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I used to know how to write in Japanese

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Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#101

Post by victorp13 »

Small nuance, but the term ワープロ馬鹿 actually is unrelated to software like MS Word, and refers to the at one point ubiquitous ワープロ (Word Pro) dedicated hardware device that many Japanese people owned in the 80s/90s to write letters. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor#Japanese_word_p...

Interestingly the English Wikipedia page above only mentions Japanese word processor devices in a small section, but the Japanese version of that page is almost entirely dedicated to these hardware devices: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3...

I was lucky enough to live with a Japanese family in the early 90s and used one to learn how to type Japanese but also write letters home in my own language. I guess you had to live through this age to understand the difference of how Word Pro is used and the hardware association it has in Japanese.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#102

Post by jongjong »

I'm convinced that different people process handwriting (and movement) differently. This is true with latin languages as well.

I think this may explain the difference between recognizing shapes versus drawing them for some people.

I remember when I was in school, some people had really neat handwriting, they could write fast and all their letters looked exactly the same with apparently little effort. On the other hand, I had to focus hard to ensure that my letters were all the same style, shape, size and slope... Also, I didn't have a single 'handwriting style' I could write in a number of different styles. I couldn't have both speed and nice looking, consistent letters; it was one or the other.

The interesting thing though is that I was always quite good at drawing... Conversely, I noticed that the people who had beautiful, effortless handwriting would typically be quite bad at drawing... They were the kinds of people who had to start out every drawing as a bunch of circles, triangles and crosses before joining them together to form the final drawing.

I feel like these people automate their hand to some extent. It's like a reflex to them. It lets them render common shapes without much thinking or effort.

It reminds me of that time I did a drawing class and the teacher kept reminding students to "stop thinking in symbols and just draw the different shapes and shades as they appear."

This probably has parallels in a number of areas like sports (e.g. tennis) where being able to offload certain movements to muscle memory can free up your brain for more strategic aspects of the sport.

This also reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking fast and slow." I suspect it would be interesting to try to categorize people based on what kinds of mental activities they offload to system 1 vs system 2 thinking.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#103

Post by aikinai »

numpad0 wrote: post #81
aikinai wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also affects the learning curve. English-speaking children can read far more advanced books earlier than equivalently educated Japanese. They probably don't outweigh the disadvantages, but there are some small benefits. Once fluent, I think I remember Japanese to be slightly faster to read because of the more unique shapes. And you can make more flexible and elegant graphic text designs and tables (like in Excel)…

Is that so? Deducing definition of an unknown kanji word isn't that difficult. I never had issues with "advanced kanji" as far back as I can recall.

My children are Japanese-English bilingual and can read far more advanced books in English. Initially I took this as an imbalance and suggested they read the same books (or something very close) in Japanese. But their native Japanese language teachers said, no, because of the different learning curves you can't expect them to read the same level of Japanese texts; the equivalently educated/advanced Japanese reader will be behind, at least in the elementary school years.

Japanese as a whole are extremely avid readers, so I don't think there's a gap at the top, only the shape of the learning curve.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#104

Post by djtango »

vunderba wrote: post #43

I spent years in Taiwan studying traditional Chinese and even at the height of my proficiency there were plenty of rarer logographs that I'd frequently stumble over - only able to draw "blurry approximations" of them depending on my familiarity. Coming from a phonetic language with only 26 letters, it was such a surreal feeling being able to effortlessly read a character but be unable to reproduce it.

My understanding (which may have been in the previous HN discussion on the topic) is that Chinese people just substitute with a homophone if they're really stuck and native readers can guess by context what the writer meant. Much like fudged spelling like when Americans mix up do and due

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#105

Post by StefanBatory »

pm215 wrote: post #68
timr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to an old-school language school where I was forced to take tests in handwritten Japanese. I probably still have some of that in my brain, but like you, I almost completely abandoned it as soon as I didn't have to take language school tests anymore. It's occasionally useful to write out a character, but on the whole, it's completely unnecessary now that we have computers with hiragana keyboards. As a partial a…

Yes, I agree that trying to learn kanji upfront is a silly idea. Heisig says in the introduction to RTK I that he learned 1900 characters "before the month was out". If like him you can do the whole set in a month and then have no further need of formal review or study beyond using them as they turn up, then I can see it not being a terrible idea. But as far as I can tell, almost nobody has a mind that works like Hei…

It's ~63-64 kanjis per day.

I do imagine someone dedicated would be able to pull that off. But that's still 3-4 hours per day, I guess?

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#106

Post by jcims »

What if we call this 'constructive recall', in which your mind needs to take a concept and generate the concrete manifestation of it, vs 'recognition', which is the obverse. There are many examples of this in life, aren't there?

Imagine a song you used to love as a kid and knew by heart. Now try to write down the lyrics word for word. Typically quite difficult.

Now play the song and sing along. You not only know all the words, your mind provides you a just-in-time recollection of all the nuance in the delivery, the pauses, the details of the music itself, nearly a perfect replay of the entire song is there in your mind...you just couldn't knit it together like you can when it's there in front of you.

I've noticed something similar when listening to podcasts. If I'm out doing something, typically driving, while listening to a podcast episode for the first time, I will have these intrusive photographic recalls of what I was doing at that time if I listen to it again. At least if I do that within the first few weeks.

Just seems like a general characteristic of the brain.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#108

Post by pm215 »

StefanBatory wrote: post #105
pm215 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I agree that trying to learn kanji upfront is a silly idea. Heisig says in the introduction to RTK I that he learned 1900 characters "before the month was out". If like him you can do the whole set in a month and then have no further need of formal review or study beyond using them as they turn up, then I can see it not being a terrible idea. But as far as I can tell, almost nobody has a mind that works like Hei…

It's ~63-64 kanjis per day. I do imagine someone dedicated would be able to pull that off. But that's still 3-4 hours per day, I guess?

I think the thing that makes it a problem for most people is that they can't memorise them as "once and done" the way Heisig says he did. So as well as the initial time spent looking at the kanji and coming up with a good memorable story/image/mnemonic/etc, most people I think also spend time in an SRS (e.g. anki, or kanjikoohii) reviewing the characters they learnt previously. It's the review time that really stacks up, especially where you have particular characters that you have trouble with ("leeches").

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#109

Post by Klonoar »

vidarh wrote: post #93
vunderba wrote: post #46

From the article: > On the surface, this atypical trait seems to explain quite well why I can draw a blank when asked to write the kanji for "plant" (植) from memory. I don't see the character in my mind, so it makes sense that I can't reproduce it on paper. While the author's aphantasia may have posed some recall issues - it wouldn't explain why they had ever been able to reproduce 植. Kanji has the concept of radical…

As someone with aphantasia, I'm also not convinced that is the cause. I can draw better than average from memory, and used to be quite good but haven't practiced for many years. There are also animators and artists with aphantasia[1]. My spatial recollection is particularly good - I can sketch out precise diagrammatic drawings from memory much better than I can do artistic drawings. So while it's not impossible that…

My wife has aphantasia, is fluent in Japanese, and writes the language better than many of our friends who still live there. She was just forced to learn the stroke order, etc when learning the language.

Aphantasia causes many odd issues for her but the ability to write complex languages or draw are not one of them.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#110

Post by tgv »

nneonneo wrote: post #35

This is very common in Chinese now. The older generation, many of whom didn’t learn pinyin, just use voice input to send messages; the younger generations just use pinyin input and similarly can’t handwrite beyond the simplest characters. The phenomenon of forgetting how to write is called 提笔忘字 (tíbǐwàngzì - to pick up the pen and forget the character). It was previously covered here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.c…

That is a very melancholic name.
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