Another interesting writer is John DeFrancis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_DeFrancis); the two books I have read are Visible Speech, a general examination of writing forms, with Chinese as an important case (and it was written before Mayan writing translation was commonly known, so it makes an interesting comparison with Breaking the Maya Code), and The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, an in-depth look at Chinese in the form of addressing some of the (really wacky) myths about Chinese writing.

IIRC, he reports several actual difficulties in learning to read and write:

* You have to learn many, many characters. And using a dictionary is non-trivial. (IIRC, the key is stroke order.)

* You may have to learn a different language. Written Chinese is written Standard (a.k.a. Mandarin) Chinese. If you happen to have grown up speaking Cantonese, you'll have to learn a related, but different language.

* Traditionally, the "proper" written language is classical, and by 'classical' I mean old. Imagine speaking modern French or Italian and writing in classical 1st century BC-1st century AD Latin.

* Many characters have a "sound" component and a "meaning" component. That might help, right? You could sort of sound things out. That is, if you were into historical phonology---like every other written language, the sound component as written was frozen when the character entered the language.

>* You have to learn many, many characters. And using a dictionary is non-trivial. (IIRC, the key is stroke order.)

Correct. Dictionary apps makes it easy to look up characters, however.

>* You may have to learn a different language. Written Chinese is written Standard (a.k.a. Mandarin) Chinese. If you happen to have grown up speaking Cantonese, you'll have to learn a related, but different language.

This is a regional/cultural thing and has nothing to do with the Chinese (Mandarin) language. French isn't a bad language because the Swiss also learn German.

>* Traditionally, the "proper" written language is classical, and by 'classical' I mean old. Imagine speaking modern French or Italian and writing in classical 1st century BC-1st century AD Latin.

What? Nonsensical and incorrect. Mandarin evolves like every other language in existence.

>* Many characters have a "sound" component and a "meaning" component. That might help, right? You could sort of sound things out. That is, if you were into historical phonology---like every other written language, the sound component as written was frozen when the character entered the language.

Again, what? 90% of Chinese characters are phonetic compounds where the component on the left modifies the sound of the main component.

In general, these types of ideas that the Chinese/Japanese/other non-alphabetic languages are inferior are strongly culturally biased (what exists in my own culture is correct, other cultures are wrong) and has hints of /r/iamverysmart (you actually have no idea what you're talking about).

>>* Traditionally, the "proper" written language is classical, and by 'classical' I mean old. Imagine speaking modern French or Italian and writing in classical 1st century BC-1st century AD Latin.

>What? Nonsensical and incorrect. Mandarin evolves like every other language in existence.

The person you're responding to is contrasting Classical Chinese with Mandarin. Recall that it wasn't until the Republic of China that Classical Chinese was abandoned as the written standard and that it is quite a bit more divergent from Mandarin than Latin is from Italian. The spoken language changed plenty but any educated person could read pretty much the entirety of the Chinese canon because the only writing in the vernacular was what was perceived as popular dross for peasants and women. Much as almost all scholarship in Europe up to the 1700s was written in Latin, anything for an educated audience in China was written in Classicak Chinese.

Mandarin(普通话) is a lot more divergent from Classical Chinese than Cantonese is, not that any modern Sinitic language is particularly close.

Total agreement on the boring and stupid assumption of superiority of lots of writers from languages with alphabets. The massive and unnecessary complexity doesn't do any harm to anyone except foreigners trying to learn a language who can't speak it already. Removing it would be uprooting a people from it's culture, like Vietnamese.

Sneeze isn't a particularly difficult word to spell. It's taken me many years to master the art of spelling "bureaucracy" and I literally just now misspelled "entrepreneur" and now "misspelled." Hell, people are spelling "their" incorrectly. THEIR!

Well, bureaucracy is half French and half Greek. Bureau being the French word for "desk", imported into English to refer to the metaphorical desk. The "-cracy" part is from -κρατίᾱ, a derivative of κράτος (power) which ends up denoting a form of rule (see also autocracy, plutocracy, democracy; all of these purely Greek).

The key to good English spelling is the meticulous study of etymology; I learned this when I was about five years of age. Once you get used to thinking about words in terms of their root languages, then things start to make sense most of the time, except for all the exceptions.

"The key to good English spelling is the meticulous study of etymology"

I'd argue it's the key to good understanding and use of any language

From a spelling point of view there are certainly exceptions. Bahasa Indonesia and its Malaysian cousin involve a remarkable amount of words borrowed English, but it doesn't show in the phonetic orthography

Yes, but "thier" problem is not that they aren't "mispelling", it's that they can't remember the character at all. It would be the equivalent of missing a stroke in a chinese character - if my minimal experience from Japanese is any guide, people would still be able to roughly figure out which character it was, but it would be considered a bit crude. That's where incorrect spelling is in english.

They're not talking about that, they're saying "We can't remember how the word looks at all". It's pretty neat as a problem to have, to be able to say it but not even have an idea about how it might be spelled.

"Not one of them could correctly produce the character." is slightly different from "We can't remember how the word looks at all". I would assume they know it's spelled with the 口 radical, but they might get the details of 疐 wrong.

FWIW, I could write it correctly, but I also spend 40 minutes per day practicing vocabulary, the bulk of which is spent on writing the characters.

> it's that they can't remember the character at all

I can guarantee you that each of those students would recognise the character if they saw it, they just can't generate it correctly from scratch.

As a native Chinese, I can't produce 嚔 either. I'm interested in the statistics among college-educated Chinese how many _can actually_ write down that character...

I'm curious about that original passage - is the real reason for that something like that a native Chinese person writing a letter to another native Chinese person telling them that they were sick and had to cancel something would not phrase things like that, using the literal word for "to sneeze"? Is some other phrase or wording more commonly used to communicate things like that?

I was assuming the note would be something like

   Dear Dr. Li, I'm sorry to say that I have to cancel our appointment this afternoon because I've been coughing and sneezing all day. I look forward to seeing you when I feel better again.

Modern Chinese would write 感冒 (gan mao; 'have a cold') instead. Much simpler to remember. Besides, they could send an audio message on WeChat, which functions like a global distributed walkie-talkie, or type it in pinyin, at which point the computer would auto-guess the characters and they'd only have to remember vaguely whether those characters "looked right" with some general degree of confidence, which is exactly how I input them myself. If they really had to write, they'd use the same method on their cellphone then copy the characters over. If the reader couldn't recognize the characters, an OCR system on their phone could do it for them. In short: through technology, this is now a solved problem.

I'd like to see the proportions of college-educated folks that could write it before and after the advent of the internet/commonly-used chinese keyboarding; were people better at it before the era of 'select the desired character from a list'?

Mainland Chinese use 嚏 instead of 嚔. I suspect they don't often know how to write that character because the phonetic root 疐 is only also used in 懥. Anyway, when writing, wouldn't Chinese use same grass-script style shorthand for it?

>Mainland Chinese use 嚏 instead of 嚔.

I really had to zoom in before I could even see the difference....

嚔 is indeed hard to produce, even for Chinese native speakers. It is an example of an exception, though, like entrepreneur in English (I know it is from French, so the spelling is "unusual").

First, people don't write 喷嚔 often, although they use it in spoken Chinese regularly. It seems people are reluctant to write down words that describe certain body functions.

For 嚔, the difficulty is that its "sound" component is extremely rare in Chinese characters. The majority of Chinese characters are 形声字. Each of such character has a "sound" component and a "meaning" component. Many characters can share the same "sound" component. The "sound" components are usually the "harder" component in writing, in that they have more strokes. (For 嚔, the rectangle at the left is the "meaning" component. The complicated looking part at the right is the "sound" component.) As a result, if one remembers how to write one character, one can simply remember many other characters with the same "sound" component. If one of these characters is commonly used, it is an easy task to remember all the others.

I only know two other characters who share the same "sound" component with 嚔, and I don't think people use them now. They only appear in ancient books.

So 嚔 is a character you don't often write down, and there are no other commonly used characters who shared the same "sound" component. Then you get a character who is hard for native Chinese speakers as well.

I like this analogy, but doesn't it just sort of point to the non-phonetic aspects of Chinese as the problem? If every time I had a hard time remembering how to spell something I couldn't even write down an approximation ("entrepenor") that someone or my computer could error-correct, it would strike me as a real flaw to the writing system!

(I'm assuming here that when Chinese writers can't remember the symbol for an unusual word, they also can't write down a recognizable approximation. Maybe not true?)

See @schoen's good explanation to solve the issue with a computer.

It can be solved with a dictionary as well, by looking up the character from its pronunciation.

With neither computer nor dictionary at hand, it would mostly fall into three scenarios. First, you vaguely remember the character, but can't produce the correct one. Then you can make up a character that look closely to it, like an approximation ("entrepenor") in your example. People will get what you mean from the context.

Some people will substitute with another character of the same sound. Usually it is a character of much simpler form. This is actually an evolving process naturally occurred in history (I don't know what is the correct term in linguistics.) Many very complicated characters had been gradually replaced by simple ones of the same sound in Chinese's >2000 years' history. That is one of the reasons why one character may have multiple meanings.

Some other people will substitute with pinyin. It mostly happens in children's writing. Many children start writing diary at very early age (Chinese is indeed a difficult written language, so we have to start early :) Children like to try new words, especially the "big" words they hear from adults. But it is tiring and frustrating to keep looking up dictionary. Pinyin comes to the rescue. I find it cute, even aesthetic visually, that a child's writing has occasionally pinyin mixed with characters.

They could use a computer with a pinyin input method and see a list of characters that have that pronunciation. In this case they could enter "tì" or "ti4" and get a list something like

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C3%AC#Romanization

but probably with a nicer interface. (They do have to be able to recognize the written character when they see it. Here the character Moser was trying to produce is one of the forms under item 5.) Also, there are statistical techniques to show the most probable characters in context following particular other characters, not just the most frequent characters overall.

For example, if Moser had just typed 喷 on a computer and then was looking for a character pronounced "tì", software could suggest 嚏 as the most likely possibility in that situation.

But it would probably be a fairly terrible situation when not using a computer.

You can fake it, though, just like you can misspell a word in English.

Write 打喷替 and someone will figure out what you mean.