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Comment by generic92034 | Hacker News Reader

generic92034

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).

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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