Character amnesia | |||||||||||||||
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Traditional Chinese | 提筆忘字 | ||||||||||||||
Simplified Chinese | 提笔忘字 | ||||||||||||||
Literal meaning | pick up pen, forget the character | ||||||||||||||
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Character amnesia is a phenomenon where experienced speakers of some East Asian languages forget how to write Chinese characters previously well-known to them. The phenomenon is specifically tied to prolonged and extensive use of input methods,such as those that use romanizations of characters,and is documented to be a significant issue in China and Japan. Modern technologies,such as mobile phones and computers,allow users to enter Chinese characters using a phonetic transcription without knowing how to write them by hand. [1] [2] Whether or not the phenomenon is as widespread or troubling as some have claimed is the subject of debate. [3]
Chinese characters are a logographic form of writing,where the form of the character is not always directly related to its pronunciation. The characters are composed of a combination of 8–11 standard strokes,over a hundred common radicals,and hundreds of phonetic components. The characters can be very complex and learning them is a highly neuro-muscular task,meaning that it is difficult to remember how to write the characters without repetitive practice in writing them by hand. [4] Scientific studies have also shown that while reading utilizes diverse areas of the brain,reading Chinese makes unique usage of distinct parts of the frontal and temporal areas of the brain associated with motor memory and handwriting. [5] [6] [7] [8]
It is difficult to establish exactly how many Chinese characters are in use today;the new HSK,a widely used proficiency test for Standard Chinese as a second language,tests 3,000 characters,while in 2013 the People's Republic of China published the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters ,which contains 8,105 characters. In Japan,where a smaller set of characters are in general usage,the Japanese Ministry of Education prescribes the teaching of 2,136 kanji in primary and secondary school in a list called the jōyōkanji,meaning "regular-use Chinese characters".
Chinese character literacy in both China and Japan is taught by rote memorization,where schoolchildren become proficient at writing characters by writing them by hand repeatedly. As a result of people becoming less reliant on handwriting and more willing to use computer input methods,they are no longer exposed to the necessary reinforcement to retain the ability to write the characters. Those affected by character amnesia are still capable of reading text and visually recognizing characters,but are unable to write some characters by hand,usually those less frequently used,without the aid of an input method device such as a mobile phone or computer. [4]
Until the 20th century,Chinese characters were written with brush and ink. In the early 20th century when the pen became the dominant method of writing in China and Japan,critics complained that the expressiveness of Chinese characters would be lost. [9] Calligraphy is,however,still a thriving art form throughout East Asia.
In the 1980s electronic typewriters and later personal computers provided people in China and Japan an alternative to writing by hand. With the advent of the World Wide Web in 1991 and the subsequent widespread use of email,internet chat,and discussion forums,people began using computers to communicate with each other in Chinese and Japanese. Today,increased computer usage and the use of SMS text-messaging,especially among young people,means that a large portion of those people's everyday use of Chinese characters is done using input methods,not by hand. In a 2010 survey by Dayang Net,43 percent of respondents said they use the computer all the time for their jobs and 43 percent said that they only write out characters by hand when filling out forms or writing their signature. [10]
Some input methods are,in fact,related to the structure of the character,as opposed to those based on pronunciation. Cangjie is one popular example of such a structure based input method for Chinese. Input methods based on phonetic transcription which do not require the user to know how to write the character by hand are the most popular,because they are easier to use. In China,more than 97 percent of computer users enter Chinese characters using such a phonetic input method. [9]
A parallel phenomenon has appeared involving the increased use of input methods to write Chinese characters and the difficulty of remembering such a large set of characters. The use of word processors allows the user to write using characters that the user does not remember how to write by hand. This resulted in the reappearance in the 1980s in Japan of complex older characters which had been removed from the official lists. The number of characters available for use on a word processor far exceeds the number of characters a person can readily remember how to write by hand. [11] While many have blamed the use of input methods for difficulty remembering how to write the characters by hand,widespread use of input methods may be responsible for a reversal in the decline of kanji use in Japan. [12]
A way that smartphone developers have been attempting to combat this problem is their inclusion of active pens and handwriting options for their operating systems.
Anecdotal evidence of character amnesia is plentiful,but there has been insufficient scientific study of the phenomenon. [1] [13] [14] [15] There are,however,a few surveys which reinforce the claim that character amnesia exists among users of written Chinese and Japanese. China Youth Daily surveyed 2,072 people in April 2010 and found that 83 percent reported having trouble writing characters. A similar Dayang Net survey found that 80 percent of respondents acknowledged having forgotten how to write some characters. [10] In 2008 the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China conducted a survey of 3,000 teachers,where sixty percent complained of declining writing ability. [16] Another anecdotal example can be seen during a spelling bee show hosted on CCTV in 2013,where only 30% of participants were able to write "toad" (Chinese :癞蛤蟆; pinyin :Làiháma) in Chinese. [17] [18]
While some claim that text messaging is the primary cause of character amnesia, [10] the phenomenon,at least in Japan,appears to have originated with the widespread use of word processors. An article in The Asahi Shimbun from 23 September 1985 reports that students found it increasingly difficult to remember how to write even quite simple kanji by hand since the full-scale introduction of word processors at a university campus in Isehara. [19] A 1993 survey of members of the Information Processing Society of Japan found that habitual word processor users reported declining ability to write characters by hand. [11] The Japanese term "word-processor idiot" (ワープロ馬鹿,wāpurobaka) describes a person whose handwriting ability has deteriorated due to overreliance on computer input methods. [20]
In China,the Ministry of Education has attempted to counteract the problem of character amnesia through the promotion of traditional Chinese calligraphy classes. In 2011,the ministry's instructions included increasing the frequency of calligraphy classes for younger students to once every week and optional classes and after-school activities for older students. [21]
Several input methods allow the use of Chinese characters with computers. Most allow selection of characters based either on their pronunciation or their graphical shape. Phonetic input methods are easier to learn but are less efficient,while graphical methods allow faster input,but have a steep learning curve.
Kanji are the logographic Chinese characters adapted from the Chinese script used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used,along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana. The characters have Japanese pronunciations;most have two,with one based on the Chinese sound. A few characters were invented in Japan by constructing character components derived from other Chinese characters. After the Meiji Restoration,Japan made its own efforts to simplify the characters,now known as shinjitai,by a process similar to China's simplification efforts,with the intention to increase literacy among the common folk. Since the 1920s,the Japanese government has published character lists periodically to help direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characters that exist. There are nearly 3,000 kanji used in Japanese names and in common communication.
Penmanship is the technique of writing with the hand using a writing instrument. Today,this is most commonly done with a pen,or pencil,but throughout history has included many different implements. The various generic and formal historical styles of writing are called "hands" while an individual's style of penmanship is referred to as "handwriting".
In a written language,a logogram,also logograph or lexigraph,is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language,such as a word or morpheme. Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other languages are logograms,as are Egyptian hieroglyphs and characters in cuneiform script. A writing system that primarily uses logograms is called a logography. Non-logographic writing systems,such as alphabets and syllabaries,are phonemic:their individual symbols represent sounds directly and lack any inherent meaning. However,all known logographies have some phonetic component,generally based on the rebus principle,and the addition of a phonetic component to pure ideographs is considered to be a key innovation in enabling the writing system to adequately encode human language.
Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia,representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars;of these,they comprise the only writing system continuously used since its invention. Over time,the function,style,and means of writing characters have evolved greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech,Chinese characters generally represent morphemes,the units of meaning in a language. Writing a language's entire vocabulary requires thousands of different characters. Characters are created according to several different principles,where aspects of both shape and pronunciation may be used to indicate the character's meaning.
Handwriting recognition (HWR),also known as handwritten text recognition (HTR),is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input from sources such as paper documents,photographs,touch-screens and other devices. The image of the written text may be sensed "off line" from a piece of paper by optical scanning or intelligent word recognition. Alternatively,the movements of the pen tip may be sensed "on line",for example by a pen-based computer screen surface,a generally easier task as there are more clues available. A handwriting recognition system handles formatting,performs correct segmentation into characters,and finds the most possible words.
In relation to the Japanese language and computers many adaptation issues arise,some unique to Japanese and others common to languages which have a very large number of characters. The number of characters needed in order to write in English is quite small,and thus it is possible to use only one byte (28=256 possible values) to encode each English character. However,the number of characters in Japanese is many more than 256 and thus cannot be encoded using a single byte - Japanese is thus encoded using two or more bytes,in a so-called "double byte" or "multi-byte" encoding. Problems that arise relate to transliteration and romanization,character encoding,and input of Japanese text.
Handwriting is the writing done with a writing instrument,such as a pen or pencil,in the hand. Handwriting includes both block and cursive styles and is separate from formal calligraphy or typeface. Because each person's handwriting is unique and different,it can be used to verify a document's writer. The deterioration of a person's handwriting is also a symptom or result of several different diseases. The inability to produce clear and coherent handwriting is also known as dysgraphia.
Cursive is any style of penmanship in which characters are written joined in a flowing manner,generally for the purpose of making writing faster,in contrast to block letters. It varies in functionality and modern-day usage across languages and regions;being used both publicly in artistic and formal documents as well as in private communication. Formal cursive is generally joined,but casual cursive is a combination of joins and pen lifts. The writing style can be further divided as "looped","italic",or "connected".
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji,which are adopted Chinese characters,and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries:hiragana,used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements;and katakana,used primarily for foreign words and names,loanwords,onomatopoeia,scientific names,and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts,in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters,the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.
Semi-cursive script,also known as running script,is a style of Chinese calligraphy that emerged during the Han dynasty. The style is used to write Chinese characters and is abbreviated slightly where a character's strokes are permitted to be visibly connected as the writer writes,but not to the extent of the cursive style. This makes the style easily readable by readers who can read regular script and quickly writable by calligraphers who require ideas to be written down quickly. In order to produce legible work using the semi-cursive style,a series of writing conventions is followed,including the linking of the strokes,simplification and merging strokes,adjustments to stroke order and the distribution of text of the work.
Japanese input methods are used to input Japanese characters on a computer.
OpenVanilla (OV) is a free,open-source text-entry and processing architecture. It includes a collection of popular input methods and text processing filters,serving as a bridge between input methods and the operating system. It was originally designed to offer a better text-entry experience and alternative input methods not found in Apple's built-in set or suit better the needs for Windows "switchers." However,the developers have since worked on a Microsoft Windows port and a bridge between OV and SCIM on the X Window System. The macOS version is compatible with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) and Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). OV's input methods can also be used through SCIM on Linux or FreeBSD. An experimental Win32 Unicode version is also available.
In Japanese language,Ryakuji are colloquial simplifications of kanji.
ATOK is a Japanese input method editor (IME) produced by JustSystems,a Japanese software company.
Radical 113 or radical spirit (示部) meaning ancestor or veneration is number 113 out of the 214 Kangxi radicals. It is one of the 23 radicals composed of 5 strokes. When appearing at the left side of a character,the radical transforms into 礻 in modern Chinese and Japanese jōyōkanji.
A keyboard layout is any specific physical,visual,or functional arrangement of the keys,legends,or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard,mobile phone,or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard.
Bengali input methods refer to different systems developed to type the characters of the Bengali script for Bengali language and others,using a typewriter or a computer keyboard.
Radical 95 or radical profound (玄部) meaning "dark" or "profound" is one of the 23 Kangxi radicals composed of 5 strokes.
The thumb-shift keyboard is a keyboard design for inputting Japanese sentences on word processors and computers. It was invented by Fujitsu in the late 1970s and released in 1980 as a feature of the line of Japanese word processors the company sold,named OASYS,to make Japanese input easier,faster and more natural. It is popular among people who input large quantities of Japanese sentences,such as writers,playwrights,lawyers and so on,because of its ease of use and speed. The rights regarding the use of this design were transferred to Nihongo Nyuuryoku Consortium,a technology sharing cooperative of interested companies,in 1989. It is referred to as an example of keyboard layout in Japanese Industrial Standards.
...logographic systems appear to activate very distinctive parts of the frontal and temporal areas, particularly regions involved in motoric memory skills... because that is how Chinese symbols are learned by young readers- by writing, over and over.
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