MCLC: written Chinese declines in digital era

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: written Chinese declines in digital era
***********************************************************

Source: SCMP (8/20/13):
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1297946/command-written-chinese-decl
ines-rise-pinyin-input-devices

Command of written Chinese declines in digital era

Many Chinese resort to pinyin, or romanised Putonghua, when using a
keyboard but their grasp of the written language is weakening as a result
By Mandy Zuo

A popular spelling competition run on state broadcaster CCTV has
reinforced fears Chinese are losing their grasp of their own written
language - thanks, it appears, to computer and mobile device keyboards.

Seventy per cent of adults in the audience of Chinese Characters Dictation
Competition have been unable to write, by hand, the characters for the
word "toad" correctly .

The series, the first of its kind on national television, retriggered
alarm among many Chinese about their growing difficulty in reading and
writing their language in the keyboard era.

The programme, supposedly launched with a mission to resolve the Chinese
character "crisis", was an instant hit when it was launched on CCTV this
month. Altogether, 32 teams of middle-school pupils from across the
mainland, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan are taking part in the competition,
with the winner to be decided in October.

During the past two episodes, less than half of the adults randomly
selected from the audience could write correctly such commonly used
characters for the word "thick".

Evidence of declining competence in written Chinese has emerged in several
studies. In May, a survey by the Beijing-based Horizon Research
Consultancy Group found that 94 per cent of respondents in 12 mainland
cities could not write correctly a character they assumed they knew.

32 teams of middle-school pupils from across the mainland, Hong Kong,
Macau and Taiwan are taking part in the competition.

A quarter of the respondents encountered the same problem several times in
the interview.

Chinese has one of the most complicated systems of writing in the world,
and requires knowledge of several thousand characters for an adequate
level of literacy.

The pictorial forms are notoriously difficult to learn, requiring years of
repeated handwriting. In the 1950s, the mainland began simplifying many
commonly used characters to help improve literacy, although the
traditional forms remain in use Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. At about the
same time, the phonetic pinyin system of romanised Putonghua was
introduced.

Today's computers and mobile devices offer many ways to input Chinese
characters, or hanzi. Some allow characters to be physically written using
a stylus or finger. The most popular, however, involved typing pinyin and
choosing the appropriate character from a list of others with the same
pronunciation.

It is believed that the convenience of this system, which requires only
knowledge of a word's sound, is eroding people's memory of certain
characters, especially the more complicated or less commonly used. Like
everywhere else, Chinese are falling out of the habit of writing with pen
(or brush) and paper.

Another study finds that mainland schoolchildren are slipping behind in
their reading ability, which it attributes to writing pinyin on devices.
In a paper published in January in the US journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, nearly a third of 5,000 mainland primary
school pupils of normal intelligence were found to be two grades behind
the expected reading level of examination standards. The test, conducted
on grade three to five pupils in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Jining in
Shandong province found that typing pinyin on electronic devices hindered
children's reading development.

"The Chinese language has survived the technological challenges of the
digital era, but the benefits of communicating digitally may come with a
cost in proficient learning of written Chinese", it concludes.

Ma Long , a Chinese language teacher at the Hangzhou Foreign Languages
School, said he and many other Chinese teachers at his school shared the
problem.

"You know what a character means and how to read it, and it seems that you
also know what it looks like, but you just can't write it with your own
hand," Ma said .

He said that at many schools today, not just in his, students tended to
attach more importance to the learning of foreign languages than Chinese.

Hao Mingjian , editor-in-chief of the Yao Wen Jiao Zi magazine, a monthly
publication dedicated to Chinese characters, said the deterioration of
written Chinese had become more serious.

On the one hand, he said, schools were putting less effort into teaching
characters while, on the other, there were fewer opportunities for
handwriting in the digital age.

"It's also a reflection that we read too little - not those fragmented
texts from the Web - but serious works in books," he said.