Mandarin Expression of the Week

tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

This week’s MEotW, “tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字)”, is generally translated as “character amnesia”. Its literal meaning well describes what it’s like to experience it—you pick up your pen, pencil, brush, etc. to write a certain Chinese character and you…just…can’t…remember how to write it. This can happen with complex, rarely used characters, but it can also happen with fairly commonly used characters, and even with characters you’re sure you once knew well.

It occurs to me that while “tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字)” literally refers to forgetting a character while trying to write it by hand, and while “character amnesia” is similarly defined as forgetting how to write certain characters, people also often forget characters—and thus fail to recognize them—when they are just reading. There doesn’t seem to be a corresponding common Mandarin expression for this, though, probably because it is generally harder to write than it is to read, and so forgetting a character while engaged in the harder task of writing is generally a more significant emotional event compared to forgetting a character when reading.

It Happens to Chinese People Too

It’s also worth noting that “tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字)” is an expression that Chinese people do apply to themselves—it doesn’t just describe a problem that only other people experience while learning a language typically written with Chinese characters. Chinese people are also only human, so it is ultimately practically impossible for them too to learn and continue to remember how to write (or even “just” read) all the over 100,000 existing Chinese characters as well as the theoretically unlimited number of Chinese characters that could be invented in the future, even if they have spent, and are continuing to spend, their entire lives trying to do so.

While the government of China considers someone who can recognize “just” 2,000 characters to be literate, the truth is that even those who are considered literate by this standard can surprisingly often be unable to read or write relatively common characters that they once knew, never mind obscure characters that they never learned.

One example of even relatively highly literate native Mandarin speakers having trouble remembering how to write a not terribly uncommon character is related in David Moser’s well-known essay “Why Chinese Is So…Hard”, which has a section devoted to character amnesia:

this phonetic aspect of the language doesn’t really become very useful until you’ve learned a few hundred characters, and even when you’ve learned two thousand, the feeble phoneticity of Chinese will never provide you with the constant memory prod that the phonetic quality of English does.

Which means that often you just completely forget how to write a character. Period. If there is no obvious semantic clue in the radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character, you’re just sunk. And you’re sunk whether your native language is Chinese or not; contrary to popular myth, Chinese people are not born with the ability to memorize arbitrary squiggles. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of vindication and relief to see a native speaker experience the exact same difficulty you experience every day.

This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like “tin can”, “knee”, “screwdriver”, “snap” (as in “to snap one’s fingers”), “elbow”, “ginger”, “cushion”, “firecracker”, and so on. And when I say “forget”, I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like “knee” or “tin can”? Or even a rarely-seen word like “scabbard” or “ragamuffin”? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn’t remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 “to sneeze”. I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the “Harvard of China”. Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word “sneeze”?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China.

Truly, the phenomenon of tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字) is nothing to sneeze at! (Sorry, I couldn’t help it 😜.)

Carrying on, this YouTube video from Asian Boss shows how some people on the streets of Shanghai fared when asked to write some Chinese characters. (One of the interviewees uses “tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字)” at around 7:10.)

Relatively highly literate native Mandarin speakers can also have problems recognizing or remembering characters when “just” reading, as discussed in the tiandi.info blog post “An Avoidable Minefield of Human Tradition and Cultural Pride”:

A few nights ago, my Mandarin congregation had a Memorial meeting that went well overall. However, there was a momentary hiccup that I think we Chinese field publishers can learn from.

The speaker who gave the talk is a fluent, eloquent native Mandarin speaker originally from mainland China, and he is one of the best Mandarin speakers in a city of several Mandarin congregations. In fact, he was one of the instructors in the very first official Mandarin class ever held in this country. However, while reading a scripture from his paper Bible as he was giving the Memorial talk, he, of all people, just…got…stuck…on…a…Chinese…character…. He struggled with it for what felt like quite a while, and eventually, a young brother who was serving as an attendant at the side of the stage approached and gave him a hint, and he was able to carry on.

For Real, It’s Not You

Yes, from considering both the basic design of the Chinese characters writing system as well as real-life experiences like the ones related above, it is evident that the objective truth is that the Chinese characters writing system is by its very nature fundamentally unfit for human use. So, the blame for the all-too-real phenomenon of even relatively highly literate people surprisingly often forgetting characters while reading or writing should be squarely placed on the Chinese characters writing system, not on the imperfect humans whom it should serve, but for whom it so often causes huge problems instead.

It is thus unfortunate, not admirable, that many still cling to the problematic Chinese characters writing system because of tradition, pride, cultural inertia, apathy, inability to walk away from sunk costs, etc. Such ones simply accept tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字) as “normal” rather than recognize it as the institutionalized inhuman madness that it is, while dismissing as madness and heresy any suggestion of using a human-appropriate alphabetic writing system like Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) to read and write Mandarin.

New Technology Is Not the Problem

Of course, these days, many people hardly ever write characters by hand anymore. Indeed, many would say that’s the problem! Instead of staying in practice with their handwriting, now, to write something in Mandarin using characters, people generally type Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) with a keyboard and then select the characters they want from the ones their computer or mobile device presents to them in response to their typing. (In such settings, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) is like the assistant who does the real work while the big boss, the characters writing system, gets all the credit and recognition, even if many individual characters don’t get recognized when they need to be!)

However, is it really fair to blame the fine new technology for people getting out of practice with the old ways? Consider that if we were to continue with this line of thinking, we could then say that pen/pencil/brush/etc. and paper should in turn be villified for making people forget how to engrave stone tablets! Really, though, people in general got so used to enjoying the advantages of writing on paper compared to having to carve into stone tablets that they didn’t consider it much of a loss that eventually few were able to do the latter. Similarly, few people now lament that with the ubiquity of cars, not many people are now able to ride horses—most people are too busy enjoying their cars to worry about that.

Indeed, rather than blaming keyboards and computing devices for the phenomenon of tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字), some feel that keyboards and computing devices have helped to alleviate the problem. This is because even if they tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (characters 字) when they are trying to type Chinese characters, they feel they can hope in and rely on the visual designs of the characters they want to help them “know them when they see them” when they pop up in response to the Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) that they type, making handwriting of characters unnecessary in most situations.

The Actual Problem, the Actual Solution

The thing is, the actual fundamental problem that leads to tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字) is that while “know it when you see it” may be how the visually oriented characters must work (when they work), that’s not the primary way that human language works. With human language overall, speech is actually primary, not writing, so it’s really more important in the grand scheme of things for us—including and especially in our preaching and teaching work—to be able to “know it when we hear it”.

While using the unnecessarily complex and inhumanly numerous visually oriented Chinese characters for this is like trying to put a spiky, sharp-edged object in a round hole, the simple and elegant phonetically oriented Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) writing system is a great fit for “know it when you hear it”. If you know how an expression should sound and you know the easy-to-learn-and-remember Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) writing system, you’re all set—no danger of tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字)!

Of course, you may still encounter occasional situations in which Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) is not an option, and you can’t avoid reading or writing characters. In such situations, all you can do is just do your best. When you can use Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音), though, don’t let pride, prejudice, etc. prevent you from making good use of it to completely sidestep the very real problem of tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字)!