When Chinese children forget how to write | Hacker News Reader

When Chinese children forget how to write

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23 pointsw1ntermute58 comments

This will seem like an odd analogy, but for those unfamiliar with kanji to see what's happening here, I might suggest grabbing a pen and trying to draw Mickey Mouse or Bart Simpson, or some other simple iconic figure that's always drawn a certain way. Even though you could recognize it easily, and can recall the general shape and some of the individual features, unless you've practiced it you're not sure how many lines you need or where they connect. And if you just wing it, you'll probably get enough parts right that others can guess what you were drawing, but the result will look way off, even to you.

For me at least, that's approximately what it feels like to be unable to remember how to write a kanji.

It is actually a bad analogy, because when you draw Mickey Mouse you're using your right brain. This is also the case for a beginner in kanji, because he'll be considering it as a drawing.

When you really learn the kanji (or Han characters to be more generic, kanji being the Japanese name), you end seeing them with their components, and you'll be using your left brain to write them - just like when writing English.

I don't know what I'm talking about, but isn't that exactly what he describes? That if you forget how to write the character, you depend on your right brain to draw it which feels uncomfortable and likely comes out wrong?

It's the best analogy I can think of, perhaps you have a better one. Note that when I say "draw Mickey Mouse" I mean the rote reproduction of the standard iconic character - not the creative act of drawing an original picture. A well-known corporate logo might be a better example but I couldn't think of any complex enough.

As for left-brain/right-brain, I doubt that's a useful distinction here (if indeed it's useful anywhere). But that aside, I don't think it's correct to suggest that native speakers process Han characters just like English. See for example: http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/123/5/954.full.pdf

Don't students have to know how to write anyway when they need to take notes in class?

I get the complexity is quite high since every symbol will look different depending on what's after and before it however you would think you get enough practice taking note or is this a formal language used only in certain contexts?

Language Log has many posts about what they call character amnesia, for example this one:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5669

Is there any real advantage to having such a complex system rather than (some level of) a phonetic one like most other languages? Obviously there are cultural reasons we would still like to be able to read old text and not lose that, but in general the Chinese system just seems like pain for very little gain...

- The Chinese language does not have a single universal pronunciation standard. You may have heard of different Chinese 'dialects' such as Mandarin and Cantonese. The same characters are pronounced differently in different dialects, and it's more than just an accent: someone who speaks only Mandarin may follow something like 20% (ish) of an overheard conversation in Cantonese, if they concentrate hard.

- Even in a single dialect, many words sound exactly the same, but mean different things. Using a phonetic system would harm comprehension. See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone... for an excellent illustration of this point.

But you don't choose the same characters for the same words in Shanghainese as in Mandarin as in Cantonese.

Actually, Mandarin is the only one with a standardized written form. Hong Kong people (Cantonese speakers) write formally in Mandarin and pronounce the characters with Cantonese, but they way Cantonese is spoken has different grammar and lexicon. Written Cantonese is non-standardized and often requires new characters that are not found in Mandarin. I don't think there are many people writing Shanghainese because the language is actively discouraged by the government.

Nature and evolution seem to be concerned with passing down information. For that, Nature came up with 4 letters: A, T, C, G. You see where I'm going with this.

Social Darwinism?

Edit - I am not meaning this in its worst excesses, though I am meaning it pejoratively.

Just because there are 4 bases on DNA doesn't mean anything about what makes a good written language.

This is because they are not letters in a language, at least not as we commonly understand letters or language.

Those are just the labels we have given them as they were some of the closest metaphors to hand.

We could have called them notes and it would work just as well.

However that would have no bearing on the best ways to write music.

Which further down all merely protons and neutrons? If we could go further there maybe only 1 matter, or even Null? You see where I'm going with this. Arguing spiritual culture with physics theory is really comparing hot chicks with debugging assembly.

Yes there actually is! English is a language that really favours the writer while Chinese favours the readers. Most of the time, you can read Chinese a lot quicker because the characters are all the same size (although they might have different complexity), and there is generally a lesser need for linking words to ease the awkwardness of sentences, unlike English, because each Chinese character carries more of a "concept"/"theme", where as english words usually have quite precise definitions, and have more specific places where the words would actually make sense.

This is just my opinion as a native Chinese and English speaker, but I'm sure other bilingual English/Chinese speakers would tend to agree.

Hangul (Korean) has the uniform, blocky look of Chinese characters, while also being a phonetic alphabet like English. Every hangul block is composed of two or more alphabets from a set of 24, so if you know those 24, you can read any of the 11K+ possible combinations. It's similar to the concept of "radicals" in Chinese, but much simpler and with fewer irregularities.

So the reading advantage, if any, is not necessarily incompatible with using a phonetic alphabet with a small number of symbols.

The lack of precision (or higher ambiguity) might also be seen as a disadvantage in the highly technical world of today, although I very much appreciate it in literary and philosophical works.

Scientific terms, especially biological, tend to more apparent. Our words have the legacy of Greek and Latin.

A quick search seems to indicate it's almost a tie, overall. That is, Chinese readers end up reading at about the same speed add English readers. It seems like an unintuitive result though. From my own mild studies of Japanese and the kanji, the few kanji I can read, it feels like the information just jumps right into my mind.

Also apart from the actual reading, which may be a tie, I'm not sure the complexity cost overall, e.g. teaching, fonts, IMEs, etc. are actually worth it. What would a designed writing system look like? I think a properly phonetic/syllable approach like Hangul or even the Kana might be correct.

> What would a designed writing system look like? I think a properly phonetic/syllable approach like Hangul or even the Kana might be correct.

You're thinking in too broad of terms. A system representing syllables as units would be a bad choice for english, which has extremely intricate syllabic structure (consider "strengths", which is CCCVCCC). This makes a Hangul-like system a stretch, though possible, and a Kana-like system, wherein every possible syllable has its own character, completely impossible. Most[1] potential english syllables are unused or used so rarely that no one could ever be expected to know their character. Douglas Adams named a fictional person "Slartibartfast" -- as far as I know, the syllable "slar" (rhymes with far) has no other existence in English. How would he have written it in an English syllabary?

Chinese has so few possible syllables that enumerating them is quite easy, but it doesn't use them all either. Kana work in Japanese because the only legal syllable structures are CV, V, and N.

> What would a designed writing system look like?

Well, all writing systems are designed; none are naturally occuring. It's hard to know what you mean by this, but:

- A syllabary works fine when the phonology of the language allows for it

- Spanish is a good, though not perfect, example of an alphabetic writing system that corresponds closely to pronunciation (a minor wart would be that I believe 'b' and 'v' are the same sound; c/z in Spanish Spanish and c/s in latin american Spanish have a similar problem)

- The Cherokee syllabary was created from nothingness within living memory

- The design goal of Esperanto was probably similar to what you're thinking of

Anyway, big picture, a given writing system is not equally suitable for all languages, so it doesn't make sense to ask which approach is "correct". They're more and less workable. Alphabets (in which the basic idea is one character per phoneme in the language) are about as simple as it gets, since the number of characters necessary is V + C rather than the O(V * C) needed for a syllabary in the languages with the simplest phonological structure.

[1] I have no numbers for this; it's a guess.

Yes I was being imprecise. I suppose I'd combine writing and language. English's pronunciation rules are suboptimal, I think. It just happens to be that way by accident.

By designed, I mean "if modern scientists and engineers designed" versus more primitive people sort of making stuff up and folks adding on. With an explicit goal for efficiency; not aiming to necessarily "look nice".

When I look at Hangul, I see a rather simple underlying set of principles. It seems to logically build up. Compared to say, the Cherokee one, which, by looking at it for a minute, doesn't appear to have any structure. It seems like they're more-or-less random symbols. Maybe there is some deeper design there but it isn't apparent at a quick glance.

But is Hangul's choice of symbols the best representation for human minds for reading? And for writing or algorithmically dealing with characters?

> When I look at Hangul, I see a rather simple underlying set of principles. It seems to logically build up. Compared to say, the Cherokee one, which, by looking at it for a minute, doesn't appear to have any structure. It seems like they're more-or-less random symbols. Maybe there is some deeper design there but it isn't apparent at a quick glance.

It's the other way around; Hangul is also composed of more-or-less random symbols with no deeper design. Hangul is an alphabetic system much like Spanish, except that the letters are arranged into two-dimensional square syllables, and the squares then placed in a line, instead of the letters being arranged into a one-dimensional line directly. That's just an artistic choice.

Well another thing with Chinese characters is that they are usually made up of parts, and these parts generally carry a theme. For example, if I have never seen a specific Chinese character, I can usually decipher its definition easier than English words because of the parts the Chinese character consists of. This is similar to roots in English, but these parts are less specific, and are recycled and reused in many more characters.

I agree that Chinese is not the easiest or best language when all practical aspects are considered, and this is one of the reason simplified Chinese was invented, but the social hurdle to completely adopt a different language or change it even more dramatically would be far bigger than the nuisances that the language may have.

Really? I've been studying the kanji and well this is true enough to build up a framework to jog memory, it didn't particularly seem enough to have much predictive power. I can say "oh, I can see how those 3 concepts could be related", but only after-the-fact. Maybe it gets better when one knows over a thousand.

Do you think spoken Chinese relies on linking words much more heavily than written Chinese does? My first Chinese teachers kept getting mad when I wanted to begin sentences by linking them to the previous one.

When you think about the fact that even in English we generally tend to read the word and don't even notice that a letter is not correct I think Chinese is superior in the amount of information it can convey per symbol however a real pain in the ass to master.

I don't know Chinese however however i found the lack of any similarity with European languages fascinating.

I've lived in China and studied Chinese for 13 years, much of that reading heavily (I'm a literary translator), and I'm only now, in year 13, developing the ability to scan Chinese text successfully. I'm not posing this as some objective argument about the learnability of Chinese, just that, in the case of my brain, at least, my eyes are far more able to inhale an alphabetic script than Chinese characters.

My increasing ability to scan lines hasn't slowed my increasing disability to write with a pen! Despite my occasional flirtation with wubi.

The information density of Chinese characters is enormous compared to English. This becomes very obvious when you find yourself trying to say something in just 140 characters. ;)

Is the information density measured in bits and bytes still higher?

Way higher. Partly due to the writing and partly due to grammar. Isolated concepts tend to use two Chinese characters, or 4 bytes, which is typically denser than English already. But on top of that English spends a lot of characters on structure - words that are required grammatically but don't change the meaning of the sentence. Chinese's famously simple grammar doesn't do that.

>English spends a lot of characters on structure - words that are required grammatically but don't change the meaning of the sentence. Chinese's famously simple grammar doesn't do that.

I admit that I only got as far as Mandarin I in school, but it seems to me that the existence of classifiers in Chinese languages contradicts that.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

English raw text: 11KB

Chinese raw text: 8.8KB (UTF-8), 6KB (GB18030)

English compressed with xz: 3.8KB

Chinese compressed with xz: 3.7KB (UTF-8), 3.3KB (GB18030)

Yes, the information density does seem to be a bit higher in Chinese. Which, of course, is obtained at the cost of an encoding algorithm (writing system) that is more difficult to implement (learn), encode (write), and decode (read). It's the typical tradeoff between processing efficiency and memory consumption.

I wonder how much time it takes for the average American to type or handwrite the UDHR in English, versus the average Chinese to type or handwrite the same document in Chinese. After all, hard drives are cheap today. Human brain processing power is not.

Just to point out, using UTF-8 to examine the informational properties of Chinese text is absurd. All Chinese characters are three bytes in UTF-8, and there's no reason to use it over GB, where they're two bytes. UTF-8 would only make sense if you wanted to have a document with stretches of, say, English, Cyrillic, Greek, and Japanese text all together.

I can't provide much in the way of authentic information as to your last question, but anecdotally I find it easier to finger-type Chinese into my phone than English. A couple factors are at work:

- I don't adjust my style for the phone, and it's next to worthless at predicting what I want to say (in English). This leads to a lot of thumb-tiring selection of single letters.

- I don't speak fluent Chinese, so most of what I say is pretty basic stuff, which the predictive input has an easy time with. This leads into the third point,

- Using a pinyin input method, you can call up entire phrases by just putting in the first letter of each syllable, e.g. xx for 谢谢 or bhys for 不好意思 or ng for 那个. This is basically the equivalent of your computer automatically expanding IANAL into "I'm not a lawyer" whenever you type it in, except, for everything. (This is also true for typing on a computer, but I'm comfortable enough on a keyboard that I don't have problems typing English.)

> using UTF-8 to examine the informational properties of Chinese text is absurd.

By the same reasoning, using 8-bit ASCII to examine the informational properties of English text is also absurd. English can be comfortably expressed with only 6 bits per character, after all.

Anyway, I did include a GB-encoded version in my calculations. And once you compress the text, the charset-related difference becomes much smaller anyway.

Agreed. In fact, I'll go farther and say I misspoke, raising the objection you rightly criticize when it would make more sense to object to using UTF-8 to compare english text to chinese text. I have no issues with your comment, though, and I agree that under compression is the correct place to make the comparison. It's faintly aggravating to me that the same text compresses differently according to the intermediate encoding, but that's between me and the universe.

English can be comfortably expressed in 5 bits per character, using 26 letters and the five symbols [. ',"] . Capitalization and numeric digits are nice-to-haves. ;)

If Chinese was written like English, the characters you wrote in your comment "那个不好意思,谢谢" would be written "用阝人丨丆卜女子立日心田心, 讠身寸讠身寸".

Not many Westerner seems to appreciate that Chinese Hanzi (and Japanese Kanji) are really words made up of simpler components arranged into squares, instead of written sequentially and separated by spaces. And the shape of the components in the square provides additional encoding information not available in sequentially written languages.

I'm afraid I don't see your point? Are you responding to something in my comment?

A character is more like a word though.

I really get screwed when I have to fill out a bilingual form and they want me to describe something in N characters (which it says in both English AND Chinese...doh!). This is just bias against us laowai!

Actually there is, IMHO.

Chinese is in fact a group of spoken languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, and Southern Min. These are completely different languages at least in tones and pronunciations. Mandarin speakers could hardly talk to Cantonese speakers.

But all these languages share a common character set, so that different dialect speakers can communicate in the written form even they couldn't understand each other orally.

Traditional Japanese (and similarly Traditional Korean and Traditional Vietnamese) uses a subset of Chinese characters which they call "Kanji". And "writing down the characters" (Bitan, 筆談) had been a very effective way of communication between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese until the last century.

No, people from Beijing cannot read a text written in Shanghainese using simplified script. The only reason why they can read Cantonese is because pop music from Hong Kong is popular enough that most kids teach themselves enough to get the jist of the written lyrics.

> But all these languages share a common character set, so that different dialect speakers can communicate in the written form even they couldn't understand each other orally.

Since everyone in China is taught mandarin Chinese they tend to write to each other in mandarin.

> No, people from Beijing cannot read a text written in Shanghainese using simplified script.

I'm not a native of Shanghai but I still get to understand written Shanghainese. Because even though I can't _read_ it, I can somehow _interpret_ it. It uses the same Chinese characters and I already knew what these characters mean.

> Since everyone in China is taught mandarin Chinese they tend to write to each other in mandarin.

There are still people native to Cantonese, Min Nan, or Hakka who don't speak Mandarin.

You must be joking. Mandarin is not a written system at all. Even though I don't have the passion for HongKong pop music, I have no problem understanding traditional writing at all, cause it is just so similar to simplied one.

Of course Mandarin is a written system. Pop music from Hong Kong is usually in what basically amounts to Cantonese-pronounced Mandarin. That's why they sing 是 instead of 系 and it's why people recommend NOT using pop music as a learning tool when learning Cantonese. Written Cantonese also exists: 係唔係佢哋㗎？ vs 是不是他們的？, for a Wikipedia example. The first is what people speaking Cantonese actually say, the second is what they might write if they're trying to be formal or official and it's probably what you're used to seeing.

The other commenters have listed some advantages, but you really meant to ask whether any of those advantages make this complex writing system "worth it." They don't.

Increasing literacy by slightly modifying the writing system is why the PRC created Simplified Chinese in the first place. Now a more radical simplification of just using Hanyu Pinyin directly and not having a computer transliterate is an obvious next step. Hanyu Pinyin is not intelligible to speakers of non-Mandarin dialects, but this shouldn't be a showstopper for a government that is capable of this: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong_National_Language_R....

Minor point: simplified characters weren't intended to make Chinese easier to read (which is good, since they'd be a miserable failure at that). They were intended to make it easier to write (by hand!) -- the idea was to reduce the number of strokes used to write common characters, and the accompanying propaganda was to the effect that using simplified characters would cut a piece of typical text from so many strokes to so many (less) strokes. Characters were targeted for simplification not based on how ungainly they were but based on a combination of how many strokes they required with how frequently they were used.

Then the advent of computers and typing made stroke count mostly irrelevant.

> Increasing literacy by slightly modifying the writing system is why the PRC created Simplified Chinese in the first place

While it was an interesting experiment, the fact that Taiwan still has a higher literacy rate than Mainland China, and one comparable to the other developed countries using the latin alphabet, shows that traditional Chinese isn't that much of a hindrance.

How does that show it? In a developed country, even if literacy is more difficult, we'd expect the education system to have compensated or calibrated for it to achieve an overall good rate. If schoolkids must spend an extra 10% overall time due to increased literacy requirements, that's really but gonna show up on the overall literacy rates, right?

If that doesn't show up on literacy rates, or GDP, or crime rate or... can you really consider it a hindrance?

Sure! For instance, more kids might commit suicide due to increased stress. In response, more people may work harder, and culture might shift to view this as virtuous thing, so those general numbers might still fair alright.

If one factor isn't so terrible that is overcomes all advantages of a wealthy educated society, can you really consider it a hindrance?

Taiwan has a much higher rate of english speakers as well. Hence the higher literacy rate.

Literacy rate has not much to do with English speakers, as speaking English does not help people read and write Chinese.

It is interesting to ponder how much the world would have been different if the PRC had just gone all the way to Pinyin when they decided to simplify the writing system.

Also interesting: the linguist who developed Pinyin is apparently still alive at age 108 -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_Youguang

I think that radical simplification is just a joke. It is not possible to replace logograms like Chinese completely with phonograms like Hanyu Pinyin or English without considering the grammar and the culture. Chinese has its own flexibility for writing/speaking/thinking.

"...many Chinese people consider the creation of Chinese calligraphy to be one of their primary contributions to civilisation..." - is this really true?

Anyway there are no reasons to oppose the natural process of more advanced languages displacing the less advanced ones, apart from political (avoiding cultural assimilation).

There are plenty reasons to oppose the natural process of advanced things displacing less advanced ones. Cultural assimilation is not a political reason, it is an emotional reason. Many Chinese people regard calligraphy as art, so naturally they'd be uncomfortable with a newer generation not being able to perform it.

I think western society has the same feeling towards cursive writing, although it is much easier to obtain the basic skill of writing cursive western characters not many people are still able to write it in a beautiful fashion.

Chinese script is arguably superior in many respects, and it provides a whole platform for "creating language" rather than just script.

Forgetting how to properly write by hand is not just a problem for those writing in complex script, although it's exacerbated by complexity. People relying too much on spelling correctors feel lost without them and make mistakes, people also go months or years without writing by hand and struggle when they have to.

There's a natural process of writing more with technological aids, which by the way favours Chinese script as it retains its strengths and loses its drawbacks (there are extremely fast Chinese input systems). It may well happen - seems to be happening - that moderately skilled handwriting becomes as rare as professional calligraphy is now.

Chinese calligraphy carries far more artistic dimensions compared to non-symbolic languages. My grandmother has accrued such a beautiful Chinese font style over years of practicing calligraphy and being reporter on battlefields. Her ink writings/letters have been passed down to my parents and taken good care of as family treasure brought overseas. Being Chinese British I still occasionally use them as copybook to practice. Even though all everything about her was told as stories, her handwritings, those strokes & circles, speaks a decisive, brave and clever woman.

Each character needs to be written in balance itself. Like architecture all characters itself has a firm pillar stroke and together they also need to fit into structural of the whole paragraph. Positive or negative, aggressive or passive meaning can also be expressed by same strokes but sharp or round in the right place.

Without telepathy, the diversity of languages is still important and there is unlikely an ultimate language more advanced than the rest, just like there are so many programming languages of all kinds. If Chinese is displaced then the new one is highly possible of the same kind.

I'm sorry "English", but the whole idea of "spelling bee" is ridiculous to begin with, and excuse me "China" - same goes for you, but in writing...

Give me sane language with small alphabet, and whatever you speak is whatever you write (and vice versa).

Just kidding!

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