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by cooper12
2628 days ago
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I actually made a serious attempt at learning the Four-Corner Method for kanji [0] and it was very frustrating. It would be difficult to determine what parts of the kanji belonged to which corner, and which exact shape they corresponded to. And strokes wouldn't always be interpreted the way I thought they'd be since it's based on a handwritten representation of the character. Many characters also have multiple FC numbers! The FC method was never meant to uniquely identify specific characters, but just to help narrow down a list of candidates in a dictionary. Funnily enough, I also argue something similar in this thread that has the same drawbacks :) [0]: Because I was interested in typing characters while not actually knowing the kanji. The Tagaini Jisho app (https://www.tagaini.net/) was indispensable because it lets you search on multiple parameters including partial FC # and simpler methods like SKIP codes (http://nihongo.monash.edu/SKIP.html). The only characters I couldn't transcribe with this method were those printed so small that the individual strokes were difficult to make out. |
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In fact, all of these non-phonetic input/encoding systems are highly non-intuitive and have a reputation of sharp learning curves, frustration is expected. This is because, in general, Chinese or Kanji characters are expected to be pronounced or written by the speakers, not to be indexed in a particular encoding system. Only the pronunciation is the natural form in the language.
The encoding schemes are completely foreign, arbitrary to the native speakers. Using them requires extensive and systematic training. In mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, in the 80-90s, learning to use a computer often starts from learning the code, and it needs at least two months of mechanical memorization to get started, and years of use to master it, just like how amateur radio operators learn Morse Code (edit: well, you don't need to memorize the code for every single character as if it's Morse Code, but remembering the standard decomposition of characters in the system is comparable to rememebr the Morse Code table). And remember, these are native speakers, much greater effort is needed for foreign speakers.
Sure, schemes based on radicals have been used for a thousand years in dictionaries, but all of these schemes used today are a completely artificial creation for typing and searching things into/from computers (often on those with very limited computing power).
The increase of processing power of personal computers in the late 90s allowed phonetic input systems to map pronunciation to characters heuristically, with high correctness rate. So those codes are rarely used by Chinese, and Japanese speakers (I believe) today.
Unless you've learned computing in the during 80s to mid 90s, or you have a job related to language or word processing that requires typing tens of thousands of characters or creating/searching them in a language-related database, or you are someone who emphasize typing efficiency.
> Because I was interested in typing characters while not actually knowing the kanji.
This is actually a common requirement for people with those jobs, and one of the biggest reason to keep using them. It is especially useful when transcribing texts to computers or searching them in a database.
Users also argue that, using them help preventing the modern disease of forgetting the writing of characters due to computerization, which I do see a point, similar to the spell-checker problem in English education.