too. For example, the first parts of "Widerspruch" and "wiedersehen" are said/heard the same, so you just have to learn the spelling. Many, many other examples... Although on the scale of languages German is indeed closer to phonetic spelling than some others.
But if you were asked to spell the words, you'd produce something close to what was expected, rather than drawing a blank. The question "how do you spell wiedersehen" contains in itself a lot of clues.
This feels more like "what's the Unicode character for 'full moon'?" I'd be able to recognize the result as correct, but if I don't know the answer, I just don't know.
(Of course, that goes too far in the other direction. I assume you can draw a few strokes to "get someone started" on a character and they'll pick it up, whereas most people wouldn't recognize the first half of a Unicode code point. As the grandparent poster said, it's an exotic problem that's hard to empathize with in phonetic languages)
> I assume you can draw a few strokes to "get someone started" on a character and they'll pick it up
In my experience this is not actually the case; I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half).
I guess there's several levels of character amnesia here, from "I remember half the character" to "I have no clue but I'll recognise it".
> In my experience this is not actually the case; I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half).
That one's just bizarre, since 虾 is also just the most intuitively obvious choice to form a substitute character if you do forget the right component. If anything, I don't think pinyin substitution is something you do unless you're a highly-educated computer user who deals regularly in Latin script. It's a striking "man bites dog" moment, but the one has been passed around since 2006 (cf. https://pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_refor...) and is not, as far as I can tell, indicative of any particular trend. Discreet literacy outliers in jobs where you'd expect it are ... a thing in English too: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43700153
(It's honestly weirder to see someone write jiu菜 than 9菜 too.)
I do not think that the example is good. "Wider" and "wieder" have different meanings, even if they are probably derived from the same word.
I do not know if this is true in all the German dialects, but at least some pronounce "wider" with short "i" and "wieder with long "i", so they are easy to distinguish when heard (like the difference in English between "fill" and "feel").
English and German appear to have had a similar semantic evolution for this pair of words, because "wider" means "against", while "wieder" means "again", so in both cases a single word has evolved to cover these two different meanings and the variants have become differentiated in pronunciation too.
I'm a native German speaker and i don't know of a dialect in Germany that would pronounce "Widerstand" with a short "i". Would you mind sharing which dialect you think of?
"ie" is always long. For "i" it depends on the splitting of the word, i think. I don't know if this is a concept in other languages too. I think the rule is that if the "i" is at a split, then it is long, but i'm not sure and there are always exceptions to every rule in German. Consider "Schnit|zel", "Lis|te" (short) vs "Bi|bel", "Wi|der|stand" (long).
I have worked for some time in Germany and this is how some coworkers pronounced it, but I do not know where were they from.
From what you say I assume that the literary pronunciation is also with long "i", which is good to know.
Perhaps they were influenced by the different spelling, because I have seen this phenomenon in other countries, where despite a mostly phonetic writing some words were spelled differently than pronounced, for etymological or other reasons, and then the pronunciation of those words by many people has shifted, matching the spelling and not the traditional pronunciation.
> Except in German this is not a problem.
I don't know any German, so I can't comment on this, but I'll add that the concept of a spelling contest (like we have in English) wouldn't make sense in a lot of languages because the spelling of words are so obvious/consistent.
Finnish does this very well too. There is only a few tricky parts, but in general the spelling and pronunciation match. And if they don't, obvious solution is to write as word is pronounced. Which is a drift, but I think it is more desirable way.
If you need an example of a germanic language that has a very regular phonetic spelling I think Dutch is a better example than German. German has a lot of idiosyncrasies, because the spelling tries to preserve the etymology of the words. In Dutch they don't bother trying to preserve a word's history, everything is written as it sounds. (With a handful easy to memorize exceptions)
I think Spanish is a much better example for write how you speak and still being correct, than German.
Hmmm not so literate people (or just children) make a lot of mistakes writing Spanish because a bunch of letters are pronounced the same. And then the “h” when not preceded by a “c” is silent, which causes issues.
What is true however is that of you learn the pronunciation rules you should be able to read a text correctly even if you have no clue what you’re saying. That’s not true of English for example.
There are a couple of rules that cause confusion:
- b, v and sound like /b/, because v lost its original pronunciation and w was lent from other languages.
- h lost its sound and became silent (used to be a soft /f/).
- g can sometimes sound like /j/ (there was some pressure to remove these uses).
- x can be an /s/ at the start of a word (due to Greek ancestry).
Those are considered mistakes, but they do not change the pronunciation of the words.
For the concrete rules: https://www.rae.es/ortograf%C3%ADa/valores-fonol%C3%B3gicos-.... You can see the exceptions to "one letter, one sound" are very few.
Also, in Latin America (but not most of Spain) z and s are pronounced the same.
Is it? There is a lot of historical spelling in Spanish, though not as much as English. German, on with the other hand, has its spelling routinely updated every few years.
The historical spelling is quite limited, and mostly for retro-compatibility. Spanish tries to be understandable across a large number of countries and rules must accommodate old Spanish dating from the XV century.
I think the example of "ampersand" "&" is good.
We have a word describing what it is, we have a symbol of how it looks, and we have a word of how it is pronounced "and". We also tend not to write ampersands down by hand. Its a more common symbol. However unlike the treble clef the meaning and the pronunciation is the same so perhaps the example isn't as good?
Even the Chinese Character Heroes competition mentioned in the article seems a lot like the spelling bee in the US, doesn't it? I wonder if the anecdote about the PhD students has a cultural dimension in addition to language proficiency — could the students have refused not because they don't know the characters, but because they aren't fully confident they wouldn't make a mistake?
The article points out that, because Chinese is not a phonetic language, if you don't know how to write something, you might not be able to write it at all, while in phonetic languages you can always spell something that sounds the same. E.g. "snees" for "sneeze".
This is true in mainland China, but not in Taiwan. There, katakana is used as pinyin, and words can be composed by katakana.
I'm not sure where you've got this from, but I lived in Taiwan for years - you might be thinking of 注音 which does look similar to kana but is distinct and unrelated.
And the authors article is referring to the writing of the logograph - 注音 is strictly for pronunciation.
So the question is then whether writing "snees" instead of "sneeze" is like writing sneeze in pinyin (or in "注音"), or not.
The Heisig method, which recursively breaks down Chinese characters into patterns with arbitrary meanings, can help you sidestep this problem. You're never dealing with shapes anymore, but rather reconstructing stories from these stroke/meaning pairs. Since patterns consist of subpatterns, you can tweak the level of granularity until a sensible narrative emerges. Just recite that story as you move your pen.
It's a lifesaver as an adult foreign learner, but I don't really see anything preventing native writers of Chinese and Japanese from benefitting from this general process as well. I've wondered if the guys who pass those truly insane 6,000+ character exams have to fall back on some sort of hack at that point.
As another adult Chinese learner, does something like the Heisig method really help with language acquisition or just memorizing characters? I’m skeptical because of the immense amount of time it takes to learn even without elaborate story construction for each character. I’ve kind of resigned to being a word processor idiot, and only memorizing characters in handwriting as a bi-product of usage.
It may be anecdotal, but I once involuntarily trained my memory by trying to recall what I've been doing each day. After a few weeks, my memory noticeably improved.
That's to say, the task may feel insurmontable at first, but if you give time to your body to adjust, it should become easier.
That's very interesting. Did the memory boost persist? If so do you do any maintenance exercises like the original ones or have you noticed other effects?
It's difficult to say: I think shortly after this "incident", I started doing more maths/physics on my free time, which must have help this boost to persist.
Thinking about it, this recalls me of a Leonardo quote (pertaining visual memory then):
> « I myself have proved it to be of no small use, when in bed in the dark, to recall in fancy the external details of forms previously studied, or other noteworthy things conceived by subtle speculation; and this is certainly an admirable exercise, and useful for impressing things on the memory. »
I remember reading about similar observations regarding visual memory, where students trained to memorize visual information would outperform their peers (observations perhaps in the 1800s/early 1900s, IIRC a woman was in charge of this).
It surely helps. Mnemonics are a good tool for memorization. You don't have to remember elaborate stories, just something like: "歌" - "older brother lacks singing". It certainly doesn't work with all characters, but it helps.
It's designed for Japanese where it probably works better - pretty much all Kanji have multiple pronunciations that can be completely different to each other so it makes some amount of sense to ignore the sound and focus on the shape and the meaning. Much less relevant for Chinese where you can usually tie the character to a single sound and learn all three halves at the same time.
I did Heisig's Remembering The Kanji as my first step on my Japanese learning journey. It helped make the written language feel more accessible, and I took it on as a fun challenge, but in hindsight only learning to read is important and learning to write is mostly a waste of time. Learning to read is vital, but being a word processor idiot is how everyone is living their lives for the most part.
fwiw I studied Japanese, but I believe most of this still applies.
It's divide and conquer. When you are reading the book, you are indeed just learning the characters. It's a significant ~2-3 month investment that maybe doesn't make sense unless you plan on living and working in the country. But once you've gotten through it, it absolutely feeds back into vocab acquisition, since the characters are now completely unambiguous to you. Much like how Latin/Greek helps with English, you can also work out what entirely new words might mean if you are familiar with their characters.
I did RTK. I also learned to read around 3k kanji. Turns out it wasn't at all necessary to learn to write that additional 1k Kanji in order to become able to read / distinguish it.
The time is better invested in simply studying how to distinguish visually similar characters. That alone solves the problem directly.
I also did all three volumes and found the extra 1,000 to be a waste. Really polluted my Anki.
> The time is better invested in simply studying how to distinguish visually similar characters.
But you still have to know what you're distinguishing between, which might only arise after repeated mistakes. Heading off this frustration directly by studying characters may not have been the best use of my time in absolute terms, but it did wonders for my overall motivation and made me feel like I was doing more than treading water. Pre-Heisig I was reading specific books intended for foreign learners, while afterwards I was just reading the newspaper.
It's somewhat a shame there isn't heavily curated Anki decks for doing what I call "disambiguation study" where you focus on cards that help you distinguish similar things from one another. It'd really speed things up.
>But you still have to know what you're distinguishing between, which might only arise after repeated mistakes.
I'm learning Korean at the moment and it's particular brutal for this IMHO. Some words have taken a long time to properly understand due to repeatedly mistaking them for very similar words, and there are a lot of these in Korean.
You've got it backwards. The Heisig method is faster, and less work overall. It takes about 10 seconds or so to set an image in your mind of the scene for a character, then a handful of reviews over the following weeks. Then you never forget it.
Classical methods would have you drilling characters for hours upon hours of wasted time.
Well, "it worked for me." Similar reports for many people who have done fast-track Heisig speed runs, such as Heisig himself. It takes about 10 seconds of initial study to fix a story in mind (which is actually quite long--seriously count out 10 seconds slowly and imagine that time spent fully focused on the character at hand), and a review sequence that gets it in your long-term memory.
There are in fact many people who have learned 4000+ Chinese characters, using this or other methods.
I mean to say that my current method mostly omits hand writing. I can use a keyboard or phone to write and I can recognize characters fine. But on top of just learning a language, is Heisig so effective that I will be able to also memorize handwriting each character? Or do people measure how useful it is by being able to memorize the strokes for many characters, yet fail to become fluent in the language otherwise?
Heisig will have you learn handwriting, yes. Because that is explicitly all you practice in that method.
Aside: Do you learn simplified or traditional? I learned traditional. I would have anyway because my wife is Taiwanese, but I advocate others to do the same because it is arguably the same difficulty if not easier. And going traditional -> simplified is tractable whereas the reverse is not.
Learning the Heisig method is similar: learning from a perspective of handwriting is easier, and you get the ability to read “for free.” It’s a better approach, even if you never need to write by hand.
Also traditional, and I agree it’s easier to remember them than simplified characters even if they are more complicated to write.
So you have a reference point for this. When you learn a character by the Heisig method, you go from meaning -> writing. You don’t bother practicing reading -> meaning. It turns out that it’s very easy to go from writing to reading, much like going from traditional to simplified, but the reverse not so much.
I'm using something similar to Heisig, and I can already tell that while I can list all of the radicals and components in a character, I have no memory of their relative positions. I'm also not trying to learn them and I only using a pinyin input method, but I can't imagine really needing to be able to write by hand ever.
If you're not actually writing out the characters, you're not using Heisig. You wouldn't have that issue if you were actually writing them out. And it's not the wrote practice, it's the fact that you intrinsically must write one primitive at a time, which solidifies the order in the story. Most Heisig students end up developing slightly different primitive meanings for different placements, or an aspect of the story which controls the layout, for that reason.
Characters are not words. Most words are 2- or 4-character combinations. Individually they have fragments of meaning, so you may get a hint, but not enough to understand for sure unless you’ve learned the word.
I think a helpful analogy here for the non-chinese is recalling the names of pieces of music from hearing a short part and vice versa. I'm classically trained, and in my circles I can probably hum out a short piece of music that'll have other musicians go "I know the piece but am drawing a blank on the name" and vice versa. I know I'm not the only one to have had that happen to pieces I'm actively practicing :)
Anecdotally, I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half).
I guess this is analogous to only remembering the main themes of a piece and forgetting how the rest of it goes. I'll recognise it when I hear it, but can't recall it off the top of my head.
This discussion wouldn't be complete without a mention of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_..., which AIUI was initially constructed as an argument against Romanization.
In short, it's the same nominal sound with varying tones ("shi", which is closer in pronunciation to "shirr" than "she"), repeated about a hundred times, which is of course meaningless in spoken form (since there's not enough context to differentiate between the various forms), but actually conveys a story in written form.
With the shift toward typing and (especially mobile) computerization in the recent era, it's really not surprising (to me, at least) that Chinese society is moving in a direction where literacy no longer extends to recall of individual characters, and only encompasses recognition, since recall is no longer as necessary of a skill in day-to-day life.
The poem is written in Classical Chinese, which was spoken over 2000 years ago, and back then would have been intelligible to a listener because the words would have sounded different. Even today, they sound different in e.g. Cantonese.
There's a close relative of Mandarin (Dungan) which is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. The spoken language is tonal, but tones aren't used in the written language because written words are polysyllabic, and if you know how to speak Dungan, you can reliably infer the tones.
https://www.omniglot.com/chinese/dungan.htm
The poem uses now-rare characters from classical Chinese but it was written in the 1930s and uses the modern Mandarin pronunciation of said characters. The whole point of the poem is to make everything "shi" in modern Mandarin pronunciation, to argue against switching from Chinese characters to Latin alphabet romanization.
You can also construct ridiculous sentences in English that no native speaker will understand [0].
In normal texts written in modern Chinese, this is not a problem. Nobody writes real texts like the "shi" poem. In cases where something can only be understood in written form, you can rephrase it to avoid homophones.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
It would result in a pretty severe loss of fidelity.
You may think it’s not needed, because that information isn’t available in spoken Chinese. The same is true for written English - putting spaces between words, dividing texts into paragraphs, capitalizing them, differentiating between different pauses (a comma, period, semicolon, etc. all signifying what kind of pause something its), quotation marks, parenthesis, etc. - none of this is available in our spoken language, and we’re still able to understand it. In theory, we could get rid of them all and understand what’s being written. In practice, most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess.
The same goes for Chinese. Written languages, for the most part, are more than a simple transcription of spoken sounds.
> In practice, most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess.
Unless Chinese is somehow unique among all human languages, this isn't true. Chinese would be just as intelligible if written in a phonetic script (like Pinyin) as it is when written using the characters.
Now, it would be an incredibly shocking transition for Chinese people who have already spent their entire lives writing with characters. However, after the transition to Pinyin, especially for young people who wouldn't ever learn the characters, written Chinese would still be perfectly understandable.
That being said, I don't favor replacing the characters, because the transition would be extremely difficult and because the characters are very culturally important to China. They've been in use for a good 3000 years, and people are very attached to them. Phonetic scripts are technically superior, but the cultural and practical arguments for sticking with the characters are still stronger.
> Unless Chinese is somehow unique among all human languages, this isn't true.
I was talking about English in that paragraph:
> The same is true for written English - putting spaces between words, dividing texts into paragraphs, capitalizing them, differentiating between different pauses (a comma, period, semicolon, etc. all signifying what kind of pause something its), quotation marks, parenthesis, etc. - none of this is available in our spoken language, and we’re still able to understand it. In theory, we could get rid of them all and understand what’s being written. In practice, most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess.
> I was talking about English in that paragraph:
The very next sentence you wrote was
> The same goes for Chinese.
So you were talking about both English and Chinese in that sentence.
In normal texts, that's correct. However, written Chinese does contains semantic information which the spoken language and Pinyin lack and, unlike English, has fewer distinct syllables, and seldom borrows words from other languages. So someone who's literate in Chinese would usually be able to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words when written down, as they would already know the meaning of all their component characters, but might struggle if they were written phonetically. This is like having a good knowledge of Classical Greek when encountering words like nephropathy or myocarditis for the first time.
It still isn't a very good argument, though. Most English speakers get by without any knowledge of classical languages, and accept having to look up words in a dictionary.
Someone who's literate in Chinese would only be able to infer the meaning of an unfamiliar character if they already knew all of the surrounding characters. Then, you can guess the meaning of the character based on context, and possibly hints from the character itself about pronunciation and/or meaning (though this is very hit-or-miss, because many characters don't contain obvious hints). In order to reliably know all of the context surrounding a character, you need to know about 3000 characters total (that's the point at which you can recognize 99% of characters on a page). This is still a very tall order, which takes years of study to achieve.
The Chinese characters do indeed contain semantic information that Pinyin (the standard Romanization) does not, but in practice, you don't need that extra semantic information. If you write down a single word in Pinyin, it may have a few homophones, whereas the same word, written in Chinese characters, would be unambiguous. However, in written Pinyin texts, you would almost always be able to figure out which word is meant from context. In the few cases in which that would not be possible, the author could slightly rephrase the text to make it unambiguous.
Most languages on Earth (that have a writing system) are written using alphabets. Chinese is not so special that it could not be written using an alphabet as well. The reason why China hasn't switched to an alphabetic script is because of cultural attachment to the script, not because the Pinyin doesn't work just as well in a practical sense.
> Someone who's literate in Chinese would only be able to infer the meaning of an unfamiliar character if they already knew all of the surrounding characters.
In what I wrote, I was assuming there would be no unfamiliar characters, but there would be one or more unfamiliar words composed of two or more characters.
I was trying to put forward the best argument I could think of for retaining the characters, but like you, have decided it isn't worth the additional effort of learning thousands of characters up front to become literate when you can use a phonetic script and look up any unfamiliar words in a dictionary instead.
This argument is also used for Japanese, but I do not consider it valid.
This just proves that a phonetic writing is not sufficient, but it does not mean that the phonetic writing must be replaced with traditional writing.
To resolve the ambiguity of the phonetic writing, both in Chinese and in Japanese, where the ambiguity is much worse, it is enough to retain at most a couple hundred symbols to be used as semantic classifiers. It is likely that a great part of the traditional radicals would be suitable to be retained as classifiers, with perhaps a part of them omitted if redundant and a few other symbols added, if necessary.
Then the writing could be phonetic, but with classifier symbols attached to words, wherever the ambiguity makes them necessary.
This is not a new method. The oldest writing systems, like those of Egypt or Mesopotamia, also used classifier symbols (with meanings like: "a kind of human", "a kind of god", "a kind of animal", "a kind of stone", "a kind of wood", "a body part", "a kind of tool" and so on) attached to the words written phonetically, to avoid ambiguities.
If one would have to learn only 200 classifier symbols and with lower stroke counts than most symbols used now, that would be a great simplification.
Many of the Chinese characters are actually intended to be composed of two parts, a semantic classifier and a phonetic symbol, but this principle is applied too inconsistently and with too many variants, so the system can be greatly simplified by using a simple phonetic writing like Pinyin together with semantic classifiers inserted in the text only if they are necessary.
I think ambiguous homophones aren't actually much of a problem. There's usually only correct option that matches the surrounding context, so the correct inference is easy to make even with no characters at all . After all, there aren't subtitles when you're talking to other people, all the homophones still exist, and yet communication doesn't seem to be impeded.
Thanks for the interesting link! Nitpicking a bit, but if I understand this page (linked from the wikipedia article? see point 3)
https://pinyin.info/readings/zyg/what_pinyin_is_not.html
correctly however, the text was not meant as an argument against romanization but as a playful example of how pinyin are unfit for classical rather than modern vernacular chinese.
I'd accept that interpretation. To be more precise, I view it as a demonstration of information loss from replacing classical characters entirely with romanization, as opposed to a forceful argument against any form of adoption of romanization.
> Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den
Sounds like Buffalo buffalo, but it's more like someone being clever than pointing out an actual problem with the language.
The Greeks and the Romans got it right; a small set of characters that can be combined to form any word. Complexity from the composition of simpler elements, not inherent. Computer interaction via keyboard makes the superior design all the more obvious. Those guys were ahead of their time. Ave imperator, morituri te salutant.
I would argue that a system like the Japanese Hiragana or Katakana are a better system: they are each 56 letters that directly correspond to syllables. So "ha" is a single letter, as is "he", as is "be". With this nearly everything you say is directly translated both directions, and there are fewer complications (there are always a few, for example in Japanese one of those 56 letters is "n".. so no vowel, and in many dialects you say "s" for the "su" character if it is on the end of a word, and there are a few oddities around letters involving "y").
English, being the composite/mongrel language that it is has really complicated patterns for how you put letters together. For example the "i before e except after c as in neighbor and weigh" sort of thing (which does not cover all of the exceptions of course). This sort of thing has lead to the existence of spelling competitions in the English-speaking world (spelling bees). My Hungarian wife was surprised that such a thing existed. In Hungarian it is much closer to see-what-you say, with only a few exceptions (not that the rules are kind on English-speaking Hungarian learners like myself).
>I would argue that a system like the Japanese Hiragana or Katakana are a better system: they are each 56 letters that directly correspond to syllables.
No, they're really not. First, they have 46 characters (each), not 56, though there are another 36 combination characters like ちゃ. Regardless, the problem here is that number comes from the total number of allowed sounds in the entire language. Japanese has an extremely small number of total possible sounds in the language compared to most other languages, particular western ones, and almost all syllables are of the form consonant+vowel: there's basically no way to write, for instance, a word ending in a hard "t" sound, so when Japanese adopts such words, it adds a vowel ending like "tu", and does this for every syllable with a hard consonant without a following vowel. Because of this, loanwords can be really hard to recognize even if you're a speaker of the language that word was adopted from (usually English these days), because the sounds don't map over very well.
And because there's so few total possible syllables, there's a huge number of homophones. The main reason kanji is still around is because it resolves ambiguity and makes it much, much easier to read Japanese text: trying to read text that's all in hiragana (or katakana) is cumbersome, even if spaces are added (Japanese text doesn't normally have spaces).
I believe you mean the Ugarites, Phoenicians, & other northwest Semitic peoples. They developed from cuneiform syllabaries the abjad which the Greeks subsequently adopted (being their language's second written form, preceded by Linear B before an interlude of illiteracy). The Greeks added only non-diacritic vowels.
There are benefits to both systems. Western readers have a hard time reading older writing - while eastern readers have no problem with very old texts.
On the other hand - western scholars can understand what the spoken word sounded like - but eastern readers have a much harder time what ancient words sounded like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rime_dictionary
Western writing systems "decay" faster. Look at french writing - the spellings are phonetic for the time they were first put to paper - but they sound nothing like the current pronunciations.
This is completely backwards and comically wrong. Japanese text looks very little like it did even 150 years ago; the characters have changed completely, and the language was highly standardized during the Meiji era. Try taking a native Japanese speaker to a museum with old Japanese texts or handwriting and see if they can read any of it; they generally can't understand much of it at all.
Modern Korean people can't even read stuff older than a century or so because the language changed from using Chinese characters to the home-grown Hangul character set, and that was only completed a few decades ago.
By contrast, English speakers can read Shakespeare just fine mostly, with a little difficulty understanding some words that are no longer used.
Japanese is not really the right example, because unlike Chinese the writing is really more phonetic than not (and when it isn't, as in kanbun texts, it's basically an idiosyncratic translation to a completely different language). I imagine that the reasonably educated Chinese should be able to read something like the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Stele from the 8th century just fine, given the regular typeface. English, from the same time period, has Beowulf, which is incomprehensible to any lay reader.
Once calligraphy/handwriting is involved, the situation on the Western side is not much better either. Modern Anglosphere children probably would struggle with 19th-century cursive like https://www.pinterest.com/pin/375276581427478862/ ; in Germanic countries, the handwriting system underwent deeper changes, so nobody apart from selected nerds and antiquarians can read Kurrent as in Goethe's letters - https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goethe_Brief_(nich... - or even the newer Sütterlin. Contra what some posters here claim, Roman cursive (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive) is right out. I don't think this should be conflated with the question of whether the writing system is understood by future readers - as an imperfect computer analogy, an ASCII text document is in some meaningful sense more futureproof than an Autodesk Animator .FLI, even if the former is on a five-inch floppy and the latter is on a USB thumb drive.
(As for the effects of the Japan's Chinese character simplification, I think they are a bit overstated. I accidentally bought a 旧字体 copy of Mishima's Haru no Yuki at a book sale once, and at least as an L2 speaker I didn't find it particularly more painful to read than I find unmodernised Shakespeare as an L2 speaker of English.)
The OP never said "Chinese", he said "eastern". Japanese and Korean are both eastern.
That's a fair objection, but given the context I assume he was not actually having anything other than Chinese in mind. Otherwise one might as well bring up Vietnamese, which has a similar history and lexical makeup as JP/KR and is spoken about as far east, but is now written phonetically in Latin-based script with hardly any readers of the old Chinese-based writing system remaining.
Yes, Vietnamese is another great objection, as it's similar to Korean that way. Given that China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam are the 4 major "eastern" countries then, and only 1 of those might be true for his claim, then why did he say "eastern" instead of just "Chinese"? That's like claiming the American continents (North and South) use English because it's used in the United States. People in Quebec and almost every place south of Mexico will be quite offended, rightfully so.
Yeah - that was my mistake.
Where did you get that idea from? I can read most books in Japanese, but probably not a word of most reasonably ‘old’ texts. I think most native speakers would struggle as much as English speakers do with, say, medieval-era English.
> Western readers have a hard time reading older writing - while eastern readers have no problem with very old texts.
That's simply not true.
Ancient Chinese calligraphy and language is so different that you have entire PhD fields about it.
By contrast, as someone who has studied basic Latin in high school, I can read stuff from the walls of Pompeii without issue. I can directly read Latin texts from 700AD or so with the standard difficulty of reading handwriting.
See: http://www.edr-edr.it/edr_programmi/view_img.php?lang=en&id_...
Now, perhaps if I were Chinese, I could read ancient graffiti on the Great Wall, but nobody seems to have ever mentioned that.
Yes, and when you strip out the vowels and squeeze the individual syllables together - the syllable almost becomes a chinese character or a llm token. Paleo-Hebrew (10th century BCE) was a century older then ancient Greek (9th century BCE). Like Phoenician (from which ancient Greek derived) it shared close roots with Proto-Sinaitic.
The Proto-Sinaitic alphabetic script is the oldest (1800–1500 BCE) and evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols. It contained simplified characters representing consonants, The Phoenician alphabet came later, around 1050 BCE, evolving from Proto-Sinaitic. It became a widely used script with 22 consonantal characters and was highly influential, serving as a foundation for both the Paleo-Hebrew and Greek alphabet. The Etruskan alphabet was adapted from the Greek alphabet in the 8th centry BCE and the Roman alfabet was adapted from the Etruskan alphabet in the 7th century.
Alphabets with 20–30 letters seem to be close to a neurolinguistic optimum for balancing simplicity with expressiveness. The Armenian script was designed by monk and linguist Mesrop Mashtots in the 5th century CE to enable the translation of the Bible into Armenian. With 39 letter it represents Armenian phonetics. The Khmer alphabet with 74 characters evolved from the ancient Pallava script, which was developed in Southern India around the 4th century CE. By the 7th century CE, the Khmer people had adapted the Pallava script, creating an early form of the Khmer script. This script was initially used to write Sanskrit and Pali, the languages of Hindu and Buddhist texts.
The article lumps together writing characters slightly incorrectly and failing to come up with the character at all. For instance, the game show contestant wrote the word "烹" with one extra stroke, while the writer of the shopping list writer gave up entirely on the characters for "egg" and "chives". (This is analogous to the difference between misspelling an English word and not being able to think of the word at all.) In the story of three PhD students who couldn't write the characters for "sneeze" (打喷嚏), it's entirely unclear if they were completely stuck, or if they just made small mistakes.
My question is if "character amnesia" describes trivial errors or if people are forgetting characters to a significant extent. In other words, is this article genuine or is it the equivalent of claiming English writers suffer from "word amnesia" because they sometimes need to look up a spelling?
> In the story of three PhD students who couldn't write the characters for "sneeze" it's entirely unclear if they were completely stuck, or if they just made small mistakes.
The article says "all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment", which in context, reads clearly to me that they were embarrassed for not knowing where to start, not that they wrote them down with minor errors that they were embarrassed about after checking a dictionary. The rest of the article strongly reinforces this interpretation. For example: "‘lift the pen, forget the character’... this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character..."
Further in the article he discusses the 'virtuous cycle'; connections between writing, speaking, and reading. With phonetic alphabets, the way something is spoken reinforces the way that it is read, the way it is read reinforces the way that it is written, the way that it is written reinforces the way that it is spoken (for the most part, even English fails this cycle sometimes). However, with character sets the cycle is broken, and the speaker has to learn 3 different memorization techniques.
Regarding your question, there is a difference between not knowing how to write a word and not knowing how to spell a word. If someone in English doesn't know how to spell 'sneeze' or any other word, they can at least come close enough and convey information 'fuzzily' via text using an incorrect spelling. Now that I'm writing this, though, I suppose with character sets like Chinese if you know characters that are close enough you potentially could use other characters to convey the information, like mouth-fart for sneeze or something along these lines. But I don't speak the language, so that is just a theory.
Do Chinese speakers use the language this way if there is a character they don't know how to write?
> Do Chinese speakers use the language this way if there is a character they don't know how to write?
I'm by no means an expert on the topic but one thing I have noticed in learning Chinese languages is that there are a huge number of homophones. That means there are probably 20 other characters with the same pronunciation for any given syllable that are considered different words (not to get into it here but the conception of a word in Chinese languages can be a bit odd too). It seems to be very common for people to use the character for a similar sounding word or syllable to write slang words or local dialect words that don't have an official character.
In the example at the start of the article, 烹, the contestant wrote "child" when the proper grapheme was "complete." That's a non-trivial error, even if it is only one stroke difference.
> That's a non-trivial error, even if it is only one stroke difference.
As is the difference between "fitter" and "filter" in English.
I don’t think so, no. English is phonetic and so some of those spelling errors can come down to your dialect pronouncing the word differently and forgetting the official spelling. That’s now how Chinese characters work though. It tells a story, and a story with “child” instead of “complete” is a vastly different story.
Well, but as far as I can tell there is no legitimate character created by replacing complete(了) by child(子) in 烹. It does not matter what "story" it tries to tell, if someone writes "boild eggs" I'm not going to conjure up a hypothetical German etymology that might have led to "boild" that later got borrowed into English; I will understand it as a typo of "boiled".
Even less of a difference. There's no equivalent character, so it's clearly 烹 written with an extra stroke. It's more like the difference between writing "deceive" and decieve."
The equivalent in English would be writing "ghyche" when trying to write the word, "fish". Yeah, that combination of characters/marks can make sounds equivalent to "f" "ih" and "sh" but it's so far off it's laughable.
> This is analogous to the difference between misspelling an English word and not being able to think of the word at all.
Part of the distinction is that you can always at least misspell the word when using an alphabet. That's why the shopping list used an alphabetic script.
If people normally enter characters in their phone or computer rather than actually handwriting, then there is no reason to keep remembering all of the character details.
Just like it doesn't matter that I frequently am uncertain about spelling for some words because we have spell check built into everything.
Do Chinese usually use pinyin to enter characters or what is the normal method? Whatever it is, they don't need to remember the character strokes apparently.
Some older folks, particularly those with regional accents or less Pinyin education, stick with handwriting input (which was surprisingly good even ~20 years ago) - drawing the characters with a stylus or a finger.
Most folks these days use Pinyin. The T9 input method (Pinyin, but using a nine-key telephone pad) is popular with folks who grew up using dumbphones.
Finally, voice input is really popular in China. Lots of folks send texts (on WeChat) as short voice messages. WeChat even has a feature to auto-transcribe these voice messages.
But Pinyin is based on pronunciation, which varies across China. So Pinyin is based on Putonghua ? So Pinyin reinforces the role of putonghua as a project of national unification ? And the pre-eminent role of Beijing ?
Exactly.
> Do Chinese usually use pinyin to enter characters or what is the normal method?
In mainland China, it’s pinyin, but in Taiwan, they often use Bopomofo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
Either way it's phonetic; it's not based on either the radicals or the strokes. Even though there are input methods that use those, they are not commonly used.
There are other input methods such as Cangjie or Sucheng which are also popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong. They have much faster WPM since they are based on the structure of the characters. Pre-smartphone there was a Q9 input method with one stroke mapped to each of 8 numbers and a wildcard for if you forgot.
I doubt that they're faster than pinyin. With pinyin you can type e.g. 'wmdl' and instantly enter '我们到了'.
> Just like it doesn't matter that I frequently am uncertain about spelling for some words because we have spell check built into everything.
But it does matter that you don't know the spelling for some words. For one, you don't always have a computer to fix it for you. For two, the computer's spelling is often wrong and you need the human knowledge to fill that gap.
The interesting thing here is that nobody writes chinese one character at a time with pinyin; you almost always type out an entire phrase in pinyin, and usually there's only one meaningfully correct combination of those sounds in terms of characters and meaning (that's how the listener can tell what you're saying, after all, when listening) which will be the first choice in your input software (input software traditionally gives you a first choice with what it thinks the entire phrase is, and gets shorter with the 2nd choice onwards to partially match a phrase.)
The problem is not that people can't recognise the words; it's that we can't write them if given pen a paper. If the phone gets it wrong you just choose the nth choice instead of the first.
> For one, you don't always have a computer to fix it for you.
You can't be serious. I thought that the "you need to be good at algebra because you won't have a calculator in your pocket" argument died out naturally. I can't recall the last time I actually made hand-written notes.
> For two, the computer's spelling is often wrong and you need the human knowledge to fill that gap.
It happens to me once a month that the computer cannot recognize a correctly spelled word, and virtually never in English.
> You can't be serious. I thought that the "you need to be good at algebra because you won't have a calculator in your pocket" argument died out naturally. I can't recall the last time I actually made hand-written notes.
Then you are an extreme outlier. Most people write plenty of things down by hand in their day to day life. And there's no reason for the argument to die out, because it's completely correct.
> It happens to me once a month that the computer cannot recognize a correctly spelled word, and virtually never in English.
Again, this seems like an outlier. False positives and false negatives are both quite common in spell checkers.
> Then you are an extreme outlier.
If that were the case then the problem described in the article would be limited to just a few outliers like me. But it's not.
> Again, this seems like an outlier.
No u. The fact that you are on this website means that you most likely are educated, therefore you are likely to use uncommon words unknown to the spellchecker. Most people focus on just a handful of basic words needed for everyday life, and besides that, very few people actually care about correct spelling. All of my friends have at least college degree and 50% of them pay zero attention to correct spelling, I can only assume that average Joe cares even less.
This is actually one of the main reasons I don't think China will become a global hegemon. English, with all its flaws, is far easier to speak, read, and write.
Languages are the walls between cultures.
Language difficulty is not absolute. Most Japanese natives have a much easier time learning Korean than they do English.
What makes a 2nd Language easier or not to speak is how closely related it is to your native language.
English is not any easier to speak than Chinese if your native language is far removed from both.
It is definitely harder to write though. Writing systems can be absolute in difficulty.
I don't think English is particularly easy to speak, read nor write. The pronounciation is highly irregular and the writing system is very non-phonetic. E.g. "spelling bees" don't make any sense in most languages.
Chinese also seems to be moving to the very phonetic and regular Pinyin that (for Mandarin) doesn't suffer from character amnesia.
I do agree that languages are walls between peoples and should be taken down with a global language. Maybe in few decades the kids speak some kind of Chinglish.
"Easier" I didn't say easy. It's a relative comparison. Spanish and ASL are easy languages, but they won't help Peru or the Deaf community become hegemons for their own reasons.
We already have the global language. It's called English lol
Could argue this works in exactly the opposite way.
This "wall" makes the west an open book to china, while for the west it is hard to crack the Chinese. For one thing, think of the implications on recruiting people to spy or interpret intercepted messages from china or on espionage in general.
Also the impact of this "problem" on running a well-functioning highly-productive and scientific powerhouse society is highly exaggerated and easily refuted by empirical facts.
Just think of what Japan and China managed to accomplish in engineering and scientific accomplishment in the last 50 years and they both use character-based languages.
The BBC produced a great series, The Secret History of Writing. There's a segment where you can watch some Chinese speakers experiencing this while being prompted to write mildly uncommon words like "cough" or "embarrassment".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3seWGtZ3DQ&t=3035s
The whole series is worth a watch if you're into writing.
Sounds like a losing battle to me. Handwriting in general is doomed to go the way of the dodo. The difference is that with Latin characters, you can at least "draw" them fairly easily from memory.
> The orthography may be inconsistently phonetic, as is the case with English spelling, or highly consistent, such as the Korean Hangul system. No writing system is perfectly phonetic. But phonetic systems enable the native speaker, with just a few dozen symbols, to reliably write whatever they can speak, and read out loud anything they can read.
I'm not sure if the author has studied Vietnamese. I'm a native Vietnamese, and I believe the language is perfectly phonetic.
If I hear a word, I can write it. If I see a word, I can pronounce it, regardless of whether I understand the meaning.
It's interesting that among the 4 countries (China/Japan/Korea/Vietnam), it's the only one that completely reinvented the language into Latin based. I think that refactor addressed the phonetic issue well enough. When I was there, there was also no TV program for "spelling bees" or something like that. Even a third grader could read/write almost any word (even when they don't understand the text yet)
Edit: adding to this original post to reply a common theme people brought up in multiple posts.
I think bringing up dialects and provincial accents is not convincing. There is one official way "gia đình" should be pronounced. It's taught in school, even in the South. Pronouncing it as "da đình" can still be understood, and it doesn't retract from the point that the language is phonetic.
In other words, assuming I know nothing about the meaning of the word, if I hear "da đình" I can correctly write down it as so. I wouldn't know that in Saigon that also means "gia đình". But I definitely can write it down exactly.
I don't think using provincial speaking accent is a good line of argument here. Otherwise, no language in the world can satisfy the phonetic requirements. Any group of people can have different accents, different tones, different sound length and pauses.
Korea's writing system is not logographic anymore. They didn't go Latin but Hangul is absolutely an alphabet/syllabary
> If I hear a word, I can write it.
Not if you account for variations of pronunciation in dialects. Not even the most phonetically accurate accent, the Hanoian Northern accent which I am a native speaker of, is perfect.
For example, you could hear Northern Vietnamese people say "dổ", "dá" instead of "rổ", "rá". Morning dew is pronounced "xương" but is written as "sương". These characters are pronounced with greater clarity in the Central and Southern regions, but they have their own peculiarities too. Til' this day I still find it iffy they call someone named "Diễm" as "Yỉm". Unless you have seen the correct way to spell those words before, you can't say for sure. Even now as a working adult I find myself referring to the dictionary to make sure my accent doesn't embarrass me in official emails.
In a perfect world, we can have one single Vietnamese accent that aims to pronoun all these words true to the intended way of the alphabet, but it isn't practical. That being said, one can get pretty far in Vietnamese when encountering new words.
Yeah, and because the "common" way of pronouncing these words/letters have become so entrenched in our minds, it often feels pretentious to hear people actively try to pronounce words in a way that they feel is "correct", for example trying to emphasize the "strength" of the tr/s/gi sounds as opposed to ch/x/d.
That's not quite true. There are many letters that sounds mostly/exactly the same, especially in everyday pronunciation. For example, "gia đình" vs "da đình", or "lý trí" vs "lí trí", or "xổ số" vs "sổ số", etc. If you don't know the word beforehand you wouldn't be able to write it down after hearing it.
Chinese writing system is a language in itself. You can translate Mandarin, Cantonese and even English to that language. To learn that language is harder because it has to support more than one spoken language.
Using an alphabet would make things far more easier, but then how would people from different parts of China understand each other?
I suppose advocates of alphabetic writing imagine everyone in China (outside Hong Kong and Macau) will be speaking standard Mandarin in a few generations anyway due to standardized public education.
I've seen Chinese input methods where instead of keys corresponding to sounds in Pinyin, they correspond to strokes in characters, I wonder if this could help with character amnesia.
They do exist, but as far as I'm aware, wubi and cangjie are very uncommon relative to zhuyin and pinyin. Even so, my experience is that you end up just memorizing chords for typing particular characters, as opposed to regularly deriving from first principles how a given character is constituted.
Meanwhile, if you remember how the character is pronounced and can identify it in a lineup, it's far easier to use the phonetic approaches. (Even if your input method doesn't auto-correct the word based on context, experienced typists will also memorize the position of common words, so even they don't need to stop and look at the individual candidates in most situations.)
There's a related paper from Chen & Chuang (2008), Experience with a computer word-entry method in processing Chinese characters by fluent typists ( https://escholarship.org/content/qt2s84m9t0/qt2s84m9t0.pdf) that has an unsurprising finding: If you type with a phonology-based input method, you can more easily recall (transcribe) a character by its sound. If you type with an orthography-based input method, you can more easily recall it by sight.
Right but it seems slower for people who are comfortable with pinyin. If I want to reply to a friend saying "I'm on my way and will be there soon", I can tap 'msll' and the input method will show 马上来了 as the first suggestion. 5 taps in total to enter 4 characters.
In Japan, they call them "wapuro-baka" (idiot who's forgotten how to write stuff because he's only using WADO-PUROCESSA).
When I compare my handwriting to my father's I can see nearly 100% computer / phone use for writing has had its effect. With a gigantic number of characters, it would obviously be worse.
It always struck me that a phonetic alphabet for writing rather was much simpler and easier to learn than a system based on pictograms. So much that a society could achieve the same level of literacy with much lower cost if they adapted a phonetic system.
But I wonder if that is actually true? Has there been comparative studies of what mainland China did compared to Taiwan (which kept the traditional system) or Vietnam (which adopted latin letters) and its effect on literacy. Obviously hard to do ...
It certainly doesn’t help literacy in general, but one advantage of a writing system divorced from phonetics is that you can still read old written material even after the phonetics have changed over time.
Another advantage of using pictograms is that people who speak completely different versions of Chinese can still communicate in writing. They may pronounce the characters completely differently, but the characters still mean the same thing.
I think "complicated" is one way to describe pictogrammic(ideogrammic) languages, and "offloading OCR to geometric sub-systems" is another. Formal Hanzi writings are grid aligned so it's probably more suited for batched processing too.
We have this too! It’s not just treble clefs and ampersands- while everyone can read both forms of g, what fraction of people can draw both forms of g? Of course it doesn’t have the cultural baggage in the US.
I wanted to write in cursive a few years ago and realized I had completely forgotten. It didn’t take long to remember with the help of a cursive alphabet, but I was still completely unable to get started without it.
Apparently Gen Z didn't learn to write in cursive at all, since it had been removed from the curriculum. Some US states have since started adding it back.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32884213 (2022)
In China, children start studying at the age of 6 and continue until they graduate from university at around 23. They have a large amount of homework and exams that require handwriting. There's nothing to worry about.
China should make another attempt at simplifying their written language. Yes it’s a monumental task, but Korea managed to mostly transition off of Chinese characters.
Would someone kindly explain what the authors means in the last paragraph with
"There is a bit of irony in all this: the digital technology is both a cause of and a solution to the problem."
? How is it a solution?
Pinyin
I think this is not as complicated as it sounds; it's same as how NN classifiers aren't always built to do label to image, only image to label. Being able to do former through a parallel pipeline helps(that's like GAN), but that ability isn't required in training or in inference.
Your OCR engine in the brain might generate "𰻞" for 'zh_hant_適' if reversed, doesn't mean it can't recognize the latter.
In English I find that I frequently cannot spell words without typing them. I wonder if there is actually some other related computer use effects.
Unicode has stroke and radical counts for over 75000 characters. As this article states, most Chinese written text on computers is actually typed using pinyin.
It's simply people stop writing stuffs on paper. Nothing too surprising. I myself cannot spell some English words because I rely too much on auto-correction.
it is quite common, since chinese people use hand write not a lot as previous time.The computer and internet will make this more common after serveral decades.
I understand that the topic of writing systems is touchy because it involves people's national identity and national pride.
That's why all the comments that mention efficiency of different writing systems are heavily downvoted.
But if we think about writing systems' evolution as an optimization problem that optimizes for "efficiency" (whatever that means. It is pretty hard to define so I'm not even going to try) we could easily imagine some systems being stuck at a local minimum. Or maybe even all of them being stuck at different local minimums some of which are smaller than the others.
I decided to practise some “千字文” in fountain pen calligraphy after mind struggling as well for the character ”嚏“
“Sneeze” or “喷嚏” is a pretty difficult word to write in Chinese in terms of number of strokes and its internal components. I’m not surprised people wouldn’t know it off the top of their heads. It’s like if someone asked you to spell “unnecessary.”
The other dimension is that the second character 嚏 in particular is obscure: it's virtually never used in any other word than 喷嚏. In Japanese, it's a hyogai kanji not taught in school, meaning most people would spell it phonetically. Alas, this is not a practical/socially acceptable option in Chinese.
The first, 喷 "erupt", is not exactly common either but is at least used in a few other compounds like 喷水 "fountain".
> It’s like if someone asked you to spell “unnecessary.”
I would be quite surprised if someone couldn't spell that word, unless it was a child.
I don't think anybody is proposing that Chinese people are not normal humans making normal mistakes. The difference is that if somebody asked people to spell "unnecessary", there would only be three common mistakes they would make (based on whether letters are arbitrarily duplicated or not), and all would be easily understood by readers if written.
English orthography is terrible (i.e. a single vowel can be a half-dozen letters), but there's a limit to how complicated it can be to write a word that one knows how to say.
Wiyul I took migh yot to Luffbruh (acting az a cooryer surviss), I inshored my dissertacion woz cerrect bye revuwing the seilerfoan musick. Suddenly, their was a laud noys. I rush't too the sighed of the bote, but I sore the wartre fludding inn. "Quick! Sumbody hasta seel the hoal!" I cryde. Fourtuneatley, the glew oonder the bought's scin maid the holl cloaze up, sow we kepped floting, butt we terned arowned buy mesteak. Immajin mie shock wen wee woshed up in Lossymuth! Eye wonet fourget thatt deigh enny thyme sune, that's fore shur.
(I'm pretty sure this isn't eye dialect: I consulted the rhyming dictionary a lot, to make sure I was swapping spellings between two words with the same phonemes. I also tried to avoid reanalysis, though some of these words might not quite achieve that.)
It would be rather interesting if technology simply caused people to start writing in the roman alphabet. Phonetic spelling is certainly the superior option, so perhaps that will simply be what people arrive at through inevitable statistical pressure.
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Many people here may not be familiar with David Moser, the author of this article. He’s frequently mentioned in Douglas Hofstadter’s book Le Ton Beau le Marot (fantastic book on language and translation BTW) in regards to matters related to Mandarin. He was a well known (as Mo Dawei) in China’s xiangsheng scene (a verbal comedy routine, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangsheng#:~:text=Xiangshen....) and is probably one of the most knowledgeable foreigners on Mandarin. He started learning it in college in mid 80s.
Does this happen in Japanese as well?
I remember almost 25 years ago, when I was teaching English in Japan, one of my adult students couldn't remember how to write the kanji (i.e. Chinese characters) for "police".
Text input is now universally phonetic, and young people have a lot of trouble remembering how to write words.
Add to this the enormous (and increasing) use of English words, written either in katakana or actually in Roman letters, and it's plain that Japan is further down the road of losing its writing identity than China is.
It's not a problem, just transition to new writing instruments. I completely forgot how to write in my birth language (Russian) while my English handwriting is slow and messy. Doesn't affect me in any way. There is a valid need to leave a note when technology is not handy, sounds like pinyin solves this problem. Although, unless we are talking scratching out a message with a sharp stone, ballpoint pen and paper is also complex technology.
There is nothing wrong with being sentimental, I lift heavy weights, collect vinyl and do film photography because I like the aesthetic of these activities. But let me force my own kids to learn whatever I think they should learn just like me at home rather than everyone forcing everyone else's kids in school.
How long have you been living outside of a Russian-speaking county?
Suddenly the woes of English spelling seem slight.
Does Arabs and Sanskrit have the same problem to some extend? AFAIK, characters can sometimes combine and not.
Arabic is still fundamentally phonetic. The article mentions thus is only a Chinese and Japanese problem.
Arabic is an adjad, so of course not. The "combination" you're thinking of is akin to cursive - stylistic.
No one uses Sanskrit anymore.
Thar said, South Asian languages are phonetic so similar problems to Chinese do not exist.
The best comparison for character amnesia in Chinese would probably be Japanese.
>"Can the Education System Solve the Problem..."
I think the question is rather: should it? Is there a real benefit for average Joe to memorize insane amount and complexity (at least to my untrained eye) of such characters? I think my brain would just explode. I'd rather use my memory for something more creative.
They really should let it go for common communication.
It’s beautiful and culturally significant, and that will never be forgotten. But it doesn’t fit well with modern writing.
I got a little more than halfway into this long article, so I apologize if this was answered at some point. So what?
Many native English speakers can't pick up a pen and paper and write intelligibly and would be in real trouble if they lost their phones; an increasingly annoying number TALK into their phones, not even pretending to type and just spewing auto-corrected crap out into the world.
Doctors have messy handwriting, but I don't think I've ever met a native English speaker who completed elementary school who would pick up a pen and pause, completely uncertain of how to draw a letter of the alphabet. They might make minor spelling mistakes, but I don't think that's closely analogous to the phenomenon the author is talking about.
The "Doctors have messy handwriting" trope derives from the fact that prescriptions often contain a large fraction of Latin terms, chemical names, abbreviations and acronyms that don't parse (and thus seem sloppy/illegible) if you are trying to "decipher" them as English. Doctors don't have significantly messier handwriting compared to similar populations (esp. now that drafting isn't as emphasized in architecture, engineering, and similar programs)
>>>Doctors don't have significantly messier handwriting compared to similar populations
I'm skeptical of this claim. My family doctor had bad handwriting, and one time the hospital worker had to call him to ask if he ordered a x-ray or Ct scan.
Please. I still have my medical charts from my childhood, back before the computers. I can barely read the handwriting there, and it's not because of medical terms.
Apparently, it became slightly better recently, now that doctors spend less time scribbling things and mostly type them instead.
This is far more analogous to spelling mistakes.
The entire article is an argument to the contrary. It's fine if you disagree with the author's opinion on that point, but it's begging the question to just dismiss it on that basis. They even specifically mention that "this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character", which would be more like a spelling mistake.
What the author describes is a phenomenon like wanting to write the word "analogous" but having no idea how to even begin putting pen to paper. Not writing the word and ending up with "analagous" by mistake.
Do you read Chinese? I do. The examples given in the paper involve forgetting which radicals constitute a character. It very much feels similar to forgetting whether it is “through” or “thru”. They put the wrong component down. They did not forget how to write the set of components in common use.
There are cases, almost certainly overrepresented here, where a character has some truly unique variation that the writer forgets. They know it is different but forget how. In almost all other instances it is a matter of forgetting “is it heart or fire here?” as these two are very similar. It’s like spelling with an i instead of an e.
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katakana! This is true in mainland China, but not in Taiwan. There, katakana is used as pinyin, and words can be composed by katakana.
Wikipedia says [0]:
> After Japanese administration ended, the system soon became obsolete. Now, only a few scholars, such as those who study the aforementioned dictionary, learn Taiwanese kana.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_kana
This is not true. If you need to type on your phone, everyone needs to know that the mainland used the Wubi input method, which is Katakana, and now uses Pinyin typing. Taiwan has always used the original Katakana input method. Pinyin typing was invented later.
Manny people mistakenly recognise Bopomofo as katakana. I use bopomofo and get this reaction a lot, it just have to mention its actually bopomofo/zhuyin and then they know what it is.
This has been a perennial "story" for at least 15 years on English language internet, but for actual Chinese it's not really a thing.