taigu "Henry H. Tan-Tenn"

taigu "Henry H. Tan-Tenn" 

Che si ti Tiongkok 1-koa siu7 kau-iok e lang e keng-giam.

---------------

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

In China, Computer Use Erodes Traditional Handwriting, Stirring a Cultural
Debate

February 1, 2001

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

YANGSHUO, China -- WHEN Li You picks up a pen, he finds that with
increasing frequency he can't remember how to write the Chinese
characters he learned to write as a child. The delicate strokes
scramble themselves in the hazy recesses of his memory, eluding his
brain's insistent summons to order.

"There are some characters that I can't write with a pen, but if
you give me a computer I can type it out," said Mr. Li, a
23-year-old computer teacher who lives in rural Yangshuo in Guangxi
province, in southern China.

It has been more than six years since Mr. Li started using a
computer for Chinese word processing. It has been just under six
years since the characters started slipping away. He estimates that
more than 95 percent of his writing is now done by computer.

"I can go for a month without picking up a pen," Mr. Li said.


Among Chinese speakers, anecdotal evidence suggests that the use of
computers for word processing is mounting a slow but steady assault
on their ability to write characters by hand. Many Chinese say that
could undermine the written language.

"It's a cultural loss," said Ye Zi, a coworker of Mr. Li's. "A
long time ago, we all wrote much better."

But Mr. Li waved off the idea of sentimentality. "I have no
regrets," he said. "This is the natural trend of societal progress.
You use your hands less, but you use your brains more."

The problem faced by Mr. Li and others as old skills yield to
advancing technology is nothing new in China or elsewhere.
Educators, for example, engage in fierce debates about whether the
calculator has decreased or increased students' mathematical
skills.

For many people, language and literacy are intimately linked to
what it means to be human. For the Chinese, writing has additional
cultural weight. Throughout the country's history, written language
has played a critical role in China as a symbol of both unification
and division. It was used to bridge the hundreds of variations in
spoken Chinese, but it has also been a symbol of political
division, as evidenced by the different writing systems used by
Taiwan and China, one traditional and one simplified. And
handwriting is often used to evaluate character.

The slow erosion of writing skills is the frequent subject of
conversations, jokes and self-consciousness in China and Taiwan.
The characters are not forgotten completely, but the writer often
simply needs prompting from a dictionary or a friend. Or the
writer's memory is jogged by trial and error. But Chinese writers
say that in the last five years or so, their lapses in memory have
become more frequent and more annoying.

Complicated and rarely used characters are usually the first to
fade from memory, but even common characters are being lost. "My
friends will tease me, `How you can forget such a simple
character?' " Mr. Ye said.

The Chinese have a name for the written equivalent of having
something on the tip of the tongue that translates as "forgetting
characters upon lifting the pen."

But many in China take a pragmatic approach to the language, not a
sentimental one. "The role of language is communication," said Zhou
Liwei, a consultant in Beijing who said he had not written in
Chinese without a computer for several years. He carries a laptop
with him wherever he goes.

The conflict is a result of forcing the complexities of the
Chinese language to conform to a standard Roman-alphabet keyboard.
Becoming literate in Chinese requires mastering characters that
range from the simple to the intricate. Pupils spend thousands of
hours copying character after character for homework. "The task of
Chinese characters is enormously complex, more than any other
language or any other script," said Dr. Brendan Weekes, a cognitive
neuropsycholinguist at the University of Kent in England who has
done research on Chinese character recognition.

But Chinese typing requires users only to recognize characters and
not construct them from scratch. More than 97 percent of computer
users in China type by phonetically spelling out the sounds of the
characters in a transliteration system, called pinyin, that is
based on the Roman alphabet. The software then either offers users
a choice of characters that fit the pronunciation, or it
automatically guesses the characters that the user wants, based on
context.

As spoken, Chinese is a tonal language, and typing "ma" on a
keyboard, for example, will bring up a list of numbered choices for
characters that include "horse" or "mother," which have different
tones. Entering a number selects one of the characters. On average,
there are 17 characters that correspond to each typed pinyin
spelling like "ma."

The pinyin system of typing and selection is time-consuming and
awkward, but it is popular because it requires less training. Other
systems involve a large amount of memorization but are faster.

The Japanese, which also use Chinese- based characters in writing,
have long complained about the effect of word processing on their
writing abilities. But computers have become widespread in China
only in the last five years, although they have had a sizeable
presence in Taiwan for almost a decade.

There has been little if any research on the effect of computers
on the written language. "Scientifically, we haven't established
the phenomenon reliably," said Ovid Tzeng, minister of education in
Taiwan, who has done research in cognitive neurolinguistics. "We
have heard people anecdotally speaking talking about it, but we
need to examine in detail."

It is notable that the Chinese contend that only their writing
skills, not their reading skills, are eroding. Neuroscientists have
long established that writing and reading are handled separately by
the brain. Some patients with brain damage are able to read but not
write, and others may have the opposite problem.

"Reading involves recognition," said Prof. Alfonso Caramazza, a
Harvard professor of cognitive neuropyschology who has also done
research on the Chinese language. "You don't have to generate the
parts. They are given to you. The task of the brain is to find the
match for the parts that are given to you."

Writing something, whether it is an English word or a Chinese
character, involves retrieving the basic elements of the word ?
either letters or brush strokes ?from memory. It is the recurrent
construction of a word or character that reinforces the writing
process. "If you were to try to retrieve a word as a whole ?
without going through parts ?you would not be practicing with
letters and strokes," Professor Caramazza said. "You are
short-circuiting the process."

Also, since many Chinese characters resemble each other or share a
sound, it is easy to mistake one for another.

It is not just the Chinese who are vulnerable to having the
computer usurp some of their skills. American children growing up
with word-processing aids like spelling checkers are also becoming
dependent on computers for literacy.

"My mom tells me all the time: `Spellcheck has made you not be
able to spell,' " said Ehren Fairfield, a 22-year-old senior at
Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., who spent a year studying in
Beijing. "Chinese people will ask me how to spell something, and
I'll say: `I don't know. Give me a computer, and I'll tell you.' "

This is not the first time that Chinese writing has come under
assault. Until the 20th century, the calligraphy brush was the
dominant writing instrument. With its rich cultural undertones,
calligraphy took many years to master, an investment that also
meant that the vast majority of Chinese remained illiterate.

When the pen became popular in China after the turn of the 20th
century, it was furiously attacked, accused of undermining the
country's cultural heritage. While the characters written were
identical, critics said that it removed the expressiveness found in
traditional calligraphic writing. But now calligraphy has largely
retreated to an aesthetic form that is practiced by only a small
segment of people.

In the same way that the pen increased literacy in China,
computers may help pull down barriers. "Why would you still spend
so much time on handwriting Chinese characters when you are
eventually going to use computers?" asked Ping Xu, a professor of
Chinese language at Baruch College. Professor Xu has obtained a
federal grant from the Department of Education to develop a penless
approach for students learning Chinese as a foreign language.
Students start using computers for writing almost immediately.

Professor Xu says that the approach can be extended to pupils in
China.

"In spite of the opposition against the pen, why did the pen
prevail?" Professor Xu asked. "Because the pen is much easier to
use and much easier to carry around." He extrapolated the idea to
the historical inevitability of the dominance of the computer. "If
the computer can provide an easier way of learning Chinese
characters and all the Chinese language skills, eventually it will
prevail."

Some parents are already criticizing schools for not adapting
quickly enough to the educational advantages of the computer.

Li Li-Chuan, who teaches at an elementary school in Taiwan, said
that a parent had recently complained about the many hours her
child spent practicing characters. "She asked, `What's the point of
making students practice characters, when now, with computers, they
only need to recognize them?' " said Ms. Li, who says she herself
often hesitates before writing some characters.

Ming Zhou, a Microsoft researcher based in Beijing, also takes a
more neutral view of the tension between modern technology and
traditional skill. "You can't say it's a cultural tragedy," Mr.
Zhou said. "It's just the way it is."

Mr. Zhou has worked on sophisticated Chinese typing software that
even eliminates the need to choose characters. The computer can
automatically convert entire sentences from phonetics into
characters using the context.

"If people use this system, they will forget how to write even
faster," Mr. Zhou joked. "What we are chasing is speed. When
culture and speed come into conflict, speed wins."





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Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company