
Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan - vorg
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100826/lf_afp/lifestylehongkongchinajapanculturetechnology
======
pavlov
David Moser's essay _Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard_ [1] has an amusing and
enlightening passage about this "character amnesia".

 _I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain
characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as
in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and
so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the
first stroke down on the paper. 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"??_

[1] <http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html>

~~~
vorg
"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."

Simple! 嚏 is spelt 口十冖田厶止. The first character, 口, meaning "mouth", is on the
left of the other 5 characters, 十冖田厶止, which are stacked on top of each other
on the righthand side. Those five are the picture of a body: 十 is the head, 冖
are the shoulders, 田 is the sixpack abs, 厶 are the privates, and 止 means "stop
walking", for the legs. When he sneezes, the mouth becomes detached from the
body, comic book style. Perhaps when Chinese students learn characters in
primary school, they don't remember them because they learn them in rote
style, not remembering WHY a character has a certain shape.

The character amnesia is because of the rote learning, not because of the
enlarged character lexicon.

~~~
lookACamel
That is a great way to remember the character but it doesn't work as an
explanation for why it's written that way. It is NOT a picture of the body. In
fact, most Chinese characters are not pictures of anything.

The character amnesia is because the monosyllabic sound of each character
doesn't not provide enough information to make it easy to remember how to
write that character. (A consequence being that rote learning is practically
the only way to memorize the characters.)

~~~
vorg
"In fact, most Chinese characters are not pictures of anything."

Originally, most of them were pictures. Around 2000 yrs ago, they were
simplified into "Clerical script", and many lost their pictorial resemblance.
When new phonetic characters were created (i.e. one component semantic, the
other phonetic) there were many choices of what to use as phonetic (e.g. any
of 体提替etc could have been chosen for righthand side of "ti" to sneeze) and the
one providing the most semantic clues is often chosen.

Another example of "ti" with mouth radical is 啼, meaning "to cry". The 帝 on
the right (actually "di", close enough) looks like an eye (立) with tears
flowing down (冖 and 巾).

I believe the reason I've had character amnesia as a foreign learner of
Chinese in the past is because I was initially never shown how to "spell"
characters into their components. One of the first characters I learnt was 喜
in 喜欢. I was told to practise writing it many times over until I knew it. But
I needed to learn it as being spelt as 士口八一口 before I could remember it
easily.

~~~
lookACamel
I know the _ancestors_ of Chinese characters were pictures but not the current
characters (with a few unconvincing exceptions). Most of the characters now
are "phono-semantic compounds".

Not to be offensive or anything but those "oh they picked that cause it looks
like this" stories are bullshit. In my opinion at least. Take the example you
chose 啼. That also means "wild animal cry". How does that help the picture
theory? And even if this one story happens to be true, how does that explain
all the other thousands of characters?

I understand that you're trying to apologize for the Chinese writing system.
But there is no need. It just sucks. Horrible, hard-to-use designs are cobbled
together all the time, the Chinese character system is just a particularly
prominent example.

Now for a quote from David Moser's _Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard_ speaking
about learning a French word.

And voila! I've learned a new word, quickly and painlessly, all because the
sound I construct when reading the word is the same as the sound in my head
from the radio this morning -- one reinforces the other. Throughout the next
week I see the word again several times, and each time I can reconstruct the
sound by simply reading the word >phonetically -- "a-mor-tis-seur"

------
jdietrich
I'm not at all surprised. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for Hanzi
and Kanji.

The failings of these writing systems are manifold, but perhaps the most
pernicious is the effect on education. The countless classroom hours wasted on
memorising characters poison the classroom with a culture of rote learning. It
should be no surprise that when the fundamental skill of literacy can only be
acquired through mindless drill, that will almost inevitably become the
default approach to the rest of schooling.

Those of us who work with the Japanese are often amazed at how so much
schooling leads to so little learning, but with the millstone that is kanji I
am surprised that so much is achieved.

~~~
dublinclontarf
The advantage of Hanzi is that it can be used for any dialect of spoken
Chinese(or any spoken language), of which, in China there are hundreds. China
is really 30 countries bound together by a unified writing system.

The tradeoff is that it's difficult to learn.

If you want a totally phonetic alphabet then look at Hangul(Korean
characters). Beautiful in it's simplicity and how it mirrors the spoken
language. But Korea would only be a small province in China, and Hangul would
be useless to those who spoke a different dialect.

Hanzi will be around for quite some time, so few Chinese are immersed in
technology to the point they forget how to write, in fact the majority of
Chinese are peasants and don't even have an email.

~~~
Groxx
I've _really_ got to look into learning Korean some time. It seems like a
near-ideal written language (albeit at a potential loss to historical
documents, _because_ it mirrors the spoken language. But that's what linguists
and historians are for, and are needed in _every_ language).

~~~
w1ntermute
> It seems like a near-ideal written language (albeit at a potential loss to
> historical documents, because it mirrors the spoken language.

Actually, it's not ideal anymore. Hangul perfectly mirrored the spoken Korean
language when it was originally created in 1440s by King Sejong's Hall of
Worthies (a group of scholars). But like any other phonetic writing system, it
stayed constant as the spoken language changed (a problem we have much
experience with in English). This is obvious in something as basic as the word
"Korea" in Korean. It is romanized as "Hanguk", but written in Hangul as "한국".
As you can tell, the 4th and 6th letters are the same (a "ㄱ") even though they
are pronounced differently in modern Korean.

However, it is indeed probably the closest one can get to perfection with a
phonetic writing system.

~~~
kijinbear
The fact that Hangul closely mirrors spoken Korean is also probably due to the
fact that Hangul is a relatively new invention as writing systems go. Chinese
characters and the Roman alphabet have been around for millennia. By contrast,
Hangul is only 570 years old, and less than 100 years since it actually became
popular. It hasn't had much time to diverge from the spoken language, yet.
Judging from the intermittent stream of Korean "experts" complaining about how
laypeople are bastardizing their spelling, the gap between proper writing and
everyday pronunciation seems to be growing.

Having said that, Korean is probably one of the easiest languages to type into
a computer or a mobile phone apart from the Roman alphabet and its relatives.
It uses only 24 symbols which can be combined in various ways. Fits perfectly
onto a keyboard/touchscreen. No stupid menus asking you to clarify what you're
typing.

------
yewweitan
I learnt both Chinese and English as a child and all the way through my formal
education (up to 18), and I must say, that the phenomenon of forgetting easy
characters is pretty common.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters are ridiculously complex. The
resultant expressive power is obvious, and it's no wonder why these are the
few languages in which calligraphy blossomed into a fully-fledged artform,
which I personally practice as well.

As with everything, we're going to artificially and naturally select the best
language. I personally think that 'best' here is defined by flexibility and
beauty.

Flexibility - no way would you have come up with a word like "globalization"
in Chinese, it lacks the prefix/suffix system to do that. It also doesn't have
the phonetic flexibility to include foreign terms like Japanese does. Eg:
"Basketball" in japanese can be pronounced "baskeboru" but it's "lan qiu" in
Chinese.

I think one overlooked point is that Chinese isn't a beautiful language, at
least not in the opinion of youth today. It's conciseness has spawned some of
the best poetry (i think) on earth. But as much as the French complain about
how it's hard to sound romantic in English, it's even harder in Chinese (not
to mention some of the dialects like Cantonese and Hokkien).

Kinda reminds me of how people despise Lisp (of which I'm also a fan of). It's
an obscure language, but it's the most expressive one that I've seen, and will
continue to admire it for it's beauty forever. That's probably the reason why
it's still around after all this time.

Will the Chinese language suffer a similar fate to Lisp over the long run? I
doubt so, since natural languages are a whole different beast. But the
problems are real, and with more than a billion people potentially using the
same character set, this will be interesting to watch.

\---

TL;DR - Chinese is difficult to learn. It's not as flexible as English; you
can add "ization" to "global" easily in English, not so in Chinese.

It's also not a beautiful language in the way that youth see it; Chinese makes
for great poetry about the mountains and the ocean, but not for whispering
sweet nothings into a partner's ear (at least compared to a language like
French)

~~~
aikinai
Does Chinese not use 化 or something similar to mean "ization?" If not, how do
they turn "global" into "globalization?" (I'm just curious)

In Japanese, the kanji 化 is almost perfectly equivalent to the English
"ization," and I think it's very elegant. For example, 機械 is machine and 機械化
is mechanization. Or another very popular one in Japan these days is 高齢化, old-
age-ization, used to refer to the phenomenon of Japan's "aging society."

That's actually one of the main benefits I see with kanji is the elegance and
succinctness. The worst thing to translate from Japanese to English is a table
(figure in a document). Kanji allows you to express things so succinctly that
you can have lots of tiny columns with one or two kanji for the heading (no
longer than the digits in the content). Often that heading has to be at least
three or four words in English, and it's impossible to recreate the table in
the same space.

~~~
yewweitan
Yep, you're right, and I could have chosen a better example =). Globalization
is usually referred to as 国际化, "international" + suffix to mean "evolving to
something"; ie - becoming international.

So yes, this is one of the ways whereby when Chinese is succinct, it's really
succinct, hence loved by many of the older generation. But since Chinese
doesn't share the recursive and context-free grammatical structure of English,
and because tense isn't explicit, you lose some flexibility.

Eg: Instant Messaging can be shortened to IM, and can be turned into a
transitive form but adding 'ing' to form IMing.

And of course, I'm confident that a language affects the way you think, as
well as the memes that can be passed around. Best example, the word LOLcat and
the associated lulz could never have evolved in the Chinese language.

Something else could have evolved perhaps, but different things for sure, with
a different focus.

Should probably also bring up the fact that acronyms are near impossible in
Chinese, at least in it's strict sense. I like Japanese for the fact that both
the language and the culture is willing to evolve.

Or put slightly differently, Chinese is kinda like Java. Japanese is more
Clojure-ish, with the ability to abandon formal declarations (arigato + many
trailing speech placeholders) yet retain the good parts of its core.

~~~
Charuru
It's not just the example. Your entire point is ehrm, incorrect. Chinese uses
radicals and entire characters to serve as the prefix/suffix. It's perfectly
capable of performing character mashups or other mutations to create slang,
and there are spontaneous word generations all the time... I mean how else
could new ideas be expressed?

>Should probably also bring up the fact that acronyms are near impossible in
Chinese, at least in it's strict sense. I like Japanese for the fact that both
the language and the culture is willing to evolve.

Lol wut. There is some interesting bias and stereotyping going on here, but I
find this so novel and shocking that I'm unable to respond.

~~~
lookACamel
I think he means the written language doesn't work well for acronyms and other
shortening. Each character is already so much work. You could never get words
like SNAFU.

~~~
vorg
Chinese shortens words by replacing two-character words with one-character
ones, e.g. 北京天津高速铁路 (Beijing-Tianjin High-speed Railway) is abbreviated to
京津高铁 (lit. "Jing-Jin High-Rail).

~~~
lookACamel
Yes, but that is still 4 characters = lots of strokes. Also, not everything
can be reliably shortened this way. You can't get the kind of shortening you
can with things like "TNT", "DNA". And what about when there are no two
character words to be shortenened? Like WTF.

------
brazzy
Um, yeah. This has been happening since approximately 1980, when word
processors became available. And it's also the reason why those were a lot
more important in Japan than in the West: mechanical typewriters that would
have allowed the use of 3000+ Kanji were simply impossible to construct, so
digital word processors were a huge revolution.

~~~
dublinclontarf
Sorry but there has been a typewriter that supports this since the 40's,
invented by the author of 'A moment in Peking'.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Kwai>

And a Japanese typewriter since 1929

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_typewriter>

------
mikecane
This is fascinating because in the 1980s when there was nearly a trade war
between the US & Japan, part of the rhetoric from Japan was that their symbol-
based system was superior to Western alphabets in that it used a different
part of the brain and therefore somehow enhanced intelligence.

My own testimony is that my English-based handwriting (my native and only
language) has gotten progressively worse due to using a keyboard daily for
years instead of using pen & paper. It's also frustrating, because it's
slower. It feels like labor now.

~~~
Dn_Ab
While language does not limit or boost what is expressible, conceivable or
knowable it does impose a default in how we structure the world and what
details we take in as important. There was a fairly interesting article in the
NYT recently that goes over this.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=1)

What I found interesting were the accounts on a particular tribe of Australian
aborigines who had an amazing sense of cardinal direction - instantly knowing
north from south regardless of orientation due to a language based on
geographic instead of egocentric directions and the Matses people whose
precision in relaying past events would make a Vulcan logician proud.

Intrigued I researched this concept to be evidentiality and epistemic
modality. Enforcing such reporting precision into the grammar seems like it
would combat sloppy thinking. I wonder if someone raised in such a language
would have an easier time creating proofs, programming or studying subjects
like bayesian probability or philosophy. I wonder how marketing would work in
such a default. I bet statistics would not be a form of lying in that culture.

------
miguelpais
In here you have a very interesting video about Kanji I saw some months ago:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WxihOeMPBg#t=4m10>

(I put the flag to skip to the moment he speaks about this issue).

------
ww520
This is a non-event when better tools come along. It's like people complaining
they forgot how to carve writing on stone when paper and pen come along.

------
greenlblue
As an outside observer I find this a little funny. It's very much akin to how
some segments of America constantly blame technological advancement for what
they see as the deteriorating quality of youth.

------
jephthai
I find myself forgetting how to write in cursive. To combat this problem, I
force myself to write cursive periodically, just to stay in practice. It will
never be as consistent and attractive as my grandmother's cursive, though.

------
mjgoins
I have this problem in English, and I'm not even young by tech standards. I
should probably spend some time re-learning to write, because it's kind of
frightening.

------
tomjen3
Not really much different from what has happened in the west, my handwriting
(which was never easy to read) as flown of a cliff since I left grade school.

Which is mostly not a problem, except that I makes it more difficult to write
on whiteboards.

~~~
pjscott
But you can still hand-write any word you can spell, right? If you really try?
Imagine trying to write on a whiteboard and just being completely unable to
remember how to write "shoulder".

There's a big difference of degree here.

~~~
tomjen3
If by handwriting, you mean "painting" then yes, but only because there are so
few letters and they are relatively simple.

I am Danish, and we have three letters that are not from the Roman alphabet. I
constantly have to think about how to paint æ.

~~~
rue
Even writing e.g. "frimaerke" is not unintelligible, though. One could also
imagine that ø and æ were replaced by the more common ö and ä in the future.

I think the "there are so few letters and they are relatively simple" is the
point here.

------
mkramlich
heck I think every written/human language but English should die out. If there
are some words worth saving from those languages, let's figure out how to
import them into English, then move on already.

~~~
GeneralMaximus
Agreed. Some other things that should die out include: all operating systems
but Mac OS X, all programming languages but C, all car companies but Toyota,
all clothing retailers but Banana Republic, all coffee shops but Starbucks,
all pizza chains but Domino's ...

~~~
jephthai
With you so far...

