This article actually hits on a pet peeve of mine where I feel people sorta “mystify” kanji/hanzi unnecessarily.
The truth is that there’s actually nothing particularly weird about being able to read some kanji but not be able to write them…
You actually get close to my point here:
> Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.
Yes! But have you ever heard of someone forgetting how to spell certain words in a language that uses the Latin alphabet (e.g., English)? I can use myself as an example here: while writing this comment, I forgot how to spell “peeve” in “pet peeve” (I thought it had an ‘a’ in it) and I also forgot how to spell “unnecessarily” (I thought it had one n and two c’s).
The western equivalent of being able to read some kanji but not write them is simply called bad speling. No need to mystify kanji in particular.
Nice comparison. When I was living in China, I'd encounter someone who forgot how to write the characters for a word on a weekly basis. I think the difference is that with Latin alphabets you can still misspell something, and having gotten it down on paper, still rely on phonetics to convey your meaning.
Alphabet is such an underrated invention. It's probably higher in significance compared to the invention of wheel. It's the original "bicycle of the mind". For example, Korea pivoting from Chinese characters to its own alphabet or Hangul is very well documented including the positive effects it has in the much improved Korean literacy and civilization after the conversion. Fun facts anyone can learn Hangul alphabet in a single day if they wanted to but the same cannot be said to Chinese characters. If your mother tongue is Korean (e.g Korean American) that only just started learning, it only take one day turnover from illiterate to literate.
Scripts being the main driver of literacy is a pet peeve of mine. It's not the script, it's the schooling system. The high rates of literacy in modern states are just a result of the school system - Japan has a high literacy rate, for example, and their writing system is either the worst in the world or close to it.
That said, the characters are a whole boatload of unnecessary extra effort, and as a student of the two languages, the artificial illiteracy created by kanji, where I often just can't read words I've known for years, is simply maddening. Not having to wrestle with characters does free up a lot of time for both native and foreign students alike.
>their writing system is either the worst in the world or close to it
Yes, it's probably the worst since even Microsoft until now still struggle to provide proper search solution for Japanese names in their Windows OS due to their multitude of writing systems.
By sheer wills of course you can make everything hard feasible but that does not means it's efficient and effective. I consider Japanese as a unique country with extraordinary people that can collectively overcome adversity, that's include a non intuitive and difficult writing systems.
If your mother tongue is Korean (e.g Korean American) that only just started learning, it only take one day turnover from illiterate to literate.
Heritage speakers (of any language, not just Korean) often have limited vocabulary and limited exposure to complex grammar. Being able to sound out words wouldn't be enough to allow a heritage speaker able to fluently read a newspaper.
How many Korean-Americans know the Korean words for things like 'legislature', 'inflation', or 'geopolitical tensions'?
The term that would cover what you mean here is regular. And that is only in regards to correct spelling. Is obviously complicated when considering that we don't have official pronunciation across all dialects for the same word. Even if we do agree on a spelling.
But it is a complete non-sequitur to lead to the modern idea that English isn't phonetic.
This is not about regular VS irregular, there are aspects of English spelling that are highly non-phonetic. It's not uncommon to have letters in words that are entirely irrelevant to the pronunciation. For example the spellings "programme" and "program" would be read the same by any English reader, and yet both persist in certain places. The s in island is completely unnecessary.
Also, the same English word can be read in very different ways by the same speaker, but in different contexts. This is most proeminent with some of the most common words in English - a, the, there, and many other connective words can be pronounced very differently by the same speaker in the same speech, depending on stress (for example "a" can be pronounced as either ə if unstressed or eɪ if stressed). And yet, there is no version of written English that differentiates these - another sign that English is not a phonetic spelling.
Of course, on the other hand, you can't say that there is no correlation between spelling and pronunciation, like you can in Mandarin and other Chinese languages.
That is what is typically meant by a regular orthography. Wikipedia also calls it deep and shallow. These are legit terms that pre-exist to this odd debate that English isn't phonetic.
Nobody that knows how to read English at a level to be on an internet forum is surprised that English has odd spelling. Many people would be deeply confused to be told that written English doesn't follow a phonetic system. Rightfully so.
This happened with cyrillic to me. During Yugoslavia we had to learn both latin and cyrillic. Since I'm from Croatia, I didn't have a need much for cyrillic (or at all). Today, I can read _at speed_ (including subtitles) cyrillic just fine, but I probably couldn't write a thing if my life depended on it. It's weird when I think about it.
> > Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.
When I was in grade school, I took notes for my classes using Tengwar (elvish) runes as a way to alleviate boredom and force myself to pay attention (just taking the table in Appendix E from Lord of the Rings and transliterating English letters into them). I could do this at a speed sufficient to keep up with a teacher talking, so pretty fast. I cannot read any of these notes today, much less write them.
If you don't use this stuff for a few decades, you do forget, even when it's just an alphabet.
I learned how to write cursively in school, but as soon as it was no longer mandatory I switched back to print capital letters and some years later to print letters entirely, as it was just much easier for me to make legible.
At this point, it's fair to say I _have_ forgotten how to properly write cursive capitals, if I tried I'd just end up with print capitals with random tails for most of them.
I don't think anyone is "mysticizing" the language. It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component.
IMHO spelling is an inapt analogy. Every single word I can communicate orally, I can write. Sure I might mess up "I before E" or some other minor issue, but I'm BUILDING the word from first principles, e.g., syllable phonemes. That's why kids are taught to "sound it out" at a young age.
The closest equivalent you have in logographs might be radicals.
> I don't think anyone is "mysticizing" the language. It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component.
People absolutely do mystify the operation of kanji, like they're more than scribbles that point to words, or that Japanese would fall to incomprehensibility and ruin if they were done away with.
> It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component.
This isn't quite true - about 80% of Chinese characters are so-called phonosemantic compounds, where people originally started using the character for one thing for another thing whose word sounded similar (say, emoji for "can", as in able to) and then adding a semantic component to differentiate the character from other similar-sounding ones. In Chinese, they smushed the two components into the space of one character, but in eg. Egypt, they simply wrote whe semantic clarifier and the phonetic hint side by side, full size.
That is, the majority of the characters are primarily sound-based, it's just that the connection between a character and its sound is shoddy, even in Chinese languages.
Japanese kun readings for native words do divorce the characters pretty completely from their sound.
Yes! I've studied Japanese for years and read numerous novels in it each year, yet I couldn't physically write to save my life.
But there's nothing crazy about that, like you said it's similar to spelling (not entirely, as I can spell things fine if I have a phonetic keyboard that "writes" for me).
Writing vs reading to me, is more about the type of memory.
> Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.
I’ve actually done this all the time as a bilingual speaker with my language in Cyrillic. It doesn’t happen often but once in a while I’ll freeze and be unable to remember which glyph makes which sound when switching alphabets/languages.
>> Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.
> Yes! But have you ever heard of someone forgetting how to spell certain words in a language that uses the Latin alphabet (e.g., English)?
Erm... great that you gave English as an example but I'd argue this mostly applies to English. I remember wondering why "spelling bee" was a thing when watching shows from the USA because that wouldn't make any sense in Polish. Same with Spanish. And a lot of others. There are some minor things to remember and you can do errors but in 99,(9)% of the cases it's "you write what you hear".
It could have been a case for English as well but the reform efforts were killed so here we are with all it's quirkyness :)
The reverse almost happened to me before, I write almost exclusively in cursive and once or twice had to stop and think about what a capital Q was supposed to look like.
The truth is that there’s actually nothing particularly weird about being able to read some kanji but not be able to write them…
You actually get close to my point here:
> Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.
Yes! But have you ever heard of someone forgetting how to spell certain words in a language that uses the Latin alphabet (e.g., English)? I can use myself as an example here: while writing this comment, I forgot how to spell “peeve” in “pet peeve” (I thought it had an ‘a’ in it) and I also forgot how to spell “unnecessarily” (I thought it had one n and two c’s).
The western equivalent of being able to read some kanji but not write them is simply called bad speling. No need to mystify kanji in particular.