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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

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 "烹" 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" (打喷嚏), 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?

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> 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..."

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?

> 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.

In the example at the start of the article, 烹, the contestant wrote "child" when the proper grapheme was "complete." That's a non-trivial error, even if it is only one stroke difference.

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

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

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.

Well, but as far as I can tell there is no legitimate character created by replacing complete(了) by child(子) in 烹. 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".

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.

Even less of a difference. There's no equivalent character, so it's clearly 烹 written with an extra stroke. It's more like the difference between writing "deceive" and decieve."

> 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.

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