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Language Log is an applied linguistics blog founded by U.Penn's Mark Liberman. This blog post concerns the phenomenon of character amnesia, which is becoming more prevalent in E. Asian countries like China and Japan, which have character-based languages. Basically, character amnesia is the phenomenon of forgetting how to write words, due to the increase in keyboard input of characters, word processing, online correspondence and composition, predictive text technology, and the decline of handwritten documents. This particular article focuses on Japanese kanji amnesia. The bottom of the article contains links to previous discussions of this topic.

"The most Chinese of Chinese ideograms was identified as 和 (pronounced 'huh' and typically Romanized as 'he')-the character for an indistinct concept often (though clumsily) translated as "peace" or "togetherness.""

Chinese characters have been an obstacle preventing the development of Chinese proficiency for learners of Chinese whose native language does not have characters. A substantial literature review identified linguistic, pedagogical, and political factors as causes of those difficulties. Tone changes represent different meanings of a word. Compound characters include the phonetic component radicals that do not always sound the same as the phonetic radicals. These unique linguistic features of the Chinese language add even more challenges for learning of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL).Technology integration has been found to facilitate the teaching and learning foreign languages in many efficient and effective ways.

When the Communists took over Mainland China, the literacy rate in China was below 20%. It is now 95%, according to some estimates. The same rate among young people (15 to 24 years old) is now 99.6%, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. And while the literacy rate in 1990 was 87% for men and 68% for women, in 2010 it was 98% for men and 93% for women. Many experts ascribe this considerable achievement to the simplification of Chinese written characters, actively promoted by the communists in the 1950s. Along with traditional Chinese characters, a simplified set of Chinese characters is one of the two sets of the contemporary Chinese written language.

David Moser, of the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies and a L1= English speaker, reflects on his adult language learning struggles with Chinese, his L2. His takeaways as to why the language is so difficult, even for L1= Chinese speakers: 1. Because the writing system is ridiculous: need to recognize a whole lot of characters to be literate, specifically 7-8 years to recognize and write 3000 characters. 2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet, which would make learning the components of words more simple. 3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic. 4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates. 5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated. 6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen 文言文). 7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck. 8. Because tonal languages are weird. 9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met. When you consider all the above-mentioned things a learner of Chinese has to acquire -- ability to use a dictionary, familiarity with two or three romanization methods, a grasp of principles involved in writing characters (both simplified and traditional) -- it adds up to an awful lot of down time while one is "learning to learn" Chinese.

In fear of being left behind, China wanted to modernize their language to keep up with the rest of the world. This article considers how the political climate and technological advancements impacted the modernization and simplification of characters and phonetic writing of the pronunciation.

This is a thesis paper exploring the various theories regarding the evolution of Chinese characters. It is highly unlikely that the Chinese took inspiration from the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, which may have formed at around the same period in time. The author makes the claim that while it is true that Chinese characters may have started off as drawings or pictographs, in the most ancient form of the script, the characters are far from any recognizable images of items. It is very likely that the Chinese script went through a similar evolution process as to the Mesopotamian cuneiform, but no such archeological evidence for this theory has been found.

"The discrepancies between the two accounts which have been identified here are genuine, farreaching, and not merely apparent discrepancies. [...] it is clear that a definitive judgement on the character and extent of Genie's linguistic development still cannot be given."

Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer, two linguists who have been studying the Disney princess franchise, have discovered that, in the average "modern" Disney princess movie, male characters have three times as many lines as women in Disney princess movies. Though Snow White has a nearly equal split, Cinderella actually features more women, and Sleeping Beauty gives almost three-fourths of the lines to women. On the other hand, The Little Mermaid has 68% of lines delivered by males, Beauty and the Beast males have 71%, Aladdin males have 90%, Pocahontas males have 76%, and Mulan males have 77%. Fun Fact: Frozen has two heroines, but women still have only 41% of the lines.

The author of this piece simply explains how some languages involve more characters than others. Also, this leaves languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc., with an advantage because they are able to express their thoughts through fewer characters.

Chinese love proverbs and four character idiomatic expressions, which are also known as "chengyu" 【成語】。Idioms can reveal a lot about a culture. Here's a fun one: 行尸走肉 xíng shī zǒu ròu. Literally, this means "walking corpse and running flesh"--said of someone who's zombie-like due to workaholism.

Analyzing the verbs that followed male and female pronouns in 100K stories, the following patterns were observed: 1. Women are more likely to be in the role of victims- "she screams", "she cries", or "she pleads." Men tend to be the aggressor: "he kidnaps" or "he beats". Not all male-oriented terms are negative- many, like "he saves"/"he rescues" are distinctly positive- but almost all are active rather than receptive. 2. There's an old stereotype (that's appeared in works like Game of Thrones and Sherlock Holmes) that "poison is a woman's weapon", and this is supported in our analysis. Female characters are more likely to "poison", "stab", or "kick"; male characters are more likely to "beat", "strangle", or simply "murder" or "kill". Men are moderately more likely to "steal", but much more likely to "rob". 3. Based on this text analysis, a fictional murderer is about 2.5X as likely to be male than female, but in America (and likely elsewhere) murderers are about 9X more likely to be male than female. This means female murderers may be overrepresented in fiction relative to reality. David Robinson, the data scientist who ran the text analysis, offers these questions for future research: 1.Is the shift stronger in some formats or genre than another? We could split the works into films, novels, and TV series, and ask whether these gender roles are equally strong in each. 2. Is the shift different between male- and female- created works? 3. Has the difference changed over time? Some examination indicates the vast majority of these plots come from stories written in the last century, and most of them from the last few decades (not surprising since many are movies or television episodes, and since Wikipedia users are more likely to describe contemporary work). 4. I'd also note that we could expand the analysis to include not only pronouns but first names (e.g. not only "she tells", but "M

This study looks at the advancement in technology in China and how it has impacted children and their language skills. Chinese children have learned to use pinyin input on electronic devices, which is typing in what a character sounds like, without having to actually write it out. Use of pinyin input and other e-tools are negatively impacting character recognition skills and Chinese reading acquisition, while handwriting works oppositely.

New research into how the bilingual brain processes two very different languages has revealed that bilinguals' native language directly influences their comprehension of their second language. The innovative study by researchers in The University of Nottingham's School of Psychology set out to explore whether Chinese-English bilinguals translate English words automatically into Chinese without being aware of this process. Although everything in the test was in English, in some cases, the two words actually had a connection -- but only if you know how they're written in Chinese. So, for example, the first word might be 'thing' which is written 东西 in Chinese, and the second might be 'west' which is written 西 in Chinese. The character for 'west' appears in the word 'thing' but these two words are totally unrelated in English. When two words shared characters in Chinese, participants processed the second word faster -- even though they had no conscious knowledge of having seen the first word in the pair. Even though these students are fluent in English, their brains still automatically translate what they see into Chinese. This suggests that knowledge of a first language automatically influences the processing of a second language, even when they are very different, unrelated languages.

New research into how the bilingual brain processes two very different languages has revealed that bilinguals' native language directly influences their comprehension of their second language. The innovative study by researchers in The University of Nottingham's School of Psychology set out to explore whether Chinese-English bilinguals translate English words automatically into Chinese without being aware of this process.

Twitter - the social network where users write tweets of 140 characters is changing how poets and novelists write. They are being forced to strip down language to its bare minimum.

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, ALS patient, uses an Intel microprocessor which enables him to speak. Hawking irreversibly lost speech function in 1985 as a result of a tracheotomy. Since his hands are too weak to type, Hawking uses a single cheek muscle to control the device. The device uses an adaptive word predictor from London startup SwiftKey which allows Hawking to select a word after typing a letter. Intel worked with SwiftKey, incorporating many of Hawking's documents into the system, so that, in some cases, he no longer needs to type a character before the predictor guesses the word based on context. The new version of Hawking's user interface (now called ACAT, after Assistive Contextually Aware Toolkit) includes contextual menus that provide Hawking with various shortcuts to speak, search or email; and a new lecture manager, which gives him control over the timing of his delivery during talks. It also has a mute button, a curious feature that allows Hawking to turn off his speech synthesizer.

Linguist John McWhorter links Donald Trump's use of casual speech as one of the reasons for his popular appeal. Even Trump's penchant for Twitter is understandable: the 140-character limit creates a way of writing that, like texting, diverges as little as possible from talking. America's relationship to language has become more informal by the decade since the 1960s, just as it has to dress, sexual matters, culinary habits, dance and much else. Given this historical context, we have to realize that Trump's talking style isn't as exotically barbaric as it looks on the page - the oddness is that it winds up on the page at all. And second, we have to understand that his fans' not minding how he talks is symptomatic of how all of us relate to formality nowadays. Language has just come along with it.

Yay for Wellesley College, my alma mater! Ravi Ravishanker, Chief Information Officer at Wellesley College, and his team developed an app that allows characters in other languages to be printed on diplomas. Thirty-two students took part in the pilot with nine languages (Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Korean, Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, and Japanese) represented. "The diploma will have both the English and the alternate alphabet," Ravishanker explained, adding that the goal is to make this available to anyone who wishes to take advantage of the program next year. "We are the first liberal arts college to provide this service," he said.