China's language input systems

My Dutch newspaper referred to a PNAS article, of which I present here the abstract:

China’s language input system in the digital age affects children’s reading development
Li Hai Tan1, Min Xu1, Chun Qi Chang, and Wai Ting Siok

Edited by Dale Purves, Duke–National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School, Singapore, and approved December 5, 2012 (received for review August 7, 2012)

Abstract
Written Chinese as a logographic system was developed over 3,000 y ago. Historically, Chinese children have learned to read by learning to associate the visuo-graphic properties of Chinese characters with lexical meaning, typically through handwriting. In recent years, however, many Chinese children have learned to use electronic communication devices based on the pinyin input method, which associates phonemes and English letters with characters. When children use pinyin to key in letters, their spelling no longer depends on reproducing the visuo-graphic properties of characters that are indispensable to Chinese reading, and, thus, typing in pinyin may conflict with the traditional learning processes for written Chinese. We therefore tested character reading ability and pinyin use by primary school children in three Chinese cites: Beijing (n = 466), Guangzhou (n = 477), and Jining (n = 4,908). Children with severe reading difficulty are defined as those who were normal in nonverbal IQ but two grades (i.e., 2 y) behind in character-reading achievement. We found that the overall incidence rate of severe reading difficulty appears to be much higher than ever reported on Chinese reading. Crucially, we found that children’s reading scores were significantly negatively correlated with their use of the pinyin input method, suggesting that pinyin typing on e-devices hinders Chinese reading development. The Chinese language has survived the technological challenges of the digital era, but the benefits of communicating digitally may come with a cost in proficient learning of written Chinese.

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This suggest that computer input methods based on pinyin are damaging to the ability to use Chinese characters. About fifteen years ago a Microsoft employee in Australia developed a direct method of inputting Chinese characters based on the sequence of writing the strokes. I think the Chinese should use this method or perhaps an improvement on it. Has any of our members experience with this method?

The whole article can be downloaded from the PNAS site.

I can't agree that using electronic input damages *reading* ability. It's more likely to affect their *writing* ability.

I know because I hardly ever hand-write in Chinese anymore. If you don't write in Chinese all the time, it's very easy to forget how. Just reading the characters do not help.

The strokes input is very inconvenient to use. Pinyin, and the automatic word associations, are much more efficient.

solarz said:

I can't agree that using electronic input damages *reading* ability. It's more likely to affect their *writing* ability.

I know because I hardly ever hand-write in Chinese anymore. If you don't write in Chinese all the time, it's very easy to forget how. Just reading the characters do not help.

The strokes input is very inconvenient to use. Pinyin, and the automatic word associations, are much more efficient.

Click to expand...

Chinese is a language where it is possible to recognise the characters when you see it, but not recalling how to write them without the originals as reference. I think it is something with it being a logogram and pictorial rather than an alphabetical language - So trying to recall a character is like trying to recall a small picture. You recognise a computer keyboard when you see one, but can you recall the positions of all the letters without studying a sample?

Typing effects hand-writing is a matter of all human community not just Chinese. As typing becomes a habit, you're no longer in good habit of writing anymore. You'll become more and more reluctant to writing, and eventually stop writing at all. I like writing!

As for Chinese input methods, there are plenty of them around the web. For mainland China, I think the most favorite input method is Wubi or Five-stroke. Pinyin is for novice or lazy users because using Pinyin you don't have to learn anything. Just know Pinyin and that's enough! As for myself, I use Cangjie, a Taiwanese input method which I first encounter some 20 years ago. This input method is built-in with Microsoft's Windows.

sinc when is character stroke input invent 15 years ago by microsoft? i cleaely remember using both 五笔画 and 五笔字型 back in 1980s and you need a lenovo cqrd on you computer just to type and read chinese.

anyways, if ever used pinyin system before, you'll realize if you can read, you can't type. since you need to choose the the correct character among many many choices.

solarz said:

I can't agree that using electronic input damages *reading* ability. It's more likely to affect their *writing* ability.

I know because I hardly ever hand-write in Chinese anymore. If you don't write in Chinese all the time, it's very easy to forget how. Just reading the characters do not help.

The strokes input is very inconvenient to use. Pinyin, and the automatic word associations, are much more efficient.

Click to expand...

I agree. I think I'm one of the best people to speak out, because I have a very mixture of various backgrounds. First of all I'm born in HK, learned Chinese in HK since 2(pre-school), went to Canada(hence public education turned English) at 6, started tutorials in Chinese at 7, relied on Doraemon comics which were in traditional Chinese, mom forced me to write buddhist texts, tutor made me read Chinese newspapers, and continuous exposures to Chinese at home and Chinese media. At grade 8 I began to listen to Chinese songs, read Jin Yong novels, went to Chinese school later on, etc. During all these times, all my knowledge of Chinese came from writing, which built up my current mental database of the language. When the writing pad came out, it was my first computer input of Chinese, and I still use it to this day. I never learned other methods of Chinese input (such as Chong and Sucheng, which are prevalent in HK) until last year, when I realized that I can use pinyin on the keyboard. I switched to using that as my dominant input skill(also learned to change the entire thing to traditional), although I still retain the writing pad as backup for many moments. It helps because there are some characters that only exists in Cantonese slangs which would never show up in Mandarin. Of course when I got my iphone 2 years ago, I quickly installed both pinyin and writing input. With all these being said, from my experience I can say that even with my awkward history of Chinese buildup, it is always essential to rehearse and to use by writing. It's very often for even us the advanced users to forget certain basic Chinese words, and therefore pinyin can indeed lead to loss of vocabs if not practiced enough. This is why even for me, I will always keep a writing input around, and sometimes write everything in Chinese as a way to retain, recall, retrieve the knowledge. Even then, writing helps because it requires visualization, but then in the case of pinyin, when your word pops up, it is only intended as memory matching, and some bit of visual memory.

My hypothesis is that if you plug a Chinese to a fMRI, then instruct him/her to type Chinese, the visual cortex will lit up much less than someone who writes it out