Character Amnesia

[Chiara]

Hi there, I'm Chiara!

I'm attending my last year of university (in Italy university lasts 3 years), I'm studying to become an interpreter and one of the languages I'm studying is obviously Chinese. On July I'm going to graduate, my thesis is about Character Amnesia.

What do you think about this phenomenon? Does it worry you or do you think it is just a natural development of the language?

Thank you very much!

[Kelby]

I have a rough idea if what you're talking about, but since this is a thesis you're writing would you mind helping us help you and define what you mean by "character amnesia?"

[bluetortilla]

If you're describing the inability to recall how to write characters, I'm a chronic sufferer. My first Asian language was Japanese, not Chinese, but the principle is the same. About 15 years ago I could still recall and write by hand around 2000 characters, but now I doubt if I can write from memory a tenth of that. However, my reading ability has been largely unaffected. In fact, it's growing every month! Since I've been using the keyboard to input characters all these years, it's safe to say that my hand has 'forgot' the combinations of radicals and strokes, much like a musician's hands forget chords and progressions. In other words, I really believe that there is strong physical component to the problem. I use a trackpad sometimes to 'write' characters with my finger and that helps some, but a designated stylus would work much better. It's hard to imagine going back to paper and pen, at least for me, but people who do write down characters every day will not suffer from C.A. Also, all the radicals and strokes remain familiar to me, both in meaning and script, and I can write any character once I've seen it (I often have to look twice or compose a mnemonic though). I'll be honest- it's a lot easier to copy/paste an unknown character than to use the trackpad. Writing from memory is vital when you don't have an electronic device in front of you, but I've lived without it. The most important thing with characters and literacy is to know the radicals and other elements through and through. Hope that helps a bit.

 

As a related amnesia, my spelling ability in English has unmistakably declined since I've been using 'correct as I type' spell checking. Now when I write on the whiteboard in class I sometimes misspell words or have to look them up, and other times I will write a word correctly but not feel confident about it and have to double check. It's embarrassing I suppose but I just laugh it off and blame it on dependence on the computer's spell checking (which after all is the truth). So it is not only with Chinese Characters that the amnesia syndrome occurs (though it must be the worst lol), but with any writing system that does not adhere to a strict and simplified phonetic base. Hard to go wrong with pinyin!  

[lechuan]

At a very simplistic level, If you don't read characters often enough, you may forget how to read them. If you don't write them often enough, you may forget how to write them. I don't think it's unique to characters vs other scripts, it's just much more of a challenge because of the sheer numbers involved.

[Kelby]

There's jargon for everything, lol.

For me, I just see it as a natural thing and not as scary of a boogeyman we all think it is. It used to concern me that my hard work could be undone, but it's never a take you back to zero thing. In college I neglected my Chinese for two years after a huge sprint and gain in skill at the beginning of my career. While I lost a lot during that time, it was surprisingly easy to learn everything back once I made it back to China. It still took months of concentrated effort to break the plateau created by where I 'left off' but now that I've experienced how much having solid experience with a languae can help when picking it back up again I'm not as afraid if losing it all. One will have hot and cold periods in language learning, and a lifetime of reinforcement is just the price of admission if you want to have proficiency.

I will admit that characters are probably the first to go for us Chinese learners, but even after four years without writing by hand I could still construct basic sentences by hand, so I'm not convinced that character amnesia should be seen as anything but a minor inconvenience from time to time.

[Chiara]

Thank you very much!

 

Here in Italy teachers pay a lot of attention to misspelling (of any language: Italian, English, French, etc.); that's why I consider Character Amnesia a big loss for Chinese culture. The goal of my thesis is to understand how many Chinese young adults of my town are affected by C.A. I want to understand their feelings, if they are worried about C.A., if they believe they're losing their traditional culture and so on...! 

 

But there are people who believe that C.A. is not a big problem. Many Chinese I interviewed said they are not worried because they can check the missing character/stroke/shape on the Internet, in a dictionary or they can simply ask to friends or relatives. I can't understand, for me this is just a loss of their thousand-years-old culture!

[Baron]

I get where the Chinese people you interviewed are coming from. In England once you get out of high school you're never required to hand write anything, and in many cases it's discouraged (e.g. at university). What with spellcheckers and autocorrect, it doesn't matter if you can spell well, and it doesn't make you feel inferior or that you've done a disservice to your language or heritage. In fact I don't even think about or notice how atrocious my spelling might be, until someone asks me how to spell 'diarrhoea', 'aneurism' or similar.

 

I get pissed off if I forget Chinese characters, but that's because I'm a foreigner and I've spent years working on it, and it's a 'special skill' that people admire.

 

Maybe you see it as a big issue because you're from a culture that takes pride in memorising the spellings of words.