[crazylogger]

> It might seem weird for us to teach beginners Python, knowing that they’ll then have agents output other, faster languages. I see an analogy here with Chinese: Many people don’t realize this, but children in China first learn Latin characters, which they use to spell out Chinese phonetically, using a system called “pinyin.” They then use their knowledge of Latin characters to learn Chinese characters, whose pronunciation isn’t obvious from the characters themselves.

The article did explain, albeit near the end.

[faitswulff]

Pinyin is widely used, but pinyin’s primacy is oversold. Chinese texts start with teaching Chinese characters - many are recognizable to children from daily exposure to begin with, so they don’t need the pinyin. Pinyin only comes in when the character is genuinely unknown.

[RationPhantoms]

I think computer/smartphone usage has been changing that latent space for quite some time. People have been talking about "character amnesia" since 2010.

[faitswulff]

Sort of, but the amnesia typically applies to writing characters, rather than reading them.

[nneonneo]

Pinyin is also the main way people input Chinese into computers, so it's rather important in that regard.

[reuven]

I've been taking Chinese lessons for a number of years, and my teacher described her son as learning characters via pinyin. But it's quite possible (even likely) that the common ones don't require pinyin, and/or that I misunderstood how it's used. Nevertheless, even if I pushed the analogy a bit, I still think this might happen as a bridge between learning to code and agentic coding.