It seems that forgetting how to write Hanzi/Kanji is no longer a problem which faces the foreign learner. 'Character amnesia' is a growing problem in China and Japan among young people, now used to using alphabet based input systems on mobiles and computers. There is even a suggestion this could be the beginning of the end for Chinese characters.

http://www.physorg.com/news202021739.html

Nah. They can still read characters fine.

I rather think learning Chinese without characters is even harder...

I wonder who is generally worse at characters, Chinese or Japanese people. My guess would be Japanese. To me it makes sense that there are characters in Chinese, because of all of the homonyms, but why does Japanese need Kanji? Are there lots of homonyms in Japanese too? Do they hold on to characters because of their heritage/history, or because they actually really need to have Kanji/characters for their written language to be comprehendible? I would love for all of the Japanese hot-shots to delve into this one!

Reading is not a problem but handwriting is in fact a growing problem. On the other way, it is actually very seldom they do need to write by hand. I can my self write more than 1000 more characters using IME tools than I can write by hand. If you do not use knowledge it will get lost. For characters it is the handwriting they are loosing but the reading and IME Inputting is still there. I see this with both my Chinese and Japanese friends. Computers makes it so easy to avoid writing so they are loosing that part fast. I have tested this with some Skritter games at bars with friends and it is amazing to see how hard they have to think to write. It is similar with spelling in the west. We are so used with spelling check that wee are getting poor in proper spelling.

@Mandarinboy: An example of which you provided in your last sentence :-P

Sorry, i am so ashamed, again;-)

About Japanese, They have actually tried at least 3 times to change to Latin letter based writing. It where not popular. Even Mao where considering alternatives. Both Chinese and Japanese actually like the characters so they are not that interested in changing that. It is part of the identity. Young people usually complains since it takes time even for them to learn. Japanese can be entirely written with Kana so many young suggest that they should abolish Kanji for only Kana. They do change opinion when they get older. How sad it would be without characters.

@Mandarinboy where in Europe are you originally from?

From the very cold Sweden. Actually miss that now.

Oh cool !!

Mandarinboy said:

'I can my self write more than 1000 more characters using IME tools than I can write by hand.'

I would argue that if you can only produce them using IME tools, that you don't actually know how to write them, only recognise them. That is the whole essence of the article I posted, young people can recognise many characters but can't remember how to write them by hand.

Yeah the IME tools help you out a lot - kind of like Skritter when you're not using raw squigs mode. ;)

James

@James I agree that using raw squigs is better for long term learning, but in my opinion it's not half as fun (especially when using a mouse)

A similar article was posted a while back but I don't have time to search through the forums to find it.

@Bohan. You seem very young to me -- high school, I'm guessing. Am I right?

I think Kanji complements the other two scripts (hiragana and katakana) in the Japanese language. If you thought about your question for a while I bet you would think of the answers you seek.

@icecream You're right, I am young. I'm in 7th grade right now.

You think Kanji complements the other two scripts? In what way? Seems like an incomplete answer. What you just wrote was more philosophical then anything else. Thanks anyway!

I'm guessing that there are far less Japanese studying Skritter users because it's really rare that I see a Japanese related post on the forum. I'm pretty sure everyone who left a comment on this thread is studying Chinese

@Bohan lol… Disregard my last comment. If I would have known you were in 7th grade I would have made my answer explicit. Chinese characters are good at representing certain ideas and complex concepts in a clear and concise manner that is superior, at least to me, than the “native” katakana and hiragana scripts in Japan. Sometimes abstraction is also easier to achieve with characters.

It complements the language the same way other “languages” have complemented English. It’s sort of like how borrowed Arabic numbers (0, 1, 2, etc.) instead of using Roman numerals (I, II III IV, etc.) in math. There are multiple ways of saying the same thing but some methods are more elegant or serve a specific purpose. We do the same thing in English. Whenever I want to sound smart I use vocabulary that comes from Latin – succinct instead of terse, for example – to give it an academic flavor.

Many westerners have a warped view and perspective when it comes to Chinese characters and consider them “backwards” and “inefficient”. There might be some truth in what they say. Personally, however, I think that they would lose a large part of their culture if they switched to an alternative.

As much as the Chinese student who despises hanzi from the depths of her soul within me would love to see hanzi die a painful death, I would probably mourn their passing. As irksome and borderline impossible as writing them is, Chinese just wouldn't be Chinese without them.
...Besides, once I'm not being controlled by teachers, I'll be able to use my computer input program anyways, and it won't be a problem!

For Chinese, I can't imagine Hanzi going away because the a lot of information is already built into the characters and people will actually draw characters during a conversation just to make it clear which words are being used.

For Japanese, I think that using Kanji is important if for no other reason than it provides a kind of shorthand to written materials. I read a blog post awhile back in which a Japanese speaker tried reading a version of "The Hobbit", that was translated into Japanese using only kana. He said that after a few pages he had to put it down and a version that included Kanji because reading all the kana was just too tedious.

@icecream actually "terse" also comes from Latin "tersus" http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=terse

[This post is strictly in regard to written Japanese and not spoken Japanese.]

Wait a second.

Japanese would be nearly IMPOSSIBLE TO READ without kanji!

Have you ever tried reading a long paragraph of nothing but kana? I'm sure that you have. Do you know how excruciating it is? A paragraph that you could read at a glance will require entire minutes. For example, "Ka" has to be one of the most inscrutable words in Japanese without kanji readings. It's like, what DOESN'T it mean? :) "Kyou" and "Kyuu" are 2 more onyomi readings that beg for kanji. A language like Korean is possible without kanji because they have more than enough sounds and characters to be phonetic and create unique sounds and images for words. But there are way too few sounds in Japanese to make the current system work with just kana. They would need to have spaces between words, more sounds or more kana. Or drop onyomi entirely and make longer and more unique words for their kunyomi counterparts.

For a comparison, imagine if I turned each of the previous comments into International Phonetic Alphabet? In IPA, you would be able to pronounce each sentence perfectly but good luck trying to decipher the meaning since "there", "their" and "they're" would all be spelled the same. We need spelling in our written language in the same way that Japanese needs kanji.

The day HanZi will end is the day the world ends haha. I think it will never happen. Writing and reading entire pages only in PinYin is inefficient, tedious, and very unclear in my opinion.
I think we are overestimating the trouble that Chinese people have with writing characters; many western people have problems writing correctly as well. I think it's pretty common for language to suffer under the new technological era.
Besides I think the Chinese would never allow it to happen. Imagine the process of converting everything to PinYin?

The argument that if a meaning can be conveyed without being precise is as old as languages. It usually start with the young. I went through the same phase in school. For the Chinese and Japanese its their characters, for the English its spelling, for the Hebrews its vowels etc. The same can be said about grammar. Its trouble to learn and I suppose you could talk and write with complete disregard of grammar, but its never going to be abolished because its a bit trouble to learn.

Just look at kids with their sms language. They seem to understand each other "only" because of the level of the conversation: "lol u shld check my pic on fb. r we still gr8 4 2nites party?"

Try to draw up 'n legal contract in sms language and see if all the parties are going to live happily ever after. Thats why the UN and EU and all the international organizations have hundreds of linguist and grammatic specialists facilitate the writing of their agreements in 2 or 3 or 6 etc number of languages so that there can be precision. In my view, the same apply to the need for characters.

I just typed "yi" into nciku's search bar, and it came up with 121 characters with that pinyin. Even if you consider neutral to be the 5th tone, that still leaves an average of over 24 words per pinyin 'yi'.

That's why Chinese will always need characters. It's a language with such a limited set of phonetic syllables that clear, alphabetic, written communication is virtually impossible.

Doing away with HanZi has been considered a few times by the Chinese governments as a way to make communicating with the West easier and in an attempt to improve literacy rates, but has always come up against strong opposition.
To illustrate the reasons why the characters are needed in Chinese (any of the dialects, not just Mandarin), a poem was written showing that using only Pinyin makes it an impossible language to read. The poem is on this link, in English, HanZi and Pinyin and makes a good read - it probably makes a good tongue twister as well if you want to practice your tones! :)

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/10466

@ Happyblue and Fatdragon

Then how is it that a tonal language like Vietnamese has been able to get away with not using characters?

哎哟。I'd like to think--would love to think--that anyone who's gone as far as signing up for a subscription at this website is past the point of thinking that characters are a waste of time. Far be it from me to presume that nerdy Western assumptions on the aesthetic value of longstanding handwritten conventions should determine linguistic practice in nations not our own, but. Ok yeah that's exactly the argument I'm advancing here, kinda.

Characters are beautiful. They are fantastic. For many of us, they're most of the reason we endure this ridiculous enterprise of learning Chinese/Japanese in the first place. God knows that our lives are hard enough as is without adding to them the mind-crippling task of mastering a language that couldn't be more different from the one/s we grew up with. Characters are as beautiful as they are abstruse and willy-nilly, which is in fact the thing that leads us to pay x dollars a month for a service let's face it which has us memorizing, as an exercise in kinesiology, the repetitive drawing of curvy lines on an electronic visual display for a half hour or more a day.

Which is to say what everyone here knows already, which is that Chinese/Japanese is f****** hard if you plan on learning it all the way down. And that if you expect for a second not to learn your 汉字 or 漢字 to the point of more or less fluency, you had better give it up altogether in favor of something easier instead, like French let's say.

Be encouraged :-)

@Bohan

I don't know enough about the Vietnamese language to start to comment on how the language works without characters, but I can comment on why Chinese has difficulties.

The first point is that Chinese has a very limited number of different syllables which is why so many words (different meanings) have the same sound, whether tonally the same or not. That is how writing a passage using one 'sound' is possible. As a written language, Chinese relies on the different characters to differentiate between the different meanings, otherwise the written passages become meaningless.

The original article comments on how many Chinese people are losing the ability to write the characters as they type the words using IME, but they still read the characters when they receive an e-mail or text, many Chinese people would find it hard to understand a large piece of text written entirely in Pinyin.

My point is that characters are central to the Chinese writing system and, whether we like it or not, they are here to stay - for the duration of our lives anyway! As Murray said, characters are a reason for many people (me included) to learn Chinese and the world would be a duller place without the beauty of the characters to astound and baffle us! :)

@ HappyBlue

That poem was awesome! Thanks for the link! :-)

The audio has me cracking up! Is this understandable? It seems as unintelligible as the pinyin.

I can't imagine that a Chinese person hearing that would have any better idea of what it's saying than I do!

After reading HappyBlue's post about Chinese people finding it hard to read text written entirely in pinyin reminded me something that happened with my language partner.

I was asking him about a sentence that I wrote out in pinyin, and he had so much trouble reading it that I had to dig out the print out that I had which had the same sentence in characters. As soon as he saw the characters, his face lit up and he immediately understood the sentence.

I asked him why he had so much trouble with pinyin and he told me that reading pinyin for a native speaker of chinese is a lot like an English speaker trying to decipher the phonetic symbols in English dictionaries without seeing the actual English word.

@Bohan
@Happy Blue


The first point is that Chinese has a very limited number of different syllables which is why so many words (different meanings) have the same sound, whether tonally the same or not. That is how writing a passage using one 'sound' is possible. As a written language, Chinese relies on the different characters to differentiate between the different meanings, otherwise the written passages become meaningless.


Hello all,

As a native speaker of Vietnamese, I am extremely interested in this topic. To address Happy Blue's point: Vietnamese and Chinese, according to my understanding, have about the same number of phonetic sounds, or at least, they are in the same range. In other words, its set of phonetic sounds and their number are MUCH (sorry, I can't bold it) closer to those of Chinese than to those of English.

However, we do not have problem understanding any popular text, if we pay attention. The context makes it clear, and of course this takes practice but it can be achieved.

Only when you read philosophic/translated/highly-academic work then the problem creeps in,but then only sometimes. The problem is that in Vietnamese's writing, a space is inserted after each "pinyin". If you don't pay close attention when reading highly-academic works, you will get lost.

Because of these spaces and the lack of character, it's harder (for me) to take in new abstract or just plain technical vocabulary. It's also make it harder to difficult to skim。　But most people don't realize this, because they have been brought up in this environment. Because of this I think Chinese with Characters and English are superior in some aspects.

Also, since Vietnamese's grammar, like Chinese's, is not strict, not having character indicating important parts of sentences (such as but not limited to, 的，　地，得）　some times makes sentence structure weak and even illogical.

Most of the problem can be solved if we start grouping "pinyin' together though. It has to be done in a certain way, with a strict set of offical rules. I dont see it getting fixed anytime soon, since it's not that big of a deal. I only realized this after some years in the U.S. and couple months in China, so I don't blame them.

** In Vietnamese, the problem with add a space between every two "pinyin"s is that since Vietnamese like Chinese is comprised mostly of disyllabic words. For example, "History" in Vietnamese is "Lich su", "Lich" alone can mean a lot of different things.

Actually since most of the words are disyllabic, it's hard to mistake a word's meaning for other words' meanings. That's why we don't have that big of a problem, but it does happen on occasions.

Yikes. Just been reading Wikipedia... Vietnamese sounds like an even harder language than Chinese :o.

It's hard, I agree, but it doesn't have 了，呢，着。。。

And no characters.

Learning it after you are done with Chinese (if that can be done) is a piece of cake!

People, how is it possible that a spoken language can survive if it is incomprehensible without writing? That seems nonsensical on its face. How is it that children learn to speak Chinese before they learn to read and write? How is it that Chinese people can't understand texts written in pinyin - they can just read the text aloud, and since they understand spoken Chinese they should have no trouble, right? This is blowing my mind.

Sure, there are homophones and ambiguities in every language. But how often have you had to ask whether someone was saying "you're" or "your", or "too" or "two" or "to"? If you're like me, it's almost never, because the context, intonation, and stress all make it abundantly clear.

James

The spoken language is clear because of prosody (rhythm, stress, and intonation). The written language is clear because the characters are more specific. But transcribing the spoken form loses the prosody and the specificity.

English has way more sounds and syllables to make reading phonetic transcriptions easier (or bad misspellings), but even so, something like this (a relatively straightforward text with context) is not easy to read:

Kair ik terz aar byue ti fool. Thae aar fant tas tik. Fer men ee uv us, thair moest uv thu ree zin wee end duer this reed dik yue lis ent er priez uv lern eeng chien nees or jap in neez in thu ferst plaes.

In fact, there was a game I played where it would give you an English sentence with nonsense words, which if you pronounced it right, was basically the same as another sentence, which was the answer--but it was often very difficult to figure out what the sentence was, even though you had the pronunciation! They helped confuse the prosody you'd start with by making a different sentence out of the same syllables.

I think all it takes is some practice. This is, after all, the first time (or maybe 10th) you see it.

It's indeed harder if you break it out like that. It's sort of like Vietnamese but there is a small difference.

I am sorry I made a mistakes.

Vietnamese and Chinese words are monosyllabic, that is they are complete even when there is only one syllable. But most words are comprised of two of the same or related words.

It's not like English when you type: Jap in neez. Rather it is: Ri Yu, where both words would still make sense in context if they stand alone.

I'm with jww1066. Hanzi is helpful because it can very specific - words with the same sounds have different characters.

But if Hanzi was truly necessary, then 1 billion people in China would walk around with paintbrushes, drawing characters every time they wanted to say something. That simply doesn't happen, because even though different words have the same sounds, they can tell from the context what the meaning of the word is.

Yes people will draw characters on their hands sometimes in conversation. But not every conversation, and it is just a shortcut to asking "wait, what do you mean?".

1. computers will decide this issue...

computers have Digitial memory...
computer can remember forever...
No need for human memory of characters.

2. Moore's Law.. Double computing power in 2-years time...... 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 etc..

Double power in 2-years.

3. HANZI IN CHINA... Writing sytem in

japan

korea

china

will all be based on ABC-system

0101010101
xoxxoxxxoox: magic of two

0123456789: magic of ten.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvxyz.

Like KIM JONG IL in North Korea... once he is dead.
Son #3 will in lead to the collape of north korea.

Free world will be HANZI-free.
Digital age will be the end of HANZI....

Mao, thank you for your post. This "end of Hanzi" ideal comes from Communists.

Enough said.

@Mao, first, welcome back from the dead.

Second, another possibility is that computers will make it easier for people to learn hanzi/kanji and that will allow them to survive.

jww1066 December 9th, 2010 12:00p.m.

"...Second, another possibility is that computers will make it easier for people to learn hanzi/kanji and that will allow them to survive."

I didn't even think of that! You are quite smart, jww1066. I really hope that you end up being correct.

A switch to pinyin-only would destroy written Chinese, not make it easier. Ancient literature would be particularly hard-hit and need to be translated; classics that children read in school would no longer be accessible.

I have a really hard time comprehending how anyone could think this would be a good idea. English spelling is so much less logical and less learner-friendly, yet we somehow manage.

So many words in Chinese are accessible at first glance even if you have never seen them before. A Chinese child can tell you what 猿人 means. Not many American adults can tell you what "australopithecine" means.

Here's an example of a paragraph that, if written in characters would take seconds to skim over. It's about as readable as most pinyin writing could get since there are few instances of ambiguity. Hint, topic is literary criticism.

　ránér ，lái zài fēngfù 、qǐlì 、shénmì de rénshēng zhīqián ，jíshǐ shì jīngāng sì de bùléidìyē ，tā yě yào zěnyàng shīsè ，jìntuìwéigǔ ，fǔyǎng wúpíng 。yī gè pīpíngzhě xūyào guǎngdà de xiōngjīn ，dàn shì bú pà méiyǒu guǎngdà de xiōngjīn ，gèng pà quēfá shēnkè de tǐwèi 。suī shuō yī shǒu sì háng xiǎo shī ，nǐ wánquán jiē shòu ma ？suī shuō yī bù tōngsú xiǎoshuō ，nǐ dānbǎo méiyǒu shēnhòu rénshēng de bèijǐng ？zài shīrén huò xiǎoshuōjiā biǎoxiàn de gèrén huò shèhuì de jiǎoluò ，rúruò nǐ méiyǒu shēnghuó guò ，nǐ yǒu shízú de xiǎngxiàng chóng shēng yī biàn ma ？rúruò nǐ de jīngyàn hé zuòzhě de jīngyàn cānchà ，shì shuí gèng yǒu dào lǐ ？rúruò nǐ yǒu dàolǐ ，nǐ kě céng bǎ yīqiē jī běn de qūbié ，lìrú xìngqíng ，gǎnjué ，guānnéng děngděng ，yě dǎ jìn lái jì suàn ？méiyǒu dōngxī zài bǐ rénshēng biànhuàmòcè de ，yě méi yǒu dōng xī zài bǐ rénxìng shēn'àonánzhī de 。liǎojiě yī jiàn zuòpǐn hé tā de zuòzhě ，jīhū suǒyǒu de kùnnán quán zài rén yǔ rén zhījiān de céngcéng gémó 。


There are certainly drawbacks to characters. They are difficult to learn to write. They do not mesh well with new technology. They are difficult for white people to get used to. However, there are many, many reasons why getting rid of characters would be a very bad thing for Chinese. Simple literacy is by far at the top.

Not to mention characters let you write stuff like this:
作为一个裆的干部,手先应伸入裙中,撩解裙中,真抓湿干,鸡急进去,提睾睡平,让裙中满意,让裆放心

With the advance in computer power, bar code is going from 1-d into 2-d like the “Data Matrix” and “QR code”. The ABC-system is analogous with the 1-d bar code while the Hanzi is with the 2-d. When thinking in computer power, Hanzi is the trend.

pts, that went right over my head. Are you saying that hanzi are being used in computer coding?