Young Chinese and Japanese forgetting how to write

[HedgePig]

Here is an article on young people in China and Japan forgetting how to write. The gist of it is that nowadays people are so seldom needing to write with a pen that they are forgetting how to do so. Probably nothing new but I found the article quite interesting.

Regards

HedgePig

(Mods: apologies if this is the wrong forum - wasn't sure where to post it.)

[Chinadoog]

I wonder if this really has that much to do with cellphones and computers, or if the same thing was happening 30 years ago. It makes sense that after you get out of school you stop writing as often and your skill deteriorates.

[kayro]

As a non-Japanese person who has studied Japanese from the bottom up and achieved newspaper reading ability, I would say this phenomenon definitely has to do with the widespread usage of cell phones and computers. This has definitely happened to me during the last couple of years working full-time, and I have to whip out my cell phone to punch out characters when I am taking notes in a class or at a meeting. It definitely wasn't that way when I was still a student learning Japanese, when computers were not used in the classroom for taking notes and almost all homework had to be hand-written (although longer assignments such as essays were routinely done with a word processor).

While I am continually acquiring knowledge of how to read new characters as a working professional, sadly I am not simultaneously acquiring knowledge of how to write those new characters...

You definitely lose it if you don't use it.

[Meng Lelan]

提笔忘字 is what they call this situation = pick up pen but forget how to write the character.

[Dashu]

When natives forget how to write, is it useful to learn it? Or is reading enough?

[jbradfor]

YAWN.

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform

without thinking about them"

This is just another example of that. I don't see how the requirement to write Chinese/Japanese from memory, rather than recognizing it when displayed, is going to signal the end of civilization.

One notoriously forgettable character, Zeng says, is used in the word Tao Tie -- a legendary Chinese monster that was so greedy it ate itself.

Still used as a byword for gluttony, the Tao Tie is one of many ancient Chinese concepts embedded in the language.

"It?s like you?re forgetting your culture," Zeng says.

How is that forgetting your culture? You still know the story, you still know the allusion, all you've forgotten is how to write in the totally arbitrary scheme that any written language is.

So people that can't read and write at all have already forgotten their culture.

PLEAAAAAASE.

[helixness]

I believe it's essential to know how to write no matter what. The use of computer makes life indeed much easier but if people only rely on it then how will they manage when a situation comes and they need to write? pinyin? lol.

That's why websites like www.skritter.com should be more emphasized. For natives, it's a good way to review, and for non-natives, it's the best way to learn. I used to use Anki (which is very good), but I would only be able to recognize the characters, not to write. Now that I use a tool which makes me write hanzi entirely, I am able to write on paper no problem, or at least much easier.

[querido]

One can acknowledge that civilization will carry on with new arbitrary schemes, while also mourning the passing of one's own.

One may also reasonably dread the arrival, simply, of someone else's arbitrary schemes. There are a lot of those in this world.

[Eng Seng]

When people type in English, they are basically doing a refresher on their spelling skills. In school, when your teacher asks you to spell out 'apple', you would say out aloud A-P-P-L-E. When you type, you're basically doing the same thing... You would press the letters A-P-P-L-E in that sequence.

When people type Chinese using pinyin, they are basically doing a refresher on their pinyin rather than the character itself. When you want to type out 蘋果, you would type P-I-N-G, select the correct character, then type G-U-O and select the correct character. When you want to write out 蘋果 by hand, P-I-N-G G-U-O is not going to guide your hand to write out the characters magically. In the case of alphabetic languages, alphabets is a way of deriving the correct spelling for words like how you derive the solution to a mathematical problem by applying Pythagoras theorem, etc.

Chinese and Japanese users only forget how to write but not forget the language. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to write anything at all! If they can select the right character out of the list, that means their character recognition ability is still fine as it is.

[doraemon]

Not really surprised at all. In this day and age when everybody's typing away forgetting to write isn't all that shocking. My Japanese teacher told us that she's pretty much forgotten how to write Chinese characters in Japanese because whenever she types the kanji just pops up by itself.

In Australia the government started giving out free laptops two years ago to high school students to use in class. My English teacher said he wouldn't be surprised if in a few years everybody did their high school graduation exam on computer. I personally don't think it's a good idea though...

The English language is easier to write than Chinese IMO, so I don't think students will forget how to actually write letters. The problem that could arise would likely be not knowing how to spell (although there's always spell check).

Apart from being able to render students illiterate, it also seems to decrease interaction between people. There was this one rainy day where a bunch of Year 9's were sitting in the school corridors and every one of them were so immersed in whatever they were doing on their laptops and this poor kid who didn't have one just sat there looking so bored...

[roddy]

I think touchscreens may yet rescue the written character, it's not rare to see people handwriting SMSs. Whether that translates into actual hand-writing with a pen skills is another matter.

[Glenn]

I've heard Japanese people say that they had to read the descriptions of homophones when converting to be sure they picked the correct characters, so it's beyond even being able to write them in some cases. Granted, I only heard that from a couple of people once, but I'm sure it's not limited to them.

That's actually one thing I like about the single-character-only pinyin input method for traditional characters I have: it forces me to know the characters, i.e., the "spelling' of the word I'm typing. It's easier with the simplified version, where you can type a whole sentence and convert it.

[biglizard]

yeah,handwriting is quite slow compare to typing by keyboard,and the other reason is neet and clean handwriting needs a lot of practise even for chinese,so we'd rather use computer to write something then write down all the characters by hand.

and most importantly,as mentioned above,we write in characters,it's more like a picture,but when type chinese by keyboard,most of us use Pinyin to compose the words,so the more you use computer to type chinese,the more characters you will forget how to write.

We call it"提笔忘字"means pick up the pens but forget how to write.

[Sam Fairhall 92]

This is an article taken from 'The Times', a popular newspaper in the United Kingdom. A leading article today was as follows:

"A televised contest that has become hugely popular in China has led to nationwide hand-wringing over the population’s increasing inability to write Chinese characters."

Article snipped, please copy and paste selectively, even (especially?) from behind paywalls.

Source: http://www.thetimes....icle3849344.ece

Seems ironic us foreigners are busting our asses to learn these characters that the natives are gradually discarding.

[Glenn]

提筆忘字 is a well-enough-known phenomenon that there's a term for it, so I'm not questioning that. What really annoys me about what you've quoted are the numbers. Where do they get 10,000, much less 50,000? Last I read your average well-educated Chinese person knew around 7000. That's far beyond middle school.

[anonymoose]

Firstly, the person who wrote that article clearly has no idea about the Chinese language. As Glenn pointed out, the numbers are not accurate, and I suspect the author just copied from another source without any actual understanding.

Anyway, the idea that the digital age is killing off the ability to handwrite characters has been circulating for a long time. I'm not sure if any quantitative research has been done, and indeed there may be such an effect, but personally I don't think it is significant. From my experience, native speakers do not have serious problems writing by hand. They may occasionally forget how to write a character, or write incorrectly, but what evidence is there that this is the result of digital technology? Certainly native English speakers make spelling mistakes when handwriting. I suspect that the inability to write is more a reflection of the complexity of the writing system itself, than any effects from technology. It stands to reason that Chinese is relatively difficult to write by hand. English with its inconsistent spelling is also difficult. I guess native speakers of Spanish or other languages with a consistent writing system based on pronunciation make much fewer mistakes.

Really a scientific comparison between the current and pre-digital eras needs to be made to draw any conclusions. But this would be very difficult to carry out in practise, given that there are many other factors, such as education, that change with time, which would confound the data.

Anyway, going back to the article, they state that 70 percent of adults (in the audience of that programme) could not write the characters for "toad" by hand. But come on, what does this have to do with digital technology? How often does one write the word "toad" anyway? The reason why they couldn't write it is simply because the word is so seldomly used (and relatively complicated compared to most characters anyway - presumably they meant 蟾蜍). If anything, I'd say technology is a blessing in this kind of situation because from another perspective, it allows them to write something that they wouldn't have been able to write otherwise.

[mouse]

Typical hack journalism from a hack newspaper. "Pictograms" indeed...

[johnk]

A few years ago a friend of mine, a lady in her 60s and who is not a native English speaker, had a rant about the average English person's ability to write English. If you take away the computer spell checker and grammar checker and ask the average English office worker to type something, what you get is likely to be embarrassingly bad. Or at least embarrassingly bad to someone who is 'old school' educated.

I don't think it is just a Chinese thing. Computer technology is affecting every language, txt spk anyone ?

[roddy]

Sam, could you read the T&C's? Again ;-)

[realmayo]

Typical hack journalism from a hack newspaper

Bit harsh. Looks like a useful little "filler" story, tells non-specialists something interesting they wouldn't have known about China.

On the same day, the reporter also wrote about a radioation leak in Japan and a UK fraud investigator being arrested in China. Today is the trial of Bo Xilai.

Anonymoose, I think you're certainly right about the word "toad". What would people have done pre-computers, written their best guess with the correct radicals and a common component that indicated pronunciation? Probably easy to do with two-character words.