青岛市二手房过户流程:Chinese is losing its characters

来源：百度文库 编辑：九乡新闻网 时间：2024/04/28 00:13:23

Chinese is losing its characters

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2011-9-1 10:35


Illustration: Peter C. Espina


By David Hughes

I was sat in a coffee shop when my doctor called to tell me the address of his surgery. He told me the Chinese characters but I didn't recognize them, so I asked the coffee shop owner, Ms Li, to talk with the doctor and write them for me. After a minute of trying, the owner gave the phone back to me. The doctor informed me that the owner didn't know how to write those characters in Chinese.  


The coming of computers and cell phones in China has created an odd phenomenon here in which educated people aren't able to write in their own language. The problem has become a bit of national embarrassment, so the government has decided to step in and put pressure on teachers to make sure Chinese students' calligraphy is up to scratch.


I asked Ms Li if she found it odd that she couldn't write in her mother tongue. A little embarrassed, she said it was a problem but that it wasn't necessary to run a successful business in China. All her business transactions are done using a computer or cell phone and she can read the newspaper without any problems, thus she feels there is no incentive to learn.


There is a term for this; "ti bi wang zi", which roughly translates as "take pen, forget character." I try to imagine what it would be like to live in the West and not know how to write in one's own language and remember a few years ago in the UK, watching a documentary which followed the lives of people who couldn't write (which means that they definitely could not read as, even though English isn't phonetic, for the most part it comes close). All the subjects in the documentary were marginalized and embarrassed. They weren't successful entrepreneurs.


The Chinese government has stepped in and is putting an onus on teaching writing and calligraphy in schools and trying to beef up youngsters' ability to write; the scheme seems almost certain to fail.


Firstly, the global education system is moving to make all classroom learning electronic which will stop people cutting down trees for books; it would be surprising if this were not the case in China in the not too distant future. Secondly, the progression from knowing how to write to not knowing has been organic and long coming. Mao Zedong acknowledged the flaws in the language as early as the mid-1930s telling journalist Edgar Snow, "sooner or later, we believe, we will have to abandon characters altogether if we are to create a new social culture in which the masses fully participate."


Mao ended up simplifying the language instead of radically changing it, as they have in Japan and South Korea. But he saw that Chinese is unreasonably hard to learn as it's not systematic, relying on memorizing and rote learning. This means that if you don't need the information, because, for example, your computer will store it for you, it's unnecessary to learn.


So maybe the better option now is to accept the shift away from writing with pens and brushes and channel energy into creating a more efficient system, rather than forcing kids to write more. After all, they are just going home to their Blackberries to tell their friends how boring writing class was anyway.
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