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"Character Amnesia" result of computer-culture surge.

A recent survey indicates that the tech-savvy young people of China and Japan are experiencing a crisis of sorts. Thanks to their constant use of computers and mobile phones, many are becoming dependent on alphabet-based input systems and are starting to forget characters used in their ancient writing forms. 

The China Youth Daily in April commissioned a poll that found 83 percent of 2,072 respondents admitted to having problems writing characters.  

A survey by the southern Chinese news portal Dayang Net, found that 80 percent of respondents had forgotten how to write some characters according to AFP and Tech Eye.
  
"I think it's a young people's problem, or at least a computer users' problem," said Zeng Ming, 22, from the southern Guangdong province in China.

The phenomenon, dubbed "character amnesia", occurs because many asian cultures use electronic input systems that are based on characters translated into the Roman alphabet. The user enters a word and the device offers matching characters.  Users don't need to be able to write a character in order to find a match.

Li Hanwei, a 21 year-old university student in Hong Kong, said that when she tries to write, she finds that characters, even for common words, have begun to elude her.

"I can remember the shape, but I can't remember the strokes that you need to write it,"  said Li. "It's a bit of a problem."

Siok Wai Ting, assistant professor of linguistics at Hong Kong University said that the Chinese use a different part of the brain than they do to read the Roman alphabet, a part closer to the motor area, which is used for handwriting.  

Although Siok warned that forgetting how to write could eventually affect reading ability, Professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, Victor Mair, called character amnesia part of a "natural process of evolution".

"The reasons why characters are innately difficult to enter into computers and mobile phones are innate to the character-based writing systems themselves," he said.

While a few asian input systems are available to the public on some chinese computers, they have failed to gain mass appeal.  

Options are also becoming available on smartphones and other smart devices which offer users the opportunity to input characters by drawing them via touch screen.

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English Too
By Braxus on 9/1/2010 11:04:55 PM , Rating: 4
I would say the same is true to a certain extent (at least for me) for handwritten English. Do almost everything on a computer + printer these days that my handwriting skills have started to go beyond chicken scratch! Sometimes I need to stop and think, "WTF did I just write?"

Couple of my peers appear to suffer from the same syndrome as well.




RE: English Too
By FITCamaro on 9/1/2010 11:14:16 PM , Rating: 1
I've used cursive most of my life so my printing skills have always sucked.


RE: English Too
By FITCamaro on 9/1/2010 11:15:18 PM , Rating: 2
It amazes me how many people in the US don't know how to write in cursive. Or that actually think its another language entirely.

How do these people sign their name?


RE: English Too
By someguy123 on 9/2/2010 12:07:09 AM , Rating: 4
Most signatures nowadays are basically gibberish anyways. I don't know many people that just write out their name in cursive as a signature. Usually the first letter is legible and the rest are just lines and then some kind of loop.


RE: English Too
By FITCamaro on 9/2/2010 5:56:31 AM , Rating: 4
For me it depends. If I'm signing a check, I don't care as much. If its an official document, I sign more formally and properly.


RE: English Too
By phantom505 on 9/2/2010 10:54:47 AM , Rating: 2
It's an American tradition:

Make your mark here.


RE: English Too
By rcc on 9/2/2010 1:00:38 PM , Rating: 2
Right.

But as everyone likes to remind us, we are a young country and it was done somewhere else first.


RE: English Too
By stirfry213 on 9/2/2010 1:06:48 PM , Rating: 5
I purposefully forgot cursive as quickly as my grade school teachers would allow it. If I had to guess, I'd say I haven't written in cursive since 7th grade. I honestly could not write anything in cursive, I couldn't even legibly write my own name.

This being said, I don't see this as being an issue. Ask your self, what is the purpose of reading/writing? Communication, pure and simple. Actually, I think that printing is easier and likely more universally readable.


RE: English Too
By HrilL on 9/2/2010 2:45:40 PM , Rating: 2
Heh I can sign my name but I can't write or read cursive. Its not a big deal. And my handwriting isn't too bad but it always amazes me when I use it how much writing by hand sucks.


RE: English Too
By Kensei on 9/2/2010 4:33:11 AM , Rating: 5
You are correct but the problem in the Chinese and Japanese written languages is many orders of magnitude greater. I didn't find speaking Japanese too difficult to learn. Writing was a nightmare. Computers have made it easier for foreigners to learn to write in Japanese and Chinese since it's easier to identify the correct character rather than to write the correct character. Sort of like the differece between taking a multiple-choice test vs. an essay. But, they will probably never learn how to write all of those characters from memory.

I do agree that character-based writing systems may have a certain elegance to them, but for simply being able to communicate efficiently.... they really suck.

I think one of the most efficient systems I've ever seen (and I'm no linguist) is the hiragana system used in Japanese. It's a syllabary, not an alphabet. Every "character" is always pronounced exactly the same way within every word. It's much easeir to pronounce words in Hiragana than in English. My daughter is in Kindergarten in Japan and she can read Hiragana and Katakana words quite quickly. It will be a while before she can read at that speed in English.


RE: English Too
By CloudFire on 9/2/2010 6:41:29 AM , Rating: 2
Yea I know what you mean. I started to try learning Japanese, and Kanji killed it for me. I learned Hiragana and Katakana but when I got to Kanji, oh boi lol.

If you are interested in asian languages, another very efficient system is Korean. Very flexible to pick up and easier to learn than Hira/Kata. :)


RE: English Too
By AnnihilatorX on 9/2/2010 7:10:52 AM , Rating: 4
Kanji is not hard to learn... if you are a child

There are rules to it of course, but they never teach you in depth. Most characters are made of common radicals, themselves have different meanings or pronounciations that help to make up the character.

For example the basic radical wood/tree, written ?, is shape of a tree with roots. Most radicals can exist themselves as characters

Combine 2 of them, you get wood as in woodland, ?
Have 3 of them, you get forest ?

There is also variation such as, a root with a bar at bottom marks root. ? means root. ? is a radical of the Sun, it's used to be a circle with a dot, an astrology symbol for sun, but turned into straightened strokes.

so ??, Origin of the Sun, is Chinese writing of Japan

Another example, radical human, ?, human resting near a tree resting, so ? means resting. The left part of ? is ?, sometime the shape changes when combined so that it takes up less space.

There are many more radicals and rules to make up words. But common words are either based on Shapes of object, like ? (Fire),
Radical of the 'category' that represent meaning + a radical signifying pronounciation , such as ? (flower), Very top part is a radical for ? (grass), notice they are the same. Bottom part of both ? and ?, ? ? means chemistry and morning respectively, which sounds incompatible. But they represent the pronounciation. ? is pronouned Hua, so is ?. ? is pronouned jou, similar to ? chou.


RE: English Too
By AnnihilatorX on 9/2/2010 7:16:33 AM , Rating: 5
damn I see how dailytech does not support unicode.

I repost it with links:

For example the basic radical wood/tree, written http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%9C%A8
, is shape of a tree with roots. Most radicals can exist themselves as characters

Combine 2 of them, you get wood as in woodland,
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%9E%97
Have 3 of them, you get forest
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%A3%AE

There is also variation such as, a tree with a bar at bottom marks root.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%9C%AC
means root.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5
is a radical of the Sun, it's used to be a circle with a dot, an astrology symbol for sun, but turned into straightened strokes.

Therefore
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC
, Origin of the Sun, is Chinese writing (Kanji) of Japan

Another example, radical human, http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BA%BA , human resting near a tree resting, so http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BC%91 means resting. The left part of http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BC%91 is http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BA%BA, sometimes the shape changes when combined so that it takes up less space.

There are many more radicals and rules to make up words. But common words are either based on Shapes of object, like http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%81%AB (Fire),
Radical of the 'category' that represent meaning + a radical signifying pronounciation , such as http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%8A%B1 (flower), Very top part is a radical for http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%8D%89 (grass), notice they are the same. Bottom part of both http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%8A%B1 and http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%8D%89, http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8C%96 http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A9 means chemistry and morning respectively, which sounds incompatible. But they represent the pronounciation. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%8A%B1 is pronouned Hua, so is http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A9. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A9 is pronouned jou, similar to http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%8D%89 chou.


RE: English Too
By CloudFire on 9/2/2010 6:41:32 AM , Rating: 2
Yea I know what you mean. I started to try learning Japanese, and Kanji killed it for me. I learned Hiragana and Katakana but when I got to Kanji, oh boi lol.

If you are interested in asian languages, another very efficient system is Korean. Very flexible to pick up and easier to learn than Hira/Kata. :)


linguisitc evolution in action
By rika13 on 9/2/2010 6:16:28 AM , Rating: 3
The death of cursive and of symbol-based writing is language evolving into the 21st century. People can complain about "idiot kids" and "cultural loss" but in reality, cursive and kanji just plain suck. Cursive is just "Let's write in some fancy way so we look cool, even though nobody can read this stuff because my penmanship is bad." and kanji is "Nobody can write this because one slighly off stroke and you're insulting some dude's mom AND nobody can read it because its all crammed into a tiny space."

Both cursive and kanji are dead, cursive was ALWAYS a bad idea, kanji was great in the times where paper was scare and communications were hand-carried. However, with normal computer input devices unable to reproduce kanji (unless you wanted a keyboard the size of ENIAC or a graphics tablet) and unable to display it in a usable form until rather recently. Evolution has been about survival and propagation of the fittest; those whom are fit, survive and reproduce, passing the traits that allowed them to survive to their offspring. Linguistic evolution is similar, that which survives the medium of communication lives on, that which does not, dies. Latin alphabet based computers and devices are like the meteor that killed the kanji and cursive dinosaurs.




RE: linguisitc evolution in action
By Dr of crap on 9/2/2010 9:40:54 AM , Rating: 2
I have to agree, but then add -
It's like riding a bike once you learn you don't really forget.
Are they not teaching kid in the US HOW to write?
Yes no one writes this way anymore, but for arts sake at least learn HOW to do it.
How do the geeks in 10th grade sign their names today -
" X " ?


By UNHchabo on 9/2/2010 2:26:22 PM , Rating: 3
quote:
Are they not teaching kid in the US HOW to write?
Yes no one writes this way anymore, but for arts sake at least learn HOW to do it.
How do the geeks in 10th grade sign their names today -
" X " ?


They are teaching us, but it's not necessary to learn it, so it doesn't stay in our muscle memory. That, combined with the fact that many of the cursive letters don't resemble the printed versions, means that most people don't remember how to write letters that aren't in their signature.

I remember when I took the SAT, and we all had to write -- in cursive -- a statement saying that we promise not to cheat, and all that good stuff. Practically everyone I've talked to said that they either had to rack their brain to figure out how to write those letters, or they just wrote it in a hybrid of cursive and print.

Don't think that this is just a product of the pre-teen-cell-phone generation either; I'm in my mid-20s, and I haven't written in cursive since 4th grade, except that one time when I took the SAT. Don't think I replaced cursive entirely with typing either; most of my schoolwork outside of my CS courses was handwritten.

I sign my name just fine, but mostly because I've developed my signature over the years, signing my name several times a day. I can sign legibly when necessary, because I remember the shapes of those letters through constant repetition. However, when I use my credit card at the grocery store, who cares if my signature's legible? I just go from muscle memory there.


RE: linguisitc evolution in action
By Fritzr on 9/2/2010 11:11:09 AM , Rating: 5
Cursive is not "fancy". It was developed as a method for speeding up the process of writing. When you block print, you lift the pen between characters. When you drag the pen to the next character without lifting it, the result is lines joining the characters. This method of writing is called cursive. The letter shapes are the same, but the lines that are added due to not lifting the pen make them look strange.

If you do much writing by hand, you will find that cursive writing is much faster than block printing.


RE: linguisitc evolution in action
By UNHchabo on 9/2/10, Rating: 0
By Alexstarfire on 9/2/2010 2:30:36 PM , Rating: 1
Yes, let me convert my in-class essay into standard form after it's over. I'm sure the teachers and such will let you do that. Seriously, there are plenty of examples where time is a factor and writing shorthand isn't going to cut it.

I can agree that many people need to learn the write cursive better. I'm sure we all know about doctors handwriting after all. On the other hand, people need to learn to read and write cursive. There is no real reason to use print over cursive, except for computers of course. I don't care if people don't use cursive, but everyone really needs to know how to read it.


By AnnihilatorX on 9/2/2010 4:16:25 AM , Rating: 4
I am from Hong Kong, HK, like Taiwan, uses the traditional writing system, which characters are their traditional ancient form which can be quite complex to write. The Japanese Kanji characters were based on the traditional form, and they simplified a bit on their own ways, but no way as much as an overhaul as the Simplified Chinese mainland China developed after the war.

I very much prefer the traditional system. Simplified Chinese is just plain awful to look at, it does not preserve the beauty and history of the original characters. The system came about because it is much easier to write simplified with many less strokes. Now that with computers, less strokes are less of a concern.




By BruceLeet on 9/2/2010 5:48:08 AM , Rating: 1
AnnihilatorX,

I see you claim quite a few nationalities for quite some time now. I'm not sure if you use this to try and sound more credible or to make your 'story' more believable. Aren't you from Canada, Australia and the US too?


By AnnihilatorX on 9/2/2010 6:53:33 AM , Rating: 3
I don't know where you see me mentioned I was from Canada, Australia and the US. It's quite worrying that you are acusing me of lying.

There are many people with same 'username' on the Internet I am sure

but on Dailytech I've never claimed myself to be from Canada, Australia nor the US. I did say I am from UK sometimes.
I was born in Hong Kong, is a Chinese, residing in the UK and knows Japanese.


Not a new problem
By NA1NSXR on 9/1/2010 11:55:43 PM , Rating: 2
East asian character based languages have always had this problem. There is no way everyone can know every character and there will always be a set of vocabulary any particular individual has trouble writing. Both my parents are asian but my mom was a literature major while my dad was an engineer. My dad sometimes has to ask my mom how to write a certain odd character once in awhile. The reason why it is getting worse is that (I don't know about other languages) Chinese input doesn't require that you know how to write in the first place. You only need to know how to pronounce and recognize the word to type it (you input a character phonetically and choose your intended character). So while in English, typing constantly won't make us forget how to spell words, in Chinese it can.




RE: Not a new problem
By chrnochime on 9/3/2010 10:54:52 AM , Rating: 2
Since Chinese characters(I can only comment on Traditional Chinese as I don't write Simplified that often) are only related in some way via their roots(I'm not Chinese Major so I might have the term wrong, but you get my point) yet pronounced entirely differently, more often than not you can't just guess the pronunciation of said word. And if you try to guess without knowing Mandarin well enough, you'd just end up getting the pronunciation wrong. So in the end the person plucking away trying to type in words still need to know the strokes of the word, even if somewhat incorrectly. Another words, there's really no way around not knowing a rough shape/strokes of a word, as otherwise you can't pick the right word when you have a list that springs up.

There are way faster method of inputting Chinese than "zhuyin" or even hand-writing recognition, such as "Boshiamy"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boshiamy_method

My friend can input ~2 Chinese characters a second, which is like being capable of typing 120 English words/min. I'd say that's pretty damn fast.


squirel milk tastes bad.
By Randomblame on 9/1/2010 11:17:19 PM , Rating: 1
The first 3 words in the title - youth in asia ... Sounds a lot like Euthanasia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia




RE: squirel milk tastes bad.
By RugMuch on 9/2/2010 10:18:46 AM , Rating: 2
That's what I thought. I mean if they are dead of course they are going to forget how to read.


Auto correction
By IntelUser2000 on 9/1/2010 11:03:12 PM , Rating: 2
The auto correction offered on some of the Smartphones don't help either. You don't need to even read all the characters in detail when the device fills it out for you.

This effect may expand further into other languages like English as the devices become more capable.

As the devices become "smarter" the people using them become "dumber".




good news
By lagomorpha on 9/2/2010 12:19:36 PM , Rating: 2
This is great news! Maybe within another generation Japan can finally abandon their cumbersome written language in favor of their perfectly sensible syllabary. The only reason Japan holds onto it is to piss off foreigners anyway.




Chinese difficult
By paydirt on 9/8/2010 3:39:44 PM , Rating: 2
Sociology professors in the west speculate that the character-driven Chinese alphabet was designed to be difficult so that the ruling class of China would be literate and the serfs would be illiterate...




Many youth in the U.S.
By Beenthere on 9/2/2010 11:02:58 AM , Rating: 1
...never learning how to read, write or do math. It's an afflction. But they all have a cellphone.




stupid
By whickywhickyjim on 9/2/10, Rating: 0
Umm yeah. That would fun...
By Smartless on 9/1/10, Rating: -1
RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By Gul Westfale on 9/1/2010 10:51:00 PM , Rating: 2
my former boss and his wife use a tiny touchpad-like device they bought in hong kong that lets them draw chinese characters on screen. his wife is waaaaay faster that way than she is wit a 'normal' keyboard. it's all a question of practice.


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By Smartless on 9/1/2010 11:06:06 PM , Rating: 2
Lol never thought of that. iFail.

Though I guess programs, web server stuff, would all still need to be translated to be fully language capable unless written in binary. Sorry not a programmer obviously.


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By chick0n on 9/1/2010 11:21:10 PM , Rating: 2
thats because your former boss's wife doesn't know how to type it fast.

I enjoy typing on screen. I also enjoy writing and I actually practice it every week or so.

but sadly most kids these days in Asian don't do it. They can't even pronounce the words right. this is just sad.


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By karlostomy on 9/2/2010 12:08:13 AM , Rating: 5
Hmmm.
Can of worms, that one.

I would argue that the purpose of language is to facilitate communication. Some people seem to think that language itself is the ultimate goal, but this is a mistaken assumption.

While it is necessary to have a good grasp of language, writing Chinese and Japanese is a tedious affair that merely seems to serve itself by being overly complicated.
Thus, for all the people that seem to think language should be foremost - I disagree.

I think communication is the ultimate intention labguage and if that is achieved, then the means is irrelevant.

Everything in life is evolving - why not the traditional need to write (for example) Kanji in Japanese? As a student of the Japanese language I was continually frustrated at the need to learn Kanji, romaji, Hiragana - simply to communicate with other Japanese.
It seems unnecessary and inefficient.
One character set would have covered ALL the permutations of the language. Kanji, is a waste. Beautiful, yes - but still a waste of time to learn as everything can already be expressed in Hiragana.

A perfect analogy involves the use of computers.
While all of us know HOW to use computers, most of us do not know how to BUILD a computer.
So, should we force everyone to learn how to build computers before we let them use one?
It seems silly and inefficient to do so.

Similarly, if communication is the key, why are we so anally focused on 'building' the language when the 'communication' is the real objective?

In the end, I think language is undergoing an evolutionary change. Some parts of it will die out, in the long run.

That's NOT sad.
It just IS.


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By Rookierookie on 9/2/2010 1:53:50 AM , Rating: 2
Because Kanji conveys meaning easier than Hiragana. Obviously you were not a good student of Japanese.

And no, don't talk to me about "being able to tell from the context". It doesn't work in practice.


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By wushuktl on 9/2/2010 7:22:54 AM , Rating: 2
If context alone doesn't work then how do people talk and understand each other without the written language to differentiate the homonyms? Because context is everything! I for one practice writing Chinese every day and so I think it's sad to hear that the youth is struggling with this but given how tedious and time consuming it is I am not surprised it is happening. In my opinion there's really no function reason to keep a character based system. It's just culturally very interesting and beautiful to look at and a challenge to master. In reality, it's probably okay to forget how to write, it doesn't affect how well they are able to recognize and read them.


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By michael67 on 9/2/2010 7:57:24 AM , Rating: 4
quote:
it's probably okay to forget how to write, it doesn't affect how well they are able to recognize and read them.

There is one very big impact on society that everyone seems to forget.

The Western way of writing stimulate more the logical side of the brain.
Ware Asian writing stimulate more the creative side of the brain.

And as writing and reading is something you do all day, Asia will lose one of its most creative influences.


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By PaterPelligrino on 9/2/2010 2:40:30 AM , Rating: 5
quote:
Kanji, is a waste. Beautiful, yes - but still a waste of time to learn as everything can already be expressed in Hiragana.


There are a huge number of homonyms in Japanese. For instance, there are 16 different ways of writing kansho, all written with different kanji and all having different meanings. If you eliminated kanji from Japanese, no one would know what you were talking about.

The reason for this is that around 7-800 AD when they first came under the cultural influence of the Chinese, the Japanese had no writing system of their own. This was during the Tang Dynasty when China was probably the wealthiest and most advanced nation on earth. The Japanese sent scholars to China to study Buddhism, etc., who then brought back the Chinese writing system. At the time, everything Chinese was considered superior. In a sense this was a linguistic tragedy for the Japanese as the two languages are completely different.

Ultimately it proved impossible to write Japanese using only Chinese characters and they invented purely phonetic symbols (hiragana, katakana) of their own based on Chinese. By that time, however, a huge number of important terms had been incorporated into Japanese from Chinese. When those words are pronounced in Japanese they all sound the same because Japanese lacks the tones the are used in Chinese to distinguish among what would otherwise be homonyms. The result is a huge quantity of Japanese terms that cannot be distinguished from one another unless written in kanji.


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By AnnihilatorX on 9/2/2010 8:21:33 AM , Rating: 2
No, if you know the language you'll see having Kanji in the writing make it hell a lot easier to read. They make the sentence shorter, convey meaning of the specific word among others with same reading. And makes it look nice

Take my word for it, I have played SNES era Japanese games where all words are hiragana or katakana, very hard to read.


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By PaterPelligrino on 9/2/2010 9:41:08 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
No, if you know the language you'll see having Kanji in the writing make it hell a lot easier to read.


Why did you start that sentence with No ?

Nothing that I said about kanji contradicts anything that you've written. In fact, my point is precisely that kanji are necessary to clarify meaning in Japanese.

Perhaps you meant to reply to karlostomy's post?


By AnnihilatorX on 9/2/2010 10:46:58 AM , Rating: 2
Yes I replied to the wrong post sorry
Now I've started the sentence with yes lol


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By KingstonU on 9/2/2010 10:26:25 AM , Rating: 2
I completely agree with you and this is an argument I have had with my mother as we grew up speaking both french and english at home. She would cry as we grew older and started to lose our french in favor of english.

But the fact that french almost always requires nearly double the words to say or write the same thing as you would in english, and that the grammar in french is orders of magnitude more complicated than english, had me and my sisters all naturally choose to make english our primary language.

It is simply a more efficient and more effective way of communicating but she does not understand this at all. I think it is important for the human species to use the most efficient form of communication possible.


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By JediJeb on 9/2/2010 2:45:03 PM , Rating: 2
I agree that communication needs to be as efficient as possible, but sometimes that efficiency causes problems with meaning.

I converse with a few people from Russia, and when using translator software we have to remember that using a word like "hard" can cause a problem. Do you mean to say something is "difficult" or something is "not soft". Also think about the word "so", it has been used to replace the word "very" in many instances such as "that job was so hard" instead of "that job was very difficult"

Also someone mentioned evolution of language. Isn't is strange that biological evolution starts from the most simple of organisms and leads to the more complex, yet, language starts with the most complex forms and ends in the simplified forms. Sanskrit is said to be the oldest known language, but it is also the most complex language ever devised.

I have also found that over the years I have allowed my language skills to follow the path of simplicity. Things like instant messages in hurried communications drive such a change in habits. But also as I use the more simplified forms of communications I have had many more instances of being misunderstood, because they way I conveyed a thought turned out to have more than one meaning and without spoken inflections the meaning I meant to convey was not the meaning that was received. Just try saying a simple sentence and emphasizing a different word each time you say it and see how many different meanings you will find. The more complex the sentence structure and vocabulary used, the less effect speaking it will have on the meaning.

A comical example could be:

YOUR butt's not that big.

Your butt's not THAT big.

One can be a compliment, the other has you sleeping on the sofa.


By Rookierookie on 9/2/2010 10:34:25 AM , Rating: 2
By the way, we actually have a term for this "simplification" of languages.

It's called Newspeak.


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By AnnihilatorX on 9/2/2010 4:12:19 AM , Rating: 2
Chinese also have phonetic alphabets, you just don't write them. The number of vowels is similar to Japanese


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By Ahkorishaan on 9/2/2010 8:45:52 AM , Rating: 2
Uh, not to be contrary but Chinese does not have a phonetic alphabet. The Taiwanese have recently created a phonetic key for the language, but it is far from commonplace in usage or education.


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By chiadog on 9/2/2010 10:25:56 AM , Rating: 2
It was created by the Chinese almost a hundred years ago (there was only 1 China then). Taiwan continued its use after the KMT's retreat from mainland China. PROC has since switched to the romanized Hanyu pinyin.


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By AnnihilatorX on 9/2/2010 10:50:39 AM , Rating: 2
Alphabet I don't mean the tangible ones you can write it out, I should have used 'syllables'.

The phonetic system you mentioned is Jyu Yin some Taiwan people uses you can write them out yes, and indeed it's not common. But it's just a way to write sounds out, just like the romanisation into English.


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By Fritzr on 9/2/2010 11:06:11 AM , Rating: 2
Its a syllabry. It serves the same purpose as an alphabet, but once learned is easier to read as all the characters have assigned sounds. The difficulty with this system is new sounds. So with an older syllabry you will occasionally find symbols with extra sounds assigned in words that didn't exist when the character list was developed.


By phantom505 on 9/2/2010 11:22:07 AM , Rating: 2
Pin Yin. I took a year of Chinese spoken language and that is how they teach Chinese tones and syllables. My instructor was from Beijing so what she taut was Mandarin. What I always thought was odd is that if you ask a primary Chinese speaker what dialect, or more likely do you speak Mandarin or Cantonese they often have no idea what you're asking them. That has happened to me many times and I have had a hard time being understood by older generations of Cantonese speakers. However, younger Cantonese speakers and almost all Mandarin speakers understand my "accent", as they put it, alright. I just wished I could remember more but I just don't use it enough.


RE: Umm yeah. That would fun...
By whsyu on 9/2/2010 12:40:49 PM , Rating: 2
Almost all Taiwanese are familiar with bopomofo (Jhuyin, Jyu Yin), and all of them know how to use bopomofo for typing Traditional Chinese characters.

Bopomofo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo


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