Young Chinese and Japanese forgetting how to write

[roddy]

Merged with the same topic from a few years back. Good luck finding anything new to say, folks

[淨土極樂]

I think this is more of a problem in Japan, since they can always fall back on kana, and with each new generation less and less words are being written with hanzi (e.g. nowadays あなた、たくさん、がん etc are all usually written in kana). I personally saw an 18 year old Japanese kid struggling to remember how to write 義, among other characters. He finally looked it up on his iPhone.

This is a problem in China only with rare/complicated characters, e.g. 喷嚏. Since the Chinese kids have to do an immense amount of handwriting during their high school and university years, it's very unlikely that their handwriting ability gets much worse later with a foundation like this.

[Sam Fairhall 92]

@mouse If you regard 'The Times' as a hack newspaper, i'd hate to think what you think of other British newspapers - any newspaper in fact.

Anyway, for my opinion on the matter. I don't think its a 'filler story' - it makes sense that because of these new tools (which we are all using) its easy to see how writing characters off the top of their heads is becoming a problem. Writing the pinyin into an application is allowing something else to do all the hard work - the calligraphic part of the brain isn't being exercised! I don't think it took a newspaper article to enlighten me of the issue, i guess i was just surprised to see it being talked about on such a large scale.

For anyone who's not subscribed to 'The Times', this is a similar article http://www.france24....ith-digital-age

In response to this not being a researched issue, while the original article i posted didn't provide any citations, I have found some articles through my university research database. I can't copy any paste the research unfortunately (@roddy- I've re-read the T&CS ) but heres an abstract of one (Freely available - this isn't plagiarism and isn't breaching any copyrights!)

'Written Chinese as a logographic system was developed over 3,000 y ago. Historically, Chinese children have learned to read by learning to associate the visuo-graphic properties of Chinese characters with lexical meaning, typically through handwriting. In recent years, however, many Chinese children have learned to use electronic communication devices based on the pinyin input method, which associates phonemes and English letters with characters. When children use pinyin to key in letters, their spelling no longer depends on reproducing the visuo-graphic properties of characters that are indispensable to Chinese reading, and, thus, typing in pinyin may conflict with the traditional learning processes for written Chinese. We therefore tested character reading ability and pinyin use by primary school children in three Chinese cites: Beijing (n = 466), Guangzhou (n = 477), and Jining (n = 4,908). Children with severe reading difficulty are defined as those who were normal in nonverbal IQ but two grades (i.e., 2 y) behind in character-reading achievement. We found that the overall incidence rate of severe reading difficulty appears to be much higher than ever reported on Chinese reading. Crucially, we found that children's reading scores were significantly negatively correlated with their use of the pinyin input method, suggesting that pinyin typing on e-devices hinders Chinese reading development. The Chinese language has survived the technological challenges of the digital era, but the benefits of communicating digitally may come with a cost in proficient learning of written Chinese.[ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]'

Source: 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 1/15/2013, Vol. 110 Issue 3, p1119-1123. 5p.

Authors:

Min Xu

Wai Ting Siok

There are other examples, but i fear i may have already bored you.

[Guest realmayo]

It fills space, is moderately interesting, but adds nothing new, and is not in-depth. Hence "filler".

I don't mean to say the topic itself is uninteresting, just commenting on the nature of the newspaper article.

[Meng Lelan]

#23 thanks for posting that. I have been observing Chinese immersion first grade classes here in Texas and wasn't sure why they would not teach pinyin until fifth grade, and now I understand the reason after reading the journal article abstract.

[Steingletscher]

For western audiences who though might have heard the story once or twice over the years but each time only for a few seconds, this will probably sound new and interesting because the previous times it was exposed to them didn't stick in.

Learning to write to the characters is still extremely valuable. If I wasn't taught stroke order or radicals (though I figured about the consistency of the components on my own), then my ability to retain new characters would be abysmal as I wouldn't know how to process characters and examine their structures. I'm probably not the only one who feels this way too.

I tend to have the opposite problem where I can remember the character, but forget the pinyin. Even when I'm texting anything longer and more complex then 回来啊、明天没有课, I have to go to Pleco and draw in the character I'm thinking of just to get the pinyin.

[imron]

Surely if your phone supports pleco it should also support some kind if standalone handwriting input method?

[ZhangKaiRong]

@淨土極樂

"This is a problem in China only with rare/complicated characters, e.g. 喷嚏. Since the Chinese kids have to do an immense amount of handwriting during their high school and university years, it's very unlikely that their handwriting ability gets much worse later with a foundation like this."

Are you sure? During my school year in China, I went out for a dinner several times with my Chinese friends. At our favourite restaurant we had to write down what we ordered, and my friends had problems with characters like 腐 in doufu, 保 in gongbao, 脊 in tangculiji, etc, so usually I was the one who wrote down the order... And they are students at a university!

IMO the problem is that almost everyone use QQ and/or 微信, and write homeworks on computer and take notes on computer/smartphone, so they tend to forget the characters. Since I started to use these IM apps, I've started to forget how to write characters as well. I have no problems recognizing them or choosing the right one when I type, but handwriting is another story...

[Steingletscher]

Surely if your phone supports Pleco it should also support some kind if standalone handwriting input method?

Yeah, but it sucks. If I pause for a second while imputing it, then what I had scribbled so far disappears and gives me what it think it most resembles. But just trust me, it is terrible.

[mouse]

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.

The problem with the story is that it's full of misinformation. The reason it is full of misinformation is greatly to do with your second point, that journalists have to write too many stories that they simply don't have time to research properly.

@mouse If you regard 'The Times' as a hack newspaper, i'd hate to think what you think of other British newspapers - any newspaper in fact.

I am familiar with British newspapers. They blazed the trail for this kind of just-in-time, poorly researched journalism. See Nick Davies' Flat Earth News for details.

[Guest realmayo]

No one is saying that the article doesn't have mistakes. I just think you should care a little less. It's not an important or researched story. My big mac the other day didn't taste like it contained "great beef" but it did the job.