China is seeing a somewhat similar phenomeno too. The ubiquity of pinyin-based digital input methods is causing a lot of younger generations to lose the ability to write Chinese characters by hand without looking them up online. Abbreviated acronyms due to a mix of censorship/laziness is also becoming common making a lot of online messages look rather cryptic to anyone who doesn't know the lingo.
My experience from living in Hong Kong for 10 years was also that hand-written forms were often some kind of cursive/shorthand. I'm familiar with both traditional and simplified characters, but I'd often encounter written forms that were more a shorthand/cursive form of traditional characters. I'm not sure if there was an official system, but reading handwriting was much different than reading my textbooks.
Yep there are cursive traditions for writing Chinese characters, and there is historically quite a bit of acceptable variation on how you write the characters (think lowercase 'a' or 'g' in Latin). Just like with Latin script ability to read cursive is also fading as people handwrite less; the computer/print forms you see come from the woodblock forms/Ming typeface and there's a large stylistic shift going from brush writing to woodblock forms.
A large chunk of the contemporary standard of simplified Chinese were basically just shorthand cursive forms that passed down the ages. It's just something people acquire by exposure/immersion.
> I'm not sure if there was an official system, but reading handwriting was much different than reading my textbooks.
There is an official system. I don't know what it is and I can't read Chinese handwriting either, but I am assured that there is a system and, for example, it's possible for a Chinese person to view an unfamiliar handwritten character and be able to look it up by its standard form.
When you read word-processor, you probably think Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, not Xerox 6016 Memorywriter (thanks wikipedia) or any other type of electronic typewriter. Maybe it's a generational thing, but the only use of ワープロ I know of is for the latter (do a google image search for ワープロ, and compare to a google image search for word processor).
I'd say the expression ワープロ馬鹿 is probably very outdated.
Indeed. When someone says ワープロ, electronic typewriters are what come to mind, just like what the Japanese Wikipedia page[1] shows. The word ワープロ馬鹿 probably wouldn't make much sense to those under 30, as they're very unlikely to have ever used a ワープロ.
Dated put probably not outdated - Japanese also retains パソコン (pasokon, short for “personal computer), which shows its age. I recall a Japanese friend explaining it in 2003, at which time the IME for kanji in Windows had had at least a decade of common use and was remarkably sophisticated. It may be that post-smartphone it’s been such a common phenomenon that everyone accepts it as part of everyday life, there are certainly enough articles and posts about it.
I mean I don't think ワープロ is used to designate word processor programs. ワープロソフト (literally word processor software) might, but not ワープロ. The expression ワープロ馬鹿 has probably never been used in the context of software.
Nowadays, the phenomenon itself is largely driven by smartphones.
This affliction is now near-universal in Japan. A friend of mine was recently ribbed for forgetting how to handwrite an admittedly somewhat complex but still very common character (橋 hashi, "bridge") in her own name.
Just so people know how most of this typing is done in Japan, it's on cell phones and it's pretty amazing because there are only 5 vowels and 10 "consonant" sounds so you can put it on a standard keyboard by just flicking lf-dn-rt-up (for ee-oh-eh-u) or pressing for "ah" to get all the hiragana (well except for accent marks). Everything fits in 12 buttons so it's been used since flip phones.
Then based on the hiragana phonetics you can get predictive kanji (or katakana for foreign words). It's really important to put kanji in, because a lot of words in hiragana are homonyms and the meaning can be unclear. Japanese already really like terse contextual conversation so that's critical. However... sometimes the right Kanji isn't there until you type more hiragana, at least hopefully. And Japanese names have lots of weird Kanji which you really need to use since that's polite.
On a standard computer keyboard (Japanese IME in Windows) the prediction is even better, but standard hiragana are multiple romaji (roman character) keypresses. There are also direct hiragana keyboard mappings, but kanji keyboards are mostly for humor value. See below for a 500 key version from Alps:
I've always wondered why the latin alphabet doesn't have a keyboard like that. It would totally work. With 26 letters (plus additional letters in some languages), you could assign the 10 most common letters to each key, then assign the lesser-used letters to swipes. Capital letters would work as shown in the video: tap the letter, then tap the "capitalize" button to transform it to a capital letter.
A T I del
O E S space
cap N ,.?! enter
Obviously you would have to learn the layout, but I don't think it would take very long to get proficient.
I've experimented with using traditional T9 with predictive text on my smartphone (Samsung phones have it pre-installed, you just need to enable it), and for typing sentences it can be incredibly quick, but it completely falls down as soon as you can't rely on the prediction system, such as for passwords and URLs. So I always end up switching back to the cramped QWERTY keyboard.
I wonder how much time is collectively 'wasted' due to kanji/Chinese characters.
Each of these characters also have a certain order to the way they should be drawn, and from what direction. And at least in Japanese, each one has at least 2 readings (and sometimes much more), a Chinese reading and a Japanese reading, but which one is used doesn't always follow the 'rules'.
A lot of this is likely learned through simple exposure for listening and speaking, but it makes reading and especially writing rediculous.
In my experience with Japanese, kanji is more work to learn how to write, but it makes it easier for others to read - not just compared to romaji but even hiragana and katakana. I'm not really sure it's time "wasted".
> rediculous
In a lot of ways, it's like spelling in English ;)
There's no way a language with that kind of major "deficiencies" have survived past 2k years, and especially the postwar media development. It's all just creative quirks, guaranteed to fit well within the computational budget of a human brain.
Similar kind of criticism can be made up against English: English is such an inefficient language, there are only 26 symbols, 52 if you count "capital" letters but those cannot be used for better compression, and so you cannot just remember a letter but 2-3 sequences of letters as meta-symbols, and those meta-symbols would have tons of special cases when it comes to pronunciation, and and ...
Most books in most languages compress into similar sizes of zip files, it's not like there is always one version that gets to just 512 bytes and the other that's always 50MB. I would think that "all languages are explicitly equal" is a stance too dogmatic to hold, but clearly all our human languages are quite close against each others even just looking at that.
There’s a stroke order but the rules are pretty easy to learn. Outside of calligraphy, nobody will likely care if you get the order wrong. There’s also shorthand ways to write kanji called ryakuji.
Yeah, kanji can have lots of readings. There are some rules around when you use an on’yumi vs kun’yomi. A kanji paired with a hiragana is always a kun’yomi reading, but if there’s no kana you just have to know which reading to use. You can only pick that up through context and exposure. Of course any one kanji can have multiple on’yomi and kun’yomi readings. (And then there’s the concept of rendaku which can modify pronunciation based on neighboring syllables.) There’s nothing easy about it, but it is what it is. The you’re serious about learning Japanese it’s something you just have to get used to.
But nevertheless, kanji has many positives. It can make it much faster to read things because they can wrap complex things into a single character. If you have an unfamiliar character, understanding its components can often times provide a hint as to its meaning.
Think of it kind of like reading a conversation entirely in emoji. You may not get the whole meaning, but you can generally pick up the gist. And with far fewer words than it would take to write it out in full.
> I wonder how much time is collectively 'wasted' due to kanji/Chinese characters.
There's probably research on this in Chinese educational literature. Pinyin, though now used primarily for computer input and foreign language learning, was originally conceived for use in teaching literacy to native Chinese speakers. Mass literacy in China was a particularly hard nut to crack because of the huge challenge of learning thousands of characters as compared to a small phonetic alphabet.
The ambition of replacing characters with pinyin never really developed momentum for native Chinese speakers. But the increasing use of computer input, I believe, has reduced the emphasis on years of character-writing memorisation drills in Chinese schools.
>each of thrse characters also have a certain way they should be drawn
I have been learning japanese for a few years now, and kanji stroke order was honestly one of the easiest things to get right. there are exeptions, but in general, after having practiced like 50 characters, you pick up on patterns and are able to guess stroke order pretty easily. I highly doubt learning that specific aspect causes a significant amount of time wasted.
In the reading direction, it has similar strengths and weaknesses as irregular English spellings. Faster to scan given there's more variety in glyph shapes to take cues from. Preserves etymology and relationships between words, so new words can actually be faster to learn at an intermediate level of fluency. Personally I often can guess the meaning of new words from kanji + context, but if I only hear the pronunciation I have no idea, so I always turn on closed captions on Japanese TV.
In the writing direction, it's both time-consuming to learn initially and time-consuming to write every time, but it does carry a certain satisfaction and delight. So the current trend to learning exclusively how to read and type them seems economically productive, but the loss of aesthetic enjoyment of calligraphy in daily life is regrettable.
Probably not that much, at least when comparing to French or English orthographies. Those two are very complex, and it's easy to forget about it because we used them for decades. But try teaching reading, then writing a beginner in those languages and you'll see for yourself how complex they actually are. Also communication with less educated people (in my company internal docs and code are riddled with mistakes in both languages) is revealing in that matter. I myself have to check very often if a letter is doubled or not, if a 'e' or 'a' is used in word like dependent and it doesn't help that cognates existing in French and English are often written slightly differently, which adds to the possible confusion.
A lot, I'm sure. I have no experience with Japanese but my wife is a native Chinese speaker.
1) In a language like English if you know a word and are faced with it's written form that you do not know you can probably figure it out. In Chinese knowing how to say it gives you no guidance in figuring out the written form, literacy takes years to learn. I have watched two literate Chinese speakers stumped by an unknown character and not even realize it was actually Japanese, not Chinese. (I knew because of the context, not from being able to read it.)
2) It appears to take my wife longer to write something in Chinese (and she's not a word-processor idiot by any means, when she's putting something into the computer she uses handwriting recognition, she's never learned the new ways) than it would take me in English--more strokes and they are less connected than even printing, let alone cursive.
3) Chinese lacks the concept of alphabetizing. I've watched her with her dictionary (we've been together since the 80s) and it's a process of looking stuff up in tables to get you close to your target and then a manual search once you're there. I can find a word in an English->Chinese dictionary far faster than she can find one in a Chinese->English dictionary.
That being said, I'm not going to call someone a word processor idiot because maintaining a skill like that costs time--it simply isn't worthwhile for most people. Many years ago I chose to abandon cursive when I realized that if I wanted to be able to write it decently I would have to deliberately practice--and I would say I write maybe a dozen words a month. Practicing would be a time sink, not a time saver. (Not to mention most of those words are on a whiteboard, too large to do in cursive.) Look it up is a perfectly good answer in most cases, only an issue for emergency type skills.
How many WPM can the average Japanese adult write by hand?
Are kanji more efficient to write out than phonetic writing systems, or is proficiency with them more valued for tradition's sake?
Is almost everyone a word-processor idiot these days?
When I think of writing things by hand in English, it's hard to ever really want to do it. I type literally 10x faster than I can write, and when I write I cramp super quickly. In my life, at least, handwriting is obsolete.
I still prefer to write out mathematical proofs sloppily (and with a lot of the nitty-gritty details missing) in a scrap notebook, then write it more nicely (filling in all details) on computer printer paper, and then (if I think it's useful to somebody) writing it in Latex. I probably write too much, but it's just the way I'm used to doing calculations and proof-of-concepts. I also like the different styles and aesthetics that can be employed in handwriting. My handwriting ranges from incredibly sloppy (when I don't really care or just want to go fast) to very, very neat.
I very much agree. Doing math involves a lot of fiddling with equations, fixing, and playing around with drawings. When doing that on the computer, I would waste most of my time fighting the word processor instead of thinking about the math.
> I type literally 10x faster than I can write, and when I write I cramp super quickly.
Because you don't do it enough to keep those muscles in training, and because you use the wrong tools when you do.
A $20 Pilot Metropolitan is more than enough to discover how pleasant longhand can be when done with a tool that's designed specifically for that purpose, in a way ballpoints and pencils are not. It'll teach you to stop ramming the point into the paper, too, which is the other reason why writing makes your hand hurt.
I have a fancy fountain pen and was taught Gregg shorthand by my grandmother and have used it for note taking for most of my life. I still type 50%-75% faster than I write and can type for significantly longer than I can write.
If I learned how to use a stenotype I can imagine the discrepancy would be even larger.
Syllabic notation is harder to understand, someone talked about it above, syntactical boundaries are harder to parse, and the language’s functional parts - things like tenses and inflections, are mostly written in kana, the rest mostly in kanji.
This article (featured previously on HN) discusses the efficiency thing a bit - https://yakkomajuri.com/blog/language-efficiency - though I think the pixel count metric is meaningless and leads to weird conclusions, there are some good thoughts.
With the way things are going, reading analogue clocks is about as useful as reading Roman numerals.
Something culturally relevant that's taught (and probably should be taught) to everyone in school, but not something that's actually useful in real life.
Don't blame kids and the younger generations for the bad education their elders have given them. Reading analogue clocks is hardly a difficult test, but it's impossible to expect someone who's never been taught to to just "know" that clocks are three rudimentary base-12 progress bars how far along the current half of the day we are; it's just not intuitive.
It's like IT people complaining that kids these days don't even know how to fax anymore, society is moving on and old skills will disappear and become niches as a result.
It's a shame for the Japanese/Chinese culture that this relatively unique cultural aspect is disappearing, but I'm also quite surprised it has taken so long since the introduction of foreign alphabets.
On the contrary, I find analog clocks more intuitive. They graphically and clearly represent locations within the cycle of time.
I just wish 24-hour clocks/watches were more common. I think much of the confusion some people have must come from abbreviating it to 12 hours that each happen twice a day, which is obviously nonsense.
Somewhat relatedly, I recently went on a months long mission to reacquaint myself with cursive. I hadn't used it since grade school, and had almost totally forgotten many characters.
It was fun, and felt good to accomplish something so useless.
Hardly useless. Over something like three thousand pages of work notes and personal diary since I discovered the habit in 2018, I've learned there's something to the idea that longhand writing eases access to a somewhat unique mode of thought.
There's craftsmanship to it, too. It's not something I anticipated, but I do enjoy for its own sake not being the anglophone sort of wāpurobaka any more.
Cursive as taught in American schools was never very practical, for a lot of reasons. But writing by hand is an important skill, and the block letter style they teach kids isn't really up to the task of writing long passages. I recommend learning the Getty-Dubay italic style. It's a bit like block letters but with strokes and joiners designed for both legibility and speed. I spent a good two months with the book some 20 years ago and the before-and-after of my handwriting, while not dramatic, is clear to me, and I write faster. https://handwritingsuccess.com/write-now/
This isn’t about quality or legibility of handwriting. When wiring 馬鹿 on a computer you type the 4 characters “baka” (or the two character ばか” if your phone supports Lana input) and get an autocomplete drop-down with the kanji.
Readit News
There is an official system. I don't know what it is and I can't read Chinese handwriting either, but I am assured that there is a system and, for example, it's possible for a Chinese person to view an unfamiliar handwritten character and be able to look it up by its standard form.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34622381
I'd say the expression ワープロ馬鹿 is probably very outdated.
1: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3...
So this point doesn’t make sense to me in this particular discussion - even though you may be right at the end of the day.
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This phenomenon also goes beyond Microsoft Word too, it's typing in general because the IME handles kanji conversions from hiragana/romaji.
Nowadays, the phenomenon itself is largely driven by smartphones.
Then based on the hiragana phonetics you can get predictive kanji (or katakana for foreign words). It's really important to put kanji in, because a lot of words in hiragana are homonyms and the meaning can be unclear. Japanese already really like terse contextual conversation so that's critical. However... sometimes the right Kanji isn't there until you type more hiragana, at least hopefully. And Japanese names have lots of weird Kanji which you really need to use since that's polite.
Here's a native demonstrating typing on an iPhone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q204SYyfEJY
On a standard computer keyboard (Japanese IME in Windows) the prediction is even better, but standard hiragana are multiple romaji (roman character) keypresses. There are also direct hiragana keyboard mappings, but kanji keyboards are mostly for humor value. See below for a 500 key version from Alps:
https://twitter.com/LanguageCrawler/status/11344608406970531...
I've experimented with using traditional T9 with predictive text on my smartphone (Samsung phones have it pre-installed, you just need to enable it), and for typing sentences it can be incredibly quick, but it completely falls down as soon as you can't rely on the prediction system, such as for passwords and URLs. So I always end up switching back to the cramped QWERTY keyboard.
Each of these characters also have a certain order to the way they should be drawn, and from what direction. And at least in Japanese, each one has at least 2 readings (and sometimes much more), a Chinese reading and a Japanese reading, but which one is used doesn't always follow the 'rules'.
A lot of this is likely learned through simple exposure for listening and speaking, but it makes reading and especially writing rediculous.
> rediculous
In a lot of ways, it's like spelling in English ;)
Similar kind of criticism can be made up against English: English is such an inefficient language, there are only 26 symbols, 52 if you count "capital" letters but those cannot be used for better compression, and so you cannot just remember a letter but 2-3 sequences of letters as meta-symbols, and those meta-symbols would have tons of special cases when it comes to pronunciation, and and ...
Most books in most languages compress into similar sizes of zip files, it's not like there is always one version that gets to just 512 bytes and the other that's always 50MB. I would think that "all languages are explicitly equal" is a stance too dogmatic to hold, but clearly all our human languages are quite close against each others even just looking at that.
Yeah, kanji can have lots of readings. There are some rules around when you use an on’yumi vs kun’yomi. A kanji paired with a hiragana is always a kun’yomi reading, but if there’s no kana you just have to know which reading to use. You can only pick that up through context and exposure. Of course any one kanji can have multiple on’yomi and kun’yomi readings. (And then there’s the concept of rendaku which can modify pronunciation based on neighboring syllables.) There’s nothing easy about it, but it is what it is. The you’re serious about learning Japanese it’s something you just have to get used to.
But nevertheless, kanji has many positives. It can make it much faster to read things because they can wrap complex things into a single character. If you have an unfamiliar character, understanding its components can often times provide a hint as to its meaning.
Think of it kind of like reading a conversation entirely in emoji. You may not get the whole meaning, but you can generally pick up the gist. And with far fewer words than it would take to write it out in full.
There's probably research on this in Chinese educational literature. Pinyin, though now used primarily for computer input and foreign language learning, was originally conceived for use in teaching literacy to native Chinese speakers. Mass literacy in China was a particularly hard nut to crack because of the huge challenge of learning thousands of characters as compared to a small phonetic alphabet.
The ambition of replacing characters with pinyin never really developed momentum for native Chinese speakers. But the increasing use of computer input, I believe, has reduced the emphasis on years of character-writing memorisation drills in Chinese schools.
I have been learning japanese for a few years now, and kanji stroke order was honestly one of the easiest things to get right. there are exeptions, but in general, after having practiced like 50 characters, you pick up on patterns and are able to guess stroke order pretty easily. I highly doubt learning that specific aspect causes a significant amount of time wasted.
In the writing direction, it's both time-consuming to learn initially and time-consuming to write every time, but it does carry a certain satisfaction and delight. So the current trend to learning exclusively how to read and type them seems economically productive, but the loss of aesthetic enjoyment of calligraphy in daily life is regrettable.
1) In a language like English if you know a word and are faced with it's written form that you do not know you can probably figure it out. In Chinese knowing how to say it gives you no guidance in figuring out the written form, literacy takes years to learn. I have watched two literate Chinese speakers stumped by an unknown character and not even realize it was actually Japanese, not Chinese. (I knew because of the context, not from being able to read it.)
2) It appears to take my wife longer to write something in Chinese (and she's not a word-processor idiot by any means, when she's putting something into the computer she uses handwriting recognition, she's never learned the new ways) than it would take me in English--more strokes and they are less connected than even printing, let alone cursive.
3) Chinese lacks the concept of alphabetizing. I've watched her with her dictionary (we've been together since the 80s) and it's a process of looking stuff up in tables to get you close to your target and then a manual search once you're there. I can find a word in an English->Chinese dictionary far faster than she can find one in a Chinese->English dictionary.
That being said, I'm not going to call someone a word processor idiot because maintaining a skill like that costs time--it simply isn't worthwhile for most people. Many years ago I chose to abandon cursive when I realized that if I wanted to be able to write it decently I would have to deliberately practice--and I would say I write maybe a dozen words a month. Practicing would be a time sink, not a time saver. (Not to mention most of those words are on a whiteboard, too large to do in cursive.) Look it up is a perfectly good answer in most cases, only an issue for emergency type skills.
- UI animations sliding/folding (e.g. 1Hz interactivity vs 120Hz interactivity).
- MS Windows default keyboard settings with slowed down key repeat rate.
- corporate firewalls configured to DROP instead of REJECT the LAN traffic.
- latency to access office documents in the cloud.
- MS Teams bugs frustrations.
- increased number of mouse clicks in WIN11 to reach common functions.
- other software bugs/annoyances we cannot fix, c.g Jonathan Blow.
kanji is useful training for visual memory and can be used to provide memory pegs
Are kanji more efficient to write out than phonetic writing systems, or is proficiency with them more valued for tradition's sake?
Is almost everyone a word-processor idiot these days?
When I think of writing things by hand in English, it's hard to ever really want to do it. I type literally 10x faster than I can write, and when I write I cramp super quickly. In my life, at least, handwriting is obsolete.
Because you don't do it enough to keep those muscles in training, and because you use the wrong tools when you do.
A $20 Pilot Metropolitan is more than enough to discover how pleasant longhand can be when done with a tool that's designed specifically for that purpose, in a way ballpoints and pencils are not. It'll teach you to stop ramming the point into the paper, too, which is the other reason why writing makes your hand hurt.
If I learned how to use a stenotype I can imagine the discrepancy would be even larger.
This article (featured previously on HN) discusses the efficiency thing a bit - https://yakkomajuri.com/blog/language-efficiency - though I think the pixel count metric is meaningless and leads to weird conclusions, there are some good thoughts.
This constitutes a higher level of idiocy than not being able to write kanji (knowing each kanji stroke order, having good calligraphy).
Something culturally relevant that's taught (and probably should be taught) to everyone in school, but not something that's actually useful in real life.
Don't blame kids and the younger generations for the bad education their elders have given them. Reading analogue clocks is hardly a difficult test, but it's impossible to expect someone who's never been taught to to just "know" that clocks are three rudimentary base-12 progress bars how far along the current half of the day we are; it's just not intuitive.
It's like IT people complaining that kids these days don't even know how to fax anymore, society is moving on and old skills will disappear and become niches as a result.
It's a shame for the Japanese/Chinese culture that this relatively unique cultural aspect is disappearing, but I'm also quite surprised it has taken so long since the introduction of foreign alphabets.
I just wish 24-hour clocks/watches were more common. I think much of the confusion some people have must come from abbreviating it to 12 hours that each happen twice a day, which is obviously nonsense.
It was fun, and felt good to accomplish something so useless.
There's craftsmanship to it, too. It's not something I anticipated, but I do enjoy for its own sake not being the anglophone sort of wāpurobaka any more.
I think we started learning it when we were 7-8 years old, and could be trusted with a cheap fountain pen. Before that, it was printing with a pencil.
ワープロ馬鹿
I should be a doctor, with my handwriting.
TBF, my handwriting sucked before I started using computers, but they didn't help.
My entire family has awful penmanship (and it's an Ivy-league family). I used to dread trying to decipher my mother's notes.