If we measure Mandarin handwriting literacy by this ratio:

characters-can-handwrite
——————————–
characters-can-recognize

I doubt there is any student of MSL (Mandarin as a Second Language) with a lower ratio than mine. Not that my denominator is large, but my numerator is nano scale. Partly, I’d have to lay the blame on sloth and lack of talent. But in my own half-hearted defense, I can do a lot of written communication in Chinese — as I do in English for that matter — without ever having to put finger to pen.

Partly it’s a problem of where to start. With thousands of characters lining up, just begging to be written 50 times each, I’m kind of at a loss. In fact I have started, at various points in the past, by writing my way up the word frequency list from Jun Da’s corpus. Trouble is, that list isn’t remotely representative of the words I actually have to handwrite in a given three month period, which usually consist of, in this order:

1. My Chinese name (I’ve pretty much got that down)
2. The 大写 (dàxiě) numerals used in banking to keep illiterate foreigners from sending money around the country

For those who haven’t experienced the pleasure, this is just like the US practice of writing out numerals longhand to prevent fraud, so my transfer for 27,970 is written at left, in translation, as twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and seventy.

Honestly, what corpus would have told me that I need to be able to write 贰万柒仟玖佰柒拾? Continue…

I’ve gotten pretty used to captcha’s like this:

For the visual-processing challenged, like myself, the worst of them can make it really hard to prove you’re not a machine.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find the hanzi version on Sina’s blog sign-up to be a cinch:

Sure, you have to know the characters. But compared to the roman letter captchas I’ve come to dread, they’re crystal clear. Is Sina the exception, or are Chinese character captchas really easier to decipher? Continue…

Well, the Chinese reader would be halfway through this article if it were written in Chinese anyway…

That’s the intriguing assertion from hsknotes that came out of hanzi-orthography discussion the other day:

Native speakers read chinese at the speed of light, no joke. It’s not even funny. They devour books written in Chinese in a few hours, or a day, while the equivalent thing in English would take them, or a native-english speaker, a substantially longer amount of time. Any small amount of testing will bear this out to anyone

Hsknotes “assumed it was common knowledge”, but I’d never heard this claim before. The sentiment was echoed by others in comments.

Fascinating hypothesis. Let’s give it a name, maybe, the ZEI hypothesis:

Zhongwen (i.e. 中文, written Chinese)
Enables
Incredible speed Continue…

That is, I think reading English would be harder if there was no word spacing, not just because you’re not used to it but because, well, it’s one more task that your brain has to do.

Since I’ve talked about misparsing recently, and since Kellen brought up punctuation just a couple of days ago, isn’t it time to wonder if any writers of Chinese have ever experimented with adding spacing into the writer’s toolbox? I mean instead of this*:

我写那篇东西时太年轻，发了很多过激议论。

you could have

我  写  那篇  东西  时  太  年轻， 发了  很多  过激  议论。**

Continue…

In nearly every one of my conversations about texts written in classical Chinese, the topic of punctuation comes up at least once. Mostly this is because I’m trying to figure out the grammar that lets us know what the meaning of the words should actually be, and since when these things were originally written, there was no punctuation. It’s all been added since.

What’s more, I end up thinking about punctuation a fair bit in modern texts, though in this case purely for typographic reasons. I prefer full-width commas and all my characters forming columns as neat as the rows (or rows as neat as the columns for the vertically inclined among them). So I was pleasantly surprised to find this:

Continue…

There was a bit of a brouhaha in Chinese literary circles at the end of last year, concerning a stone inscription composed by none other than popular essayist and chief advocate of that nebulous thing we call ‘Chinese culture’, Yu Qiuyu 余秋雨.

The inscription was unveiled with much pomp and circumstance at the newly re-opened Zhongshan scenic area in Nanjing, and basically, the accusation is that Yu’s composition is at best “半文不白”, not quite literary Chinese and not vernacular either; and at worst complete and utter tosh.

Continue…

Anyone who’s done business in China has found themselves in the awkward position of missing a zero. I mean, all of a sudden you write out the number and realize something is a tenth the cost you thought it was, or maybe 10x more. (Or is it just me? I confess this has happened more than once, usually on odd items of labor that are so much cheaper in China than the US.)

If you’re reading this blog you probably know the reason, but briefly, for non-Chinese speakers: the issue is that Chinese groups big numbers by four zeroes while English does it by three. So 1.5 million in Chinese is something more like 150 ten-thousand. Or look at it as 150,0000 rather than 1,500,000. Sounds easy enough to deal with, but once you throw in unfamiliar costs and currency exchanges, it gets messy in a hurry.

As far as I know, though, no one deals with it by trying to use Chinese in an English way. I’ve never heard of someone saying or writing 17 thousand (十七千, shíqī qiān). It just doesn’t work. Maybe like in English trying to say 17 ten-thousand doesn’t work for 170,000. Continue…

Having myself been annoyed by the seemingly excessive use of exclamation marks in Chinese writing, I’m glad to see Julen Madariaga is taking up the issue from a purely descriptive standpoint at Chinayouren:

I have seen from experience that many Westerners find this habit annoying, or even consider it immature. I can see where they are coming from, but they should bear in mind that  “!” does not mean the same thing in Chinese as in English. I you don’t believe me, check a professional format letter in Chinese. Both the introductory and the final formulas are normally followed by “!”.

Great point. Just because you recognize the exclamation point from your native language, doesn’t mean you know what it means in Chinese.

This would be a great paper for some intrepid Chinese student: take a bunch of writing of some genre and categorize every last exclamation point. Compare to, say, English, and let us know what you find!

The kind of dual-script format (Pinyin above, hanzi below) kids’ book I showed the other day…

…is quite common for books targeted at early elementary kids. Since my daughter has been hiding under the covers with a flashlight to read this one, I thought I’d ask her if she ever read the Pinyin:

“Read what?”

“The Pinyin,” I said, pointing. “I mean, it’s right there, above the characters.”

“Oh yeah,” she laughed. “I kind of don’t really even notice it. It’s like a blurry line.”

“But what if you come to a character you don’t know? Do you look at the Pinyin to learn the pronunciation?”

“Oh no. I just skip it or sometimes I guess it.”

Ah, to be a kid learning Hanzi. Sounds a helluva lot easier than what I’ve gone through. If only I could relax and just guess.

For those interested in a non-hanzi-script-in-China challenge, surf on over to Randy Alexander’s new Echoes of Manchu post, where his pics show some “Manchu” script that’s not far removed from some “Chinese” tattoos. He didn’t say it directly, but I’m sure the usual prize money is involved for successful explication of the text.