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Posted by nabla9 10/27/2024

Character amnesia in China(globalchinapulse.net)
483 points | 528 commentspage 4
Cerium 10/27/2024|
In English I find that I frequently cannot spell words without typing them. I wonder if there is actually some other related computer use effects.
FpUser 10/27/2024||
>"Can the Education System Solve the Problem..."

I think the question is rather: should it? Is there a real benefit for average Joe to memorize insane amount and complexity (at least to my untrained eye) of such characters? I think my brain would just explode. I'd rather use my memory for something more creative.

benbini 10/28/2024||
Can't figure out if Moser misspelling "abacus" as "abacas" in the final paragraph was some sort of joke - regardless, extremely ironic given the argument that phonetic systems are better suited for accurate active textual reproduction.
shanghaikid 10/28/2024||
In China, children start studying at the age of 6 and continue until they graduate from university at around 23. They have a large amount of homework and exams that require handwriting. There's nothing to worry about.
gverrilla 10/28/2024||
Would someone kindly explain what the authors means in the last paragraph with

"There is a bit of irony in all this: the digital technology is both a cause of and a solution to the problem."

? How is it a solution?

mlaci 10/28/2024|
Pinyin
howlingfantods 10/27/2024||
“Sneeze” or “喷嚏” is a pretty difficult word to write in Chinese in terms of number of strokes and its internal components. I’m not surprised people wouldn’t know it off the top of their heads. It’s like if someone asked you to spell “unnecessary.”
teractiveodular 10/27/2024||
The other dimension is that the second character 嚏 in particular is obscure: it's virtually never used in any other word than 喷嚏. In Japanese, it's a hyogai kanji not taught in school, meaning most people would spell it phonetically. Alas, this is not a practical/socially acceptable option in Chinese.

The first, 喷 "erupt", is not exactly common either but is at least used in a few other compounds like 喷水 "fountain".

NoInkling 10/29/2024||
喷 is included in HSK 5 and Heisig's version of the most common ~3000 characters, it can't be that infrequent.
pessimizer 10/27/2024|||
I don't think anybody is proposing that Chinese people are not normal humans making normal mistakes. The difference is that if somebody asked people to spell "unnecessary", there would only be three common mistakes they would make (based on whether letters are arbitrarily duplicated or not), and all would be easily understood by readers if written.

English orthography is terrible (i.e. a single vowel can be a half-dozen letters), but there's a limit to how complicated it can be to write a word that one knows how to say.

wizzwizz4 10/27/2024||
Wiyul I took migh yot to Luffbruh (acting az a cooryer surviss), I inshored my dissertacion woz cerrect bye revuwing the seilerfoan musick. Suddenly, their was a laud noys. I rush't too the sighed of the bote, but I sore the wartre fludding inn. "Quick! Sumbody hasta seel the hoal!" I cryde. Fourtuneatley, the glew oonder the bought's scin maid the holl cloaze up, sow we kepped floting, butt we terned arowned buy mesteak. Immajin mie shock wen wee woshed up in Lossymuth! Eye wonet fourget thatt deigh enny thyme sune, that's fore shur.

(I'm pretty sure this isn't eye dialect: I consulted the rhyming dictionary a lot, to make sure I was swapping spellings between two words with the same phonemes. I also tried to avoid reanalysis, though some of these words might not quite achieve that.)

int_19h 10/28/2024||
I'm not a native speaker even, but this is mostly readable.
bigstrat2003 10/27/2024||
> It’s like if someone asked you to spell “unnecessary.”

I would be quite surprised if someone couldn't spell that word, unless it was a child.

nuc1e0n 10/27/2024||
Unicode has stroke and radical counts for over 75000 characters. As this article states, most Chinese written text on computers is actually typed using pinyin.
transfire 10/27/2024||
They really should let it go for common communication.

It’s beautiful and culturally significant, and that will never be forgotten. But it doesn’t fit well with modern writing.

smitty1e 10/27/2024||
Suddenly the woes of English spelling seem slight.
raalyt 10/28/2024|
I decided to practise some “千字文” in fountain pen calligraphy after mind struggling as well for the character ”嚏“
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