{"id":51975,"date":"2021-09-01T21:27:17","date_gmt":"2021-09-02T02:27:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=51975"},"modified":"2021-11-04T19:18:31","modified_gmt":"2021-11-05T00:18:31","slug":"characterless-sinitic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=51975","title":{"rendered":"Characterless Sinitic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Valerie Hansen is Director of Undergraduate Studies for East Asian Studies at Yale.\u00a0 Yesterday she was talking to a sophomore who had taken 1st and 2nd year Mandarin online and is about to start 3rd year.\u00a0 Valerie writes:<\/p>\r\n

After a while, she told me that she did have one worry about taking 3rd year: she had never written a single character and she wondered if her teacher would expect her to know how to write characters.<\/p>\r\n

She can read Chinese and uses the computer to write essays. So in essence she knows pinyin and can identify the characters she needs when she writes something.<\/div>\r\n
\u00a0<\/div>\r\n
Is this the future of Chinese? Only computers will know characters?<\/div>\r\n

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This is terrifically interesting.<\/p>\r\n

Penn, and a few other schools, do have special courses that teach Pinyin only classes for Mandarin, but here in the Yale situation we have mainstream courses where the students do not have to write characters by hand.\u00a0 The subject of letting students use computers to write characters for them has come up numerous times on Language Log, and David Moser has written several guest posts and comments addressing this matter in terms of pedagogical tools and practices, but it has never been broached so directly and dramatically as a matter of actual classroom procedures as in the case described by Valerie above.<\/p>\r\n

Whenever possible (at Oberlin in Taiwan, Harvard, Penn, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford), my wife (Li-ching Chang) used to not only permit, but encourage students to emphasize language learning over character memorization, even for Mandarin, and the use of Romanization for learning Cantonese, Shanghainese, and other topolects is well-nigh universal.\u00a0 In fact, most of my colleagues do not consider Cantonese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, etc. to be full-fledged languages because they are taught without the use of characters.\u00a0 This always rankles me, but it seems now that the growth of language learning technology is moving characterless Sinitic language learning even into the primary Mandarin courses.\u00a0 In Singapore, students are permitted to use computers to write essays and exam papers.\u00a0 Increasingly, the dreaded t\u012bngxi\u011b \u807d\u5beb \/ \u542c\u5199 (look at the stark difference between the traditional versus the simplified forms of this term!), i.e., \"dictation\", for quizzes is increasingly coming to be seen as l<\/span><\/span>u\u00f2h\u00f2u \u843d\u5f8c \/ \u843d\u540e (\"backward; retrograde\").\u00a0 If the program where she was teaching absolutely required dictation, Li-ching would often tell the students, and this was already 30, 40, and 50 years ago — so enlightened was she, to just write the words in Pinyin if they didn't know how to write them in <\/span><\/span>characters.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n

Now that the lockdowns of the last year and a half, with the consequent online teaching, are winding down, I would very much like to hear what is happening at schools other than Yale.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n

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Selected readings<\/span><\/span><\/b><\/p>\r\n