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).
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 警察 (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 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.
I'm strictly referring to the handwritten language here, basically I don't think there is an analogue in alphabetic languages.
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.
> 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’ (厨房), ‘lips’ (嘴唇), ‘cough’ (咳嗽), and ‘broom’ (扫帚). 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’ (鸡蛋), ‘shrimp’ (虾仁), and ‘chives’ (韭菜), and simply resorted to Pinyin.
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.
I can't read Chinese, but I think the article has a better analogy: "most people can easily recognise the musical symbol for treble clef (𝄞), but very few could draw it by memory."
English orthography is exactly that. Exotic.
Imagine having such a strange spelling system that you have competitions where you try to recite spelling. Exotic.
We still have spelling contests at state and nation levels.
That’s horrible. ;)
I guess every word in that contest must have a v/b/y/ll or an h.
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.
- b, v and sound like /b/, because v lost its original pronunciation and w was lent from other languages.
- h lost its sound and became silent (used to be a soft /f/).
- g can sometimes sound like /j/ (there was some pressure to remove these uses).
- x can be an /s/ at the start of a word (due to Greek ancestry).
Those are considered mistakes, but they do not change the pronunciation of the words.
For the concrete rules: https://www.rae.es/ortograf%C3%ADa/valores-fonol%C3%B3gicos-.... You can see the exceptions to "one letter, one sound" are very few.
That said, Spanish and German are both so much better than English that the difference between them can be disregarded in this context. The irony is that almost any major European language (with the notable exception of French) has better spelling than English; and even French, although it's horribly overcomplicated, is more consistent when it comes to reading.
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)
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 虫 and 下, 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".
That one's just bizarre, since 虾 is also just the most intuitively obvious choice to form a substitute character if you do forget the right component. If anything, I don't think pinyin substitution is something you do unless you're a highly-educated computer user who deals regularly in Latin script. It's a striking "man bites dog" moment, but the one has been passed around since 2006 (cf. https://pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_refor...) and is not, as far as I can tell, indicative of any particular trend. Discreet literacy outliers in jobs where you'd expect it are ... a thing in English too: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43700153
(It's honestly weirder to see someone write jiu菜 than 9菜 too.)
This, it's honestly not helpful to pretend it's the same as misspelling a word in a phonetic language because it's not and it's not even a good analogy to begin to understand the issue.
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.
"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).
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.
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.
That explains why it looks like a 'silly' version of english to english speakers.
And the authors article is referring to the writing of the logograph - 注音 is strictly for pronunciation.
We have a word describing what it is, we have a symbol of how it looks, and we have a word of how it is pronounced "and". We also tend not to write ampersands down by hand. Its a more common symbol. However unlike the treble clef the meaning and the pronunciation is the same so perhaps the example isn't as good?