Wired Chinese and Japanese kids forget how to write Can you blame them?

Techeye ^ | 08/27/10 | Nick Farrell

[TigerLikesRooster]

http://www.techeye.net/science/wired-chinese-and-japanese-kids-forget-how-to-write

Wired Chinese and Japanese kids forget how to write Can you blame them?

27 Aug 2010 11:35 | by Nick Farrell | posted in Science

Wired Chinese and Japanese kids forget how to write -

Writing Chinese and Japanese is a particularly difficult skill and since computers came along it is fast becoming something that kids are forgetting.

Sure they can read and write their language on a computer, but according to BreitBart when they pick up a pen they have forgotten how to do it.

Dubbed "character amnesia", the problem is becoming widespread across China, and some are starting to fear for the future of their ancient writing system. There is even a Chinese word for it: "tibiwangzi", or "take pen, forget character".

The problem has been noted in Japan which has a similar character based language system.

The China Youth Daily in April found that 83 percent of the 2,072 respondents admitted having problems writing characters.

Chinese boffins say that Character amnesia happens because most Chinese people use electronic input systems based on Pinyin, which translates Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet.

[snowsislander]

To the Japanese, simplified Chinese looks the way teen text-speak appears to us.

That's a good analogy.

I find some of the PRC's simplified Chinese characters are even worse than text-speak is to English.

[lefty-lie-spy]

Its not only kids. I see it all the time at work with the adults too. If you don’t often write kanji, its easy to lose it.

[altair]

Do you mean using the iPhone style scheme in which letters pressed on the virtual keyboard create a pop-up of the letter, with less common alternatives appearing if you keep holding down the key?

No, but ...

CAVEAT: I've never really encountered an iPhone except at a farewell dinner where a soon-to-be-ex-colleague spent more time fiddling on his iPhone than socializing.

That sounds clumsy. A closer analogy is how multilingual cell phones work with T9 dictionary mode enabled.

For example, to get 漢字. You type KA N' JI and then select the proper symbols from a menu (you do not need to type the apostrophe, but all IMs I encountered in Japan let you type the apostrophe regardless). It's the same as XIM or XEmacs/Emacs only smarter because the dictionaries are better. It's very fast.

[Cronos]

Thai is based on Sanskrit?

[JimSEA]

The script is based on Pali and is phonetic rather than pictographic. The language itself is not based on Sanskrit.

[Cronos]

Ok, I did not know that the script was based on Pali! Thank you, that was interesting — something more for me to red up on!