The severity of the problem seems exotic.

> However, this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character. Highly literate people are forgetting how to write the characters in words like ‘kitchen’ (厨房), ‘lips’ (嘴唇), ‘cough’ (咳嗽), and ‘broom’ (扫帚). Victor Mair (2014) provides a striking example of the severity of the character amnesia problem. The following image is of a shopping list hastily written by a social science researcher from the PRC. The writer of the list struggled to remember the characters in ‘egg’ (鸡蛋), ‘shrimp’ (虾仁), and ‘chives’ (韭菜), and simply resorted to Pinyin.

Completely common problem. Anyone that speaks multiple languages sees this everyday, there are many words in Portuguese/Spanish/English I need the spellchecker for (or even translation) to write because I don't use it as frequently in that specific language.

That is happening a lot with cooking, as I started to take it much more seriously when I moved to the US and now my cooking vocabulary in English is much better/wider than it is in my native Portuguese, so I'll frequently use words in english for stuff I should know in portuguese but don't remember.

Even the Chinese Character Heroes competition mentioned in the article seems a lot like the spelling bee in the US, doesn't it? I wonder if the anecdote about the PhD students has a cultural dimension in addition to language proficiency — could the students have refused not because they don't know the characters, but because they aren't fully confident they wouldn't make a mistake?

Except in German this is not a problem. The idea that you could say/hear a word and not know how to spell it doesn't even make sense in that context.

Nah, it's common in German too. For example, the first parts of "Widerspruch" and "wiedersehen" are said/heard the same, so you just have to learn the spelling. Many, many other examples... Although on the scale of languages German is indeed closer to phonetic spelling than some others.

But if you were asked to spell the words, you'd produce something close to what was expected, rather than drawing a blank. The question "how do you spell wiedersehen" contains in itself a lot of clues.

This feels more like "what's the Unicode character for 'full moon'?" I'd be able to recognize the result as correct, but if I don't know the answer, I just don't know.

(Of course, that goes too far in the other direction. I assume you can draw a few strokes to "get someone started" on a character and they'll pick it up, whereas most people wouldn't recognize the first half of a Unicode code point. As the grandparent poster said, it's an exotic problem that's hard to empathize with in phonetic languages)

> I assume you can draw a few strokes to "get someone started" on a character and they'll pick it up

In my experience this is not actually the case; I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half).

I guess there's several levels of character amnesia here, from "I remember half the character" to "I have no clue but I'll recognise it".

> In my experience this is not actually the case; I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half).

That one's just bizarre, since 虾 is also just the most intuitively obvious choice to form a substitute character if you do forget the right component. If anything, I don't think pinyin substitution is something you do unless you're a highly-educated computer user who deals regularly in Latin script. It's a striking "man bites dog" moment, but the one has been passed around since 2006 (cf. https://pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_refor...) and is not, as far as I can tell, indicative of any particular trend. Discreet literacy outliers in jobs where you'd expect it are ... a thing in English too: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43700153

(It's honestly weirder to see someone write jiu菜 than 9菜 too.)

> it's an exotic problem that's hard to empathize with in phonetic languages

This, it's honestly not helpful to pretend it's the same as misspelling a word in a phonetic language because it's not and it's not even a good analogy to begin to understand the issue.

I do not think that the example is good. "Wider" and "wieder" have different meanings, even if they are probably derived from the same word.

I do not know if this is true in all the German dialects, but at least some pronounce "wider" with short "i" and "wieder with long "i", so they are easy to distinguish when heard (like the difference in English between "fill" and "feel").

English and German appear to have had a similar semantic evolution for this pair of words, because "wider" means "against", while "wieder" means "again", so in both cases a single word has evolved to cover these two different meanings and the variants have become differentiated in pronunciation too.

I'm a native German speaker and i don't know of a dialect in Germany that would pronounce "Widerstand" with a short "i". Would you mind sharing which dialect you think of?

"ie" is always long. For "i" it depends on the splitting of the word, i think. I don't know if this is a concept in other languages too. I think the rule is that if the "i" is at a split, then it is long, but i'm not sure and there are always exceptions to every rule in German. Consider "Schnit|zel", "Lis|te" (short) vs "Bi|bel", "Wi|der|stand" (long).

I have worked for some time in Germany and this is how some coworkers pronounced it, but I do not know where were they from.

From what you say I assume that the literary pronunciation is also with long "i", which is good to know.

Perhaps they were influenced by the different spelling, because I have seen this phenomenon in other countries, where despite a mostly phonetic writing some words were spelled differently than pronounced, for etymological or other reasons, and then the pronunciation of those words by many people has shifted, matching the spelling and not the traditional pronunciation.

I think Spanish is a much better example for write how you speak and still being correct, than German.

Hmmm not so literate people (or just children) make a lot of mistakes writing Spanish because a bunch of letters are pronounced the same. And then the “h” when not preceded by a “c” is silent, which causes issues.

What is true however is that of you learn the pronunciation rules you should be able to read a text correctly even if you have no clue what you’re saying. That’s not true of English for example.

There are a couple of rules that cause confusion:

- b, v and sound like /b/, because v lost its original pronunciation and w was lent from other languages.

- h lost its sound and became silent (used to be a soft /f/).

- g can sometimes sound like /j/ (there was some pressure to remove these uses).

- x can be an /s/ at the start of a word (due to Greek ancestry).

Those are considered mistakes, but they do not change the pronunciation of the words.

For the concrete rules: https://www.rae.es/ortograf%C3%ADa/valores-fonol%C3%B3gicos-.... You can see the exceptions to "one letter, one sound" are very few.

Also, in Latin America (but not most of Spain) z and s are pronounced the same.

H, V/B, LL/Y are problematic in Spanish and you have to memorize how each word is wrote down.

Is it? There is a lot of historical spelling in Spanish, though not as much as English. German, on with the other hand, has its spelling routinely updated every few years.

The historical spelling is quite limited, and mostly for retro-compatibility. Spanish tries to be understandable across a large number of countries and rules must accommodate old Spanish dating from the XV century.

Spanish is indeed somewhat more phonemic in spelling, even though it's not as good as Finnish, Turkish, or Serbo-Croatian.

That said, Spanish and German are both so much better than English that the difference between them can be disregarded in this context. The irony is that almost any major European language (with the notable exception of French) has better spelling than English; and even French, although it's horribly overcomplicated, is more consistent when it comes to reading.

> Except in German this is not a problem.

I don't know any German, so I can't comment on this, but I'll add that the concept of a spelling contest (like we have in English) wouldn't make sense in a lot of languages because the spelling of words are so obvious/consistent.

Finnish does this very well too. There is only a few tricky parts, but in general the spelling and pronunciation match. And if they don't, obvious solution is to write as word is pronounced. Which is a drift, but I think it is more desirable way.

And Italian. Way back in time I used to get phone calls (at work) from Italian customers not speaking English, and I could always write down what they said on the phone, and get it right. Always. I knew very little Italian at the time.

If you need an example of a germanic language that has a very regular phonetic spelling I think Dutch is a better example than German. German has a lot of idiosyncrasies, because the spelling tries to preserve the etymology of the words. In Dutch they don't bother trying to preserve a word's history, everything is written as it sounds. (With a handful easy to memorize exceptions)

>In Dutch they don't bother trying to preserve a word's history, everything is written as it sounds.

That explains why it looks like a 'silly' version of english to english speakers.

The article points out that, because Chinese is not a phonetic language, if you don't know how to write something, you might not be able to write it at all, while in phonetic languages you can always spell something that sounds the same. E.g. "snees" for "sneeze".

This is true in mainland China, but not in Taiwan. There, katakana is used as pinyin, and words can be composed by katakana.

I'm not sure where you've got this from, but I lived in Taiwan for years - you might be thinking of 注音 which does look similar to kana but is distinct and unrelated.

And the authors article is referring to the writing of the logograph - 注音 is strictly for pronunciation.

So the question is then whether writing "snees" instead of "sneeze" is like writing sneeze in pinyin (or in "注音"), or not.

Strongly disagree.

If you can remember the word "chocolate" but not the spelling then you can guess it. You might write choklit or choclate or something but you can at least get close.

If you forget what 警察 (police officer, jing3cha2) looks like then you're just completely screwed. Maybe you can remember a radical or two but it's still just going to be wrong and not meaningfully recognisable.

I guess you could write down 景茶 (jing3cha2) and rely on the phonetics, or use a different word if you know one, but it's still wrong on a level that "choclit" just isn't.

> I guess you could write down 景茶 (jing3cha2) and rely on the phonetics, or use a different word if you know one, but it's still wrong on a level that "choclit" just isn't.

If a non-native did this in their own way would likely look wrong, but Chinese natives do occasionally use phonics to write or to substitute some characters with others.

Yeah I agree with this. It's also super common in Pinyin to just typo and choose the wrong character through autocomplete.

I'm strictly referring to the handwritten language here, basically I don't think there is an analogue in alphabetic languages.

The counter-argument would be that the person could just use the pinyin or use a digital device to get them the characters. But as the article pointed out, those are both modern conveniences. Less than 100 years old both. The script absolutely gives no clues otherwise.

Let's put it this way: We know what ancient might egyptian (most likely) sounds like because they gave their writting system the uniliterals, which are pronunciation guides for complex words. We know that they said waw, and we know what a waw sounds like. They did this probably so they would not to explode their character count from hundreds to thousands.

I don't think these two forms of'amnesia-induced' typos are so different. "Typos" happen quite often, especially when typing on a smartphone and selecting the wrong character. And people learn to read it correctly. It's sometimes used intentionally, e.g. 歪果仁.

Exactly this, it was only recently my Italian friend was musing about how even other European languages don't really have this ability to just absoelootleigh fudge staff ind stihl b undurdudd.

> I’m just noting this so that this problem doesn’t seem totally exotic or specific to Chinese(/Japanese).

English orthography is exactly that. Exotic.

Imagine having such a strange spelling system that you have competitions where you try to recite spelling. Exotic.

Many people would consider Spanish, my native language, to be much more straightforward when it comes to spelling.

We still have spelling contests at state and nation levels.

> We still have spelling contests at state and nation levels.

That’s horrible. ;)

I am from Spain and I have never heard of the national spelling contest.

I guess every word in that contest must have a v/b/y/ll or an h.

> For those who can’t read Chinese here, I’ll just note that this is basically the equivalent of forgetting how to spell certain words in English.

I can't read Chinese, but I think the article has a better analogy: "most people can easily recognise the musical symbol for treble clef (𝄞), but very few could draw it by memory."

I think the example of "ampersand" "&" is good.

We have a word describing what it is, we have a symbol of how it looks, and we have a word of how it is pronounced "and". We also tend not to write ampersands down by hand. Its a more common symbol. However unlike the treble clef the meaning and the pronunciation is the same so perhaps the example isn't as good?