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As a relatively well-educated Japanese native speaker, I too experience this problem when writing Japanese on paper - being unable to write many kanji character
by drivenextfunc 2y ago
As a relatively well-educated Japanese native speaker, I too experience this problem when writing Japanese on paper - being unable to write many kanji characters by hand. I am no exception among Japanese native speakers. While the author seems to interpret this problem as something crucial, I question whether it truly is.
The orthography of Mandarin and Japanese includes an alphabet consisting of thousands of characters, the majority of which comprise dozens of strokes. Although East Asian people have higher IQ scores on average, we are not superhuman - our memory capacity is bound by human limits, and the decreased frequency of actually writing kanji on paper has naturally resulted in our forgetting how to write many of them. Is this surprising?
Furthermore, orthography is not part of language in a fundamental sense - it's merely a useful tool that accompanies a language. Therefore, I do not see the writing system becoming less stable as a significant issue. Consider Korea as an example: they used to use kanji in their orthography but have almost completely eliminated it with virtually no adverse effects. While laypeople often assume orthography is an integral part of a language, this is just not the case from the linguistic perspective.
- cedws 2y agoI'm studying Japanese at the moment and what struck me is how important context is, particularly in reading. You need to know where to read 1-3 letters ahead to read a word and interpret it. That's not really a thing in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way. I think digital is a big crutch for Japanese/Chinese because you have input methods that help you write what you want to say, so you don't actually need to remember how to write kanji as much in daily life.
- ReverseCold 2y ago> in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way Are you sure about that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
- sorokod 2y agoshure!
- DiscourseFan 2y agoreads like it would be pronounced with an aspirated -s- not sh.
- Izkata 2y agoPosted up above, here's a collection of English pronunciation rules that English speakers have internalized so well they can't generally explain them: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html https://www.zompist.com/spell.html "Ghoti" is mentioned a few times there, but basically "fish" is a nonsensical pronunciation that breaks several rules. There's a reason (well, a few reasons) why if you ask English speakers how to pronounce "ghoti" and they've never seen it before, they'll probably all guess some variation of "go-tee" or "go-tie".
- Suppafly 2y agoThat's such a dumb example because it claims to follow english rules for those letters while ignoring the actual rules. It makes a somewhat humorous joke, but people pretending that it means anything linguistically are either ignorant or intentionally trying to confuse people.
- Terr_ 2y ago> You need to know where to read 1-3 letters ahead to read a word and interpret it. That's not really a thing in English It happens in a English too, where you see a chunk of letters and mis-predict which word they represent in a way which affects its meaning [0], and sometimes that will also affect pronunciation. [1] An example from the link: > "The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families." A reader linearly scanning along doesn't know whether "complex" is an adjective or a noun, and then whether "houses" is a noun or a verb. I'm pretty sure all human languages have similar problems where a certain amount of look-ahead or backtracking is necessary. For another example to highlight pronunciation changes, consider the ambiguity of: "I saw the rhino live in the zoo." That could mean that the rhino was doing the verb of living, in which it rhymes with "give", or it could also mean that the speaker was seeing it in-person, in which case it rhymes with "drive". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)
- joe_the_user 2y ago"I saw the rhino live in the zoo" Might also mean; "Noted native-American zoologist 'I Saw The Rhino' lives at the zoo"
- jibal 2y agoNo it couldn't.
- wkearney99 2y agoGiven shenanigans like "thee stallion" as part of a name... sure it could.
- jibal 2y agoCompletely irrelevant. It couldn't because "live" and "lives" are different words.
- 2y ago
- yongjik 2y agoI agree that Chinese/Japanese has it worse, but any language where "Spelling Bee" is a thing cannot be considered phonetic in a conventional sense.
- zoky 2y agoAnd yet, given the definition and language of origin, most high-level spelling bee participants can make a pretty good guess at spelling a word they may have never seen before. English is phonetic, it just borrows its pronunciation rules from many differing (and sometimes directly opposed) other languages.
- stephen_g 2y agoVery true - and every demonstration of “English is hard to spell/pronounce” focuses directly on the exceptions which exaggerates the problem. One analysis I’ve seen puts it that with a single set of rules, 59% of a sample corpus of 5000 English words can be pronounced perfectly from the spelling (of course, there will be regional accent and dialect differences so that percentage will be a bit different for each one) and up to 85% can be pretty close with only slight errors. Then there’s a percentage where they’re just direct borrowings from other languages and you need to have an idea of how that language pronounces words (especially French), so really only 10-15% or so of English words end up being true exceptions. 1. https://www.zompist.com/spell.html https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
- nl 2y ago> a single set of rules, 59% of a sample corpus of 5000 English words can be pronounced perfectly from the spelling To do this you need to know 56(!) rules. I think this actually demonstrates how complex English pronunciation actually is.
- poincaredisk 2y agoAnd you still only get 59% of the way to the correct pronunciation. As a non native speaker of English, and a native speaker of a phonetic language, I strongly object to the notion that it's easy to guess English word pronunciation by just reading it.
- grisBeik 2y ago> in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way Some context-dependent examples: "read": /ɹid/ vs. /ɹɛd/; "lead": /lid/ vs. /lɛd/ (plumbum); "desert": /ˈdɛz.ɚt/ vs. /dɪˈzɝt/.
- Terr_ 2y agoFor more examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)
- thfuran 2y ago>That's not really a thing in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoFruit flies like a banana. English has its own ambiguity, so it isn’t really that different. I can only write Chinese via an IME these days. For one, I’m left handed so writing characters was always a struggle since stroke order worked against me, but it’s mostly how I only use Chinese anyways. I told my wife our kid should learn to write via an IME as well and she was just horrified about that, though. None of the teaching material really supports it.
- pfooti 2y agoTime flies. I can't they're too fast.
- wyager 2y agoI've been (very) casually learning Japanese for a couple years, and almost every time I think I find something "weird" that Japanese does, I almost immediately think of a very similar example in English. The alphabet is a pretty awesome invention (alphabet > kana-style syllabary > kanji-style logography) but English writing is at least as complex as JP writing, just in different dimensions. JP's phonetics, for example, are dead simple compared to English's, but they do a good job making up for it by having a few thousand Kanji.
- BeretEnjoyer 2y ago> JP's phonetics, for example, are dead simple compared to English's I'm not so sure about that. Do you know about pitch accent? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent
- BalinKing 2y agoIs that any more complicated than English stress, though? And regardless, Japanese has a very small number of phonemes (compared to English) and extremely restricted phonotactics.
- wyager 2y agoYeah, but I don't expect this to be substantively harder than learning most regional accents (could be wrong), and afaik it's also not critical for legibility.
- Tor3 2y agoI'm not a native English speaker, so I don't really know why, or if, there's a problem for native English speakers to learn or "get" pitch accent. For speakers of many other European languages Japanese pitch accent is not tricky. You listen, and then you speak. Just as you would listen to English, and repeat it the same way. Japanese, despite being extremely logical and so beautiful in so many ways, is still hard to learn for me, and of course learning the writing system is not done in the blink of an eye (unlike the Latin-based writing system we use), but pitch accent isn't really the problem here.
- maianhvu 2y agoNot so much in terms of meaning but in terms of pronunciation, sometimes you also need to read ahead in English to know how a certain word is pronounced. For example: "I read a book yesterday." and "I read a book every night." Depending on the context that follows, "read" is pronounced differently. The same thing happens for "present" and "record". Admittedly, these are exceptions to the rule.
- heavyset_go 2y agoWhen teaching reading and English, learning about context clues is one of the ways students are taught to figure out the meaning of words.
- xanderlewis 2y agoI think you’ll find all of those things are true of English too.
- mmarq 2y agoIn English you have to know a word in order to pronounce it. The “ou” diphthong in “hound” and “double” or “would” is pronounced differently. Or “ieu” in “lieutenant” vs “lieu”. Or “oo” in “poor” vs “root” Or “berry” in “berry” vs “strawberry” I could go on forever. There’s no other western language I know of that behaves like that.
- lsaferite 2y ago> “ieu” in “lieutenant” vs “lieu” > “berry” in “berry” vs “strawberry” Am I misunderstanding the point you are making or is my pronunciation just off? I would pronounce both parts of both examples the same.
- wkat4242 2y agoStrawberry is often pronounced as Strawbry. Sou the 'e' becomes silent. And Lieutenant as Lutenant (or leftenant in Britain)
- Suppafly 2y ago>Strawberry is often pronounced as Strawbry. Only in some dialects, not in the standard form.
- mhandley 2y agoThat's mostly an British English vs American English distinction: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/lieutenant https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/lieut... https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/strawberry https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/straw...
- cameronh90 2y agoEnglish is a quasi-phonetic language in that most words can be mostly pronounced how they're written, but in some cases it inherits the pronunciation of the language the word came from. I'd imagine many English speakers would consider this an undesirable quirk, though. Indeed, there has been a tendency over the centuries, particularly in the US, to move towards writing words how they sound or pronouncing words how they're written. Lieutenant is an interesting example, since in the UK we pronounce that "lef-tenant" traditionally, but the US moved to the (IMO superior) "lieu-tenant". Nowadays, most young people would probably use the US pronunciation. I do take some slight umbrage with the implication that some people seem to be making in this thread that language features can't be criticised or that one language can't be better than another. I'm don't see why this would necessarily be true. Even with spoken languages. There are a ton of annoying aspects to English that simply aren't issues in other languages, and I think it's fair to criticise other languages for their failings too. This is especially true of writing systems, which are human inventions rather than something we learn intuitively. Logographic/logo-syllabic orthographies are harder to learn and remain proficient at than alphabets/abjads, for native speakers and second language learners alike. Alphabets are an innovation that improved on ancient orthographies and enabled a wider range of people to be able to communicate as easily by writing as they do by speaking. Besides the issue mentioned in the article, the writing systems in China/Japan are associated with other issues we rarely see here. Even dictionaries are a non-obvious challenge with logographic languages, which has resulted in several competing ways to sort words.
- James_K 2y agoPeople find value in the tradition of writing. If Japanese were to ditch kanji as Korea did, I think there would be some complaints.
- WillAdams 2y agoHanja still get used in some contexts --- had to memorize ~500 of them when I was studying Korean.
- iforgotpassword 2y agoAFAIK (maybe someone can correct or confirm) it is essential for studying law in Korea. To avoid ambiguity with identically sounding words, Chinese characters are used in law.
- pas 2y agoIt seems there's room for "legal innovation" there, by providing definitions early on in various texts to disambiguate, and then sticking to them throughout the text!? I assume it's already done anyway for some terms. Why isn't this more widespread?
- mannykannot 2y agoInnovation is quite often resisted by those who have mastered the hard way of doing things, though I have no idea whether this is the case here.
- fenomas 2y agoI suppose for the same reason that law in English-speaking countries still uses so much Latin?
- hollerith 2y agoThe Latin (and Old French) words don't require a complicated arrangement to type them on a keyboard.
- garou 2y agoIf you consider that a lot of people using the Latin alphabet does use the cellphone autocomplete to check how to write a word used infrequently... So I would say this text is biased by the "western" view of the writer, something that could be categorized as "Orientalism". A study about this phenomenon is valid, is important. But this post is not a good study.
- nogridbag 2y agoBut autocomplete even for basic words? My wife is Chinese. I'll never forget when she was helping her family write some formal letter in Chinese in Microsoft Word and she simply could not input the numbers 1, 2, and 3 in Chinese because she forgot how. And I know this may be apples and oranges because this is keyboard input versus writing on paper but as a programmer who can type at a moderate pace since I was a kid (~120wpm) this was perplexing for me! And similar to the article, she's an Ivy league grad. Similarly, when she's communicating with her family via WeChat half the time she simply sends audio messages instead of text messages. I'm pretty surprised this method is so popular instead of some voice-to-text google assistant type system.
- garou 2y agoI am not from Asia so I would trust more what our wife has to say than me. But I would argue that it is common for people living in a country with different language from they native language to forget how to write or even say some simple words. There's a good active effort to learn a new language.
- nialv7 2y agoIt might be surprising but, in terms of written words, sneeze (喷嚏) is not "basic".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aragonite 2y agoI think there may be some confusion. The standard Chinese characters for 1, 2, and 3 (一, 二, 三) are among the simplest characters in Chinese: literally just one, two and three horizontal strokes. These would be extremely difficult to forget! What your wife was likely trying to write were the special variants (壹, 贰, 叁) that are used on checks, official documents, etc. These were specifically designed to be hard to alter or forge (think the difference between writing "100" versus "ONE HUNDRED" on a check). Even highly educated Chinese people might need to look these up since they are specialized characters not used in everyday writing.
- jibal 2y ago"While the author seems to interpret this problem as something crucial" Does he? Read his last paragraph.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoMaybe it's less of a factor since the standardization of mandarin, but the difference between kanji and an alphabet like Korean and Vietnamese has moved to is that writing with the alphabet leaves an artifact that is only understood by speakers of the same language, whereas kanji can have the same meaning but different spoken words entirely, such that cultures can communicate through written edicts without totally erasing linguistic differences through standardization. So you're right that the individual language/culture doesn't suffer from alphabetization or pinyinification, but I would submit there is change on the level of multicultural interactions, decreasing the mutual intelligibility between cultures for better or worse
- bane 2y agoMy wife is college educated and native Korean, so these are just my observations of her and her friend group's engagement with Chinese characters (Hanja). Hanja, in daily life, has largely disappeared from colloquial Korean for those under 40 or so. It's still preserved in some formal settings like medicine and law, and is used to appeal to older generations. I've been with my wife long enough to remember when Hanja was still very common to see on newspapers. There are some small vestigial problem with eliminating from daily life, the large number of monosyllabic Chinese-origin loan words in modern Korean can sometime create ambiguity when written in Hangul. Native Korean speakers will sometimes disambiguate these words by referring to the Hanja, but that's largely disappearing as a habit as well. Younger Korean generations still learn it in K-12, but it's mostly wasted class time in an already overly crammed education. The kids who focus on it are really geared towards becoming lawyers, and certain kinds of doctors (mostly traditional medicine). STEM focused kids will focus on English instead. As a result there's an active linguistic process occurring where English loan words are slowly replacing Chinese-origin words and concepts in active and modern Korean. I don't too much about Japanese, but I do have a sense from native speakers that writing the same words in the four major writing systems offers some sense of nuance to how close a reader might be to a concept, or how they might consider it in various ways. From visits there, I did notice the expectation that native speakers could seamlessly read and jump between the systems, often within the same sentence. But I also understand that the pronunciation of Kanji is somewhat nonstandard, and it's not immediately clear how to say something written purely in Kanji (sometimes this is supported by providing explanatory superscripts in another system next to the Kanji). Why persist with this? I suppose it's the nuance that's being conveyed, and this nuance is still prized among native Japanese speakers. I do get the sense that China has no particular plans on moving away from the system, as it's a unifying source of national identity (and has been for centuries). And they really have very few other options. The main problem is that China is a highly linguistically diverse country, and Chinese offers the ability to transmit ideas instead of sounds which allows speakers of non-mutually-intelligible "dialects" to communicate. Moving to a Latinate system or even to Zhuyin Fuhao (Bopomofo) encodes sounds, not ideas, and risks fracturing the state. It would only become possible if there was a concerted effort, maybe over a couple generations, to Mandarinize and discourage the use of local dialects, but that would also be highly disruptive. Koreans, Japanese (and other adjacent non-Sino languages like Vietnamese, etc.) escaped this either through a higher level of linguistic uniformity, or strong efforts to standardize or teach a national dialect that the writing system (Hangul, Chữ Quốc ngữ, Hiragana, etc.) could amplify.
- make3 2y ago"Although East Asian people have higher IQ scores on average, we are not superhuman" weird explicit racism as the highest voted comment
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y agoBefore calling it racist we could ask him for a reference. After all, it might be a truthful fact. But yes, it stood out to me too, and I'm confused how you're the only person commenting on it. I wonder if these people justify having a shitty writing mechanism by being smart. "It's so needlessly complex, but we're smart so we can afford it" when in reality if you're smart you want it as simple as possible. And then he comes on HN and rationalizes the fact that he can't spell. Ironic.
- Mali- 2y agoI found the "we are not superhuman" bit annoying and condescending - replacing with different groups: "While men are stronger than women on average, we are not superhuman" <- To me, this doesn't seem condescending. Not 100% sure why - perhaps because the difference in the trait (between men and women) is much larger? "While left-leaning people are smarter than right-leaning on average, we're not superhuman" <- This definitely does seem condescending - perhaps because the skill in question is intelligence, and the statement reads as "You're stupider than me, but please strain your brain to understand". "While rich people have higher IQ scores on average, we're not superhuman" <- I find this a bit less condescending than the previous one, not sure why. But still annoying for the same reason as previous. "While whites are stronger than east asians on average, we're not superhuman" <- Again condescending and annoying, but I still think the intelligence statements are more grating. My conclusion - the statement is irritating because it carries with it an implication people would be surprised Asian people can forget things too. Additionally, it gives the intention that because other groups are stupider, it needs spelling out in simple terms that they're not godly intellects.
- make3 2y agoIQ has been disproved as not an accurate evaluation of intelligence even for problem solving, so asking for a scientific reference for this is like asking a scientific reference for how a certain locally dominant ethnicity have better chakras than another one. they don't, it's just racist.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago> Although East Asian people have higher IQ scores on average Citation needed.
- alkyon 2y agoMaybe parent was referring to the studies by Lynn, a self-declared "scientific racist". I think that despite lower IQ scores on average South Korea has been consistently beating Japan in go in the recent years, and more importantly they get rid of hanja (Korean version of kanji) from their writing system.
- cubefox 2y ago[flagged]
- alkyon 2y agoDo you expect him to tatoo a word "racist" on his forehead (in kanji)? That you even dare to quote this pseudo scientific crook is just mind boggling. Relevant quote: What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of "phasing out" of such peoples. Calling his output research is abhorrent.
- tptacek 2y agoIgnore the SPLC's own editorializing --- I don't take SPLC's analyses all that seriously either --- and just read the quotes on this page. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/richard-lynn https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi... Nobody here is defaming Lynn. You can disagree with the appellation (though I find a number of fact-checked publications claiming that he does describe himself that way), but I don't think it's reasonable to call the argument libelous.