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Comment by jasonhong | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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