"They're not learning how to write characters!"
« previous post | next post »
So exclaimed a graduate student from the PRC. She was decrying the new teaching methods for Mandarin courses in the West that do not emphasize copying characters countless times by hand and taking dictation (tīngxiě 聽寫 / 听写) tests, but rather relying on Pinyin (alphabetical) inputting to write the characters via computers.
These are topics we have discussed numerous times on Language Log (see "Selected readings" below for a sample of some of the posts that touch on this subject. I told the student that this is indeed a fact of life, and that current teaching methods for Mandarin emphasize pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, etc., and that handwriting the characters is no longer a priority. Whereas in the past handwriting of the characters used to take up over half of a student's learning time, now copying characters is reduced to only a small fraction of that.
I further told the anguished student who came to my office hour to woefully tell me about this new development in Chinese language pedagogy that this is not just happening in the West and elsewhere in non-Sinitic / Sinophone cultures around the world, it is happening in Singapore (where students are permitted to write their quizzes and exams on their computers and not by hand) and even in her own country. "Character amnesia" (tí bǐ wàng zì 提筆忘字 / 提笔忘字 ["on the tip of one's brush"]) is a reality even for adults who were once more fully literate, but gradually forget how to write many characters because they constantly resort to Pinyin inputting with computers to produce the characters. In other words, they no longer reinforce the strokes of the characters by writing them out by hand.
Something I said in class this morning touched upon this phenomenon from another angle. Namely, I told the students in my "Language, Script, and Society in China" course that writing Chinese characters is a highly neuromuscular activity, that to master the characters one much engrave their shapes and sequences of strokes into the neuromuscular pathways that connect the brain through the arms and down into the fingers that hold the writing instrument (pen, pencil, stylus, or brush). That can only be accomplished by copying the characters hundreds and thousands of times each.
I gave as an example the character cí 辭 (verb "resign; discharge; dismiss; fire; depart; take leave: shirk" noun "a form of classical poetry; diction; phrase[ology]" adjective "lexicographical"), which has 19 strokes (more than average, but not so terribly many). When I write this character, if I start to think about how to write it, I will inevitably be stymied by the tangle of strokes on the left. However, if I just start writing and don't think about the individual strokes, but just let them flow out in one fell swoop, I will often be able to complete the character successfully.
Selected readings
- "Character Amnesia" (7/22/10)
- "Character amnesia revisited" (12/13/12)
- "Spelling bees and character amnesia" (8/7/13)
- "Character amnesia and the emergence of digraphia" (9/25/13)
- "Dumpling ingredients and character amnesia" (10/18/14)
- "Character amnesia in 1793-1794" (4/24/14)
- "Character amnesia redux" (4/22/16)
- "Aphantasia — absence of the mind's eye" (3/24/17)
- "Japanese survey on forgetting how to write kanji" (9/24/12)
- "How to learn to read Chinese" (5/25/08)
- "How not to learn Chinese" (4/16/17)
- "How to learn Chinese and Japanese" (2/17/14)
- "The future of Chinese language learning is now" (4/5/14)
- "Learning to read and write Chinese" (7/11/16)
- "Learning languages is so much easier now" (8/18/17)
- "A revolution in Sinitic language conceptualization and learning" (1/7/21)
- "Characterless Sinitic" (9/1/21)
- "Characterless future" (3/9/18)
- "Sinological suffering" (3/31/17)
- "Chineasy? Not" (3/19/14)
- "Chineasy2" (8/14/14)
Barbara Need said,
November 5, 2021 @ 9:58 am
When I was taking Chinese at the UofChicago many years ago, we did not learn any characters the first quarter but were introduced to characters for words we knew during second quarter. In the third quarter, we started learning words with pronunciation AND characters—which I found very hard. (The reading book we were using assumed we already knew the vocabulary.)
Phil H said,
November 5, 2021 @ 10:15 am
"writing Chinese characters is a highly neuromuscular activity"
Yep. There are so many very simple characters that I find myself unable to write on the whiteboard, even though there's nothing difficult about the structure.
And conversely, those around me who know characters often have to physically write them out on their palm/paper before they can describe to me the structure.
John Rohsenow said,
November 5, 2021 @ 10:23 am
Yes, as I have said before, I told my students in my Chinese 101 classes that this was a motor memory exercise like shooting baskets or tennis,
and just had to be done, over and over (assuming one wants to, of course). –So, I used to make them raise their arms in class and follow my stroke order movements in the air as I wrote the characters on the blackboard. (Pace, Victor :-)
Neil Kubler said,
November 5, 2021 @ 10:44 am
I once spent 30 minutes in a small room with former Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew, his 300-pound bodyguard, and 3 other linguists. Lee, who was already in his 80s at the time, described to us his conviction that Singaporean children should learn Chinese characters only on computer — no handwriting — beginning in elementary school, and wanted to know our views about this. He complained that most of the (very conservative) teachers in the Singaporean school system considered his view much too radical. With no small amount of trepidation, I spoke up to defend tradition and argued that there is pedagogical value in learning to handwrite from memory the first few hundred characters (so one becomes thoroughly familiar with character components and is less likely to confuse look-alike characters). But Minister Mentor Lee, who certainly deserves great credit for his innovative views at a rather advanced age, was not convinced!
Andy Stow said,
November 5, 2021 @ 12:14 pm
In a similar vein, many very proficient touch typists could not correctly label the letter keys of a blank keyboard. I'm typing this without looking at the keyboard, but I can't do so either. That's the same sort of "muscle memory" which of course does exist in the brain, but isn't normally available to our conscious mind.
Philip Taylor said,
November 5, 2021 @ 1:49 pm
Neil — To what extent was your trepidation a result of the mass of the bodyguard ?
Jerry Packard said,
November 5, 2021 @ 2:06 pm
Great story, Neil.
Terpomo said,
November 5, 2021 @ 2:11 pm
I wonder if you could teach Classical Chinese that way. Obviously you couldn't use Mandarin-based pronunciation and Romanization, too ambiguous, but maybe reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciation and a Romanization of that for the first semester and then characters. Of course, that would be a much less useful approach for Classical Chinese since it's not spoken, only written, and essentially everything written in it is in characters, but it seems in principle possible and I almost want to try it just to see if it can be done.
Mark Hansell said,
November 5, 2021 @ 6:46 pm
The stakes of character amnesia are raised considerably when you are writing on a blackboard in front of a class– sometimes I couldn't picture the character in my mind before I started to write it, just the first couple of strokes, and hoped that my muscle memory would fill in the rest. I felt like a cat falling off a building hoping to land on my feet. It usually (but not always) worked…
Victor Mair said,
November 5, 2021 @ 8:28 pm
@Mark Hansell
Right! Better not to think about it. Just let it flow.
Wanda said,
November 6, 2021 @ 11:38 am
Is this true for children or only adult learners? My 5 year old is in a weekend Chinese school where the emphasis for "Chinese as a second language" students is memorizing characters. It's just not working well for his little ADHD brain or for me, who is trying to reinforce it over the week without making him hate Chinese. I also find this emphasis suspect pedagogically, although I specialize in teaching college students biology so what do I know. Also any recommendations for Chinese curricula I could use to teach him at home would be welcome.
John Rohsenow said,
November 7, 2021 @ 5:15 pm
Here is an off line exchange between me and Victor: I had written: "I assume that given the widespread use of the Latin alphabet and English in China, at least in those circles who hand input into electronic devices, and the fact that most computer keybds, telephones, etc have "Latin" letters on them, we can assume that at least in the PRC MOST of those people are using HYPY input systems rather than wubixing or some other such stroke based system. Even if the ideal form of the "Z.T." (Zhu Yin Xie Zi, Ti Qian Du Xie" experiment which I wrote about in the 1980s isn't being strictly followed in K-12 schools, enough of it seeped into the schools that most adults are now familiar w/ the basics of HYPY .
Another question: are they still using ZYFH in the schools in TW? So what input are the laobaixing using over there?"
To which Victor replied: "ZYFH is used for inputting in Taiwan, but HYPY is creeping in even there. [Here at UPenn] We have hundreds of graduate students from the Mainland. Very nearly every one uses HYPY for input- ing. Almost none use Wubizixing or other shape-based system. Last I heard, all children in xiaoxue are [now] introduced to reading and writing through HYPY, & they also learn English from a very young age."
To which Prof. YC Li, a native Taiwanese who teaches at UHawaii and often returns home to TW added: "I have seen ZYFH and finger writing [input] used in TW, but I don’t know how many. Voice input in Mandarin is also used. [Also] More and more TW people have contacts in China, so HYPY use has naturally increased.