Word-processor idiot (Japanese expression)

> I'm not sure if there was an official system, but reading handwriting was much different than reading my textbooks.

There is an official system. I don't know what it is and I can't read Chinese handwriting either, but I am assured that there is a system and, for example, it's possible for a Chinese person to view an unfamiliar handwritten character and be able to look it up by its standard form.

A large chunk of the contemporary standard of simplified Chinese were basically just shorthand cursive forms that passed down the ages. It's just something people acquire by exposure/immersion.

Yep there are cursive traditions for writing Chinese characters, and there is historically quite a bit of acceptable variation on how you write the characters (think lowercase 'a' or 'g' in Latin). Just like with Latin script ability to read cursive is also fading as people handwrite less; the computer/print forms you see come from the woodblock forms/Ming typeface and there's a large stylistic shift going from brush writing to woodblock forms.

I mean I don't think ワープロ is used to designate word processor programs. ワープロソフト (literally word processor software) might, but not ワープロ. The expression ワープロ馬鹿 has probably never been used in the context of software.

Nowadays, the phenomenon itself is largely driven by smartphones.

The floppy disk doesn’t mean a thing to younger generations, yet their icon representation is very common in a lot of UIs (save button).

So this point doesn’t make sense to me in this particular discussion - even though you may be right at the end of the day.

I've heard that the Kanji make Japanese and Chinese much easier to scan quickly once you're fluent.

Anyone interested in this train of thought (pro or against) should read the Chrysanthemum Dynasty series by Ken Liu.

> I wonder how much time is collectively 'wasted' due to kanji/Chinese characters.

There's probably research on this in Chinese educational literature. Pinyin, though now used primarily for computer input and foreign language learning, was originally conceived for use in teaching literacy to native Chinese speakers. Mass literacy in China was a particularly hard nut to crack because of the huge challenge of learning thousands of characters as compared to a small phonetic alphabet.

The ambition of replacing characters with pinyin never really developed momentum for native Chinese speakers. But the increasing use of computer input, I believe, has reduced the emphasis on years of character-writing memorisation drills in Chinese schools.

Probably not that much, at least when comparing to French or English orthographies. Those two are very complex, and it's easy to forget about it because we used them for decades. But try teaching reading, then writing a beginner in those languages and you'll see for yourself how complex they actually are. Also communication with less educated people (in my company internal docs and code are riddled with mistakes in both languages) is revealing in that matter. I myself have to check very often if a letter is doubled or not, if a 'e' or 'a' is used in word like dependent and it doesn't help that cognates existing in French and English are often written slightly differently, which adds to the possible confusion.

In the reading direction, it has similar strengths and weaknesses as irregular English spellings. Faster to scan given there's more variety in glyph shapes to take cues from. Preserves etymology and relationships between words, so new words can actually be faster to learn at an intermediate level of fluency. Personally I often can guess the meaning of new words from kanji + context, but if I only hear the pronunciation I have no idea, so I always turn on closed captions on Japanese TV.

In the writing direction, it's both time-consuming to learn initially and time-consuming to write every time, but it does carry a certain satisfaction and delight. So the current trend to learning exclusively how to read and type them seems economically productive, but the loss of aesthetic enjoyment of calligraphy in daily life is regrettable.

In my experience with Japanese, kanji is more work to learn how to write, but it makes it easier for others to read - not just compared to romaji but even hiragana and katakana. I'm not really sure it's time "wasted".

> rediculous

In a lot of ways, it's like spelling in English ;)

no more time than it's spent in spelling and accurate grammar

kanji is useful training for visual memory and can be used to provide memory pegs

>each of thrse characters also have a certain way they should be drawn

I have been learning japanese for a few years now, and kanji stroke order was honestly one of the easiest things to get right. there are exeptions, but in general, after having practiced like 50 characters, you pick up on patterns and are able to guess stroke order pretty easily. I highly doubt learning that specific aspect causes a significant amount of time wasted.

There’s a stroke order but the rules are pretty easy to learn. Outside of calligraphy, nobody will likely care if you get the order wrong. There’s also shorthand ways to write kanji called ryakuji.

Yeah, kanji can have lots of readings. There are some rules around when you use an on’yumi vs kun’yomi. A kanji paired with a hiragana is always a kun’yomi reading, but if there’s no kana you just have to know which reading to use. You can only pick that up through context and exposure. Of course any one kanji can have multiple on’yomi and kun’yomi readings. (And then there’s the concept of rendaku which can modify pronunciation based on neighboring syllables.) There’s nothing easy about it, but it is what it is. The you’re serious about learning Japanese it’s something you just have to get used to.

But nevertheless, kanji has many positives. It can make it much faster to read things because they can wrap complex things into a single character. If you have an unfamiliar character, understanding its components can often times provide a hint as to its meaning.

Think of it kind of like reading a conversation entirely in emoji. You may not get the whole meaning, but you can generally pick up the gist. And with far fewer words than it would take to write it out in full.

There's no way a language with that kind of major "deficiencies" have survived past 2k years, and especially the postwar media development. It's all just creative quirks, guaranteed to fit well within the computational budget of a human brain.

Similar kind of criticism can be made up against English: English is such an inefficient language, there are only 26 symbols, 52 if you count "capital" letters but those cannot be used for better compression, and so you cannot just remember a letter but 2-3 sequences of letters as meta-symbols, and those meta-symbols would have tons of special cases when it comes to pronunciation, and and ...

Most books in most languages compress into similar sizes of zip files, it's not like there is always one version that gets to just 512 bytes and the other that's always 50MB. I would think that "all languages are explicitly equal" is a stance too dogmatic to hold, but clearly all our human languages are quite close against each others even just looking at that.

I am "shocked" how much human collective time is wasted on inefficient software and configurations, including:

- UI animations sliding/folding (e.g. 1Hz interactivity vs 120Hz interactivity).

- MS Windows default keyboard settings with slowed down key repeat rate.

- corporate firewalls configured to DROP instead of REJECT the LAN traffic.

- latency to access office documents in the cloud.

- MS Teams bugs frustrations.

- increased number of mouse clicks in WIN11 to reach common functions.

- other software bugs/annoyances we cannot fix, c.g Jonathan Blow.

A lot, I'm sure. I have no experience with Japanese but my wife is a native Chinese speaker.

1) In a language like English if you know a word and are faced with it's written form that you do not know you can probably figure it out. In Chinese knowing how to say it gives you no guidance in figuring out the written form, literacy takes years to learn. I have watched two literate Chinese speakers stumped by an unknown character and not even realize it was actually Japanese, not Chinese. (I knew because of the context, not from being able to read it.)

2) It appears to take my wife longer to write something in Chinese (and she's not a word-processor idiot by any means, when she's putting something into the computer she uses handwriting recognition, she's never learned the new ways) than it would take me in English--more strokes and they are less connected than even printing, let alone cursive.

3) Chinese lacks the concept of alphabetizing. I've watched her with her dictionary (we've been together since the 80s) and it's a process of looking stuff up in tables to get you close to your target and then a manual search once you're there. I can find a word in an English->Chinese dictionary far faster than she can find one in a Chinese->English dictionary.

That being said, I'm not going to call someone a word processor idiot because maintaining a skill like that costs time--it simply isn't worthwhile for most people. Many years ago I chose to abandon cursive when I realized that if I wanted to be able to write it decently I would have to deliberately practice--and I would say I write maybe a dozen words a month. Practicing would be a time sink, not a time saver. (Not to mention most of those words are on a whiteboard, too large to do in cursive.) Look it up is a perfectly good answer in most cases, only an issue for emergency type skills.

I've always wondered why the latin alphabet doesn't have a keyboard like that. It would totally work. With 26 letters (plus additional letters in some languages), you could assign the 10 most common letters to each key, then assign the lesser-used letters to swipes. Capital letters would work as shown in the video: tap the letter, then tap the "capitalize" button to transform it to a capital letter.

  A    T    I     del
  O    E    S     space
  cap  N    ,.?!  enter

Obviously you would have to learn the layout, but I don't think it would take very long to get proficient.

I've experimented with using traditional T9 with predictive text on my smartphone (Samsung phones have it pre-installed, you just need to enable it), and for typing sentences it can be incredibly quick, but it completely falls down as soon as you can't rely on the prediction system, such as for passwords and URLs. So I always end up switching back to the cramped QWERTY keyboard.

I find roller ball pens to be almost as good, but easier to maintain (my fountain pen at work would be dry after leaving it cap-on over the weekend).

I always use good ol' mechanical pencils, particularly Twist Erase or BiC with 0.7 lead.

I have a fancy fountain pen and was taught Gregg shorthand by my grandmother and have used it for note taking for most of my life. I still type 50%-75% faster than I write and can type for significantly longer than I can write.

If I learned how to use a stenotype I can imagine the discrepancy would be even larger.

I very much agree. Doing math involves a lot of fiddling with equations, fixing, and playing around with drawings. When doing that on the computer, I would waste most of my time fighting the word processor instead of thinking about the math.

Many analog clocks have roman numerals.

On the contrary, I find analog clocks more intuitive. They graphically and clearly represent locations within the cycle of time.

I just wish 24-hour clocks/watches were more common. I think much of the confusion some people have must come from abbreviating it to 12 hours that each happen twice a day, which is obviously nonsense.

I'm not an expert, but that looks very much like the handwriting I was taught at primary school in England in the 1990s.

I think we started learning it when we were 7-8 years old, and could be trusted with a cheap fountain pen. Before that, it was printing with a pencil.

The print, i.e. write detached letters, not attached letter like cursive.

> writing in cursive is much, much more efficient

That is very false. It’s kind of slow compared to handwriting print-looking letters (eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D'Nealian)

Source: https://theproductiveengineer.net/is-it-faster-to-write-in-c...

And also for many years I wrote cursive, then I switched to something that looks like D’Neal, and it was somewhat faster and easier to read (but not super fast)

There are pens that will record audio and you can make a short note that will take you straight to the location in the audio recording when you review.

I don't do enough these days where I need something like that but, when I did more journalism where I was quoting people it might have been useful. A lot of meetings I'm in are recorded anyway and recording is pretty routine for interviews anyway.

The other thing with taking written notes versus typing is being behind a laptop screen can be a bit off-putting.

This is also another thing everyone says, but I took notes in one class alone: Algebraic Geometry. And that was the class I was the worst at. Usually, all the way through undergrad and graduate school I'd just go home and do the exercises at the back of the class and type up a LaTeX cheat sheet. Then, during exams whole memories would return. Even today the Nullstellensatz comes to me in full form complete with lecturer at the board and where I was sitting in the class. But everything else is an unreachable haze. In fact, I remember the shapes in the class and writing in my notebook but I don't remember the actual content.

Does anyone else have this experience? Where note taking was deleterious to learning the content?

If your hand is cramping up, it's probably due to holding the pen/pencil too tightly, or applying too much pressure to the paper. If I use a ball-point pen (the most common type) for too long, my hand cramps up because of the pressure used to get the ink out of the pen. However, if I use a fountain pen, I don't need to grip it hard, nor press down to use it---it just glides over the paper, making for a much more fluid writing experience. And my handwriting got better too.

Even though I wrote plenty through elementary and high school, I was never able to write at a speed that allowed me to keep up with college professors, which was frustrating. If I could relive my college years I think I'd make sure to obtain a laptop of some sort because that would've made notetaking so much easier.

The difference in thinking between writing and typing that you noted is interesting. It didn't seem to exist for me, but that might've been confounded by struggling to keep up with the professor — I was too focused on trying to get things written down to actually put any thought into whatever was being said, making it difficult to apply any sort of grouping to the notes on the fly.

I was taught cursive at primary school and from the point it was taught it was mandatory for written work.

It was a great relief when, partway through secondary school, I realised I could just drop it for print as it did wonders for my ability to read my own writing, and reduced the number of "?" markers on homework from teachers too.

After about 6th grade I stopped using cursive. Just never made sense to waste time and effort writing something that can't be read, no matter how efficient it is.

But I never had trouble with taking notes. You get pretty fast at writing print if you do it all the time.

I still remember my college professor's surprise when I handed in a handwritten, but totally legible, essay complete with proper use of italics. For some reason people think you can't handwrite italics.

We did both in school in the late 90s. We had "computer" class 2-3 times a week where we learned touch typing, as well as "penmanship" where we learned print and cursive handwriting.

Based.

I write by hand so rarely now that it hurts my hand to do. (And I was in the cursive cohort. Pretty useless skill in retrospect lol. It's just a way less legible version of regular handwriting.)

With that attitude, why bother even teaching them to type? Only nerds use keyboards any more, Grandpa - everything these days happens on a phone.

> Playing the devil's advocate here, why should we teach handwriting at all? Why not just have first-graders learn to type?

I really can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

The most obvious response is: sometimes you have to fill out forms on the spot.

Also, I personally find that I have much greater retention for handwritten vs typed information.

Cursive has a single real use these days: signatures.

Handwriting in cursive with a fountain pen is a pleasure, not a chore.

I use a simple pelikan jazz (nothing fancy) but still it’s pleasant.

Writing is an entirely different mental process. I find that I remember things far better if I write them on paper instead of in a text file. If anything, schools should go the opposite route and be as computer/tablet free as possible. I suspect the richer ones will.

This would be a better thought out argument if I weren't typing it from the toilet.

Even if the goal isn't to learn handwriting. Learning handwriting is an excellent means to develop fine motor movement. Many of our modern tools utilise the precision we learned in handwriting to perform other functions. Whether that's a painter using a brush, or a surgeon using a scalpel, or everything in between.

Our non-dominant hand almost gives us a preview of what this could be like, so it seems that spending time to upskill the articulation of our hands is necessary: so we might as well use that time to learn handwriting since it has the benefit of working without electricity and translates well into the aforementioned tools.

I'm with you. I'm quite successful by any measure and my handwriting is atrocious. My mum would do home handwriting assignments with her left hand for me so I could play and explore nature (we lived in a rural place).

I doubt I'd be any more advanced in my life if my handwriting were better. In fact, looking back at the kids in school I know with beautiful handwriting and the ones who were messy, I don't see any real correlation. It's pretty random.

Because you don't want to be illiterate without the support of a computer!

Because handwriting only requires a pencil or pen, and a medium to write on such as paper.

Contrast typing which requires an entire machine instead of a simple pencil or pen.

Note that as far as I'm concerned handwriting is different from cursive. We should absolutely teach kids how to write by hand. Teaching cursive as part of general curriculum, however, is a waste of time. Cursive is better relegated to being a hobby.

Because you sometimes need to be able to put words to a surface.

I hike, often remote and alone. One of the many safety precautions I take is leaving a whiteboard on my dash with my destination and the date. Anyone seeing that will immediately know whether there's a problem. (And there's label tape on there with a bunch of contact information, including the satellite equipment I'm carrying.)

As a consequence, probably not that either.

It was required for me, but that didn't mean anything real. We "learned" it for like two weeks then I never used it again.

NJ public schools don’t generally teach it. Many private schools do, which makes for a fun time when a kid transitions from public to private school..

Some people are doubtless more gifted in picking up languages. But my experience getting pretty good grades in 4 years of high school French is this: Traveling in France with a friend who never had any French, I actually could read and somewhat speak a fair bit she couldn't. But I was nowhere remotely near fluent/competent. In general, studying a language and never being immersed mostly leads to pretty surface knowledge.

The problem with cursive is it has no relation to literally anything else. The shapes are only marginally similar to print, and some letters like Z and capital F and G are downright arcane. Trying to read certain cursive, particularly bad or heavily-stylized ones, is downright impossible.

Handwriting can be just as easily done using print, and is how I've always handwritten everything. The only time I use cursive is when I sign stuff, and only because I followed everyone else using cursive to sign. Print is also generally much easier to read, too; regardless the skill or style of the writer.

This is distinctly different from WorProBaka ("word processing idiot"), where people of all ages (this affects nearly everyone, not just the young) forget how to write certain kanji simply because Kakijun (stroke order) and their overall complexity easily fade from memory without constant reinforcement from common use. These people can all still read the kanji they've forgotten how to write.

I learned cursive in school and haven’t used it at least 20 years, except to read historical curiosities like old letters.

While I think it will still be many generations before people can get away with not being able to hand write at all, I’m not so sure it’s a negative. I can type an order of magnitude faster than I can write, to the point where hand writing is frustrating. It just feels like it imposes such limits on expression to go so slowly.

I find that unacceptable.

There is little need for most people to *learn* cursive these days beyond signatures. However, people should be able to *read* cursive for another lifespan because they're going to encounter it.

Interesting that it's a different etymology but ended up with the same structure as this other two-animal insult: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schweinehund

Japanese wikipedia lists 7 different hypothetized origins, none of them having real decisive evidence.

I’m sure they had more options than ‘horse’ and ‘deer’ though.