[HN Gopher] Character amnesia in China
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Character amnesia in China
Author : nabla9
Score : 176 points
Date : 2024-10-27 01:52 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (globalchinapulse.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (globalchinapulse.net)
| ggm wrote:
| 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-> Turkiye.
|
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| 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?
| looping__lui wrote:
| 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
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| looping__lui wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| Eh, see alephnerds comment above - that lines up with my
| experience as well.
| looping__lui wrote:
| Ok, the point being though (it seems): advantages are not
| universal geographically across China; I agree, that I
| also observed that.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| The hokou/education thing is pretty clearly one way
| though, correct?
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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).
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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/E
| T-09-20...
|
| [1] - https://www.ewadirect.com/proceedings/lnep/article/vi
| ew/9075
|
| [2] - https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/125949173.pdf
| looping__lui wrote:
| 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
| looping__lui wrote:
| Thanks! That's a lot of additional information. I
| appreciate the effort!
| josefx wrote:
| > 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.
| nneonneo wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| That is rather the point I was making, wasn't it?
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| There are only about 200+ Chinese ideograms. Certainly not in
| the thousands.
| nneonneo wrote:
| 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.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| The vast majority of Chinese characters aren't ideograms.
| orwin wrote:
| 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).
| vitus wrote:
| 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 Chuang or Zhu 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...
| duskwuff wrote:
| 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.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| The vast majority of Chinese characters are phonetic
| compounds, not ideograms. There are only a few hundred
| ideograms.
| vitus wrote:
| 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,
| Yu (yu; /y35/; 'exceed'), Shu (shu; /su55/;
| 'lose', 'donate'), Tou (tou; /tkoU55/; 'steal',
| 'get by') share the phonetic Yu (yu; /y35/; 'agree') but
| their pronunciations bear no resemblance to each
| other in Standard Chinese or any other variety.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classific
| ati...
|
| Or, consider Ting (ting2), Ding (ding1), Cheng
| (cheng2), Da (da3) which all supposedly derive their
| sound from Ding (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 Wa (pottery) + Ping (ping2) to
| invent the word for vase. Ping (ping2) instead uses Bing
| (bing1), not to be confused with Jing (jing3).
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| 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.
| jim-jim-jim wrote:
| 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.
| eloisius wrote:
| 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.
| mbivert wrote:
| 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.
| graeme wrote:
| 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?
| mbivert wrote:
| 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).
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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.
| eloisius wrote:
| 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?
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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.
| eloisius wrote:
| Also traditional, and I agree it's easier to remember
| them than simplified characters even if they are more
| complicated to write.
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| 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.
| ksp-atlas wrote:
| 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.
| vitus wrote:
| 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.)
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| 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 Ma Shang Lai Liao as the first suggestion. 5 taps in
| total to enter 4 characters.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| Does Arabs and Sanskrit have the same problem to some extend?
| AFAIK, characters can sometimes combine and not.
| dwheeler wrote:
| Arabic is still fundamentally phonetic. The article mentions
| thus is only a Chinese and Japanese problem.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
| w0de0 wrote:
| Arabic is an adjad, so of course not. The "combination" you're
| thinking of is akin to cursive - stylistic.
| ilaksh wrote:
| 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.
| nneonneo wrote:
| 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.
| euroderf wrote:
| 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 ?
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Exactly.
| joshdavham wrote:
| > 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
| bonzini wrote:
| 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.
| robjan wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > 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.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > 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.
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| 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.
| vitus wrote:
| 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.
| vlz wrote:
| 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.
| vitus wrote:
| 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.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| 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
| porphyra wrote:
| 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.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| 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_bu
| ffal...
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| howlingfantods wrote:
| "Sneeze" or "Pen Ti " 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."
| teractiveodular wrote:
| The other dimension is that the second character Ti in
| particular is obscure: it's virtually never used in any other
| word than Pen Ti . 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, Pen "erupt", is not exactly common either but is at
| least used in a few other compounds like Pen Shui "fountain".
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > 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.
| Cerium wrote:
| 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.
| joshdavham wrote:
| > 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).
| mlinhares wrote:
| 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.
| timlatim wrote:
| 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?
| nabla9 wrote:
| 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' (Chu Fang ), 'lips' (Zui Chun ), 'cough'
| (Ke Sou ), and 'broom' (Sao Zhou ). 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' (Ji
| Dan ), 'shrimp' (Xia Ren ), and 'chives' (Jiu Cai ), and simply
| resorted to Pinyin.
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I think Spanish is a much better example for write how you
| speak and still being correct, than German.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| 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.
| jbeninger wrote:
| 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)
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| > 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 Chong and Xia , 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".
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| piojojo wrote:
| 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).
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| joshdavham wrote:
| > 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| cubefox wrote:
| 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".
| naming_the_user wrote:
| 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 Jing Cha (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 Jing Cha (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.
| keybored wrote:
| > 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.
| chvid wrote:
| 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 ...
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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.
| meindnoch wrote:
| 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.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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.
| PerilousD wrote:
| 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.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| 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.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| 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)
| adastra22 wrote:
| This is far more analogous to spelling mistakes.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Suddenly the woes of English spelling seem slight.
| transfire wrote:
| 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.
| suchire wrote:
| 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).
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| If the texts were incomprehensible to parents, how were they
| comprehensible to their intended recipients?
| kens wrote:
| 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 "Peng " 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" (Da Pen Ti ), 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?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| > 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..."_
| animal_spirits wrote:
| 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?
| tdeck wrote:
| > 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.
| bloppe wrote:
| > 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| In the example at the start of the article, Peng , the
| contestant wrote "child" when the proper grapheme was
| "complete." That's a non-trivial error, even if it is only one
| stroke difference.
| ben_w wrote:
| > That's a non-trivial error, even if it is only one stroke
| difference.
|
| As is the difference between "fitter" and "filter" in
| English.
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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.
| yongjik wrote:
| Well, but as far as I can tell there is no legitimate
| character created by replacing complete(Liao ) by
| child(Zi ) in Peng . 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".
| riskable wrote:
| 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.
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| 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.
| mannyv wrote:
| Does this happen in Japanese as well?
| gramie wrote:
| 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.
| kleton wrote:
| 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.
| Jun8 wrote:
| 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.
| James_K wrote:
| 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.
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| 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 Chong and Xia , 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.
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| 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.
| drivenextfunc wrote:
| 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.
| cedws wrote:
| 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.
| ReverseCold wrote:
| > 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
| sorokod wrote:
| shure!
| Terr_ wrote:
| > 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], with some words 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)
| yongjik wrote:
| 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.
| zoky wrote:
| 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.
| grisBeik wrote:
| > 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": /rid/ vs. /red/;
| "lead": /lid/ vs. /led/ (plumbum); "desert": /'dez.@t/ vs.
| /dI'zet/.
| thfuran wrote:
| >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)
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| 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 Ti , as in da
| penti Da Pen Ti "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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| 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.
| generic92034 wrote:
| 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).
| jasonhong wrote:
| 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.
| nojs wrote:
| Yeah, this particular character seems to cause people
| problems because it's not really used anywhere else.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"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.
| yejanll wrote:
| 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.
| w0de0 wrote:
| 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.
| lucidguppy wrote:
| 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.
| fsiefken wrote:
| 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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 "" for 'zh_hant_Shi '
| if reversed, doesn't mean it can't recognize the latter.
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