During a visit to Beijing many years ago, I was having lunch with three PhD students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all of whom were native speakers of Chinese. I happened to have a cold that day and was trying to write a brief note to a friend to cancel an appointment that afternoon. I found that I could not recall how to write the Chinese characters for the word ‘sneeze’. I asked my three friends to write the characters for me and, to my surprise, all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the characters. I thought to myself: Peking University is usually considered the ‘Harvard of China’. Can one imagine three PhD students in the English Literature Department at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word ‘sneeze’? Yet, this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. This was my first encounter with an increasingly widespread phenomenon in China known as ‘character amnesia’. Chinese people, even the well-educated, are forgetting how to write common characters. What is the explanation for this peculiar problem?
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Several years ago, I conducted informal class discussions with my Beijing Capital Normal University undergraduate students about the frequency of the character amnesia problem. Given a choice between ‘seldom’, ‘occasionally’, or ‘often’, most students chose ‘often’. Yet, despite the perceived frequency of character amnesia, the students seemed to accept the problem as a mild annoyance. ‘When I can’t remember a character, I just look it up on my mobile phone’, they would report with a shrug.
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In writing systems whose symbols represent phonetic information, there is a ‘virtuous circle’ in which the four functions of language—speaking, listening, writing, and reading—are mutually reinforcing.
The orthography may be inconsistently phonetic, as is the case with English spelling, or highly consistent, such as the Korean Hangul system. No writing system is perfectly phonetic. But phonetic systems enable the native speaker, with just a few dozen symbols, to reliably write whatever they can speak, and read out loud anything they can read.
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It must be noted that character amnesia does not entail illiteracy. The skill that is eroding in the digital era is the physical writing of the characters, not the recognition of them. Chinese speakers can still easily recognise the characters, as attested by the fact that character amnesia has had no effect on the literacy rate. To take an analogous example, most people can easily recognise the musical symbol for treble clef (𝄞), but very few could draw it by memory. The same is true of Chinese characters; recognition is not dependent on the physical ability to write the symbol.
Yep. My ability to write in Chinese has atrophied extremely outside of very common characters. You just don’t have to write things down very often anymore, outside of like your name. It’s true in...
Yep. My ability to write in Chinese has atrophied extremely outside of very common characters. You just don’t have to write things down very often anymore, outside of like your name. It’s true in English as well somewhat - I’ll often spell “bureaucracy” wrong on the first try.
One unfortunate thing is that like the article noted, if you forgot you kinda of have to fallback to pinyin which I feel is extra embarrassing. At least in Japanese you’d just write it in hiragana. Too bad bopomofo never caught on outside of Taiwan.
Bureaucracy is one of the hardest to spell (and hardest spelling to remember of a relatively common word) words in English (imo). I never get it right on the first shot, despite conscious efforts...
Bureaucracy is one of the hardest to spell (and hardest spelling to remember of a relatively common word) words in English (imo). I never get it right on the first shot, despite conscious efforts to try and harden its memory.
Actually when I talked with him I was more so thinking that people would give up googling as they tried to type the name. I might - if it was something I’d heard about and was only mildly curious.
Actually when I talked with him I was more so thinking that people would give up googling as they tried to type the name. I might - if it was something I’d heard about and was only mildly curious.
Bu-reau (like the dresser) cracy (because working in one will make you crazy.) just like Wed-nes-day, I can kind of no longer spell it "normally" in my head but I can spell it correctly on paper....
Bu-reau (like the dresser) cracy (because working in one will make you crazy.) just like Wed-nes-day, I can kind of no longer spell it "normally" in my head but I can spell it correctly on paper.
It's good if you're also inundated with the French or Southern US "eau" since you'll recall what order to put all those vowels in.
Yeah, I find it super easy to spell, but I also like knowing etymologies, which, admittedly, makes it super easy to spell in general. I'll be honest, I'll never understand how our brains are so...
Yeah, I find it super easy to spell, but I also like knowing etymologies, which, admittedly, makes it super easy to spell in general.
I'll be honest, I'll never understand how our brains are so good at recognizing patterns that we make up intricate conspiracy theories where nothing exists, yet most people can't even recognize the patterns in how English words are spelled. Not to disrespect the people who don't; I just don't get how it is that our brains are wired.
Maybe with some etymology that would help? It's bureau-cracy. -cracy is "power from the X",like theocracy (power from the gods, theo-, like theology) or democracy (power from the people, demo-,...
Maybe with some etymology that would help? It's bureau-cracy.
-cracy is "power from the X",like theocracy (power from the gods, theo-, like theology) or democracy (power from the people, demo-, like demographics).
Bureau is a whole loanword from French that means "desk". So it's really power coming from the desk (and all the paperwork associated). As abothrr comment mentioned it's hard to spell by itself. The French have it in easy because there's loads of other common words where -eau make the sounds "o" (beautiful, water, ...) while there's not many of such words that we're loaned by English. But perhaps if you can recall the Federal Bureau of Investigation you can tell spell bureaucracy right?
As someone who uses the word bureau in their native language (meaning desk), bureaucracy's spelling is one of the easiest to remember. I have more issues with "necessary".. Always seem go for...
As someone who uses the word bureau in their native language (meaning desk), bureaucracy's spelling is one of the easiest to remember.
I have more issues with "necessary"..
Always seem go for "neccesary" on my first try, for some reason.
Oh that's interesting, my problem is with "necessary" is always -ary vs -ery. Even worse when English have words that vary only by that, like stationary vs. stationery, because then you can't rely...
Oh that's interesting, my problem is with "necessary" is always -ary vs -ery. Even worse when English have words that vary only by that, like stationary vs. stationery, because then you can't rely on spellcheck.
Honestly, I think English is just in an earlier stage of becoming like hanzi when it comes to its degree of phonetic interpretability. We're not there yet, but over the coming couple centuries? I...
Honestly, I think English is just in an earlier stage of becoming like hanzi when it comes to its degree of phonetic interpretability. We're not there yet, but over the coming couple centuries? I think English spelling is going to become not much different -- just like hanzi, there'll always be some phonetic aspect, but it'll be largely a matter of lots of rote memorization. Most of the practical arguments against reforming English spelling (too much existing literature to reprint it all, it's impossible to make something more phonetic cross-dialectically so you'd need to privilege certain dialects more than the current system already does, etc.) are more or less the same as those for replacing Chinese characters with a more phonetic system, after all.
Is there real value to bopomofo rather than just using pinyin (and romanization schemes in general)? I say that as someone who has invested the time and energy in becoming completely fluent in...
Is there real value to bopomofo rather than just using pinyin (and romanization schemes in general)? I say that as someone who has invested the time and energy in becoming completely fluent in reading and writing bopomofo. It just seems like makework when there are already Roman letters which everybody in the world basically needs to learn anyway.
I think it’s more efficient and more representative of discrete morpheme languages. It also just looks less out of place, but that’s ultimately subjective.
I think it’s more efficient and more representative of discrete morpheme languages. It also just looks less out of place, but that’s ultimately subjective.
Bopomofo has some advantages when it comes to representing Mandarin phonology iirc (e.g.,not having the y/i and w/u issues present in pinyin, unambiguously indicating the "yu/ü" vowel in all...
Bopomofo has some advantages when it comes to representing Mandarin phonology iirc (e.g.,not having the y/i and w/u issues present in pinyin, unambiguously indicating the "yu/ü" vowel in all contexts). As a Westerner learning Chinese, using bopomofo could theoretically help you not make common pinyin-based mistakes like pronouncing "e" wrong, but in practice I think pretty much every Chinese language resource I've seen uses pinyin.
There's also no risk of confusion between different romanization systems, which inevitably is at least an occasional problem when encountering romanized Chinese. For instance, what character is used to write a surname romanized as "Chang"? The most likely guess is very dependent on which romanization is being used, as this sequence represents a different syllable in Wade-Giles than in pinyin or Yale. And you absolutely cannot assume romanizations are always in pinyin, especially in the diasphora. There's still a lot of stuff using old romanizations, especially for names of people and things.
The way they're written also integrates better with Chinese characters, so they could work as a furigana-style reading aid much better than pinyin (though I'm not familiar with whether this is commonly done). You could argue that in childhood education, using bopomofo would theoretically make students less likely to make mistakes when it comes to the pronunciation of certain Latin characters when later learning foreign languages, but I don't know whether that'd actually bear out in practice. Would be a fun study to run, though.
Moreover, most Taiwanese I know here in the West haven't really needed to learn pinyin particularly rigorously. My Taiwanese friends know some of the obvious correspondences (the ones that are more or less the same between systems) but don't necessarily always remember the ones that differ between major romanizations (like the retroflex vs palatal series and their respective vowels). Most Westerners don't know pinyin anyway (much to my chagrin whenever I see someone try to read a Chinese name in a Youtube video), so it doesn't give you a leg up in communicating with them. Pinyin is useful in a language learning context for those with a background with the Latin alphabet, but it doesn't really hold a ton of utility for a native speaker of Mandarin or even other Chinese languages except as an input method -- and there's no downside to using Bopomofo in that context.
Fwiw, I'm an American white person whose Chinese education was very mainland (and very northern -- I learned to say 哪儿 and 一点儿), so I don't have any particular bias toward bopomofo and I don't know it by heart myself. But I don't think it has any obvious deficiencies relative to pinyin except to a Westerner learning Chinese (and honestly, in a vacuum, I think the advantages and disadvantages of using pinyin instead might balance each other out) or someone trying to romanize Chinese names (which bopomofo was never designed to do, of course).
At first I thought I was reading an old article from 30 years ago (Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard), but it turns out this is an update by the same author on some of the same concepts using some of...
At first I thought I was reading an old article from 30 years ago (Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard), but it turns out this is an update by the same author on some of the same concepts using some of the same anecdotes. Several years ago I asked several coworkers (native Chinese with bachelors degrees or better from top schools in China but living in the US) if they could write sneeze, and I confirmed that none of them could produce the last character.
Without some quantitative data, I'm not entirely convinced that character amnesia is more prevalent than before. The last time I was in China was just before the iphone was released there, and I talked to several native Chinese about how they could read a whole lot more characters than they could write. Some of the people I talked to about this didn't seem to use computers often, so I don't think it had much to do with changing methods of composition. I think it's more that most people don't really write that much as adults. Maybe short notes or emails, but those tend to use a fairly limited set of vocabulary.
It seems that the author's examples of educational interventions are from 2011 and 2013, before the proliferation of smartphones in China (<40% usage before 2013). Given that since then a smartphone has basically become a necessity to participate in modern society, I wonder how much smartphones have changed things in the past decade. My impression is that on smartphones older users tend to use handwriting input (drawing characters), and younger users tend to use phonetic input (pinyin), which might have some effects on ability to write characters over time. On the other hand, so much of our communication has moved from spoken to written with the internet and texting and all that. Even if it's based on a limited vocabulary, people probably compose messages more often now than when I was in China. Maybe that has some effect too.
I have mostly observed the same but quite a lot also seem to use voice to text as well. For sending informal messages short voice notes back and forth seems a lot more common than in europe. I...
My impression is that on smartphones older users tend to use handwriting input (drawing characters), and younger users tend to use phonetic input (pinyin), which might have some effects on ability to write characters over time.
I have mostly observed the same but quite a lot also seem to use voice to text as well. For sending informal messages short voice notes back and forth seems a lot more common than in europe. I can't comment on whether this is a more recent trend or not though as my only experience is recent.
I found sending short voice notes to be weirdly common in Europe! In the US, I literally never did this, but here in Germany I have some acquaintances (without an immigration background) who...
I found sending short voice notes to be weirdly common in Europe! In the US, I literally never did this, but here in Germany I have some acquaintances (without an immigration background) who really prefer communicating this way for some reason. I don't really have much personal experience with this in China or among Chinese speakers, though. When I studied abroad, my language learning class's teacher always typed out the messages in our class WeChat group (or sent stickers, bc WeChat was WAY ahead of the other apps on that front back then). But to be fair, it was literally her job to teach us Chinese.
I certainly feel like I see more people making those short voice messages on public transit here in Berlin than I did in Shanghai, but whether that's because Chinese people are less rude on public transit or because I've become more judgmental over time is unclear.
From the article:
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Yep. My ability to write in Chinese has atrophied extremely outside of very common characters. You just don’t have to write things down very often anymore, outside of like your name. It’s true in English as well somewhat - I’ll often spell “bureaucracy” wrong on the first try.
One unfortunate thing is that like the article noted, if you forgot you kinda of have to fallback to pinyin which I feel is extra embarrassing. At least in Japanese you’d just write it in hiragana. Too bad bopomofo never caught on outside of Taiwan.
Bureaucracy is one of the hardest to spell (and hardest spelling to remember of a relatively common word) words in English (imo). I never get it right on the first shot, despite conscious efforts to try and harden its memory.
An acquaintance is launching a card game named bureaucracy. I told him he absolutely needs to change the name for SEO purposes.
Search engines are quite good at spelling corrections, though?
Actually when I talked with him I was more so thinking that people would give up googling as they tried to type the name. I might - if it was something I’d heard about and was only mildly curious.
Bu-reau (like the dresser) cracy (because working in one will make you crazy.) just like Wed-nes-day, I can kind of no longer spell it "normally" in my head but I can spell it correctly on paper.
It's good if you're also inundated with the French or Southern US "eau" since you'll recall what order to put all those vowels in.
Yeah, I find it super easy to spell, but I also like knowing etymologies, which, admittedly, makes it super easy to spell in general.
I'll be honest, I'll never understand how our brains are so good at recognizing patterns that we make up intricate conspiracy theories where nothing exists, yet most people can't even recognize the patterns in how English words are spelled. Not to disrespect the people who don't; I just don't get how it is that our brains are wired.
Bureau is hard to spell in it of itself. Three vowels in a row is just beyond the pale.
Eunoia and queueing have entered chat
Queue is also an absurdity. Eunoia isn't as bad, because at least none of the three vowels in a row are silent.
Queue has the fun bit where all the vowels are waiting nicely in a row to be spoken.
😭
Maybe with some etymology that would help? It's bureau-cracy.
-cracy is "power from the X",like theocracy (power from the gods, theo-, like theology) or democracy (power from the people, demo-, like demographics).
Bureau is a whole loanword from French that means "desk". So it's really power coming from the desk (and all the paperwork associated). As abothrr comment mentioned it's hard to spell by itself. The French have it in easy because there's loads of other common words where -eau make the sounds "o" (beautiful, water, ...) while there's not many of such words that we're loaned by English. But perhaps if you can recall the Federal Bureau of Investigation you can tell spell bureaucracy right?
The etymology is useful, but even bureau doesn't quite roll off my brain (autocorrect just fixed that for me...)
Yeah I find the same. The etymology works fine but I can't spell bureau on the first try normally anyway
As someone who uses the word bureau in their native language (meaning desk), bureaucracy's spelling is one of the easiest to remember.
I have more issues with "necessary"..
Always seem go for "neccesary" on my first try, for some reason.
One collar and two sleeves are necessary on a shirt but occasionally you could have two collars and one sleeve.
Oh that's interesting, my problem is with "necessary" is always -ary vs -ery. Even worse when English have words that vary only by that, like stationary vs. stationery, because then you can't rely on spellcheck.
Do you feel you would be less embarrassed if you had to fall back on bopomofo instead of pinyin? I find it about equal.
Honestly, I think English is just in an earlier stage of becoming like hanzi when it comes to its degree of phonetic interpretability. We're not there yet, but over the coming couple centuries? I think English spelling is going to become not much different -- just like hanzi, there'll always be some phonetic aspect, but it'll be largely a matter of lots of rote memorization. Most of the practical arguments against reforming English spelling (too much existing literature to reprint it all, it's impossible to make something more phonetic cross-dialectically so you'd need to privilege certain dialects more than the current system already does, etc.) are more or less the same as those for replacing Chinese characters with a more phonetic system, after all.
Is there real value to bopomofo rather than just using pinyin (and romanization schemes in general)? I say that as someone who has invested the time and energy in becoming completely fluent in reading and writing bopomofo. It just seems like makework when there are already Roman letters which everybody in the world basically needs to learn anyway.
I think it’s more efficient and more representative of discrete morpheme languages. It also just looks less out of place, but that’s ultimately subjective.
Bopomofo has some advantages when it comes to representing Mandarin phonology iirc (e.g.,not having the y/i and w/u issues present in pinyin, unambiguously indicating the "yu/ü" vowel in all contexts). As a Westerner learning Chinese, using bopomofo could theoretically help you not make common pinyin-based mistakes like pronouncing "e" wrong, but in practice I think pretty much every Chinese language resource I've seen uses pinyin.
There's also no risk of confusion between different romanization systems, which inevitably is at least an occasional problem when encountering romanized Chinese. For instance, what character is used to write a surname romanized as "Chang"? The most likely guess is very dependent on which romanization is being used, as this sequence represents a different syllable in Wade-Giles than in pinyin or Yale. And you absolutely cannot assume romanizations are always in pinyin, especially in the diasphora. There's still a lot of stuff using old romanizations, especially for names of people and things.
The way they're written also integrates better with Chinese characters, so they could work as a furigana-style reading aid much better than pinyin (though I'm not familiar with whether this is commonly done). You could argue that in childhood education, using bopomofo would theoretically make students less likely to make mistakes when it comes to the pronunciation of certain Latin characters when later learning foreign languages, but I don't know whether that'd actually bear out in practice. Would be a fun study to run, though.
Moreover, most Taiwanese I know here in the West haven't really needed to learn pinyin particularly rigorously. My Taiwanese friends know some of the obvious correspondences (the ones that are more or less the same between systems) but don't necessarily always remember the ones that differ between major romanizations (like the retroflex vs palatal series and their respective vowels). Most Westerners don't know pinyin anyway (much to my chagrin whenever I see someone try to read a Chinese name in a Youtube video), so it doesn't give you a leg up in communicating with them. Pinyin is useful in a language learning context for those with a background with the Latin alphabet, but it doesn't really hold a ton of utility for a native speaker of Mandarin or even other Chinese languages except as an input method -- and there's no downside to using Bopomofo in that context.
Fwiw, I'm an American white person whose Chinese education was very mainland (and very northern -- I learned to say 哪儿 and 一点儿), so I don't have any particular bias toward bopomofo and I don't know it by heart myself. But I don't think it has any obvious deficiencies relative to pinyin except to a Westerner learning Chinese (and honestly, in a vacuum, I think the advantages and disadvantages of using pinyin instead might balance each other out) or someone trying to romanize Chinese names (which bopomofo was never designed to do, of course).
At first I thought I was reading an old article from 30 years ago (Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard), but it turns out this is an update by the same author on some of the same concepts using some of the same anecdotes. Several years ago I asked several coworkers (native Chinese with bachelors degrees or better from top schools in China but living in the US) if they could write sneeze, and I confirmed that none of them could produce the last character.
Without some quantitative data, I'm not entirely convinced that character amnesia is more prevalent than before. The last time I was in China was just before the iphone was released there, and I talked to several native Chinese about how they could read a whole lot more characters than they could write. Some of the people I talked to about this didn't seem to use computers often, so I don't think it had much to do with changing methods of composition. I think it's more that most people don't really write that much as adults. Maybe short notes or emails, but those tend to use a fairly limited set of vocabulary.
It seems that the author's examples of educational interventions are from 2011 and 2013, before the proliferation of smartphones in China (<40% usage before 2013). Given that since then a smartphone has basically become a necessity to participate in modern society, I wonder how much smartphones have changed things in the past decade. My impression is that on smartphones older users tend to use handwriting input (drawing characters), and younger users tend to use phonetic input (pinyin), which might have some effects on ability to write characters over time. On the other hand, so much of our communication has moved from spoken to written with the internet and texting and all that. Even if it's based on a limited vocabulary, people probably compose messages more often now than when I was in China. Maybe that has some effect too.
I thought the same; that sneeze story is very memorable.
I have mostly observed the same but quite a lot also seem to use voice to text as well. For sending informal messages short voice notes back and forth seems a lot more common than in europe. I can't comment on whether this is a more recent trend or not though as my only experience is recent.
I found sending short voice notes to be weirdly common in Europe! In the US, I literally never did this, but here in Germany I have some acquaintances (without an immigration background) who really prefer communicating this way for some reason. I don't really have much personal experience with this in China or among Chinese speakers, though. When I studied abroad, my language learning class's teacher always typed out the messages in our class WeChat group (or sent stickers, bc WeChat was WAY ahead of the other apps on that front back then). But to be fair, it was literally her job to teach us Chinese.
I certainly feel like I see more people making those short voice messages on public transit here in Berlin than I did in Shanghai, but whether that's because Chinese people are less rude on public transit or because I've become more judgmental over time is unclear.