China is seeing a somewhat similar phenomeno too. The ubiquity of pinyin-based digital input methods is causing a lot of younger generations to lose the ability to write Chinese characters by hand without looking them up online. Abbreviated acronyms due to a mix of censorship/laziness is also becoming common making a lot of online messages look rather cryptic to anyone who doesn't know the lingo.
My experience from living in Hong Kong for 10 years was also that hand-written forms were often some kind of cursive/shorthand. I'm familiar with both traditional and simplified characters, but I'd often encounter written forms that were more a shorthand/cursive form of traditional characters. I'm not sure if there was an official system, but reading handwriting was much different than reading my textbooks.
Yep there are cursive traditions for writing Chinese characters, and there is historically quite a bit of acceptable variation on how you write the characters (think lowercase 'a' or 'g' in Latin). Just like with Latin script ability to read cursive is also fading as people handwrite less; the computer/print forms you see come from the woodblock forms/Ming typeface and there's a large stylistic shift going from brush writing to woodblock forms.
A large chunk of the contemporary standard of simplified Chinese were basically just shorthand cursive forms that passed down the ages. It's just something people acquire by exposure/immersion.
> I'm not sure if there was an official system, but reading handwriting was much different than reading my textbooks.
There is an official system. I don't know what it is and I can't read Chinese handwriting either, but I am assured that there is a system and, for example, it's possible for a Chinese person to view an unfamiliar handwritten character and be able to look it up by its standard form.
There is a formal, correct way to write characters, and common "cursive" doesn't follow it.
Reading handwriting isn't quite so bad as the stereotypical doctor's handwriting in the west (or is that just an American thing?) but it definitely takes some practice getting familiar with the differences.
> There is a formal, correct way to write characters, and common "cursive" doesn't follow it.
There are political attempts to formalize how to write characters, but there is no one correct way, only more common ways and less common ways. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_order#Stroke_order_per_... shows how a very common character is standardized to be written in different stroke orders.
On to strokes themselves, you can see for example that there are multiple ways to correctly write the word for tiger even though standardizations has blessed one particular form:
More examples: historically we have a character most commonly written 䖏, but standardized as (simplified) (CN) 处, (JP) 処, (HK/TW traditional) 處. Historically, 侯 was frequently written like 隹 with diagonal /\ at the bottom as in https://www.shufazidian.com/gq/1/8/46115.jpg .
Sometimes Chinese pedagogy has an air of "one stroke order", "one correct way", but this situation is a lot like with mcdojos where there are multiple idio-traditions that tend to think that they are an authority.
Yeah, those links are taken from http://www.shufazidian.com/ , and I didn't link to the search results themselves because their search results are stateful and opaque.
When you read word-processor, you probably think Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, not Xerox 6016 Memorywriter (thanks wikipedia) or any other type of electronic typewriter. Maybe it's a generational thing, but the only use of ワープロ I know of is for the latter (do a google image search for ワープロ, and compare to a google image search for word processor).
I'd say the expression ワープロ馬鹿 is probably very outdated.
Indeed. When someone says ワープロ, electronic typewriters are what come to mind, just like what the Japanese Wikipedia page[1] shows. The word ワープロ馬鹿 probably wouldn't make much sense to those under 30, as they're very unlikely to have ever used a ワープロ.
Dated put probably not outdated - Japanese also retains パソコン (pasokon, short for “personal computer), which shows its age. I recall a Japanese friend explaining it in 2003, at which time the IME for kanji in Windows had had at least a decade of common use and was remarkably sophisticated. It may be that post-smartphone it’s been such a common phenomenon that everyone accepts it as part of everyday life, there are certainly enough articles and posts about it.
I mean I don't think ワープロ is used to designate word processor programs. ワープロソフト (literally word processor software) might, but not ワープロ. The expression ワープロ馬鹿 has probably never been used in the context of software.
Nowadays, the phenomenon itself is largely driven by smartphones.
I think it needs to be mentioned that ワープロ (WorPro) is an abbreviation of ワードプロセッサー (Word Processor).
ワードプロセッサー is defined as a computer system capable of inputing, displaying, editing, saving, and printing text. This used to refer to dedicated word processing appliances, but from around the late 90s changed to refer to word processing software for personal computers which became more popular.[1][2][3]
The ワープロ馬鹿 phenomenon stems from IMEs automagically converting romaji/hiragana to kanji, and this is most commonly seen during use of word processors like Microsoft Word.[4]
ワープロ is a Showa-era (~ 1989) term. Almost no one born after that would’ve heard of it, let alone know what it is. For software, 文章作成ソフト, which translates to “document-producing software,” seems a bit more familiar. But the majority of people would just mention MS Word instead of using a more generic term.
If I had to take a guess as to why, it's probably because:
1. It's slang, so it's of more interest to foreigners who just want to make sense of what they hear compared to native speakers who wouldn't need a dictionary for this.
2. I've never heard any of my Japanese acquaintances actually call this phenomenon ワープロ馬鹿, they all say they've just been using computers too much (or handwriting too little) in their lives.
Short rough reinterpretation: back at the time of electronic word processors, not knowing which of the homophones was the right one to use was called ワープロ馬鹿症候群
That the term is probably more than 30 years old, and probably unheard of nowadays. Googling for it, in fact, yields more stuff in English than in Japanese.
Fun exercise, I went ahead and asked ChatGPT, here is what it had to say:
Prompt: what does ワープロ馬鹿 mean?
"ワープロ馬鹿" (waapuro baka) is a Japanese slang term that literally translates to "word processor idiot". It is used to refer to someone who is not proficient in handwriting kanji characters because they have become too reliant on word processing software and digital devices.
This term was commonly used in the past when computers and word processors were becoming more popular in Japan and many people were losing their ability to write kanji by hand. The term implies that people who rely too much on technology to write are lacking in basic writing skills and knowledge. However, the term is now considered outdated since the use of digital devices has become more prevalent in society.
Prompt: what is an equivalent term that would be used today?
Today, a more common term to describe someone who relies too much on digital devices and cannot write kanji by hand is "スマホ字 (sumaho-ji)". This term is derived from "sumaho" (smartphone) and "ji" (character), and it refers to people who are unable to write kanji characters by hand due to their heavy reliance on smartphones and other digital devices for communication and writing.
Other similar terms used to describe this phenomenon include "キーボード依存症 (kiiboodo ishizonshou)" which means "keyboard dependency syndrome" and "タッチペン馬鹿 (tatchipen baka)" which means "touch pen idiot". These terms reflect the increasing reliance on digital devices and the declining use of traditional writing methods in modern society.
スマホ字 seems completely made up, and google results for the others suggest entirely different meanings....
On the second and third try it came up with スマホ字バカ, which doesn't exist either.
When I asked entirely in Japanese, it insisted on キーボード依存症. The best it came up with after a while was 筆力低下, which literally means decline in ability to write, and doesn't seem to be used to describe this phenomenon, per Google search results.
This affliction is now near-universal in Japan. A friend of mine was recently ribbed for forgetting how to handwrite an admittedly somewhat complex but still very common character (橋 hashi, "bridge") in her own name.
Just so people know how most of this typing is done in Japan, it's on cell phones and it's pretty amazing because there are only 5 vowels and 10 "consonant" sounds so you can put it on a standard keyboard by just flicking lf-dn-rt-up (for ee-oh-eh-u) or pressing for "ah" to get all the hiragana (well except for accent marks). Everything fits in 12 buttons so it's been used since flip phones.
Then based on the hiragana phonetics you can get predictive kanji (or katakana for foreign words). It's really important to put kanji in, because a lot of words in hiragana are homonyms and the meaning can be unclear. Japanese already really like terse contextual conversation so that's critical. However... sometimes the right Kanji isn't there until you type more hiragana, at least hopefully. And Japanese names have lots of weird Kanji which you really need to use since that's polite.
On a standard computer keyboard (Japanese IME in Windows) the prediction is even better, but standard hiragana are multiple romaji (roman character) keypresses. There are also direct hiragana keyboard mappings, but kanji keyboards are mostly for humor value. See below for a 500 key version from Alps:
I've always wondered why the latin alphabet doesn't have a keyboard like that. It would totally work. With 26 letters (plus additional letters in some languages), you could assign the 10 most common letters to each key, then assign the lesser-used letters to swipes. Capital letters would work as shown in the video: tap the letter, then tap the "capitalize" button to transform it to a capital letter.
A T I del
O E S space
cap N ,.?! enter
Obviously you would have to learn the layout, but I don't think it would take very long to get proficient.
I've experimented with using traditional T9 with predictive text on my smartphone (Samsung phones have it pre-installed, you just need to enable it), and for typing sentences it can be incredibly quick, but it completely falls down as soon as you can't rely on the prediction system, such as for passwords and URLs. So I always end up switching back to the cramped QWERTY keyboard.
The smartphone era is simply very young still. The QUERTY keyboard is fast enough for most use cases, but without autocomplete it's pretty much broken on smartphones.
Optimized systems exist though, for example the MessageEase keyboard. It's almost exactly how you describe, but capitalization is done by circling or by swiping back and forth.
Court writers have more advanced systems, but they also take a lot more equipment and more time to become fluent with.
This has been implemented, since PalmOS days, as MessageEase Keyboard. I still use it on Android. It can even be configured to allow one-stroke access to loads of special characters, two-step composition of accents/diacriticals (and some ligatures), and easy access to Ctrl and Alt combinations. The last bit doesn't get understood by some Android programs. The settings are a bit extensive, and several languages are supported. Unfortunately, I haven't found an open source equivalent.
I wonder how much time is collectively 'wasted' due to kanji/Chinese characters.
Each of these characters also have a certain order to the way they should be drawn, and from what direction. And at least in Japanese, each one has at least 2 readings (and sometimes much more), a Chinese reading and a Japanese reading, but which one is used doesn't always follow the 'rules'.
A lot of this is likely learned through simple exposure for listening and speaking, but it makes reading and especially writing rediculous.
In my experience with Japanese, kanji is more work to learn how to write, but it makes it easier for others to read - not just compared to romaji but even hiragana and katakana. I'm not really sure it's time "wasted".
> rediculous
In a lot of ways, it's like spelling in English ;)
>kanji is more work to learn how to write, but it makes it easier for others to read - not just compared to romaji but even hiragana and katakana.
The reason for this, which I think most westerners won't immediately understand, is because Japanese (and Chinese scripts in general) doesn't use spaces nor capitalization.
What do I mean by "doesn't use spaces no capitalization"? Think of English, but without either: canyoureadthiseasily?ididn'tthinksoeither.nobodywriteslikethisinenglish. A sentence written purely in hiragana reads like that.
Kanji serves the same function spaces and capitalization does for us, they distinguish individual words from each other.
Some words are written entirely in hiragana for brevity or style, but generally speaking the purpose of hiragana is to string the kanji together and add contextual information so the sentence flows well.
On that note, all foreign words are written in katakana, and katakana is also used for emphasis, similar to ALL CAPS or bold writing in English.
An even greater reason for the use of kanji is that the Japanese language has an enormous amount of homophones, words that are pronounced in the same way but have completely different meanings.
When talking, Japanese speakers can usually tell homophones apart based on the context. In written form, kanji make it much faster to understand what a given word means: for anything more complex than children’s books, it is actually quite hard to understand Japanese text written in a purely phonetic system (kana or latin).
Spaces weren't always used. If you look at old greek/roman engravings everything is jammed together without spaces. I think you could eventually become quite good at reading spaceless text, even though spaces definitely aid in comprehension.
There are still several languages that don't use spaces. Like Thai and Cambodian. Both of these languages are very analytic - they use short words, which makes it easier.
The actual problem without using spaces is not that humans can't read it, it's that computers can't read it (without at least complete dictionary and maybe some AI help). GNU aspell for instance does not support languages that don't use spaces.
Yeah, context is essential. We've seen plenty of examples of website names where the spaces being squashed out gives alternative meanings. Two come to mind where the last word was "exchange" and it followed a plural. No simple-minded spel chequer is going to be able to figure that out.
It's legible (ish) due to the limited ways that English characters can group up - e.g. there's only one valid way to split up "writeslikethis". In JP many common words are only 1-2 characters long, so in general even a very short string of kana can be split up multiple valid ways.
Yeah, no problem here. I've been learning japanese for a while and have encountered the phenomenon though. Still if you look at e.g. the front page of JP wikipedia: https://ja.wikipedia.org/ there's plenty of kana there, be it words that are habitually written entirely in katakana or hiragana, or even kanji words that still have some attached kana to disambiguate readings.
After more practice I've found myself starting to pick up on common dividers, like particles, verb endings, adjective endings, etc. I assume native speakers do this instinctually, much like native English readers aren't really reading letter by letter (wichh is why txet lkie tihs is rbleadae at ntiave seepd for most)
Although you can write hiragana-only with spaces between the words - children's books are written like this. But I still find it way harder to read my kids hiragana-only books than text using kanji, for whatever reason (familiarity I guess)
I also find hiragana-with-spaces hard to read, even as a gaijin. So I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea that Japanese and Chinese are harder to read because they don't use spaces. No offense to some people here, but I think it would be better to avoid coming at this from a position of "what is the secret that makes western culture so much better?"
After a quick search, there is at least some research out there that suggests that Chinese readers are able to read faster than English readers, e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1938807990955829.... This comes at a cost though, and that is the time spent learning how to write, but maybe technology like word processors will reduce that cost while retaining the benefits.
>"what is the secret that makes western culture so much better?"
I wrote that example as an attempt to frame how Japanese scripts are written compared to English. If you thought it had anything to do with superiority and inferiority, you read between the lines too much.
Spaces can be used, especially in modern times and are sometimes used for even better readability, but generally and historically Japanese script is one connected string of characters with no breaks except for the occasional punctuation and line breaks.
A connected string of nothing but hiragana and katakana is very infuriating to read, with or without spaces, and as a practical concern the issue manifests quite frequently in any piece of longer-form writing that contains lots of foreign words (because foreign words are all written in katakana).
I'm not aware of such research but it doesn't surprise me at all. Chinese and Japanese have more bits per symbol and thus if symbols can be decoded in a similar timeframe they should read faster.
There's no way a language with that kind of major "deficiencies" have survived past 2k years, and especially the postwar media development. It's all just creative quirks, guaranteed to fit well within the computational budget of a human brain.
Similar kind of criticism can be made up against English: English is such an inefficient language, there are only 26 symbols, 52 if you count "capital" letters but those cannot be used for better compression, and so you cannot just remember a letter but 2-3 sequences of letters as meta-symbols, and those meta-symbols would have tons of special cases when it comes to pronunciation, and and ...
Most books in most languages compress into similar sizes of zip files, it's not like there is always one version that gets to just 512 bytes and the other that's always 50MB. I would think that "all languages are explicitly equal" is a stance too dogmatic to hold, but clearly all our human languages are quite close against each others even just looking at that.
There’s a stroke order but the rules are pretty easy to learn. Outside of calligraphy, nobody will likely care if you get the order wrong. There’s also shorthand ways to write kanji called ryakuji.
Yeah, kanji can have lots of readings. There are some rules around when you use an on’yumi vs kun’yomi. A kanji paired with a hiragana is always a kun’yomi reading, but if there’s no kana you just have to know which reading to use. You can only pick that up through context and exposure. Of course any one kanji can have multiple on’yomi and kun’yomi readings. (And then there’s the concept of rendaku which can modify pronunciation based on neighboring syllables.) There’s nothing easy about it, but it is what it is. The you’re serious about learning Japanese it’s something you just have to get used to.
But nevertheless, kanji has many positives. It can make it much faster to read things because they can wrap complex things into a single character. If you have an unfamiliar character, understanding its components can often times provide a hint as to its meaning.
Think of it kind of like reading a conversation entirely in emoji. You may not get the whole meaning, but you can generally pick up the gist. And with far fewer words than it would take to write it out in full.
Kanji take a few more key-pressed to type. You start by typing the phonetics, and your keyboard/word processor will suggest the kanji that fit the word, which you select with arrows or space bar.
> I wonder how much time is collectively 'wasted' due to kanji/Chinese characters.
There's probably research on this in Chinese educational literature. Pinyin, though now used primarily for computer input and foreign language learning, was originally conceived for use in teaching literacy to native Chinese speakers. Mass literacy in China was a particularly hard nut to crack because of the huge challenge of learning thousands of characters as compared to a small phonetic alphabet.
The ambition of replacing characters with pinyin never really developed momentum for native Chinese speakers. But the increasing use of computer input, I believe, has reduced the emphasis on years of character-writing memorisation drills in Chinese schools.
>each of thrse characters also have a certain way they should be drawn
I have been learning japanese for a few years now, and kanji stroke order was honestly one of the easiest things to get right. there are exeptions, but in general, after having practiced like 50 characters, you pick up on patterns and are able to guess stroke order pretty easily. I highly doubt learning that specific aspect causes a significant amount of time wasted.
And it becomes easier to read if people have bad handwriting. Cause badly written characters with the same stroke order will look similar to each other, therefore it will be easier be easier to read for people used to reading japanese handwriting.
In the reading direction, it has similar strengths and weaknesses as irregular English spellings. Faster to scan given there's more variety in glyph shapes to take cues from. Preserves etymology and relationships between words, so new words can actually be faster to learn at an intermediate level of fluency. Personally I often can guess the meaning of new words from kanji + context, but if I only hear the pronunciation I have no idea, so I always turn on closed captions on Japanese TV.
In the writing direction, it's both time-consuming to learn initially and time-consuming to write every time, but it does carry a certain satisfaction and delight. So the current trend to learning exclusively how to read and type them seems economically productive, but the loss of aesthetic enjoyment of calligraphy in daily life is regrettable.
I've only learned Japanese as far the N4 test (second of five levels of the standardized tests), but my experience backs this up. Those tests preferred syllabic symbols instead of kanji, and that just made them harder to read for me.
Chinese doesn’t have a writing system that mixes different sets of pictographs. It has traditional and simplified versions of the writing system but they’re not intermixed the way Japanese does it.
Such mixing is simply not required in Chinese since words in all Chinese varieties are not inflected. There are some particles that are quite common (like 了 and 子), but they are very easy to write. The Simplified Characters are further optimized for writing speed. Most importantly 儿 for 兒 and 个 for 個, since these characters are very common in Modern Standard Chinese.
Probably not that much, at least when comparing to French or English orthographies. Those two are very complex, and it's easy to forget about it because we used them for decades. But try teaching reading, then writing a beginner in those languages and you'll see for yourself how complex they actually are. Also communication with less educated people (in my company internal docs and code are riddled with mistakes in both languages) is revealing in that matter. I myself have to check very often if a letter is doubled or not, if a 'e' or 'a' is used in word like dependent and it doesn't help that cognates existing in French and English are often written slightly differently, which adds to the possible confusion.
> Also communication with less educated people (in my company internal docs and code are riddled with mistakes in both languages)
...but you are still able to make out the meaning without all that much difficulty and without much of a chance of misinterpretation, i.e. these language are quite robust in the face of transmission errors. How does this work for ideographic scripts like Japanese Kanji or Chinese? When people make the sort of mistakes made by those less educated people mentioned above does their writing end up similarly readable, i.e. are ideographic scripts similarly robust in the face of transmission errors?
As a native Chinese speaker, I know that many older and less educated people in China do write with errors or using some non-canonical simplified characters, but usually it's not a problem for us. In most cases, the meaning of the word with the character missing or corrupted can be deduced from the context.
For example, it's common to see people in mainland China that cannot write 餐 (can1, meal) correctly, but I never experienced any issue with that in real life.
In addition, I read and write simplified Chinese natively, but I can read traditional Chinese with little difficulty, and even a little bit of Japanese with high kanji density. The characters have evolved significantly, but the remaining similarity is still enough for me to parse the text.
We were once in Japan, my wife (mainland Chinese) was able to read about 1 in 4 characters without any practice. (Admittedly, it's possible some were wrong, but if so they were uncommon as everything she identified as being what we wanted turned out to be right.)
> How does this work for ideographic scripts like Japanese Kanji or Chinese?
For Chinese, it’s usually not difficult. If a stroke or two is off, or if it’s the wrong radical, you can usually figure out pretty quickly with a similar effort to a misspelled word what they meant from context. If they incorrectly used a homonym, you likewise can tell pretty quickly, like “queue” vs. “cue”.
In Chinese this partly happens because you don’t just memorize individual characters, you also memorize pairs/clusters of characters as the actual semantic units.
>...but you are still able to make out the meaning without all that much difficulty and without much of a chance of misinterpretation, i.e. these language are quite robust in the face of transmission errors
Well, sometimes. There are plenty of single-character errors in English that could change meaning though: Presence of absence of a comma, asymptomatic vs symptomatic, bat vs bet, etc.
Look no further than the US constitution, particularly its second amendment, to see how much a single punctuation mark can matter.
Also sentences like: "the Google party featured two strippers, Larry and Sergei." Are the founders of Google the two aforementioned strippers or VIP guests?
Neither of those examples really hinge on the punctuation. The latter is a constructed absurdity based on violating information structure soft constraints (i.e. the way it's phrased is deliberately unhelpful).
A lot, I'm sure. I have no experience with Japanese but my wife is a native Chinese speaker.
1) In a language like English if you know a word and are faced with it's written form that you do not know you can probably figure it out. In Chinese knowing how to say it gives you no guidance in figuring out the written form, literacy takes years to learn. I have watched two literate Chinese speakers stumped by an unknown character and not even realize it was actually Japanese, not Chinese. (I knew because of the context, not from being able to read it.)
2) It appears to take my wife longer to write something in Chinese (and she's not a word-processor idiot by any means, when she's putting something into the computer she uses handwriting recognition, she's never learned the new ways) than it would take me in English--more strokes and they are less connected than even printing, let alone cursive.
3) Chinese lacks the concept of alphabetizing. I've watched her with her dictionary (we've been together since the 80s) and it's a process of looking stuff up in tables to get you close to your target and then a manual search once you're there. I can find a word in an English->Chinese dictionary far faster than she can find one in a Chinese->English dictionary.
That being said, I'm not going to call someone a word processor idiot because maintaining a skill like that costs time--it simply isn't worthwhile for most people. Many years ago I chose to abandon cursive when I realized that if I wanted to be able to write it decently I would have to deliberately practice--and I would say I write maybe a dozen words a month. Practicing would be a time sink, not a time saver. (Not to mention most of those words are on a whiteboard, too large to do in cursive.) Look it up is a perfectly good answer in most cases, only an issue for emergency type skills.
- Multi-threaded UI updates, where the elements being shifted from the expected position (after a background update), causing the mouse clicks to miss the expected element. Need to delay the clicks and wait until the UI updates are settled, before clicking on an element.
No--you have it backwards. The problem comes from delayed clicks, it won't be cured by delaying clicks. You click the spot you want and something more loads causing the control to move before the click is processed.
I'm not sure how to do it but the clicks need to be processed against the state of the display when the click was done rather than against the state when the click was processed. The only way to do this that comes to mind is to snapshot the hot zones on the screen before doing anything that will disrupt the screen and any click received during or within 300ms (configurable, I'm figuring a minimum reaction time) after the screen update should be processed against that map, not against the current state.
It still will be a timing game.
What if I want to click on the new object in 300 ms time period?
I need to wait 300 ms to do so, this is a flow issue.
If 1 billion current MS Windows users would make daily 1000 UI operations, but each time wait 100 ms for UI animations, the collective wasted time on the animations would be 3000 years of collective wasted time.
Fortunately most are just watching movies and shopping online, so not much collective _productive_ time is wasted ;)
How many WPM can the average Japanese adult write by hand?
Are kanji more efficient to write out than phonetic writing systems, or is proficiency with them more valued for tradition's sake?
Is almost everyone a word-processor idiot these days?
When I think of writing things by hand in English, it's hard to ever really want to do it. I type literally 10x faster than I can write, and when I write I cramp super quickly. In my life, at least, handwriting is obsolete.
I still prefer to write out mathematical proofs sloppily (and with a lot of the nitty-gritty details missing) in a scrap notebook, then write it more nicely (filling in all details) on computer printer paper, and then (if I think it's useful to somebody) writing it in Latex. I probably write too much, but it's just the way I'm used to doing calculations and proof-of-concepts. I also like the different styles and aesthetics that can be employed in handwriting. My handwriting ranges from incredibly sloppy (when I don't really care or just want to go fast) to very, very neat.
I very much agree. Doing math involves a lot of fiddling with equations, fixing, and playing around with drawings. When doing that on the computer, I would waste most of my time fighting the word processor instead of thinking about the math.
Using a Wacom tablet as 99% substitute for mouse has been life changing to me. Literally the only thing preventing me from disconnecting my mouse is that I can't scroll websites with my tablet.
It still doesn't feel as good as paper, but the freedom of just drawing on Krita and being able to select stuff and move it around more than makes up for it.
> I type literally 10x faster than I can write, and when I write I cramp super quickly.
Because you don't do it enough to keep those muscles in training, and because you use the wrong tools when you do.
A $20 Pilot Metropolitan is more than enough to discover how pleasant longhand can be when done with a tool that's designed specifically for that purpose, in a way ballpoints and pencils are not. It'll teach you to stop ramming the point into the paper, too, which is the other reason why writing makes your hand hurt.
I have a fancy fountain pen and was taught Gregg shorthand by my grandmother and have used it for note taking for most of my life. I still type 50%-75% faster than I write and can type for significantly longer than I can write.
If I learned how to use a stenotype I can imagine the discrepancy would be even larger.
My quote's a little more widely scoped than is useful; speed does improve with practice, but not that much, and isn't really what makes the skill valuable in any case. Far too late to edit, alas.
I do love a Twist-Erase in 0.7 for a pencil, but these days I only use a pencil when I'm marking cuts or otherwise doing work too harsh for a more delicate instrument.
Use a different pen, maybe, or add an O-ring to the section or something. A capped pen should take weeks to dry out, not days.
Rollerballs are a decent second best - I keep them for lenders and for backup in case I'm caught without a spare cartridge. That said, they definitely don't come close to my Decimo or E95s.
Syllabic notation is harder to understand, someone talked about it above, syntactical boundaries are harder to parse, and the language’s functional parts - things like tenses and inflections, are mostly written in kana, the rest mostly in kanji.
This article (featured previously on HN) discusses the efficiency thing a bit - https://yakkomajuri.com/blog/language-efficiency - though I think the pixel count metric is meaningless and leads to weird conclusions, there are some good thoughts.
With the way things are going, reading analogue clocks is about as useful as reading Roman numerals.
Something culturally relevant that's taught (and probably should be taught) to everyone in school, but not something that's actually useful in real life.
Don't blame kids and the younger generations for the bad education their elders have given them. Reading analogue clocks is hardly a difficult test, but it's impossible to expect someone who's never been taught to to just "know" that clocks are three rudimentary base-12 progress bars how far along the current half of the day we are; it's just not intuitive.
It's like IT people complaining that kids these days don't even know how to fax anymore, society is moving on and old skills will disappear and become niches as a result.
It's a shame for the Japanese/Chinese culture that this relatively unique cultural aspect is disappearing, but I'm also quite surprised it has taken so long since the introduction of foreign alphabets.
On the contrary, I find analog clocks more intuitive. They graphically and clearly represent locations within the cycle of time.
I just wish 24-hour clocks/watches were more common. I think much of the confusion some people have must come from abbreviating it to 12 hours that each happen twice a day, which is obviously nonsense.
Likewise here. I tell the time by the shape of the hands, not by reading what they're pointing to. I can glance at an analog clock and instantly tell how long it is until something, but it takes a moment to actually translate the current time to something I can say to another person.
Also because I use the shape instead of the numbers, I sometimes have trouble with digital clocks, and have to mentally translate the numbers into an analog clock face before I understand what it's telling me.
Somewhat relatedly, I recently went on a months long mission to reacquaint myself with cursive. I hadn't used it since grade school, and had almost totally forgotten many characters.
It was fun, and felt good to accomplish something so useless.
Hardly useless. Over something like three thousand pages of work notes and personal diary since I discovered the habit in 2018, I've learned there's something to the idea that longhand writing eases access to a somewhat unique mode of thought.
There's craftsmanship to it, too. It's not something I anticipated, but I do enjoy for its own sake not being the anglophone sort of wāpurobaka any more.
Cursive as taught in American schools was never very practical, for a lot of reasons. But writing by hand is an important skill, and the block letter style they teach kids isn't really up to the task of writing long passages. I recommend learning the Getty-Dubay italic style. It's a bit like block letters but with strokes and joiners designed for both legibility and speed. I spent a good two months with the book some 20 years ago and the before-and-after of my handwriting, while not dramatic, is clear to me, and I write faster. https://handwritingsuccess.com/write-now/
This isn’t about quality or legibility of handwriting. When wiring 馬鹿 on a computer you type the 4 characters “baka” (or the two character ばか” if your phone supports Lana input) and get an autocomplete drop-down with the kanji.
If you go ask a native Chinese speaker from China nowadays, I can most likely guarantee you that nine out of ten of them don’t know how to write the second character in the word “sneeze” (喷嚏）
I recently found out cursive (aka. joined up writing aka. running writing aka. .... Handwriting) isn't thought in US schools any more.
This blew my mind. I understand the reasoning behind dropping it from the curriculum, but hearing that students couldn't do cursive really, blew my mind. And I'm not even sure why it surprised me so much!
It's unfortunate because taking notes by hand is still a useful skill, and writing in cursive is much, much more efficient. I did learn cursive in school, but didn't learn it very well: my hand would cramp up, and I couldn't keep up at "meeting pace" without my letters turning into scribbles. I had to spend a long time as an adult trying to improve my handwriting to get to the point where I felt like I could take legible, useful meeting notes.
Meanwhile I hate typing notes because I feel like typing forces me to think too linearly. Whereas in meetings I tend to end up with several clumps of loosely-connected notes, and I tend to spread them out somewhat evenly across the page. So even though I can type faster than I can write by hand, I still prefer writing by hand because of the freedom I get on paper. I also think the act of writing somehow helps me remember things better than typing. And e-ink just feels wrong, it's like the worst of both.
And also for many years I wrote cursive, then I switched to something that looks like D’Neal, and it was somewhat faster and easier to read (but not super fast)
The origins of the cursive method are associated with practical
advantages of writing speed and infrequent pen-lifting to
accommodate the limitations of the quill. Quills are fragile,
easily broken, and will spatter unless used properly. They also
run out of ink faster than most contemporary writing utensils. [1]
D'Nealian looks like disconnected Palmer. But, the extra pen lifts slow you down.
I handwrite with a modified semi-linked italic cursive. It's about twice as fast as my printing, and I can go faster, if I let it turn into a scrawl. That can't be done with printing.
This article doesn't actually support the claim that D'Nealian is faster than cursive. It just states the claim, without any references.
D'Nealian is intended as a teaching script, so the claim is dubious to me.
That said, I definitely don't write in stereotypical looped cursive. I remember that I did learn D'Nealian in school, and my handwriting today is something like a hybrid. The main improvement in speed for me came from the ability to write entire words in a single flowing hand motion, rather than having to pick up the pen repeatedly between letters. Cursive provides a consistent method for doing that.
Right. D'Nealian is clearly an intermediate form, which is intended to be abandoned once proper cursive is learned. It's also rather ugly and it looks immature when used as actual handwriting.
I actually wonder if shorthand would be a useful skill for a lot of people. I never learned it (though I sort of had my own informal system) and, indeed, basically never typed until college (and never learned to touch-type) because those were things secretaries did back in the day.
It's used by court reporters. I've been in a couple of depositions, mediations, and a lawsuit. The court reporters use a special device that works for fast shorthand typing, and their fingers blaze across those devices.
I know that shorthand would decrease the time that I spend taking notes or would increase the quality of the notes.
Shorthand is something different. There are a couple different systems to take notes by hand. As I remember Gregg and Pittman (or something close to that) were the two primary systems.
The post confused shorthand with stenography. Short hand is a condensed writing system. Stenography is an input system that produces fully form to standard text, significantly faster than you could type it one letter at a time on a standard keyboard.
Court reporters, also known as court stenographers or shorthand reporters, use a stenographic machine that records a form of phonetic shorthand. [1] [2] [3]
If you don't mind me asking, how did you make the switch? I've been writing cursive since early childhood and "chickenscratch" would be too nice a word for what my handwriting looks like.
Every time I've tried to change to print, however, I inevitably get stuck on the fact that I write like a child for months and months before any improvement can be seen. It's just very embarrassing to hand someone a note that looks like it was written by an elementary schooler who just learned their letters.
Between chickenscratch cursive and elementary school print, I would prefer the latter.
Why? Because I can't read chickenscratch cursive, but I can read print no matter how badly it is written.
Writing is fundamentally a communication medium, so if the resulting text is unreadable your writing does not serve its most important and fundamental purpose of conveying yourself to others.
As for how to improve: Slow down and write more. That's really all there is to it.
If your hand is cramping up, it's probably due to holding the pen/pencil too tightly, or applying too much pressure to the paper. If I use a ball-point pen (the most common type) for too long, my hand cramps up because of the pressure used to get the ink out of the pen. However, if I use a fountain pen, I don't need to grip it hard, nor press down to use it---it just glides over the paper, making for a much more fluid writing experience. And my handwriting got better too.
This is accurate - needing to grip and push on a pen harder makes it more difficult to control and the handwriting harder to read. Most cheap ballpoints are terrible for this.
I swear by Pilot G2 gel roller pens (or an off-brand equivalent, there are a few.) They glide across paper very readily and the writing comes out a lot neater as a result.
After about 6th grade I stopped using cursive. Just never made sense to waste time and effort writing something that can't be read, no matter how efficient it is.
But I never had trouble with taking notes. You get pretty fast at writing print if you do it all the time.
I still remember my college professor's surprise when I handed in a handwritten, but totally legible, essay complete with proper use of italics. For some reason people think you can't handwrite italics.
I did the same, around the same time in my life, but I found that my print writing couldn't keep up. Hence my desire and effort to switch back to cursive once I left school.
One of my engineer friends has picture-perfect print handwriting, like a gothic sans serif font. It's very impressive at how fast he can write and still have each letter look tidy and uniform.
This is also another thing everyone says, but I took notes in one class alone: Algebraic Geometry. And that was the class I was the worst at. Usually, all the way through undergrad and graduate school I'd just go home and do the exercises at the back of the class and type up a LaTeX cheat sheet. Then, during exams whole memories would return. Even today the Nullstellensatz comes to me in full form complete with lecturer at the board and where I was sitting in the class. But everything else is an unreachable haze. In fact, I remember the shapes in the class and writing in my notebook but I don't remember the actual content.
Does anyone else have this experience? Where note taking was deleterious to learning the content?
Even though I wrote plenty through elementary and high school, I was never able to write at a speed that allowed me to keep up with college professors, which was frustrating. If I could relive my college years I think I'd make sure to obtain a laptop of some sort because that would've made notetaking so much easier.
The difference in thinking between writing and typing that you noted is interesting. It didn't seem to exist for me, but that might've been confounded by struggling to keep up with the professor — I was too focused on trying to get things written down to actually put any thought into whatever was being said, making it difficult to apply any sort of grouping to the notes on the fly.
I had this experience several times in math classes, but I ascribe it to the professor not telling us where the lesson was going in advance. It was impossible to know if a given example or proof was going to be a quick thing or a major operation that consumed the entire lecture. That uncertainty made it very difficult to structure my notes. I generally didn't have that problem in my economics classes, nor do I seem to have it in work meetings.
There are pens that will record audio and you can make a short note that will take you straight to the location in the audio recording when you review.
I don't do enough these days where I need something like that but, when I did more journalism where I was quoting people it might have been useful. A lot of meetings I'm in are recorded anyway and recording is pretty routine for interviews anyway.
The other thing with taking written notes versus typing is being behind a laptop screen can be a bit off-putting.
I was taught cursive at primary school and from the point it was taught it was mandatory for written work.
It was a great relief when, partway through secondary school, I realised I could just drop it for print as it did wonders for my ability to read my own writing, and reduced the number of "?" markers on homework from teachers too.
> cursive […] isn’t taught in US schools any more.
I was dubious, so I googled.
According to this[1], 21 states require cursive as part of the curriculum, and some admittedly older data[2] suggests that 90% of students get some amount of cursive handwriting instruction.
I think that is all you really need. I mean, once you know how to write, learning cursive could be done in a few hours, it is fairly simple. After that it is up to the student whether to use it or not. I was never required to use it but I still liked it so the more I used it the better I got.
Honestly, I really do not understand all the complaning about cursive. Learning to read and write was harder (I imagine cause I don't actually remember struggling with it, it just came naturally) . Learning cursive is just a simple extension of it.
> Honestly, I really do not understand all the complaning about cursive
My memory of school was everything was required to be turned in cursive, but I was so bad at it that I wrote everything in print, then wrote a version in cursive, and then turned in both versions so there was one legible version and one version to fulfill the rules. It was a pain and I hated it, so it's a bad memory that it still feels cathartic to complain about.
Hmm, my entire education until high-school was entirely cursive. It was something of a revelation that a different method of writing existed, even though I was sort of aware that the letters in book didn’t look like the letters I wrote.
Even if the goal isn't to learn handwriting. Learning handwriting is an excellent means to develop fine motor movement. Many of our modern tools utilise the precision we learned in handwriting to perform other functions. Whether that's a painter using a brush, or a surgeon using a scalpel, or everything in between.
Our non-dominant hand almost gives us a preview of what this could be like, so it seems that spending time to upskill the articulation of our hands is necessary: so we might as well use that time to learn handwriting since it has the benefit of working without electricity and translates well into the aforementioned tools.
For me there was no connection. I could never really write legibly, but have always done lots of precise hand work (soldering, etc).
I think we spent a month+ working on cursive writing. Which for me was a waste of time. I did inform the teacher I believed it was pointless, as people would be typing in the future. This would have been maybe 1985, me in 1st or 2nd grade.
Also, even in the future, the power will go off once in awhile. Hand-writing would be like swimming. Not necessarily used much, but a skill worth keeping.
The level of training you need for basic swimming is only a couple hours. The teaching for handwriting is a lot more than that.
Anyone who uses the latin alphabet will have the character shapes memorized, so I'm sure they'd do just fine for emergency use even if they'd basically never written before.
That said, a huge amount of handwriting curriculum is actually motor skills practice, and that's pretty important!
Handwriting small notes in a meeting is less obtrusive than hauling out a laptop or thumbing a phone. I carry a 3.5 by 5.5 inch Cahier and a Spacepen at all times. If I need to write more extensively, I use one of my fountain pens.
It's also free-form. If I want to include a sketch or some math, it's easy.
Interesting! I've watched my wife writing things while studying that I can't imagine her ever referring to and I have the impression she regards writing it as a means of helping her learn. I'm aware of the value of taking notes but what she's doing is direct copying, no digesting.
All the forms I ever had to fill were in block letters. In fact as a kid we only learned cursive so I wasn't used to writing in block letters when filling in forms which was weird.
Are people referring to cursive as any type of manual writing?
I wonder if that retention has to do with having learned handwriting before typing, and that one who learns typing first would have equal retention to one who writes. Would be interesting if a study is done on this! (Of course, carefully, so as not at the expense of children)
No. I believe it has to do with the greater richness of motion involved. Writing a letter involves more effort and a specific motion of the hand for each letter and these are different for each letter (pushing keys on a keyboard is largely undifferentiated; what really varies is the position the fingers have to go, not the motion needed to produce a character which is the same). This, I think, exploits spatial memory as well (note how mnemonic devices like the method of loci work).
That does matter! A Stanford study on brain computer interface implants found that 'mentally handwriting' instead of 'mentally typing' was more than twice as fast, in some cases over triple. Because of those different motions/patterns for each letter.
Writing is an entirely different mental process. I find that I remember things far better if I write them on paper instead of in a text file. If anything, schools should go the opposite route and be as computer/tablet free as possible. I suspect the richer ones will.
This would be a better thought out argument if I weren't typing it from the toilet.
Generally this is true, but I'd say that for certain endeavors, like math, more meaningful work happens in handwriting. True as well for various kinds of planning or brainstorming, etc.
Also, definitely more volume of work happens on a computer at a keyboard. How meaningful it is is debatable. Recent events have shown what I believe Orwell said long ago, that most of what we write is just mindless concatenation of premade phrases. Computers make that easier, but it's not obvious that that activity is where the meaning comes in to work
Here is one - I thought I remembered another essay where he said something similar as well, where he was discussing jargon, but I didn't find it yet (or I'm remembering wrong and this is the only quote)
modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.
Because handwriting only requires a pencil or pen, and a medium to write on such as paper.
Contrast typing which requires an entire machine instead of a simple pencil or pen.
Note that as far as I'm concerned handwriting is different from cursive. We should absolutely teach kids how to write by hand. Teaching cursive as part of general curriculum, however, is a waste of time. Cursive is better relegated to being a hobby.
I had people insisting I had to learn cursive up until 6th grade and it magically stopped. I always felt I was hiding something until about right at this moment.
I disagree. I'm writing on paper almost daily, for three different type of tasks: journaling, writing and language learning. The physical act of writing and contact with paper somehow appease my mind a bit when journaling in a way typing doesn't. For writing (scientific or one of the book I'm working one), I start on paper first if I want to reach quality. I also sometimes do handwritten revisions on printed paper instead of using only computer. Finally when learning another alphabet (now Thai) or language (Thai and Sumerian currently), I find it easier to memorize content by writing letters and words.
Yes of course, how else would I write? Stopping after each letter and writing them like printed font? I saw some people doing this (especially in East-Asian where people aren't taught proper handwriting for English) and this is madness. No wonder handwriting is so slow and painful to these people.
I started using a fountain pen early in college, and have never gone back. It takes such a light touch that handwriting is easy and quick. If you have shitty pens, cursive makes a lot of sense to minimize the chance of an RSI. With high-quality gel pens or a fountain pen, either script or print is painless.
The kind of cursive that I was taught as a kid and that has fallen out of favor is either the Zaner-Bloser Method, the Palmer Method, or its derivative the D'Nealian. All of these have very similar looping cursive letters, the only differences are the style of the block letters and the method of transitioning from them to cursive.
A bit of trivia: the joined letters of cursive were developed in response to the limitations of the feather quill. It was important to keep the nib in contact with the paper at all times to avoid splattering and other faults. Today the only reason to keep joins is efficiency, but the other flourishes of old-fashioned cursive are less important.
I had a big argument at a DMV about that. The supervisor would not accept my signature, because he couldn't read it. I finally signed using a Palmer script and he said, "Why didn't you use that the first time?" I pointed out that my signature was my signature, and was on my bank accounts, etc.
So I went around for five years with two signatures on my license.
I'm with you. I'm quite successful by any measure and my handwriting is atrocious. My mum would do home handwriting assignments with her left hand for me so I could play and explore nature (we lived in a rural place).
I doubt I'd be any more advanced in my life if my handwriting were better. In fact, looking back at the kids in school I know with beautiful handwriting and the ones who were messy, I don't see any real correlation. It's pretty random.
Because you sometimes need to be able to put words to a surface.
I hike, often remote and alone. One of the many safety precautions I take is leaving a whiteboard on my dash with my destination and the date. Anyone seeing that will immediately know whether there's a problem. (And there's label tape on there with a bunch of contact information, including the satellite equipment I'm carrying.)
I'm using 10€ Waterman I bought 15 years ago and life would feel different if I ever lose it. The price of ink in Japanese was always a bother to me, so I hoarded cartridges wherever I traveled home. I got a Parker at Christmas once but never really used it because of the feel of it plus the very expensive price of ink; also way too heavy.
We did both in school in the late 90s. We had "computer" class 2-3 times a week where we learned touch typing, as well as "penmanship" where we learned print and cursive handwriting.
I write by hand so rarely now that it hurts my hand to do. (And I was in the cursive cohort. Pretty useless skill in retrospect lol. It's just a way less legible version of regular handwriting.)
I learned Palmer script. It was always my worst class in grade school. But I can look through years of notes and see it steadily deteriorate to the point that I really can't do cursive any longer (and yes, it hurts my hand to do it for anything beyond a minimal period).
If you want to learn to write in a way that isn't painful, learn to use a fountain pen - a $20 Pilot Metropolitan, or a Lamy Safari for I believe about the same, will do more than well enough.
Pencils and ballpoints, and to a lesser but real extent most rollerballs, require so much force to mark the paper that you can't help getting a cramp. Fountain pen ink is thinner and flows more easily, so all you have to do is steer the pen. This makes a very significant difference.
Don't start with a gold-nibbed pen - both of those I named use steel. Gold admittedly feels nicer to use, but you need the transitional step to learn better habits; steel is much more forgiving of excess force, and you'll know on your own when you're ready for a more delicate and expressive nib.
I used to hate to write longhand, too. I've been using fountain pens for about half a decade now. A few days ago I used one to work out a complex idea over eight A5 pages with no need to pause save occasionally for thought, and my wrist wasn't sore afterward. Here as elsewhere, choosing the proper tool makes all the difference.
When my kids were young, both my wife and I taught them cursive. When the kids each got into school, despite their pretty good or excellent penmanships, they were all told by teachers not to use cursive.
The teachers each said they were unable to read cursive.
There is little need for most people to *learn* cursive these days beyond signatures. However, people should be able to *read* cursive for another lifespan because they're going to encounter it.
I learned cursive in 3rd grade in the US, but I didn't use it since except for the specific letters of my own signature (which no longer really resembles the original letters anyway), so I've largely unlearned it. In hindsight, it was a huge waste of time. They should just teach enough to write your own name and then spend the rest of the year on reading, math, or typing.
You could say the same for Spanish. They teach it K-12 in a lot of districts but somehow the students never become fluent and rapidly lose any skills they gain.
Some people are doubtless more gifted in picking up languages. But my experience getting pretty good grades in 4 years of high school French is this: Traveling in France with a friend who never had any French, I actually could read and somewhat speak a fair bit she couldn't. But I was nowhere remotely near fluent/competent. In general, studying a language and never being immersed mostly leads to pretty surface knowledge.
The vast majority of people write faster in print than in cursive with a pencil or ballpoint pen due to reduced friction when raising the pencil or pen (most recent study I could find: https://www.academia.edu/16329948/The_Relationship_Between_H...). It is a waste of classroom time to optimize for fountain pen writing speed.
I write by hand a lot, actually most of my writing is by hand and I've pretty much always written in cursive since elementary school, the only times I don't is for forms, those I write in all capitals.
I know that this is wrong and that it's only in my head but I see pretty much all other writing that isn't in cursive as childish.
The sheer possibility that people might finish schools without knowing how to write in cursive is kind of worrying, because I fear that this is walking on a path towards a world where people stop writing by hand and in time even forget how to write...
And you might say that they won't forget because they constantly see and read the letters, but I can read hiragana and katakana, I can't write them though or it takes me quite a lot of thinking to get the image of the "letter" into my mind to be able to write it. And that's just because I don't write in then pretty much at all.
The problem with cursive is it has no relation to literally anything else. The shapes are only marginally similar to print, and some letters like Z and capital F and G are downright arcane. Trying to read certain cursive, particularly bad or heavily-stylized ones, is downright impossible.
Handwriting can be just as easily done using print, and is how I've always handwritten everything. The only time I use cursive is when I sign stuff, and only because I followed everyone else using cursive to sign. Print is also generally much easier to read, too; regardless the skill or style of the writer.
This is distinctly different from WorProBaka ("word processing idiot"), where people of all ages (this affects nearly everyone, not just the young) forget how to write certain kanji simply because Kakijun (stroke order) and their overall complexity easily fade from memory without constant reinforcement from common use. These people can all still read the kanji they've forgotten how to write.
I learned cursive in school and haven’t used it at least 20 years, except to read historical curiosities like old letters.
While I think it will still be many generations before people can get away with not being able to hand write at all, I’m not so sure it’s a negative. I can type an order of magnitude faster than I can write, to the point where hand writing is frustrating. It just feels like it imposes such limits on expression to go so slowly.
I don't find it surprising that it was dropped. I was taught cursive in elementary. Then no teacher or professor from high school on ever accepted cursive assignments. So, what is the point of practicing it?
That's not even getting into how terrible cursive is the write with ball-point pens.
Not really surprised. The most I write during month:
* the logbook for keys for when I leave office last
* signature when receiving mail/package.
and... that's about it for a month. Few lines at most.
But I was diagnosed with agraphia (i think that's how its called in english) as kid (something about eye-hand coordination IIRC) so my hand-writing always been fucking ugly even when I wrote a lot during school, so I don't particularly care about it
This Japanese is (just barely) legible and makes for a great example of what the OP is talking about. And since Japanese is a surprisingly popular language for HN posters - if you are able to read Japanese - I challenge you read this: https://imgur.com/a/lse8JR0
It was written by a JP native - using a mouse - but her handwriting is typically this bad so having to write using a mouse only made it very slightly worse than usual.
It made me feel better about my own handwriting. I don't sweat the details at all - writing better than natives might get me minor praise but doesn't really benefit me in the long run vs expanding my vocabulary or learning how to read more kanji by spending less time focusing on writing them. I only write kanji nowadays to help with memorization of new kanji and to make sure I can still write the first few "grade levels" of kanji for how natives learn.
Orca scribble is something else. I wouldn't be surprised if she would have visual cortex issues in lines perpendicular to the baseline and/or lines intersecting. I'm not a doctor but hers is bad as considered an LD bad.
The computer mouse is good for point-to-point movements, but pretty bad for drawing precise shapes. Even cool drag&drop workflows feel annoying if repetitive or if the target areas are very small.
This same phenomenon is present in western languages. Except instead of being unable to write difficult characters, the sufferers are just generally idiots.
They have no knowledge of navigation in the citries they grew up in, they have reduced ability in face-to-face human interaction, they suffer major inability in understanding that the physical world is the universal host of all of their "virtual" reality including the corporate products they concieve of as "community" and the chatbots they think of as "friends".
Self-professed English speaking word-processor idiot speaking. Before I was introduced to writing with a computor, my handwriting was illegible even to me, and my spelling was execrable.
similarly, i recently discovered that the japanese equivalent for a CLI one-liner is 一行野郎, or "one line bastard". which i think is a very fitting description
I have two write modes. Write and not write. Two shades of gray.
But I have a cursive world of words. I paint the air with my ability to temporarily change the density of the surrounding medium "air" through and by means of generating waves at arbitrary, sometimes repetitive patterned, frequencies, which ever started reach their destination, usually a opening of an ear, or the wall, sometimes.
Pretty offensive to people with a real disability called Dysgraphia.
Dysgraphia is a neurological disorder of written expression that impairs writing ability and fine motor skills. It is a learning disability that affects children and adults, and interferes with practically all aspects of the writing process, including spelling, legibility, word spacing and sizing, and expression.
