Posted on 08/28/2010 8:37:35 AM PDT by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at techeye.net ...
P!
日本＊ピング＊ (kono risuto ni hairitai ka detai wo shirasete kudasai : let me know if you want on or off this list)
I had enough trouble with Thai which is a phonetic / Sanskrit based alphabet. I would be completely lost with Chinese, etc. No relation to spoken language = two systems to memorize.
Simply replacing an inefficient communications system with a more efficient one.
Bodes ill for those who love books.
Might be interesting to see the long term changes on a population that switches from a pictographic to a phonetic language.
I always said this is why asian kids were better students than average. In order to become literate in an asian language, there is a whole lot of rote memorization to do, and this naturally leads to a mind that is ‘wired’ to memorize.
I took electrical engineering classes in college, and there were asian students in my class that could and did ace every single exam, because they could memorize and regurgitate the material. But if you asked them what the electrical concepts behind the equations they were spitting out meant, they didn’t have a clue.
OMG
see it, say it, write it....It’s how memory works
"There is no way we can learn the writing systematically because the writing itself is not systematic -- we have to memorise, we have to rote learn," she says.
I agree with this, and it may even be worse for foreigners. A character, even when there is an explanation as to why it looks the way it does, has almost no obvious connection to what it represents. Brute force memorization is the only technique possible.
This is a historical/cultural earthquake. In western history, the culture has always been to increase literacy and push education down to the lower classes. Every technology that helped, such as the printing press, cheaper paper, etc, was quickly adopted.
In China this trend was resisted. For the educated class who was literate, there was no incentive to create an easier system of writing to lift the peasants up. The diffficulty of writing and the time it took to learn it was a feature to help create a barrier between the educated class and the peasants.
This may finally be the reform that has been still born for more than a century.
Modern revisions lost that characteristic. I'm not surprised Chinese kid would forget how to do the modern stuff.
We had a Korean-American restaurant here and his logo was "It takes a tough man to make a tender duck". Took me about 5 minutes to work through that one, which was pretty good for me ~ but he did it in old fashioned kitchen Chinese. A tender duck is, of course, a duck, in water, over heat with a duck press on its head/body. That's what slowed me down ~ figuring out what "tender" meant ~
If people are smart and informed, money should not matter.
It really depends on what you are measuring the efficiency of.
For instance, if you are writing in Japanese and measuring "efficiency" as the minimum number of characters displayed on a mobile device, kanji is the clear winner, with hiragana and katakana tied for second, and using the Latin alphabet is the worst choice.
For example, say you are text messaging to a buddy to order lunch for you. Using kanji, you could just send four kanji characters, 焼肉定食.
If you use hiragana, it would be nine characters, やきにくていしょく.
But in Latin characters, it would take at least 16: "yakinikuteishoku" (and I at least would use a space, which would make for 17 characters.)
Oops.. wrong thread. Meant to post on this one :)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2579186/posts
{to self: this is what happens when you have too many FRindows open ! }
This is not as strange as it sounds, since there is a particular order and way to draw each character, which is like remembering how to “Draw Tippy” for 5,000 or more characters. If you don’t practice, you can forget. And while I haven’t forgotten how to write, I do write horribly and slowly now because I do it so infrequently.
It’s interesting that, at the same time, American English speakers and writers are losing use of the English verb form.
Heard a minister with a doctorate the other day say, “I seen this [particular thing happen.]” And there is one radio preacher who speaks English as if it were a second language.
Doesn’t suprise me at all - lack of continual use is demonstrated in my own family. My wife in the states for 15 years admits she no longer can write most japanese kanji beyond the basics (hiragana/katakana no issues); my kids can read ok, but continually struggle to write; but for me the most telling is my sister in law who lives in japan, but because she isn’t required to write often on a routine basis, is quickly approaching my wife’s writing limitations - she’s about 8 years her junior. On the Japanese side I see them adopting hirigana/katakana more (despite arguments on efficiencies) and dropping more of the basic 2000 kanji.
Having studied Chinese, this one is more of a suprise for me - due to the tonal nature of the languages. Pinyin isn’t a really good sub for the 5000 basic characters required; but I could easily see how an alphabetic keyboard could quickly sub in based on usage and drop down menus- from there it is a simple matter of replacing typing with writing utilizing the same style - just don’t forget your tone marks. For those in the know remember Mom doesn’t like be called a horse.
But you still can’t simply enter those kanji on your average electronic device, whether it’s a computer or a phone or whatever. You have to enter the phonetic first either in hiragana or romanji and then choose from the list of available kanji. Why not skip that step and simply use the hiragana? (Rhetorical question-I know why they couldn’t.)
Having hiragana and katakana make Japanese at least a tiny bit easier for the foreigner. I could read your hiragana but the only character I recognized in the kanji was “niku” (and I didn’t read it as niku I saw “meat”.
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