Character amnesia in China

> 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

> You need to know where to read 1-3 letters ahead to read a word and interpret it. That's not really a thing in English

It happens in a English too, where you see a chunk of letters and mis-predict which word they represent in a way which affects its meaning [0], and sometimes that will also affect pronunciation. [1]

An example from the link:

> "The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families."

A reader linearly scanning along doesn't know whether "complex" is an adjective or a noun, and then whether "houses" is a noun or a verb. I'm pretty sure all human languages have similar problems where a certain amount of look-ahead or backtracking is necessary.

For another example to highlight pronunciation changes, consider the ambiguity of:

"I saw the rhino live in the zoo."

That could mean that the rhino was doing the verb of living, in which it rhymes with "give", or it could also mean that the speaker was seeing it in-person, in which case it rhymes with "drive".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)

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.

> in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way

Some context-dependent examples: "read": /ɹid/ vs. /ɹɛd/; "lead": /lid/ vs. /lɛd/ (plumbum); "desert": /ˈdɛz.ɚt/ vs. /dɪˈzɝt/.

>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)

Fruit flies like a banana. English has its own ambiguity, so it isn’t really that different.

I can only write Chinese via an IME these days. For one, I’m left handed so writing characters was always a struggle since stroke order worked against me, but it’s mostly how I only use Chinese anyways.

I told my wife our kid should learn to write via an IME as well and she was just horrified about that, though. None of the teaching material really supports it.

I've been (very) casually learning Japanese for a couple years, and almost every time I think I find something "weird" that Japanese does, I almost immediately think of a very similar example in English.

The alphabet is a pretty awesome invention (alphabet > kana-style syllabary > kanji-style logography) but English writing is at least as complex as JP writing, just in different dimensions.

JP's phonetics, for example, are dead simple compared to English's, but they do a good job making up for it by having a few thousand Kanji.

Not so much in terms of meaning but in terms of pronunciation, sometimes you also need to read ahead in English to know how a certain word is pronounced. For example: "I read a book yesterday." and "I read a book every night." Depending on the context that follows, "read" is pronounced differently. The same thing happens for "present" and "record". Admittedly, these are exceptions to the rule.

When teaching reading and English, learning about context clues is one of the ways students are taught to figure out the meaning of words.

I think you’ll find all of those things are true of English too.

In English you have to know a word in order to pronounce it.

The “ou” diphthong in “hound” and “double” or “would” is pronounced differently. Or “ieu” in “lieutenant” vs “lieu”. Or “oo” in “poor” vs “root” Or “berry” in “berry” vs “strawberry”

I could go on forever. There’s no other western language I know of that behaves like that.

Hanja still get used in some contexts --- had to memorize ~500 of them when I was studying Korean.

People love to complain about how much work other people can do in order to slightly convenience themselves. And the media loves to run air their complaints, because they are snappy, and photogenic, and easy to pitch as "feel good stories about how much I care for the old ways unlike those lazy sloppy people over there"... even if "I" also find myself forgetting how to write kanji.

It doesn't matter. It won't be a top-down decision. It'll just be a long, slow progression of people slowly realizing that writing in kanji for this character is annoying, so maybe I'll just write it phonetically, and then that character, and then there will be a year or two where there's a phase change and suddenly it's everywhere, even though nobody decided.

And people will complain and whine and moan about the "beauty" of the kanji disappearing. And even though they have a point, it won't matter because the kanji will still be there as much as they ever were, and all one has to do is go study them... but they won't. Because complaining about how other people should keep doing something hard is easy, but actually doing the hard thing yourself is hard, and the vast, vast majority of the complainers won't actually do anything about it other than complain, but take the easier options themselves, just maybe a year or two later than others.

I have no beef with the people taking the easier option. Life is full of things to spend effort on and we can't give maximum effort to all of them. I am annoyed at people who complain about how other people can do vast, vast quantities of work so they can briefly feel slightly better about themselves in some way.

Yeah, because Japanese without Kanji is at least 2x harder to read.

Sure, and there were complaints in Korea, too. Lest we forget, Hangul was developed in 15th century, and was promptly condemned by the educated elites while being enthusiastically adopted by the underclasses. But the elite pushback, going as far as outright bans in some periods, meant that it wouldn't become the standard orthography until 1900s.

I don't think anyone today would seriously argue that Hanja is preferable, though. In retrospect, it's clear that the benefits of easily accessible universal literacy are too substantial to ignore for the sake of tradition.

But autocomplete even for basic words? My wife is Chinese. I'll never forget when she was helping her family write some formal letter in Chinese in Microsoft Word and she simply could not input the numbers 1, 2, and 3 in Chinese because she forgot how. And I know this may be apples and oranges because this is keyboard input versus writing on paper but as a programmer who can type at a moderate pace since I was a kid (~120wpm) this was perplexing for me! And similar to the article, she's an Ivy league grad. Similarly, when she's communicating with her family via WeChat half the time she simply sends audio messages instead of text messages. I'm pretty surprised this method is so popular instead of some voice-to-text google assistant type system.

Not at all - forgetting kanji just isn't similar to forgetting how to spell English words, as I think TFA made fairly clear. It's the simplest analogy to make, but it's not near enough to draw conclusions from.

The analogy I've used in the past is, you read kanji with your mind but you write them with your hand, so being unable to remember a kanji is more akin to forgetting a guitar chord or a keyboard shortcut - if your hands stop making the motions, you'll eventually forget them.

> "This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence between sound and spelling. One might forget whether "abracadabra" is hyphenated or not, or get the last few letters wrong on "rhinoceros", but even the poorest of spellers can make a reasonable stab at almost anything. By contrast, often even the most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their hands and ask someone else in the room how to write some particularly elusive character."

- https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

I am Italian and was taught cursive in elementary school and I can barely remember upper case cursive letters[0] thirty years later.

In my experience, most people of my generation have generally forgot and usually just write "lower case letters but big" or block letters.

So yeah, I don't think there's anything inherently chinese about forgetting writing things you don't use.

[0] https://www.genitorialmente.it/2016/10/alfabeto-corsivo-maiu...

That's very much the impression I get. I've never seen pinyin used in Chinese writing, and the Chinese friends I've met have said they've never seen it either (they said they'd probably just look up the character or write a homonym instead, but even then it's pretty rare that it comes to that).

That's not to say it's never done, but it feels like an outlier. As if a friend found a word too hard to understand and drew a picture instead, and then the author wrote an article about how spelling is so difficult that it leads English speakers to draw words instead of writing them.

But the thing that struck me the most was just how confused people were when I asked them about it. It just didn't seem to be anything that was an actual issue for them.

Before calling it racist we could ask him for a reference. After all, it might be a truthful fact.

But yes, it stood out to me too, and I'm confused how you're the only person commenting on it.

I wonder if these people justify having a shitty writing mechanism by being smart. "It's so needlessly complex, but we're smart so we can afford it" when in reality if you're smart you want it as simple as possible.

And then he comes on HN and rationalizes the fact that he can't spell. Ironic.

Maybe parent was referring to the studies by Lynn, a self-declared "scientific racist".

I think that despite lower IQ scores on average South Korea has been consistently beating Japan in go in the recent years, and more importantly they get rid of hanja (Korean version of kanji) from their writing system.

Here is one citation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10416...

But also in most other IQ tests, Ashkenazi Jewish and East Asian people tend to score the highest.

Read the nonsense text aloud and then listen. Presumably with practice, you don't actually to actually speak aloud, and your 'inner monologue' voice is sufficient.

It sounds like the Chinese version of 1337speak.

The real answer to your question: the most commonly used Chinese input method allows you to type the first pinyin letters only, and the algorithm will figure out the most likely Chinese characters you want.

It's not "the parents" can't read it. It's that people who don't use electronics have a harder time reading it.

I think it's just easier for beginners (or teenagers) to go from phonetic to meaning. I guess advanced Chinese readers don't even read the words out loud in their head and go directly to meaning. I'm beginner/intermediate at Chinese and surprisingly, I noticed that my pinyin often seems better than many Chinese natives.

It's the same logic as writing a sentence like this:

Y U gna be late

It's grammatically completely incorrect. But you can still understand it.

When it comes to chinese/japanese characters, many have the same phonetic reading. So you can do something similar, while selecting the wrong characters.

> The written language is almost orthogonal to the spoken one.

I'm almost certain that this is true of Chinese script (after all, it was and is used for writing many languages!), but it might not be deducible based on this sort of experience.

I say thus because I had a very similar experience after I had to spend a month in the UAE. Thanks to frequent bilingual signs, I started recognizing common Arabic words, but I had no idea what the words are in Arabic or how to say them. But as far as I know, written Arabic is not at all orthogonal to spoken Arabic, every word is written exactly as it sounds.

> Modern Hanzi are a very bad phonetic alphabet

alphabets, universally have one common property: they are sortable.

I challenge you to sort Chinese characters.

This is an idea from James Gleick's The Information. The Chinese may never be able to invent morse code alone, because encoding Chinese scripts is extremely hard, even today (think of all those massive code-points in CJK Unicode, with dups and errors)

Chinese text on the Internet may have some emulation of phonemes, but it's never systematically standarized. It just borrows some aspects here or there.

Alphabet is a very specific thing: it's a small set of letters (usually less than 30) where each letter usually represents a single phoneme.

Sometimes a letter might represent a phoneme cluster (such as the letters "x" and "j" in English, that usually represent the consonant clusters /ks/ and /dʒ/ respectively). Sometimes there might be some ambiguity, like two letters being used for the same sound (both "c" and "k" can produce the sound /k/ in English) or one letter having two different pronunciations ("c" can be pronounced as either /k/ or /s/).

What distinguishes alphabets from all other similar written systems is that a single letter cannot represent a combination of a consonant and a vowel and that vowels can be independently represented by letters.

Other similar scripts are Abjad (like ancient Hebrew), where letters only represent consonants and vowels are implied from the context. The Ancient Hebrew script (which is different than the square Aramaic alphabet used to write Hebrew after circa 300 BC) is a later variant of the Proto-Canaanite script, an abjad which served as a basis to all later European alphabets (Etruscan, Greek, Latin, Runic and Cyrillic) and other Near Eastern alphabets (such as Aramaic, Arabic and Syriac). The only pre-modern alphabet (or abjad or abugida) I'm aware of that is not derived from Proto-Canaanite is Hangul (which is a true alphabet, unlike the two Japanese Kana).

Modern Hebrew and Arabic are mixed-alphabets, since some vowels can be represented by consonants, but not all of the vowels, and the letters that represent a vowel leave some ambiguity with regards to which vowels they represent (or whether they represent a vowel or a consonant).

The next type of similar system is abugida, which covers most of the Ethiopian, South Asian and South-East Asian scripts (Ge'ez, Devanagari, Tamil, Tibetan, Thai, Burmese, Khmer and many more). These are all probably derived from the Aramaic alphabet. In abugidas most letters represent a consonant that comes with default vowel (e.g. क in Devanagari used to write Hindi represents /ka/), but there are special diacritics that can modify a letter to have a different vowel (e.g. कॆ represents /ke/ in Devanagari) or even insert extra consonants or glides before the vowel. These combined forms together with the diacritics can get fairly irregular (especially in Ge'ez) and consonant clusters can become quite unwieldy and then about 80% of the consonants would just get dropped in Tibetan. But that's the general idea.

Then you've got syllabaries: these are pretty straightforward systems, where every letter represent a combination of a consonant (or a consonant cluster) and a vowel (sometimes a diphthong or a vowel with a glide). These scripts require you to remember more letters, but the combinations are simpler and more regular than most alphabets (let alone abjads and abugidas). This is the kind of writing system you see getting developed independently more often than others: Linear B, Japanese Kana, Cherokee, Vai, Yi.

Chinese characters are none of these. Characters never represent a single consonant or a stand-alone vowel that can combine with another consonant. In fact, bar few exceptions (such as 儿 in Mandarin) every character represents a full syllable and does not combine to form a syllable. But Chinese characters are not syllabaries either, since there are many characters that can be used to write each sound and they are not interchangeable with each other. A specific character has to be used based on the meaning of the word. This is how logographic writing systems works and modern Chinese is logographic language par excellence.

To appreciate that you have to compare Chinese characters with other logographic languages. Let's take Akkadian cuneiform (the writing system used for writing Babylonian and Assyrian) for example.

Cuneiform was first developed to write Sumerian, but this language was mostly dead by the times of Hammurabi (18th century BC), and it was a far-gone relic during the heyday of the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar II. The Akkadians (i.e. the various Eastern Semitic language speakers of Mesopotamia) needed to write their own language with characters that represented Sumerian concepts, and they used the same methods modern Chinese (or Japanese) speakers use today: using a single Sumerian logogram in its own original meaning (but Akkadian pronounciation), transcribing a word using syllables that represent different words with same sounds and combining multiple logograms to form a new meaning. Like Japanese (but unlike Chinese), Akkadian cuneiform characters can represent a multi-syllable word and multiple logograms can combine to a new word with completely different (and unexpected) pronunciation. Akkadian is also commonly using logograms as word classifier (e.g to indicate geographical locations, gender, type of object and many other things[1]). These classifiers were written, but rarely (if ever?) pronounced.

Egyptian hieroglyphs, which I am even less familiar with than cuneiform, seem to have a far more developed system of classification (determinaties). They also seem to exhibit combinations of logograms to denote new meanigns and phonetic writing from a very early stage. In fact, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the quintessential "pictographic" in contemporary imagination, are mostly phonetic. Each hieroglyphs generally represents a cluster of 1-3 consonants, which probably came from the original pronunciation of the word it represented.

But this is like an abjad! And yes, the Proto-Canaanite abjad probably originated in a simplification of Egyptian hieroglyphs. And like abjads, which dveloped into mixed scripts (like Modern Hebrew and Arabic) and developed optional diacritics, Egyptian hieroglyphs also needed a method to disambiguate the multitude of similar-sounding words. And for that reason most phonetic Egyptian words (as far as I know) are accompanied by a logographic determinative [2] (classifer) that signifies whether it's the name of a God, a city, a house, a lotus flower, a lotus bud, another part of the lotus (stem, stalk or rhizome) or foxes skins. Yeah, these classifiers get rather specific. [3]

No system out there (including Japanese Kanji) is exactly like Chinese characters as used in Mandarin Chinese and other modern Chinese languages, but what I want to show here is that even though Modern Chinese is quite different from Classical Chinese, the writing system is still logographic. All logographic systems (including classical Chinese) have some phonetic features, at the very least in order to account for words that have no agreed-upon logogram. But what makes them logographic, is the pervasive use of logograms in a semantic role to disambiguate meanings.

[1] https://sumerianlanguage.tumblr.com/post/167245277900/hi-i-w...

[2] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/writing/sy...

[3] http://web.ff.cuni.cz/ustavy/egyptologie/pdf/Gardiner_signli...

I'm sure there are plenty of scholarly academics with a whole body of literature to argue otherwise, but I've never bought all the arguments of how different Cantonese and Mandarin are.

To my mind assimilating Cantonese from Mandarin or vice versa is way easier than French <> Italian or Italian <> Spanish. Spanish <> Portuguese is an interesting contender.

Good luck pretending Mandarin and Cantonese are distinct languages while comparing German and French lol.

I say this as someone with a whole lot of Cantonese dna in my heritage before people get all up in arms. I've personally always figured the barriers to learning both Mandarin and Cantonese was cultural and there are plenty of people in Guangzhou who are perfectly bilingual

I think it's also an issue of translation. "Dialect" in English is variety of a language. 方言 (fangyang, translated as dialect) in Chinese is a regional language or speech. Linguistically, Cantonese and other varieties of Chinese are recognised to be part of the Chinese language group / family.

Cf https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%B1%89%E8%AF%AD/22488993?fro...

Linguists often use terms like "isolect" these days just to dodge this whole debate and the associated (often very toxic) politics. Not just with Chinese - it's also an issue around e.g. Serbo-Croatian.

> In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were.

This is the correct understanding, even within mainland China, and across all times. The practice of assigning a "mandarin" based on where the capital is/was dates back at least hundreds of years, if not thousands. You can easily Google "Mandarin in Republic of China" to see the Republic of China's attempt to standardize its mandarin. It's really not a CCP issue.

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

Once you get to ~5000 characters you can read most common texts. Vanishingly few people will know ~40,000 characters; a large fraction of those are obscure or ancient characters that only show up in historical texts.

This is comically incorrect. Even the article plainly states that you need to know ~1500 characters to be considered literate in Chinese, with sixth graders required to learn ~2500 characters. A quick perusal of practically any Chinese-language website (e.g. https://zh.wikipedia.org/) will quickly disabuse you of the notion that there are "only 200+ Chinese ideograms".

You might be conflating "ideogram" with "radical", i.e. components of characters. There's probably a few hundred of those defined, but they're more like pieces of characters rather than whole ones. Combining radicals produces very different characters that have totally different meanings; learning the radicals alone buys you very little.

There are thousands of characters, and you have to know thousands. There are tens of thousands of characters in existence, although only highly educated folks will know anywhere near 10000 characters.

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).

Um, no. If you're talking about radicals (of which there are generally considered to be 214), yes, but you can't read / write in general if you only know those. Also, of those 214, a good chunk aren't standalone words. You're never going to see 疒 or 丶 by itself.

You won't have the words for "I" or "you". You might be able to read "melon" but not "fruit". You could read "papaya" and "corn" but not "vegetable". You could read "beef" or "lamb" but not "chicken". You could read "small" but not "few". You wouldn't be able to read "hello" or "goodbye", "happy" or "sad". But you'd be able to count 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, 18, 20...

Maybe the same reason English road signs omit punctuation.

It's common. The Pinyin transcription is needed for foreigners to be able to recognize the directions, and so it doesn't need accent marks.

I think Spanish is a much better example for write how you speak and still being correct, than German.

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.

> Except in German this is not a problem.

I don't know any German, so I can't comment on this, but I'll add that the concept of a spelling contest (like we have in English) wouldn't make sense in a lot of languages because the spelling of words are so obvious/consistent.

Finnish does this very well too. There is only a few tricky parts, but in general the spelling and pronunciation match. And if they don't, obvious solution is to write as word is pronounced. Which is a drift, but I think it is more desirable way.

If you need an example of a germanic language that has a very regular phonetic spelling I think Dutch is a better example than German. German has a lot of idiosyncrasies, because the spelling tries to preserve the etymology of the words. In Dutch they don't bother trying to preserve a word's history, everything is written as it sounds. (With a handful easy to memorize exceptions)

This is true in mainland China, but not in Taiwan. There, katakana is used as pinyin, and words can be composed by katakana.

> I guess you could write down 景茶 (jing3cha2) and rely on the phonetics, or use a different word if you know one, but it's still wrong on a level that "choclit" just isn't.

If a non-native did this in their own way would likely look wrong, but Chinese natives do occasionally use phonics to write or to substitute some characters with others.

The counter-argument would be that the person could just use the pinyin or use a digital device to get them the characters. But as the article pointed out, those are both modern conveniences. Less than 100 years old both. The script absolutely gives no clues otherwise.

Let's put it this way: We know what ancient might egyptian (most likely) sounds like because they gave their writting system the uniliterals, which are pronunciation guides for complex words. We know that they said waw, and we know what a waw sounds like. They did this probably so they would not to explode their character count from hundreds to thousands.

I don't think these two forms of'amnesia-induced' typos are so different. "Typos" happen quite often, especially when typing on a smartphone and selecting the wrong character. And people learn to read it correctly. It's sometimes used intentionally, e.g. 歪果仁.

Exactly this, it was only recently my Italian friend was musing about how even other European languages don't really have this ability to just absoelootleigh fudge staff ind stihl b undurdudd.

Many people would consider Spanish, my native language, to be much more straightforward when it comes to spelling.

We still have spelling contests at state and nation levels.

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.

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.

    > language acquisition or just memorizing characters

What is the difference, in the case of Chinese?

fwiw I studied Japanese, but I believe most of this still applies.

It's divide and conquer. When you are reading the book, you are indeed just learning the characters. It's a significant ~2-3 month investment that maybe doesn't make sense unless you plan on living and working in the country. But once you've gotten through it, it absolutely feeds back into vocab acquisition, since the characters are now completely unambiguous to you. Much like how Latin/Greek helps with English, you can also work out what entirely new words might mean if you are familiar with their characters.

I did Heisig's Remembering The Kanji as my first step on my Japanese learning journey. It helped make the written language feel more accessible, and I took it on as a fun challenge, but in hindsight only learning to read is important and learning to write is mostly a waste of time. Learning to read is vital, but being a word processor idiot is how everyone is living their lives for the most part.

It's designed for Japanese where it probably works better - pretty much all Kanji have multiple pronunciations that can be completely different to each other so it makes some amount of sense to ignore the sound and focus on the shape and the meaning. Much less relevant for Chinese where you can usually tie the character to a single sound and learn all three halves at the same time.

It surely helps. Mnemonics are a good tool for memorization. You don't have to remember elaborate stories, just something like: "歌" - "older brother lacks singing". It certainly doesn't work with all characters, but it helps.

All three PhD's were perfectly capable of communicating the word for sneeze and also recognize it in writting. They just couldn't write it exactly.

I don't think it has a slowing effect. Except maybe by adding annoying/useless classes for mid/primary students - which is just par for course everywhere else. I can name 3 objectively completely useless classes from my european youth (plus one in college) that were only there because 'culture'.

A better example than sneeze might be diarrhoea. In Chinese this is very easy - 拉肚子 - but I'm sure there are English speakers who might forget the spelling for diarrhoea if they're having a bad day.

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.

No, they really just forgot the characters. I lived in Japan for the better part of a decade and it isn't at all uncommon. There were many times when I explicitly asked natives to recognize or help me with a Kanji and they struggled as well. I doubt everyone's been systematically lying when you genuinely ask for help.

The reason is just digital input really. Pinyin and Romaji typing have become so common that a lot of people write Hanzi/Kanji by hand less and less and it's so complicated of a skill there's really no other way to get it in your brain other than practice. I even notice it myself, I easily recognize 10x more characters than I can accurately write.

Happens all the time to Japanese people, too. There's a core set of characters that are well remembered, then there is a set of characters that you can remember most strokes of (so that someone else can read it) and then there's the stuff where you just have no idea.

Of course, you _can_ escape to Hiragana if you're so inclined, but then you would show that you don't know the character - so it's just avoided.

Ambiguity is king in Japan.

As a Chinese native speaker, I should admit that I forgot how to write them ("sneeze" characters 喷嚏) before I saw them just now. One of the reason, I think, is they are used quite often in oral Chinese, but rarely in written Chinese. And those characters are not easy to write, as you see.

The sneeze example is contrived because in English, sneeze is both phonetic and a word with common occurence.

A better example might involve a common English word with a wierd, non-phonetic spelling. A word that you might imagine it forgivable for even someone who recieved an English PhD to misspell. After all Chinese is a seperate language from English and it is neccessary for it to be evaluated in its own context.

If you think this definetly couldn't happen in English, take a look again at this post -- for it contains eight outright, unambiguous, misspellings of common English words that I would not be surprised if even an English PhD from Harvard made on occassion, especially if your choice of three students were unlucky and they were having embarassingly bad days. (After all, English PhDs isn't the study of spelling, it's the study of literature).

The fact there are two variants of 嚔 (嚏 and 嚔) implies that even ancient chinese people found it difficult and they misspelled it.

I would honestly be astonished if a 4 English department PhD students who were all native speakers of English could all not spell onomatopoeia. I’d expect 2 of the 4 could in the absolute worst case.

Spelling is simply not as hard as remembering hanzi, even in English.

>It would be like Ph.D. students forgetting how to spell "onomatopoeia,"

A (native) PhD student forgetting how to spell onomatopeia might be normal, but 3 I would say is statistically unlikely.

You can spell as onomatopia and people will understand you just fine. You can't do that in Chinese.

I admit I would have liked it if English language Ph.D candidates had some basic working understanding of Ancient Greek, Latin and Old English to serve as a cornerstone for their studies, but that ship has sailed more than a century ago. If you know Greek, onomatopoeia is not that confusing anymore, and you'd know that if you want to be super-pedantic, the plural of octopus would be octopodes, but never octopi.

Then again, if you knew some Old English, you would know correcting everyone and forcing them to use the "original form" is a silly goose chase. You'd know better than to remind everyone that children is a pesky double plural, and childer (from the old English cildru, and like the German Kinder) is more than enough? Or to remind everyone that's it's not "a newt tail" but rather "an EWT tail" and please mind your ewts and a good day to you to sir.

Or maybe there will be some people who would still keep doing that, who am I fooling...

Thanks!

> 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.

> That's a non-trivial error, even if it is only one stroke difference.

As is the difference between "fitter" and "filter" in English.

But Pinyin is based on pronunciation, which varies across China. So Pinyin is based on Putonghua ? So Pinyin reinforces the role of putonghua as a project of national unification ? And the pre-eminent role of Beijing ?

Either way it's phonetic; it's not based on either the radicals or the strokes. Even though there are input methods that use those, they are not commonly used.

> 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.

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.

I'd accept that interpretation. To be more precise, I view it as a demonstration of information loss from replacing classical characters entirely with romanization, as opposed to a forceful argument against any form of adoption of romanization.

The 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.

I think ambiguous homophones aren't actually much of a problem. There's usually only correct option that matches the surrounding context, so the correct inference is easy to make even with no characters at all . After all, there aren't subtitles when you're talking to other people, all the homophones still exist, and yet communication doesn't seem to be impeded.

> Many of the Chinese characters are actually intended to be composed of two parts […]

That is not entirely true in the case of Mandarin, but it is more true in the case of Cantonese (and a few other Chinese languages).

Owing to the historical loss of sounds (especially finals) over the course of the Mandarin development, many Mandarin words tend to be longer (3-4 syllables are common) compared to their counterparts in, say, Cantonese where they are most of the time (but not always) are two syllables long due to the fact that Cantonese has retained more sounds from Middle Chinese (plus, the intermingling with the Bat Yue) over the course of its development.

Which is why the «Lion eating poet in the stone den» still makes some sense when read out loud in Cantonese (also in Wu, Min) and makes no sense in Mandarin.

> Western readers have a hard time reading older writing - while eastern readers have no problem with very old texts.

That's simply not true.

Ancient Chinese calligraphy and language is so different that you have entire PhD fields about it.

By contrast, as someone who has studied basic Latin in high school, I can read stuff from the walls of Pompeii without issue. I can directly read Latin texts from 700AD or so with the standard difficulty of reading handwriting.

See: http://www.edr-edr.it/edr_programmi/view_img.php?lang=en&id_...

Now, perhaps if I were Chinese, I could read ancient graffiti on the Great Wall, but nobody seems to have ever mentioned that.

Where did you get that idea from? I can read most books in Japanese, but probably not a word of most reasonably ‘old’ texts. I think most native speakers would struggle as much as English speakers do with, say, medieval-era English.

This is completely backwards and comically wrong. Japanese text looks very little like it did even 150 years ago; the characters have changed completely, and the language was highly standardized during the Meiji era. Try taking a native Japanese speaker to a museum with old Japanese texts or handwriting and see if they can read any of it; they generally can't understand much of it at all.

Modern Korean people can't even read stuff older than a century or so because the language changed from using Chinese characters to the home-grown Hangul character set, and that was only completed a few decades ago.

By contrast, English speakers can read Shakespeare just fine mostly, with a little difficulty understanding some words that are no longer used.

One can have a larger inventory of letters if the glyphs themselves are consistently patterned in some way. E.g. if "c" is /ts/ and "č" is /tʃ/, then one can expect "š" to be /ʃ/, and "ž" to be /ʒ/ (which is indeed the case in many Slavic alphabets).

>I would argue that a system like the Japanese Hiragana or Katakana are a better system: they are each 56 letters that directly correspond to syllables.

No, they're really not. First, they have 46 characters (each), not 56, though there are another 36 combination characters like ちゃ. Regardless, the problem here is that number comes from the total number of allowed sounds in the entire language. Japanese has an extremely small number of total possible sounds in the language compared to most other languages, particular western ones, and almost all syllables are of the form consonant+vowel: there's basically no way to write, for instance, a word ending in a hard "t" sound, so when Japanese adopts such words, it adds a vowel ending like "tu", and does this for every syllable with a hard consonant without a following vowel. Because of this, loanwords can be really hard to recognize even if you're a speaker of the language that word was adopted from (usually English these days), because the sounds don't map over very well.

And because there's so few total possible syllables, there's a huge number of homophones. The main reason kanji is still around is because it resolves ambiguity and makes it much, much easier to read Japanese text: trying to read text that's all in hiragana (or katakana) is cumbersome, even if spaces are added (Japanese text doesn't normally have spaces).

Syllabaries are great if the language has relatively simple phonotactics. Once you start having things like triple consonant clusters or a dozen different vowels, it breaks down pretty quickly.

The other thing that makes alphabets more popular in the long run is that they spread easier because they're easier to adapt to different languages compared to syllabaries (indeed, it's not uncommon for a syllabary to become semi-alphabetic as part of such adoption).

I haven't written by hand in years.

Yeah, and because the "common" way of pronouncing these words/letters have become so entrenched in our minds, it often feels pretentious to hear people actively try to pronounce words in a way that they feel is "correct", for example trying to emphasize the "strength" of the tr/s/gi sounds as opposed to ch/x/d.

Over 3 decades :-)

Another advantage of using pictograms is that people who speak completely different versions of Chinese can still communicate in writing. They may pronounce the characters completely differently, but the characters still mean the same thing.

I would argue that alphabetisation would increase the use of regional languages because it would be possible to write down your speech, instead of relying on Mandarin or phonetical transcription with Chinese characters.

It's a language in the same sense math notation is a language. It's understood by both a Chinese and an American mathematician.

This is true. I learned Chinese and then hitchhiked China in 2018 for exactly this reason. Everyone was yapping about how important China had become, but China was a black box to me.

After months of hitchhiking I came back home unconcerned.

I think the fact that it's a black box makes us overhype China.

"Easier" I didn't say easy. It's a relative comparison. Spanish and ASL are easy languages, but they won't help Peru or the Deaf community become hegemons for their own reasons.

We already have the global language. It's called English lol

> Language difficulty is not absolute

> Writing systems can be absolute in difficulty

These things contradict each other.

喷 is included in HSK 5 and Heisig's version of the most common ~3000 characters, it can't be that infrequent.

Wiyul I took migh yot to Luffbruh (acting az a cooryer surviss), I inshored my dissertacion woz cerrect bye revuwing the seilerfoan musick. Suddenly, their was a laud noys. I rush't too the sighed of the bote, but I sore the wartre fludding inn. "Quick! Sumbody hasta seel the hoal!" I cryde. Fourtuneatley, the glew oonder the bought's scin maid the holl cloaze up, sow we kepped floting, butt we terned arowned buy mesteak. Immajin mie shock wen wee woshed up in Lossymuth! Eye wonet fourget thatt deigh enny thyme sune, that's fore shur.

(I'm pretty sure this isn't eye dialect: I consulted the rhyming dictionary a lot, to make sure I was swapping spellings between two words with the same phonemes. I also tried to avoid reanalysis, though some of these words might not quite achieve that.)

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)

This is far more analogous to spelling mistakes.

Manny people mistakenly recognise Bopomofo as katakana. I use bopomofo and get this reaction a lot, it just have to mention its actually bopomofo/zhuyin and then they know what it is.

This is not true. If you need to type on your phone, everyone needs to know that the mainland used the Wubi input method, which is Katakana, and now uses Pinyin typing. Taiwan has always used the original Katakana input method. Pinyin typing was invented later.