Chinese Character Challenges

Today, in my daily news scouring, I found this really interesting article about how more and more young Chinese people are having difficulty handwriting characters. With the invention of pinyin, the phonetic spelling of Chinese characters with Roman letters, and the use of cell phones and computers, it’s almost unnecessary to handwrite Chinese characters.

The article talks about how it’s a national and significant problem that people are forgetting how to handwrite characters. They’ve even hired teachers specifically to teach handwriting. It’s actually kind of sad because it’s a big part of their culture. Writing Chinese is like creating art, and calligraphists can actually make a lot of money. Ellen’s dad taught calligraphy and it seemed to keep the family afloat. It was really neat seeing him write out the characters in fluid, waving motions.

As a Chinese language learner, I think handwriting characters is one of the hardest things about the language. First of all, there characters are made up of many “radicals”, which are basically mini characters that are combined to make new characters. There is a specific order to writing each radical. And for each radical, there is a specific stroke order. It’s not easy.

My Chinese teacher in university stressed the importance of “stroke order” and could usually tell if we weren’t following it. It really does make a difference to how the overall character looks. Despite the tediousness of it, I enjoyed writing characters in college. It was like making mini pictures.

Unfortunately, I’ve kind of given up on learning to write Chinese characters. If I was studying full time then I would put in a little more effort, but I have a tough time as it is fitting in the time to study my oral and computer-written Chinese. In fact, my Chinese tutor was surprised when I told him I wanted to learn the characters. He kind of looked at me like “Why?” and said “most of my students only want to speak Chinese, learning the characters is much harder.” Yeah, I know.

I guess its kind of like forgetting how to spell. I’ve never been a great speller. In fact, I remember teachers talking about how much they hated spell check on computers. You had to go in and change the settings in Word on computers in the J-school labs in order to enable spell check – that’s how much they hated it. But I can’t imagine forgetting how to write!

Chinese isn’t easy. Native speakers will even tell you that. At least I know that they have trouble with their own language and they grew up with it, giving a glimmer of hope to all Chinese language learners out there, or at least this one.