[garou]

If you consider that a lot of people using the Latin alphabet does use the cellphone autocomplete to check how to write a word used infrequently...

So I would say this text is biased by the "western" view of the writer, something that could be categorized as "Orientalism". A study about this phenomenon is valid, is important. But this post is not a good study.

[nogridbag]

But autocomplete even for basic words? My wife is Chinese. I'll never forget when she was helping her family write some formal letter in Chinese in Microsoft Word and she simply could not input the numbers 1, 2, and 3 in Chinese because she forgot how. And I know this may be apples and oranges because this is keyboard input versus writing on paper but as a programmer who can type at a moderate pace since I was a kid (~120wpm) this was perplexing for me! And similar to the article, she's an Ivy league grad. Similarly, when she's communicating with her family via WeChat half the time she simply sends audio messages instead of text messages. I'm pretty surprised this method is so popular instead of some voice-to-text google assistant type system.

[aragonite]

I think there may be some confusion. The standard Chinese characters for 1, 2, and 3 (一, 二, 三) are among the simplest characters in Chinese: literally just one, two and three horizontal strokes. These would be extremely difficult to forget! What your wife was likely trying to write were the special variants (壹, 贰, 叁) that are used on checks, official documents, etc. These were specifically designed to be hard to alter or forge (think the difference between writing "100" versus "ONE HUNDRED" on a check). Even highly educated Chinese people might need to look these up since they are specialized characters not used in everyday writing.

[nogridbag]

That explains it. Yup these were some sort of official / govt documents. Thanks for the explanation!

Edit. I should have realized that. I just came back from China and my kids were watching a children's show with the following subtitles: "一二一二一二一二一二一二一二一二一二一二". Took me a while to realize the subtitles were not broken. The characters were marching chanting "one two one two..." :)

[unscaled]

I think this is specifically more an IME (input method software) issue than a typing one. Japanese has similar "official" numbers (壱, 弐, 参, maybe some of the few cases where modern Japanese is more simplified than Simplified Chinese). These numbers couldn't be easier to type. I just type 1, 2, 3 (i.e. the digit keys on top of my keyboard), hit the convert key and select the right character (I also get offered 三, ③, 3⃣,³ and several other options to choose from). That's it.

I tried the same with Google's IME and I couldn't use digits as input, like the Japanese IMEs let you do. I could find the character for 叁 quickly enough, but 壹 was only on the second or third page. Still, I suck at Chinese and I found it.

Now, writing these characters is an entirely different story. I think any character that's rarely written and appears only in one common word runs the risky of being forgotten, even if that word is quite simple and used on a day-to-day basis. A word like 喷嚏 (sneeze) in Chinese or 薔薇 (rose) in Japanese fit the bill.

The Japanese fallback, in case you forgot the character is quite simple: you'd just use either Katakana or Hiragana with different connotations[1]. I'm not quite sure what the fallback would be in Chinese, but I guess that would often be picking another character with a close or same pronunciation, as Chinese speakers often do on purpose as a sort of pun.

I also expect there are still fewer cases of "character amnesia" in China than Japan, since the fallback mechanism is simpler and more standardized in Japan, and children are taught far less Kanji in school than their counterparts in Mainland China, Hong Kong or Taiwan.

[1] While Hiragana gives a familiar connotation, writing the word as バラ in Katakana is "more official", if anything, since names of flora and fauna are conventionally written using Katakana in official contexts, especially when you want to use the exact scientific name. This is the equivalent of using Latin names in Western countries, e.g. Rosa hirtula would be サンショウバラ.

[Suppafly]

>The standard Chinese characters for 1, 2, and 3 (一, 二, 三) are among the simplest characters in Chinese: literally just one, two and three horizontal strokes.

Does that work for larger numbers, keep adding strokes?

[GuB-42]

No, 4 is 四. Numbers are simple characters, but only 1,2,3 are made by adding strokes.

[garou]

I am not from Asia so I would trust more what our wife has to say than me. But I would argue that it is common for people living in a country with different language from they native language to forget how to write or even say some simple words. There's a good active effort to learn a new language.

[nialv7]

It might be surprising but, in terms of written words, sneeze (喷嚏) is not "basic".

[Chathamization]

That's very much the impression I get. I've never seen pinyin used in Chinese writing, and the Chinese friends I've met have said they've never seen it either (they said they'd probably just look up the character or write a homonym instead, but even then it's pretty rare that it comes to that).

That's not to say it's never done, but it feels like an outlier. As if a friend found a word too hard to understand and drew a picture instead, and then the author wrote an article about how spelling is so difficult that it leads English speakers to draw words instead of writing them.

But the thing that struck me the most was just how confused people were when I asked them about it. It just didn't seem to be anything that was an actual issue for them.

[mapt]

> "This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence between sound and spelling. One might forget whether "abracadabra" is hyphenated or not, or get the last few letters wrong on "rhinoceros", but even the poorest of spellers can make a reasonable stab at almost anything. By contrast, often even the most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their hands and ask someone else in the room how to write some particularly elusive character."

- https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

[fenomas]

Not at all - forgetting kanji just isn't similar to forgetting how to spell English words, as I think TFA made fairly clear. It's the simplest analogy to make, but it's not near enough to draw conclusions from.

The analogy I've used in the past is, you read kanji with your mind but you write them with your hand, so being unable to remember a kanji is more akin to forgetting a guitar chord or a keyboard shortcut - if your hands stop making the motions, you'll eventually forget them.

[KittenInABox]

Most people cannot accurately draw a bicycle.

[fenomas]

Yeah - the other analogy I've used is that everyone can recognize a Starbucks logo, but even if you went to the trouble of learning to accurately draw one, you'd forget if you didn't practice.

[riffraff]

I am Italian and was taught cursive in elementary school and I can barely remember upper case cursive letters[0] thirty years later.

In my experience, most people of my generation have generally forgot and usually just write "lower case letters but big" or block letters.

So yeah, I don't think there's anything inherently chinese about forgetting writing things you don't use.

[0] https://www.genitorialmente.it/2016/10/alfabeto-corsivo-maiu...