Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

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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 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"??

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.

嚔 is an unusual character, though. Not just in that it's not often used, but also because it's construction is atypical. It would be like Ph.D. students forgetting how to spell "onomatopoeia," which, yes, wouldn't be surprising.

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).

It may be contrived, but it still highlights the key difference.

Even if sneeze was a word that you were taught once in school and hadn't used for 30 years, you would still likely get close to the correct spelling from the sound (sneaze, snease, sneeze), and seeing the misspelling also helps with recall and to self correct.

This is the "virtual circle" of speaking/listening -> reading -> writing -> referred to by the author, which is not possible with Chinese.

It's true that there are some weird non-phonetic English words that PhDs would likely misspell, but it's not 100% of the language and you still could at least make an attempt.

It's possible to just write Chinese in phonetic form (e.g. pinyin), which bypasses this issue, but you have a secondary problem, which is the extremely narrow range of syllables (~400 * 4/5 tones = 1600-2000), resulting in quite ambiguous text.

Pinyin should be approximately as ambiguous as the spoken language, i.e. not very (especially if whitespace is used to denote word boundaries)

Removing the added information would make it much more difficult to parse, though. Paragraphs don't exist in oral English - or spaces between words, quotation marks, capitalization, etc. - but we still find it much more easy to read properly formatted text than improperly formatted text.

Just because people are able to understand strict phonetic transcriptions, doesn't mean it's a good way to convey information (which is why almost no language relies on just strict phonetic transcriptions).

As mentioned in another comment, English has its share of words like that too. For example I'm sure diarrhoea can catch people out.

And how many people drink an espresso every day and think it has an x in it.

I knew plenty of elite students who would make classic English blunders like "expresso" or "pacifically"

> how many people drink an espresso every day and think it has an x in it.

Arguably, "espresso" isn't an english word, but spelling it with an "x" as "expresso" isn't as incorrect as you may think. There's two main theories behind which word to use: "espresso" meaning to "press out" the coffee, or "expresso" meaning "expressly made for the customer" as it's quicker to make than a filter coffee. This is further confused by the Latin root being "exprimire" meaning "to press or squeeze out".

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/espresso-vs-expresso...

Are those blunders or accents? From my point of view you spelled diarrhea incorrectly, unlike how our lord and savior Noah Webster taught us.

Maybe language is fine if it conveys the intended meaning.

Yes a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and well... diarrhoea is diarrhea

My point was addressing "tsinghua students..." and "Harvard students..." unless they were literary scholars or grammarians their wield of the language may be at the level of "educated" but still plenty fallible. I'm sure those of us who did any post grad would have met people who were smart in a given axis and otherwise very ordinary along the other axes.

Except most people will get close enough for most other people to understand. English is rather flexible

Not ti mention spelling differences and even all the unique words in different English countries. Or within the uk

Well in other comments, native Chinese speakers brought up that when you forget how to write a character you just write a homonym and readers can guess by the context - which is how Chinese speech works anyway.

So it turns out that humans are rather flexible

Or even more classic English blunders, like not being able to choose correctly between e.g. “their”, “there”, or “they're”.

I don't think that Chinese people have problems knowing how to spell a character as different characters share the same pronunciation (more or less) if they have the same phonetic component[1]. So pinyin helps literally zero.

What is harder is to distinguish the meaning of all these characters. Let's take this set as an example: 里理哩鲤鯉俚娌悝锂鋰

Ok, they are all pronounced the same, but guessing or knowing all their meanings is a different game. "鲤" has to be a fish that's pronounced li3. That might still be easy, but the more abstract the meaning-giving character radical is, the harder it becomes to distinguish all of them.

[1] https://hanzicraft.com/lists/phonetic-sets

This is not analagous. The sound of every English word give clues – and often precise guidance - on how to write it, but the sound of a Chinese word typically offers no hint of how to write it. If you give me some obscure English word, say "persiflage", I might have no idea what it means, but I can probably spell it. But if you give a Chinese speaker 馘 (góu) in context, almost no one will be able to write it, even if they know the precise meaning ("to cut off the left ear of the slain").

I would guess that most Harvard students could spell those misspelled words in your comment correctly if you asked them to directly. When reading we know what the word is supposed to be and we correct it in our mind to the intended spelling. If anything it’s a testament to the resiliency of phonetic alphabets - but more so it’s illustrative of how English pronunciation has deviated from spellings that were mostly set with the advent of printing in England. Most of the misspellings in your comment involve misplaced letters that are not directly pronounced.

Strictly in terms phonetics, why couldn’t “weird” be spelled “wierd” when English also has “tier”? I’m guessing the Normans are to thank for turning “wyrd” into “weird”.

Something like Wednesday or was it Wensday, Wendsday, Wednsday, Wedensday, Wednseday, Wednesdy, Wednesay, Wedsday, Wednseday, or, Wendseday?

I vote for wedensday as it is the closest to the originating Woden's day.

Even with the misspellings it's obvious what words you meant. If someone forgets how to write "嚔" are they just missing a few strokes but it's obvious what they actually meant? Or do they have zero clue what it's supposed to look like?

From what I've heard people say (and what I've seen), the most common way to handle it is to simply write another character that sounds the same. In other words, the characters can be used as phonetic elements when it's needed. It looks weird (in the same way that spelling words phonetically in English can look word), but it's doable.

That's for situations where they had to write something by hand but didn't have their phone with them to check (otherwise they can just spend a second to look at the character), which isn't a common occurrence.

It depends, but it's not uncommon to completely forget the entire character. If you sort of remember it, then the muscle memory in your hands often helps to finish the character correctly once you start, at least that's what I've found and heard from others.

Therein lies the resiliency of phonetic orthography: despite the misspellings the sound represented by the words did not significantly change thus most readers would never even notice.

If anything it’s a statement on how the orthography of English in particular doesn’t well match the phonetic structure of the language - something due to a confluence of factors in English several hundred years ago, including the rise of printing.

Woops, I thought I’d post this comment and it never posted.

Remember the english -> pirate translator? Simularily, per your graf, a "spell wrecker" tool, witch introduces mispellings and other errs, could be amusing.

Well done. I spotted weird on its own but I had to go looking for the others.

>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.

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...

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

The fact that 嚔/sneeze is usually the go to example means it ends up becoming the exception that proves the rule. Most other characters are much more easily remembered.

If you learn languages you quickly notice that knowing the 99% most frequent words still means that you need to look up a word every paragraph or two and that you have trouble expressing yourself. To write Chinese you need to know several thousand characters, forgetting just a few dozen can be quite annoying when you try to write nontrivial texts.

Being able to write a character by hand, being able to type it up, and being able to read it are all different things. I doubt many Chinese would be thrown off from reading or typing 打喷嚏.

I actually did a deep dive into the issue of unfamiliar characters coming up when reading, and how people handle them. I won't go into all the details, but the general takeaway is:

1. Unfamiliar characters can actually be quite rare or quite common depending on the material you're reading.

2. It's not much of an issue for people either way.

Of course, when I used the word „write“ I meant writing by hand.

Yeah, this particular character seems to cause people problems because it’s not really used anywhere else.

I think the shrimp meat example from the researcher daily notes was a bigger tell of the issue.

Because shrimp meat is something I see written out EVERYWHERE.

The shrimp example is kind of strange. Like you said, it's an extremely common character, and not a difficult one either. But beyond that, if you look at it he got the radical, 虫, correct. The phonetic element, 下, is a fundamental character that I doubt anyone forgets to write.

It just seems like such an odd outlier example. Like talking about a friend that spells "been" as "bin." I'm sure it could happen, but it's not indicative of a broader trend.

The story was reported by Victor Mair, though, who is extremely opposed to using characters and often exaggerates the issues with them.

Personally, I've seen a lot of Chinese people's written notes, and I don't think I've ever seen them resort to pinyin, even among people that didn't go to college. I just asked a few Chinese friends about this, and they told me they never resort to pinyin either.

A native English speaker wouldn't have trouble with "been" vs "bin" since these are two different vowel phonemes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Does English not have a native word? It would be „Durchfall“ in German, and the Greek word only be used if one wanted to be fancy.

English speakers perceive it as a native word, not a Greek one.

There are lots of examples of this, where English has a foreign-sounding word for something whereas German has a Germanic one. For example oxygen vs. Sauerstoff.

It just has, uh, diarroeha...yeah I can't spell it either

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'.

How does your assessment of the relative usefulness of ‘classes’ from youth relate to the possible existence of a retarding effect arising from language differences?

Having read it, the rest of the article was new.

Thanks!

Thank you for this. I checked the date on the article twice and still couldn’t shake the strange feeling of deja vu.

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