
The miracle of reading and writing Chinese characters - lermontov
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=31781
======
mcguire
Brian Spooner's comment on the article is interesting, too:

"...In Iran I was always fascinated and puzzled by seeing Persians read
Persian much faster than I could read English. [...] Our answer was that
literate Persians (and Urdu-writers) think, see and act much less in terms of
individual letters (than we do, and than we are taught to do as we learn to
read and write). They see and write pen-strokes, each of which may contain 1,
2, three or even four letters, possibly (though rarely) more. The letters are
written differently according to where they come in the pen-stroke and the
pen-strokes are written differently according to what comes before or after
them. Readers read pen-strokes (the number of which is very large), not
letters. They read faster because they are scanning by series of pen-stokes.
We also tend to read English by scanning words rather than reading letters,
but the Persian reader is much more efficient and faster at then. The general
approach and relationship to writing is different from ours. Its practice is
different. And its result is different. There is much more to be said about
this. But enough for this comment."

I don't know anything about Persian, but I now feel the need to go learn more.

~~~
maxander
It would be interesting to see if the same system could be implemented for
English. Say, make a text renderer that groups common sequences of 2-to-4
letters into one distinct (but still immediately legible) glyph; the set of
available glyphs would remain constant. With practice, readers' brains might
learn the glyphs as a "shortcut" to take in these sets of letters- almost like
a very basic compression scheme programmed into your reading-comprehension
neurons.

~~~
ISL
I'm pretty sure I read, write, and type words as glyphs.

When I read the word 'word', I don't read 'w'-'o'-'r'-'d'.... 'word'!

Alternatively, when skiing in Japan, having only learned katakana on the
plane-ride, it was less than a week before I reflexively processed 'スキー' as
'ski' instead of sounding out su-ki in my head.

~~~
sand500
Yep having taken Japanese in college, after a while you don't read letters,
you read words. Basically we recognize what a word is based on the shape of
the word.

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Xophmeister
Writing is a technology invented to help practically disseminate information
over time and space. It's a good invention -- arguably one of our best --
regardless of the minutiae of alphabets vs. syllabaries vs. ideographs, etc.
However, one shouldn't confound it with the thought patterns of speech and the
mechanisms required to produce and process language.

Chinese is no different to English (or any other language) in that respect. Do
you visualise the shape of the word "bee" when asked to think how to spell it?
I doubt it. The act of writing is completely removed from the linguistic
process.

~~~
Nomentatus
Chinese is different, regarding homographs. Written English forces a lot of
disambiguation of a purely abstract kind (English homograph collisions don't
usually reflect associations, just random collisions) else you can't cope with
the homographs. Ideogram collisions or overlaps are far more meaningful,
generally non-co-incidental. (Terrific for poetry.)

Examining all this, some while ago, a Chinese professional philosopher and I
concluded that this had indeed had some real influence on the two cultures and
thinking. This point isn't about visualization per se, but instead the fact
that ideograms combine concepts, not sounds. Thanks to its extreme borrowing
and therefore an abundance of synonyms, English is no doubt the most extreme
example of a language with random homonym and homograph collisions, forcing
both listener and reader to make constant choices between abstract
(unassociated) options. That's not generally how the human mind works, brains
are association engines. So it's a good bet that the fact that English is the
language of science and technology (for now) is not entirely coincidental.

This is no bar to progress for China today, however, to the extent that the
hànzì alphabet is adopted for text.

~~~
distances
> So it's a good bet that the fact that English is the language of science and
> technology (for now) is not entirely coincidental.

I have to disagree on this. For me it seems that the world politics was the
major, if not only, reason why English took over French and German in these
fields (too).

~~~
Nomentatus
I can't interpret this. Do you mean the supremacy of the english navy due to
the improvements in iron forging that gave the english iron cannons first
around the time of the Spanish Armada? That world politics?

It's true that Germany had better rates of literacy 500 years ago.

~~~
wenc
No, it is because the British Empire spanned a quarter of the globe and the
Americans won World War II. No other language has had the advantage of being
the language of two world superpowers with such vast geopolitical influence
spanning over 200 years and huge expanses of the globe. French was the
language of international diplomacy, but the French language never had the
unparalleled reach that English had (and still has to this day).

In terms of technology, the Industrial Revolution and American scientific
achievements were important drivers too. German was the language of science,
but when the vast number of new findings are published in English (due to the
sheer volume of American/British scientific output), its decline was
inevitable.

~~~
Nomentatus
Those iron cannons, together with a wealth of Elizabethan technical
innovations, are a VERY large reason why Britain spanned the globe. The
advantage of world-dominance didn't precede innovation, it resulted from it.
Better weapons, better tactics, better hull designs for ships, better mining
techniques and on and on and on.

The U.S. won WWII with no small amount of accumulated Western technology and
technological advance. What WWII did do was allow the US (and Russia, but not
Britain) to simply seize every German patent in existence without
compensation, afterward. If you research Germany technological history you
might have a chance to overturn my hypothesis. But the industrial revolution
didn't begin there. In any case you'd have to do a lot more homework than you
have so far. Japan was a latecomer, and can't count as a counterexample.

English as the primary language of technology and science long predates WWII.
The exception might be chemistry (German.)

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Nadya
This is strange for me - and now I need to ask my Japanese acquaintances the
same questions!

I'm able to visualize the Chinese characters I know just fine, and I'm by no
means fluent. I speak Japanese instead of Chinese, but I don't think that
would make a difference when visualizing the characters since most of them are
one in the same.

I can visualize「雑」(from: 複雑) because of my familiarity. I struggle with 「爆」, a
character I just recently learned, because I am not familiar with it. I would
have thought that natives of Chinese or Japanese would have no difficulties
with visualizing the characters! So it is interesting for me to hear anecdata
that they struggle with it.

E:

Reading Xophmeister's reply it actually makes sense to me. For myself, Chinese
characters are much more artistic and it is like visualizing a familiar
painting or drawing. For a native, they are closer to a tool used for writing,
like how English is for myself. For English, I can only visualize words with
eight or nine characters or so. It's a weird practice to try and visualize the
word "adenohypophysis" \- it is difficult. So I can imagine any non-trivial
Chinese character would be difficult to visualize for native speakers.

E2:

Replaced "Kanji" with "Chinese characters" in a few places it slipped through.

~~~
kazinator
Kanji -> Hanzi would work.

~~~
Nadya
I've been told this more times than I can remember and I always forget about
it. Here's hoping this time is different. Thank you for the reminder.

It really gets tiresome to type "Chinese characters" all the time, and I try
to avoid referring to them as "kanji" when used in a Chinese context.

Cheers!

~~~
vorg
To me "kanji" is an English word but "hanzi" isn't. I never saw any problem
using "kanji" in a Chinese context, since "kanji" seems to be a Japanese
sounding of the word "hanzi". But unfortunately some pedants (or one pedant
with many usernames) complained when I used "kanji" so nowadays I stick to
"Unihan" when writing in a technical context.

~~~
verroq
Chinese people generally don't like the usage of Japanese terms when
referencing their language, mostly due to WWII and historical reasons.

Usage of Chinese characters in Japanese language - kanji

Usage of Chinese characters in Chinese language - hanzi

~~~
contingencies
AFAIK the historical reasons are well-placed. Japanese Kanji is essentially a
spin-off system, since altered, wherein many of the characters that exist in
both Chinese (eg. in the Tang Dynasty) and Japanese now have completely
different modern meanings. In addition, grammars in both places have since
changed (Japanese possibly never really had one, deferring to Middle Chinese
in early use, and only slowly adopting characters elsewhere, interspersing
other writing systems to provide grammatical structure). Therefore it makes
little sense to conflate the two when discussing language, though the
evolution of Japanese character use can provide some insight in to Middle
Chinese and earlier periods, particularly in subjects such as Nara Period and
Silk Road Buddhism. (I am less knowledgeable about Japanese than Chinese, and
claim no particular expertise in either, though I do translate old Chinese
texts to English for fun and have visited Japan)

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Sharlin
Writing is primarily a _motor_ skill, not a visual one. You don't need to
visualize a keyboard to be able to touch-type, either. Muscle memory is a form
of procedural memory very much distinct from any visualization ability.

~~~
Pamar
Honest question: do you have any experience with Sino-Japanese writing? (I
practice ShoDo, while not really have any Japanese language proficiency - I
suspect that there is a big difference between writing in a phonetic alphabet
and in anything like Chinese or Japanese).

~~~
yorwba
The main difference between using an alphabet and a non-phonetic writing
system is that with the latter, knowing the pronunciation does not really help
you remember how to write a word. Since hanzi also tend to have more strokes
than alphabetic handwriting, the sequences of hand movements you have to
produce in one go are quite long. The way to cope is essentially lots of
handwriting practice to really burn in each character.

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Grue3
Well, often they can't write these characters at all [1] (this video is for
Japanese, but the situation must be similar with Chinese)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNxPRBvRQg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNxPRBvRQg)

I can recognize more than a thousand of characters (thanks to Anki) but
visualising/writing them is another matter entirely, and I would probably fail
to write a large fraction of them. Just like with alphabetic characters, I
memorize the "shape" of the character rather than its sequence of strokes.
Only when the character is indistinct, or similar to other characters do I
bother to remember which radicals it consists of.

For example the character for "dream" (夢) has a very distinctive shape that is
easy to recognize, so I wouldn't be able to write it because I never learned
how.

Now take the character 緑 (green). It looks similar to 線 (line), but lacks the
radical 白 (white). Because green is not white, you see (not actually, it's
just a memorization technique). But it also looks similar to 録 (recording).
That's because the character for "green" has radical 糸 (thread), just like
"line" character. Threads can be green, and they are also lines. But
"recording" uses radical 金 (metal) in its place, because recorders are made
from metal. So the only things I remember about 緑 is that it has 糸 and doesn't
have 白. And thus, I still won't be able to write it.

~~~
Kronopath
I expect that the problem would be less pronounced in China, given that the
Japanese can revert to kana if they forget the kanji, whereas the Chinese have
no other choice but to remember the characters.

That said, I've heard of, and even seen once or twice, Chinese people
forgetting how to write common words like "sneeze" (喷嚏). So it does happen.

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dcw303
As a student of Japanese and having previously thought I might have Aphantasia
this was interesting to me.

But I'm still not convinced that we understand Aphantasia completely. I think
there's a whole spectrum of different conditions in visualisation and everyone
has different skills and abilities. Here's mine:

\- I can currently recall just under 1000 Kanji

\- The learning system I am using (wanikani) doesn't require me to, but from
previous study I can write a few hundred

\- I can easily recognize people's faces from memory ("never forget a face")

\- But if you asked me to draw a face from memory I'd have a very hard time

\- I can visualize geometric figures in my mind's eye and move them around

\- As a long time software developer I can effortlessly deconstruct a complex
system into base abstractions, hold these in memory, and manipulate/recall the
constructs in my head

\- I get a very abstracted visualisation when reading fiction. Lengthy
overwrought descriptions bore me and I throw away most of it anyway, so I tend
to favour Charles Bukowski over Dan Brown

\- My imagination is similiar, I can set up basic scenes but I can't "see" the
detail in any way like looking at a photograph

\- My art skills are decent but I'm not working off any kind of internal
image. I think of the main points I want to express but I don't know exactly
how they'll look until I commit them to paper/pixel

\- Sometimes when I'm really tired I have very short (under one second) open
eye hallucinations where I do visualize random things in extreme detail,
indistinguishable from reality.

\- I have visual dreams that feel as accurate as reality

\- I have sporadic occasions when I (start to) lucid dream. Before I'm lucid,
everything in the dream is vivid, but once I become aware then all the detail
of the dream unravels and I wake up shortly after

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rdlecler1
Writing characters is a bit like thinking of a song. Harder to jump into the
middle, easier to start from a beginning point and work your way through it.

------
j7ake
It's called "muscle" memory. This is no different than how pianists play piano
from memory. They don't actually recall every individual keys but it's the
connections between keys that matter.

Ask people to write Chinese words or play pieces of music from arbitrary
starting points and you will see their struggle. This is because you're
breaking up the sequence into individual parts, which is not people learn
things.

To put it in an Anglo-Saxon perspective, when someone asks you whether the
letter n is before r you may likely recite the alphabet from start to finish.
So you know the answer but to get it you have to rely on some more"muscle"
memory.

I am also sure this happens when people try to spell certain words. They can't
visualize exactly the word but once they start writing or typing it they get
into the flow.

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defen
The question seems ill-formed to me. I don't know anything about Chinese
characters, but I _am_ one of those aphantasic people described in the post.
There is no impact on recall or access to information AFAIK, it's just that
you can't generate "fake" input to your visual system. Or whatever system is
used by people who can visualize things.

So - I have no trouble remembering faces. I could very easily describe
accurate visual details of any number of places I've visited or seen. I just
don't know how / am not able to turn that into something I can "see" that is
in any way analogous to actually vision.

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arayi
Why are people in general so confused by proprioceptive memory? I'd be
completely nonfunctional as a programmer if I had to "visualize" things in
fewer dimensions than my brain stores them.

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gerbilly
Huh? I found this article kind of tone deaf.

Writing uses motor memory, there is no need for visualization or rehearsal
once mastery has been achieved.

It's no harder to write Chinese than english or any other alphabetic language.

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mrcactu5
I like pulling apart the different Chinese characters into the radicals.

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dibujante
I have very poor visualization but have been able to learn to read and write
over 2,000 characters as an adult. It's all motor skill and thinking in
metaphors (for _me_).

