Copyright 2004

The “Invisible” Writing on the Wall1

David Moser
(Ph.D., University of Michigan
Beijing Foreign Studies University)

I first became interested in the Chinese language because of the writing system.
As I began to actually learn to read and write characters, some of the initial mystery went
away, but it was quickly replaced by an almost addictive fascination for the complexity
and sublime beauty of the script. I loved practicing the characters, delving into the
intricacies of calligraphy, and mulling over the cognitive and information processing
aspects of a script organized on such different principles from those of the alphabet.
When I actually got the chance to live in a Chinese environment, it was absolutely
intoxicating for me to walk around in this new semiotic sea. That an entire culture could
be bound together with these bewildering symbols boggled my mind. And to think that,
despite the daunting complexity of the character set, these symbols are the bread and
butter of this culture, the mundane tools of written communication, employed by Chinese
speakers with the same natural ease (so I thought) with which we wield the alphabet. It
didn’t take long for me to realize that this complexity and aesthetic attraction came at a
cost.
In the summer of 1990, I was a staying at a foreign student dormitory at Peking
University. One day, one of the fuwuyuan, who I called Xiao Wang, knocked on my
door. She had a new key for the guy across the hall from me, and since he wasn’t in at
the moment, she wanted to know if I would mind passing it on to him. I told her I was
about to leave town for a couple of days, and would already be gone by the time he came
back.
“No problem,” she said, “I’ll just write him a note and tell him he can pick it up
downstairs. Can I borrow a pen and paper?” I watched as she started to compose the
note. Everything went fine till she came to the characters for “key”, yaoshi 钥匙. She
suddenly couldn’t remember how to write them. Even though I had been studying
Chinese a few years, I couldn’t remember how to write the characters, either, and so was
no help to her. Luckily, there was another fuwuyuan in the hall doing some sweeping.
“Hey, how do you write yaoshi?” Xiao Wang yelled.
“Don’t ask me,” the second fuwuyuan said, “You’re the high-school graduate. I
only graduated from middle school.” Xiao Wang simply shrugged and tossed away the
uncompleted note. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll just give the key to him when he comes
back this evening.”
It struck me that Xiao Wang showed no signs of distress at being unable to render
such a high-frequency word in her own native writing system. Should this have bothered
her? It sure bothered me. For the next few days, I would mention this to my Chinese

1
The title of this article is meant to evoke the title of William Hannas’ 2003 book The Writing on the Wall: How Asian
Orthography Curbs Creativity. The current article was basically completed years before I read the Hannas’ book, but
since the anecdotal issues I bring up are merely a small subset of the total picture presented comprehensively in his
valuable work, I felt compelled to complete the article and add some content based on Hannas’ work. See the
postscript below.

1
friends, who would invariably just shake their heads in condescension and say something
like “Well, she’s just an uneducated fuwuyuan. What do you expect?” It seemed to me
that a middle school education should be sufficient to enable one to write a word as
common as “key”, but never mind that. What disturbed me most was the cavalier
assumption that Xiao Wang’s problem was her own stupidity, laziness, or lack of
cultivation, rather than a problem with the writing system she was using.2
For it wasn’t just a problem of the “uneducated masses”. As the months went by,
I began to discover that everyone, even the most highly educated and bookish, seemed to
have trouble remembering the characters for common words. I began to keep a little
notebook of examples of the ti bi wang zi (提笔忘字) phenomenon, and I was amazed at
the kind of lapses I encountered—characters in very mundane words like “paint”, “tin
can”, “spine”, “mouse” and so on—all temporarily forgotten by people who were clearly
very intelligent, well-read, and even exceptionally talented at language use. Though I
suddenly felt vindicated with regards to my own difficulty remembering how to write
Chinese characters, I began to wonder if this problem was more pervasive and pernicious
than the Chinese themselves were aware of.
The most astounding example I encountered back in my early days studying
Chinese was during a lunch with three graduate students in the Peking University
Chinese department. I had a bad cold that day, and wanted to write a note to a friend to
cancel a meeting. I found that I couldn’t write the character ti 嚔 in the word for
“sneeze”, da penti 打 喷嚔 , and so I asked my three friends for help. To my amazement,
none of the three could successfully retrieve the character ti 嚔. Three Chinese graduate
students at China’s most prestigious university could not write the word for “sneeze” in
their own native script! One simply cannot imagine a similar situation in a phonetic
script environmente.g., three Harvard graduate students unable to write a common
word like “sneeze” in the orthography of their native language.
What was even more amazingand puzzlingwas that the Chinese people I dealt
with showed almost no concern for this phenomenon. Most tended to explain away the
situation as due to low educational standards, or merely natural everyday memory lapses.
“And besides,” they would say to me, “Don’t you sometimes forget how to spell a word
in English?” And I slowly began to realize that part of the problem is that, for most
native Chinese, who have not grown up using an alphabetic system of writing, the
contrast between the systems is not at all evidentthey simply have no basis of
comparison. Such people tend to assume that their difficulties are with the process of
writing itself, rather than the particular writing system they are using.

2
A little confession: As I was writing down this anecdote, I suddenly realized that, though I could recall how to write
the first character yao 钥 in yaoshi 钥匙, I could not quite retrieve the second character, though I remembered it had bi
匕 as a component. So I am no better off than my friend Xiao Wang. I am not a native Chinese speaker, of course, and
did not grow up writing the characters, so my loss of face is minimal. Nevertheless, I do have an M.A. and a Ph.D. in
Chinese studies, and have spent almost 20 years of my life in an intensive effort to learn the written and spoken
language. That someone like me still struggles to recall the orthography of words in the top 1% of the word frequency
list is surely an indication in and of itself of a serious flaw in the writing system. [Footnote to this footnote: After
writing this passage, out of curiosity I asked my wife, a native Chinese with an MA degree, how to write the characters
for yaoshi. She quickly picked up a pen and wrote yao 钥 correctly, but mistakenly wrote shi 匙 with the metal radical
钅 to the left of the component bi 匕 . A reasonable semantic mistake, of course, somewhat like a native English
speaker writing “playwrite” instead of “playwright”. But my impression is that such errors are at least an order of
magnitude more common in Chinese than in English.]

2
 But even acknowledging the memory load problem, some people still ask: How
big a problem is this, really? After all, they say, Chinese society has not come to a
screeching halt because of it. Letters and shopping lists get written, waitresses succeed in
writing down orders for kung-pao chicken, and Chinese bureaucrats, like their Western
counterparts, drown in a sea of written documents. Surely the problem merely constitutes
a petty annoyance and not a large-scale disaster.
One can get an intuition about the scope of the problem by extrapolation: multiply
Xiao Wang’s problem to more than a billion people, and you begin to get a sense of how
the Chinese writing system impedes the use of everyday written language. Note that,
faced with the inability to retrieve the grapheme for the word in her head, Xiao Wang
first asked another native speaker, and when this failed, she simply gave up. The note did
not get written. How serious a problem was this? Not a fatal one. She was, after all,
able to fulfill her duties by other means, and she was subject to no condemnation or
penalty for her memory lapse. But the note did not get written. When I wished to write
the Chinese for “sneeze” that day at Peking University, ultimately the note did not get
written.
And here lies the problem with assessing this situation. While it is relatively easy
to measure instances of what does occur, it is difficult to assess the scope of what doesn’t
occur. Yet this problem is no more illusory for its “invisibility”— the problem is quite
real. The question is, how much communication is lost? If anecdotal information is
worth anything, there is no doubt a loss of countless mundane instances of non-essential
written communication that keep interpersonal relationships going. The Chinese writing
system is simply not as user-friendly as other scripts, and non user-friendly devices get
used less. Millions of Xiao Wang’s end up abandoning the attempt to write a simple note
or annotation, thus missing out on the very advantage that written language is supposed
to provide Every day in China, perfectly intelligent language users who normally would
be inclined to write down sentences in their native language for one reason or another, do
not do so, and for no other reason than the writing system itself discourages the attempt.
In a given day, who knows how many notes to family members get stalled, how many
would-be diarists give up the attempt, how many quick notes to oneself don’t get jotted
down, and how many glimmers of insight get lost?
China is justifiably proud of its literacy rate. And yet the orthography problem in
China surely demands a more precise definition of literacy and its functions. Note that
Xiao Wang would certainly be classified as “literate”. She is, after all, a high-school
graduate, one who has spent 12 years reading books, writing essays, jotting down love
notes and diary entries. Yet she cannot reliably remember how to write “key”—and
hundreds of other high-frequency vocabulary items—in her native script. The
inescapable conclusion is that, despite being technically among the ranks of the “literate”,
she is unable to wield the written script with the same ease and fluency as that of her
alphabet-using Western counterparts of a comparable educational level. And for this
reason “literacy” in the Chinese contexts tends to be defined as the ability to recognize x
number of characters, rather than the ability to write them. In the Chinese context, the
gap between passive recognition and active production of written symbols is relatively
enormous.
Fifteen years of living and working in this linguistic environment have convinced
me that this may be one of the most widespread yet “invisible” problems of Chinese

3
language reform. Almost every day I see Chinese struggling with this obstacle. The ad
hoc solutions are many: They write the character in pinyin. They scribble a rough
approximation to remind them of the real thing. They ask someone else. They look up
the character. They write down a homophone character. Increasingly, they write the
pesky word in English, which for some of them is becoming easier to write than their
native Chinese. And, of course, many just give up. All of these “solutions” waste
valuable seconds or minutes, distract them from the problem at hand (“Oh, so that’s how
it’s written. Now, where were we?”), and discourage people from relying on handwritten
communication for a host of mundane activities. The loss of time is locally insignificant,
but, additively over time, incalculable. And this is part of the problem. People have
learned to live with and adapt to the annoyance, for what other choice do they have? To
point out the loss of productivity caused by grappling with written characters seems as
petty to some as complaining about the time wasted brushing your teeth in the morning.
It is almost impossible to get Chinese people interested in the problem—or even to notice
that there is a problem3—though language reformers and planners are forced to consider
it.
Technology to the rescue! With the advent of voice recognition software and voice-
activated devices, along with advances in Artificial Intelligence, the sheer ability to write
characters by hand is surely becoming less and less important, right? Isn’t the act of
physically rendering written symbols by hand going the way of the typewriter and the
writing brush? In the future, visual language will all be entered and mediated by speech
—or even directly via brain waves or some such method—right?4
To some extent this may be true. It’s possible such devices might one day make the
niggling problems of remembering and writing down Chinese characters less irksome.
But there is no reason to think that the computer is going to make these problems
completely go away any time soon, if ever. First of all, despite the computer’s ubiquitous
presence, the vast majority of daily writing of characters is done by hand. Sales of
pencils and pens have not gone down. Jotting notes to oneself, taking notes in class or at
a meeting, writing a shopping list, etc. all involve the same process that has been used for
thousands of years, and this is not going to change very much in the foreseeable future.
Although the computer is now considered virtually indispensable for processing long
documents5, scribbling something quickly by hand on a piece of paper is still far and
away the most common way of getting language into written form.
It is an historical fact that the computer saved the Chinese writing system as a
viable orthography. It would not have continued to survive in a world of teletypes and
typewriters. Many people are under the mistaken impression that the computer has put
Chinese characters and alphabets on the same footing. After all, the Chinese characters
3
The level of denial in this regard can sometimes reach ludicrous proportions. A musician friend of mine who
specializes in jazz music once forgot how to write the word for “jazz” in Chinese, jueshi 爵士. When I poked fun at
him for this, he became a bit defensive and said “Well, it’s understandable that I would forget how to write this word.
It’s a loan word from English, after all!”
4
Many post-McLuhan analysts go further and maintain that the new media environment is on the verge of making
literacy itself irrelevant, as information is increasingly conveyed by sounds and images alone, rather than text. Even if
this pessimistic appraisal is true, the difficulty of the Chinese writing system can only serve to hasten literacy’s demise.
5
Ironically, it is precisely the increasing use of the computer that is exacerbating the ti bi wang zi phenomenon. Many
Chinese note that the new reliance on the computer for word processing has caused their ability to write characters to
atrophy. Due to the additional level required for Chinese character entry, neither the active retrieval of the character
form, nor the physical skill of producing the characters is reinforced by computer entry. As a consolation, many report
an improvement in their use of pinyin.

4
now seem to swim in cyberspace quite nicely alongside letters of the alphabet. But this
fact again obscures the reality that, no matter how much cleverness the programmers
muster in order to enable the computer to process characters, the nature of the Chinese
writing system still excludes an incalculable number of folks who would normally be
inclined to avail themselves of the computer.
An example of the disparity: My own mother, in her seventies, was initiated into
computer literacy with some difficulty, but once she mastered the use of the mouse and
the shuffling of windows and documents, she was able to begin communicating by email
with relative ease. Her ability to spell and type could be transferred directly onto the
process of communication in the new cyber-mode. And now, sitting in her sewing room
in Oklahoma City, she is able to send daily email messages to me in my Beijing
apartment. The new technology has been a boon to her life.
By contrast, my current next-door neighbor in Beijing, a Chinese woman about
the same age as my mother, has had a different experience. Although she has access to a
computer, she never uses it, despite the fact that she, too, has offspring living overseas
and would obviously love to avail herself of the communicative convenience of email.
But in the end, it is simply not worth the effort. Her ability at writing Chinese characters
by hand confers no advantage at all to her on the computer. On top of the same skills of
computer literacy that my mother had to master, she would also have to contend with the
byzantine intricacies of Chinese character entry, all of which is alien and new to her. Not
being comfortable with pinyin, she would have enormous difficulty entering the
characters, and as for learning wubizi or some other entry method, even her college-
educated children are unable to use these methods. As a result, this woman can only
resort to more expensive and thus sporadic communication by telephone. And the result
is, she communicates with her children much less than my mother does. For most
Chinese people of her generation, it’s as if the computer had never arrived.
From my cross-cultural vantage point, I would consider this state of affairs to be a
tragic example of inequality, brought on not by economic imbalances alone (though this
is the major factor here), but also by the very nature of the writing system. Yet this issue
is not even on the radar screen. The fact that even well-off older people in China tend not
to make use of the computer is perceived as entirely a matter of unfamiliar technology.
No one imagines the cumbersome character set as playing a role.
Yet even if some technological fix were to be devised to solve the problem of
character entry, the non-alphabetic nature of the writing system still results in other
serious and long-standing “invisible” problems. For example, the inclusion of a standard
index to books, manuals and reference materials is made orders of magnitude more
difficult by the Chinese writing system. The result is that to this day, the vast majority of
non-fiction books published in China do not have an index, or anything like it. This fact
seems incredible to those firmly ensconced in the alphabetic world, for obviously the lack
of an index considerably lessens a book’s usefulness. Removing indexes from Western
library books would be like an atomic bomb being dropped into academia. Yet their lack
is a mundane fact of life in China.6

6
The lack of indexes in Chinese scholarly materials has both created and reinforced the image of the mythical scholar
who has the entire corpus of requisite knowledge memorized—“in the belly”— and thus has no need of the “crutch” of
reference works that lesser scholars must resort to. A Peking University professor once boasted to me that he had
written an entire book while on sabbatical in the US without recourse to a single reference book.

5
 Why do Chinese publishers not provide readers with this simple but powerful
convenience? First we must ask, how should the index be ordered? The obvious method
these days would be pinyin rather than the nightmarishly frustrating character radical
ordering, but of course this adds the usual level of extra processing that plagues Chinese
character input, i.e., one must first convert the characters to pinyin. Including both the
characters and their pinyin romanization increases the size of the index considerably, and
thus the cost of the book, as well. And even if pinyin indexes were to become common,
it is doubtful they would be taken advantage of to the extent that indexes in English
books are, simply because of the added layer of processing involved. At some point the
trade-off becomes too great, and readers will prefer to flip through the pages to find the
desired passage, or simply to mark everything important in the margins. Given all this, is
there any doubt why Chinese publishers choose not to incur this extra cost and hassle?
Of course, the general readership of China is not rising up to demand indexes, simply
because they have never had the opportunity to use them, and cannot imagine the
convenience they are being deprived of.
Another surprising lacuna in the Chinese textual universe is the common
telephone book. Some of my American friends are flabbergasted when I tell them that
Beijing has no telephone book. (And the perfunctory Yellow Pages that does exist tends
to be considerably less well-thumbed than its western counterpart.) The same problems
of character ordering and lookup would plague any attempt to produce a usable
residential telephone book, and it appears that the ratio of effort-to-effect has kept this
standard urban convenience out of the picture.7 The citizenry copes without it, as usual,
with no awareness that they are “coping” at all, as Chinese people rely totally on their
own collection of phone numbers kept in notebooks, business cards, mobile phones and
on innumerable scraps of paper. It’s easy to lose a slip of paper with a hastily scrawled
number on it, or accidentally erase an entry in a mobile phone log, but in China the loss is
more often irretrievable. Telephone numbers are mainly obtained through friends or
friends of friends, and this state of affairs merely reinforces the importance of guanxi—
the interconnected network of people you know—in the Chinese social context.
These two glaring examples are really just the tip of an iceberg—or rather, the tip
of an iceberg-sized hole. Chinese information culture lumbers into the 21st century like a
cyber-behemoth, with most of the standard technological tools fully functional (albeit
often in a Rube Goldberg way), but annoyingly lacking in certain aspects. Language
users do not miss conveniences that they have never had access to in the first place.
Those few bi-cultural citizens who function in both Chinese-character and alphabetic
worlds are aware of the advantages conferred by the alphabet, but even these people soon
get used to the differences, which slip below the level of consciousness, unremarked and
unlamented.
Even in the numerous cases where equivalent information processing tools are
common in China, the added hurdles caused by Chinese characters present problems,
some subtle, some more obvious. In virtually every informatic context, from library card
catalogs to everyday user’s manuals, the relatively cumbersome Chinese writing system
exerts a low-level but constant drag force on productivity, and tends to reinforce an
7
There are other economic reasons for this lack, of course, such as the costs of paper and printing, which municipalities
in China may be more loathe to incur than in more developed Western countries. Yet the mountains of Party-produced
publications such as The Complete Works of Deng Xiaoping that collect dust in Xinhua warehouses would indicate that
the production of a truly useful reference work should be an economically feasible undertaking.

6
undemocratic state of affairs in which only the educated elite or the doggedly determined
make full use of the tools of the information environment.
One of the oldest information tools is the common dictionary. Dictionary lookup
in Chinese is relatively straightforward—if you already know how to pronounce the
character in question, and if you are thoroughly versed in pinyin. When the character is
unfamiliar, and you cannot be sure how it is pronounced (which is most of the time), you
are probably in for an annoying steeplechase. It took me a good six months just to learn
how to look up unfamiliar characters reliably in a dictionary using the radical (bushou 部
首) method.8 And now, even after 20 years of using a Chinese dictionary, I still cringe
when I’m forced to pick up a dictionary to find out how to pronounce some stubbornly
mute character. I have to buck up my courage, adjust my bifocals, and hunker down for a
little challenge that might very well take me several minutes. It has been my experience
that Chinese people also share this aversion to the dictionary. If it’s a matter of an
unfamiliar character they will usually infer the meaning from context and skim ahead. If
it is a matter of looking of a character they’ve forgotten how to write 9, they will ask
another person, or scribble a reasonable guess, or just leave a blank—anything before
resorting to a dictionary. Who can blame them? All the various skills of dictionary
consultation are almost the equivalent of a semester of secretarial school. When I was in
Taiwan, I was amazed to find that teachers often staged dictionary look-up contests in the
classroom. The poor kids were spending a significant part of their classroom time
learning to use the tools of language learning, rather than learning to use the language
itself.
Which brings us to the topic of children. Perhaps the most regrettable loss
resulting from Chinese characters is the time children must expend to master the basics of
their native script. And the burden is compounded by the fact that children are now
required to master two scripts, both pinyin and the Chinese character set. The Chinese
language planners who compile and publish elementary school textbooks willingly admit
that there is something perverse about making kids grapple with a second phonetic script
as a bootstrapping aid to learning the primary character-based orthography. And some of
these scholars have told me that once the children have gained some mastery of the
characters, they usually lose their easy familiarity with pinyin.10
At a Beijing grade school where I occasionally teach English on Saturdays, I often
observe the kids during the break writing for fun on the chalkboard. Aside from the usual
teasing caricatures and silly pictures, they also often enter into a little contest of character
writing skill. The trick is to show off your skill in writing lower frequency characters.

8
I tried to learn the much-vaunted four-corner method, since some of my geeky sinologist friends swore by it. In the
end I swore, too.
9
Very often the dictionary is needed not to ascertain how a character is written or pronounced, but simply to identify in
an utterance which character is intended in the first place (i.e., the operative morpheme), and this is particularly the case
for four-character idioms, which are terse assemblages of characters whose meaning can be idiosyncratic or reflect
classical Chinese usage. Recently on a videotape I heard the phrase mianshoujiyi 面授机宜 (meaning “to personally
instruct someone on a plan or course of action”), which to my ears was gibberish, merely four random syllables. The
Chinese people with me all understood the phrase perfectly, but it took all three of them to pin down the last two
characters and explain what they meant in this context.
10
It has been my experience that even many well-educated Chinese possess a less-than-perfect mastery of pinyin, and
will commit errors such as writing fuo for fo, or guei for gui. This obviously may have more to do with the problems of
pinyin than with their own powers of recall.

7
(“Oh yeah? I bet you can’t write this character!”) The writing system for them can be
treated as a challenging little test of memory, like a game of Trivial Pursuit.11
“What about spelling bees?” a Chinese friend reminds me. “Don’t such contests
show that English orthography is also difficult?” To which I reply: Yes, exactly!
Spelling bees are challenging and interesting (to some, anyway) precisely because
English spelling is so irregular and exception-ridden. Spelling bees would be pointless in
a language with a more regular orthography, such as Spanish. (Do Spanish people even
have spelling bees?) Educators dealing with English have for a hundred years debated
the necessity of English spelling reform, and for the same reason we are discussing here
with regards to Chinese characters: learning a complex and arbitrary orthography wastes
classroom time that could be spent on more important skills.
However, it is important to remember that for school children, there is an
enormous difference between not knowing how to spell a word and not knowing how to
write a character. As difficult as it is to master inconsistent English spelling conventions,
once a rudimentary knowledge of the system has been internalized, the child has a
powerful and error-tolerant tool that can be applied broadly across the entire lexicon.
Misspellings are seldom fatal, since “bad” spelling is merely the invoking of some
alternate conversion rule, revealing the child’s lack of sufficient contact with the written
language. Spelling errors almost never result in the kinds of total breakdowns in speech-
text conversion that occur constantly in Chinese. Of course, both Chinese and American
kids constantly produce incorrect orthographic renditions of words they have already
learned. The difference is that for Chinese kids there are always words they simply
cannot write at all until they have acquired the characters for them, whereas their western
counterparts, armed with a relatively small preliminary number of spelling heuristics, can
write virtually anything they can say.
My six-year-old daughter is currently in first grade at a US elementary school.
Her first-grade teacher often encourages the students to write little essays on whatever
topics they please, and in such cases she does not correct their spelling, the point being to
encourage them to enter into the process of converting their thoughts into written
representation without the inhibiting fear of making mistakes. And so my daughter brings
home written sentences such as these, familiar to any parent:

I put a sin on the door that says do not disterb.

She will wake up tomoro morning with muny from the tooth fary.
I am happy becus today is valintins day.
Nobude is home.

11
In my long and arduous study of Chinese characters, many of my Chinese friends have passed on to me little
mnemonics they learned or developed when they were children to remember how to write complex characters. For
example, I’ve encountered a host of little tricks to remember the ordering of the three components 月, 贝, and 凡 at the
bottom of the character ying 赢, “to win”. (“Our teacher told us that, see, in the middle is bei 贝, which is a kind of
wealth. So when you win something you keep the wealth safe in the middle…” “Think of it like a little poem, ‘ Wang
kou yue bei fan,’ and it will help you remember it,” and so on.) Every Chinese person has an enormous repertoire of
such idiosyncratic mnemonic gimmicks stored in their heads, some forgotten, some still dredged out occasionally.
Think of the grade school trick of distinguishing “principle” from “principal” by remembering that the principal is your
“pal”. (I still use this one.) The necessity for such memory prods is orders of magnitude greater for Chinese
characters. It goes without saying that such mental crutches are a waste of valuable brain space and mental resources.

8
 The writing system she is using is very forgiving of her spelling mistakes, because
the mistakes still serve to convey the sounds of her intended sentence. The Chinese
system, however, does not allow the child the luxury of substituting homophonic guesses
for the target character; huge swaths of lexicon are off-limits until the needed character is
memorized.
What this means is that, in a sense, my daughter can already successfully write
the word disturb, albeit in a nonstandard form, *disterb. Written communicative
functionality arrives well before orthographic mastery. By third grade, she and her
classmates will be able to write (with numerous errors) almost anything they can say. By
contrast, Chinese children are still learning to write new characters as late as the sixth
grade, and until they are able to write at least three or four thousand characters, the
semantic map for them is filled with roadblocks. If my daughter’s Chinese counterpart
cannot yet write the character rao 扰, she will simply be unable to produce the compound
darao 打扰, “disturb”, because there is no orthographic principle or heuristic that would
allow her to make a guess.12 Needing to write a character she hasn’t yet studied, the
Chinese child can only throw up her hands and cry “uncle” (or rather “shushu”, I
suppose).
Which brings us to sensitive issue. In writing essays and letters, are Chinese kids
able to roam as easily as their alphabetic cousins in semantic space? Is it as easy for them
to produce communicative (albeit flawed) written representations of the extensive
vocabulary they have already learned? Does mastery of the spoken language and the
written language begin to merge in this way at the same point for Chinese children? The
answer to these questions, based on the above facts and my own experience, is a
resounding “No.” There are many aspects that point to this conclusion, but one telling
phenomenon puts the issue in stark contrast.
I have occasionally taught English to Beijing schoolchildren, and one day I was
helping a class of third graders review English words for body parts. One little boy wrote
“knee” on the blackboard, and then, as he attempted to write the Chinese translation xigai
膝盖, found he could not write the characters. I found this rather intriguing, and I begin
to quiz the class on common words for body parts and everyday objects, and within a few
minutes we came up with a list of words like (again) yaoshi 钥匙 “ key”, niaochao 鸟巢
“bird’s nest”, lajiao 辣椒 “ hot pepper”, huazhuang 化妆 “ makeup”, gebo 胳膊 “ arm”,
jugong 鞠 躬 “ bow”, and so on, all of which they could write (or correctly guess) in
English, but could not successfully render in Chinese script. Abilities varied greatly, of
course, and a couple of the brighter kids could seemingly write almost any character, but
for most of them, their written English lexicon had already made a few semantic inroads
that were still inaccessible via the Chinese characters.13 After the class I mentioned this
interesting (and to me, distressing) state of affairs to some of the parents who stayed on to
chat with me. This gave rise to a lively discussion, during which we found that many of
12
If the set of Chinese characters were used as a syllabary, the Chinese child might actually be at an advantage in this
respect.
13
Simple comparisons of the lists of required vocabulary for Chinese and, say, American students of an equivalent
grade level can yield rough estimates as to the difference in writing ability, though a more ideal study would be a
comparative content analysis of grade school essays from the two cultures. Such methods are problematic due to
culturally incommensurate lexical items and a significant economic gap, but the biggest problem with word-count
approaches is the aforementioned gulf in Chinese character learning between passive recognition and active
production . Again, literacy in the Chinese context tends to be defined by the number of words children can recognize,
not by how many they can reproduce, and the Chinese children fall far behind in this regard.

9
the parents, to their bemused chagrin, also stumbled over characters in common words
like saozhou 扫 帚 “ broom”, gebozhou 胳 膊 肘 “ elbow”, zhouwen 皱 纹 “ wrinkle”,
aizheng 癌 症 “ cancer”, menkan 门 槛 “ threshold”, yulin 鱼 鳞 “ fin”, chiru 耻 辱
“shame”, xidicao 洗涤槽 “ kitchen sink”, Lundun 伦敦 “ London”, and so on. Many of
these adults held advanced degrees, and one was an editor at a Beijing newspaper. One
of the parents sheepishly confided in me “I wince when my child asks me how to write a
character, because I often can’t remember, either. This has happened so often that I’ve
totally lost face in this regard, and nowadays the joke in our house is ‘Look it up, you’ll
remember it longer.’”
Comparisons of Chinese characters with other writing systems are admittedly
fraught with difficulty, and such questions are outside my area of expertise. If there is
indeed a disparity here, as I contend, the problem would be an “invisible” one. It is
common knowledge that the characters are difficult to learn, but few imagine just how
difficult in comparison to alphabetic scripts. One could not expect Chinese parents and
teachers to notice a failing that would only be evident through direct and scientific
comparisons of Chinese kids’ performance with that of their American counterparts.
As English speaking children mature, their spelling improves (though never
comes close to perfect—most people are atrocious spellers), and they learn to apply the
appropriate rules to each word. But note that the initial “rules-of-thumb” guessing stage
for English is not one that children grow out of completely. Adults continue to apply
spelling heuristics (consciously and unconsciously) in writing to allow the
communicative process to proceed without any fatal breakdown. In my mother’s email
letters I find sentences like these:

She s been diagnosed with muscular distrophy (sp?) and is seeing a doctor.

I’m following the Irak thing, because Mandy’s husband has been sent to
Bagdad, and who knows if what these journelists are saying is true.

Misspellings like “distrophy”, “Irak”, “Bagdad” and “journelists” do not impede her flow
of thought or my comprehension in any way, and the occasional annotation “(sp?)” lets
me know that she herself is aware of a possible error. If she wanted to, my mother could
use a spell checker (as I am doing now to catch my numerous inadvertent misspellings).14
But even with the imperfect spelling, her text is perfectly comprehensible. And note that

14
Note that even these orthographic corrective measures are unavailable to Chinese character users. One cannot merely
enter a non-standard character approximation into the computer, because the character set is fixed, and confined to the
level of the syllable. The character set on the computer does not permit “fudging”. And there is no equivalent of spell
checkers in Chinese because the nature of the relationship between orthography and semantics resists automation.
Software spell checkers are possible in English because lexical boundaries are fairly clear, and matching alphabetic
character strings is trivially implementable by brute-force searches—what computers are best at—thus there is no need
to resort to semantics to detect errors. The Chinese character set, on the other hand, presents the computer with
modular semantic chunks that are combined in ways only human intelligence can judge the validity of. My mother’s
spell checker will catch the misspelling “journelist” through a simple string-matching process, but how could the
computer catch the substitution of “ 纪者 ” jizhe for “ 记者 ” jizhe? Neologisms are equally common in Chinese and
English, but the lack of orthographic word boundaries in Chinese and the infinity of semantic space render the problem
of automated error detection intractable in the Chinese system. Chinese word processors do have a feature that prompts
the user as to possible lexical combinations as the characters are being entered (and this is a blessed godsend), but there
is nothing on the market yet to detect errors once the characters have been entered into the text. Yet another lack in the
toolbox of modern informatic conveniences.

10
even exceedingly rare words like “scabbard” or “ragamuffin” are thus available to her
due to her implicit knowledge of English spelling conventions.
Misspellings in English could be equated with the ubiquitous cuobiezi 错别字 in
Chinese, which include mis-written characters as well as the substitution of an
inappropriate character. As with a misspelled word in English, a cuobiezi is usually more
a cause of mirth than misunderstanding. I stress again that the problem in Chinese is not
the miswriting a character, but rather the inability to retrieve enough of the components
to write it down at all. If one does not engage in the writing of characters every day, they
soon begin to decay and evaporate in long-term memory.
Several years ago a Taiwanese friend mine, a Ph.D. in the Harvard School of
Education, lamented to me, “You know, after ten years in the US, I feel sad that I’ve
almost lost the ability to write in Chinese. Nowadays it’s so agonizing for me to pick up
a pen and compose a letter in Chinese, that I’ve almost stopped writing to my friends. If
they have email, we often just write to each other in English. I kept a diary when I first
came here, but that’s fallen by the wayside. There are all kinds of subtleties I would love
to express in my native language, but it feels like swimming through molasses to write
the characters.” Letters don’t get written, emotions don’t get expressed. How can one
characterize this loss?
We might compare this situation to the time lost due to traffic jams. Imagine a
utopian Star Trek world in which workers could be instantaneously “beamed” to their
place of work, thus avoiding the countless hours stuck in traffic. Is there any doubt that
productivity would be significantly higher than it is now? Can anyone estimate how
many more pieces of software could be written, how many more medicines developed, or
how many points added to the GNP? And consider the inactivity of people who avoid
leaving the house at all because they don’t want to enter into the fray of traffic? The
cumulative effect of the Chinese writing system acts like a 24-hour information traffic
jam, wasting incalculable person-hours and discouraging active participation from the
less die-hard users. And as with traffic jams, society still functions, people manage to be
productive and learn to adjust to the hassle, and the problem remains largely invisible.
Is the answer to abandon Chinese characters altogether?15 Chinese scholars from
Lu Xun to Zhao Yuanren have at one time or another made the case for their abolition,
but no matter where one stands on this issue, this solution is for the time being utterly
unthinkable. And there is such overwhelming cultural inertia in favor of the characters
that any remedial attempt at alleviating the problem, no matter how reasonable, is not
likely to get off the ground. The defensiveness one encounters among Chinese people
about this whole issue is due in part to misdirected nationalist pride, on top of the
nagging awareness that the criticisms are valid. Yet to a great extent, reservations about
phasing out the characters are quite understandable and justifiable. A switch to pinyin
would not be like a switch to the metric system.16 Abandoning the characters would
entail a traumatic cultural amputation that the body of Chinese society is not prepared for.
If Chinese characters were somehow consigned to the dustbin of history, it would not
15
There are two people to go to for answers to these questions. One is John DeFrancis, whose seminal work The
Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy is a bible for researchers wanting to understand how Chinese characters work,
and don’t work. The other person is Victor Mair, the prolific scholar who has spent decades dealing with language
reform in this area, and is one of the most astute analysts of China’s orthography problems and the implications of
using pinyin to represent the sounds of Chinese. His work on this subject is too numerous to cite here, but see the
references to Mair in the bibliography below.
16
And just look what resistance this reasonable measure meets with in the United States!

11
only be a cultural tragedy, but a linguistic and logistical mess that might take a hundred
years to sort out. The uniqueness and evocative interest of personal and proper names
would be lost, and this would create enormous practical difficulties as well, forcing
fundamental changes in the very morphology and syllable structure of the Chinese
language itself (employment of the large number of homophonic morphemes willy-nilly
would not work in an alphabetic script). Chinese literate culture would lose its cherished
link to China’s 5,000-year written history.17 And of course, there would be an
irretrievable loss of aesthetic beauty. Chinese characters constitute arguably the most
complex and visually stunning writing system in the world. With the demise of
characters, the art of calligraphy would complete its current decline in popularity and
become relegated to the museum.
As much as I sympathize with Xiao Wang and her compatriots, for the time being
the struggle with the writing system may be simply one of the unavoidable costs of being
Chinese,18to be tolerated along with many other national problems such as
overpopulation. But just as the recognition of China’s population crisis eventually led to
the one-child policy, an awareness of China’s orthographic crisis should hopefully lead to
a set of solutions that relieves the burden of the Chinese script on users of the Chinese
language.

Postscript

Several years after writing this informal polemic, I encountered two important
books by William Hannas, Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma (1997) and The Writing on the
Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity (2003). These books constitute by far
the most thorough, thoughtful and authoritative works in print on the subject of Asian
writing systems, and they should be required reading for every language planner in the
Far East. Worthy successors to John DeFrancis’ pioneering work, Hannas’ treatments
constitute a convincing wakeup call to educators and cross-cultural researchers concerned
with the perceived lack of creativity in Eastern culture. Every problem I have raised
anecdotally in this article is covered exhaustively and convincingly in Hannas’ books. In
addition, Hannas goes beyond identifying and describing the numerous practical
problems and drawbacks of characters, and attempts to make the case that the very
cognitive and psycholinguistic aspects of the writing system have not been culturally
conducive to creative ways of thinking, and continue to hamper creativity in the East to
this day.
Since this is not intended as a book review, I will not attempt a thorough outline
of Hannas’ complex and interconnected arguments. I merely wish to sketch here a few of
his major points in order to bolster my observations, and point interested readers in the
direction of his research.

17
The notion that knowledge of the characters and their modern meanings somehow allows one direct comprehension
of the ancient texts is nonsense of course, and John DeFrancis (1984) has demolished this fallacy, which he classifies as
falling under the “Universality Myth”. Nevertheless, one can go too far in downplaying the usefulness of the characters
in facilitating understanding of the classical literature. The semantic overlap with modern meanings is quite significant,
and this combined with the traces of classical syntax and lexical usage in the modern language does indeed make the
characters a rather useful bridge to the literary and philosophical canon in a way that is not the case with other
languages and their scripts. (Think of the incomprehensibility of Beowulf for modern English speakers.)
18
Though of course we sinophilic foreigners have to contend with the difficulties, as well. For an intentionally
humorous whining diatribe on this subject, see Moser, 1991.

12
 Hannas in his second book musters a great deal of anecdotal and historical evidence
to highlight and flesh out the longstanding observation of a kind of “creativity gap”
in Far Eastern countries. Hannas’ credentials and professional milieu puts him in a
rather special position with regards to this much debated characterization, and his
positions on the matter, no matter how uncomfortable to some, cannot be easily
dismissed as mere stereotyping. Especially enlightening to me were detailed
accounts of the extreme dependence of Japanese and Chinese technology on the
West, and the admission on the part of experts from those countries of a distressing
dearth of creative solutions to problems. The great novelty of Hannas’ particular
analysis of this problem is the somewhat Whorfian emphasis on the special benefits
of alphabetic literacy vs. character-based literacy. His case is complex and well
documented, and resists easy characterization.

 In addition to cataloguing the inefficiencies and disadvantages of the writing system,

Hannas shatters the myth, still prevalent, that the characters are somehow
intrinsically suited to representing the special aspects of the Chinese language.
Hannas tries to show how the seemingly tight fit of the morphosyllabic characters to
the language is in large part due to the effect of the writing system on the language
itself, rather than the script’s adapted suitability to Chinese. For example, it is true
that the different character shapes are now necessary to solve the “homonym
problem”—the enormous number of homophonic syllabic morphemes—but Hannas
makes a convincing case that this homophonic redundancy in the language was
encouraged and reinforced historically by the morphosyllabic nature of the
characters. Here and in other cases, the characters are called upon to solve a problem
which they themselves created. Hannas also denies the usefulness of the semantic
information visually conveyed by the characters, pointing out that in any case the
burdensome character set and its weak phoneticity outweigh any supposedly
“ideographic” advantages over alphabetic scripts:

A second measure of efficiency…is how closely the writing system matches the language
itself, and here the characters do not fare very well, either. Even in the worst alphabetic
systems, users can rely largely on their knowledge of a word’s spoken sound to understand
or reproduce a written equivalent. The knowledge behind this maneuver is enormous, but it
is for the most part free. Character users have nothing comparable. The “radicals”… are
almost totally useless as bearers of information. Although phonetic components can give
hints about pronunciation, the relationship is haphazard, incomplete, contradictory, and
unidirectional. Proposing this “system” as the equal of English, even in terms of the match
it has with the language, makes no sense at all. (1997, p. 152)

Overall Hannas maintains that the characters are not only far from ideal as an
orthographic system for Chinese—and in most ways inferior to alphabetic systems in
accomplishing the same goals—but have also had certain detrimental effects on the
word-formation conventions and writing styles. And this effect extends to cultures
such as that of Japan, whose orthography is based upon sinitic principles.

 The fact that the characters represent speech at the syllable level is not conducive to
the development of meta-linguistic awareness on the part of language users. There is

13
 not even an indigenous word for “word” in Chinese, ci 词 being a more recent,
learned concept still not widely employed by the general populace.19 Speakers
normally refer to the smallest linguistic unit as the zi 字, the character, and have a
weak linguistic understanding of words and word boundaries.20 What is missing
from the process in syllabic scripts is the element of abstraction and analysis, and
this, Hannas says, has a pervasive effect at all linguistic levels:

[E]xamples of East Asia’s preference for concrete elements and distaste for analysis are
evident at each linguistic level. Syllables are not split into abstract phonemes, sentences
are not segmented into words, and discourse until recently was not divided into
sentences. Although China has a tradition of phonological study, it focused on rhymes
and never was able to break decisively through the syllable barrier to identify abstract
phones or features of phones. It is difficult for Westerners soaked in an alphabetic
tradition to appreciate that speech does not reduce automatically to phonemes or features,
but comes across perceptually to those outside this tradition as concrete syllable sounds
that are indivisible on the surface level. (2003, p. 110)

But it is more than just meta-linguistic awareness that is missing in users of Chinese
and East Asian writing systems. Hannas goes further and makes the case that the lack
of linguistic abstraction in the writing system has a kind of cascading cognitive effect,
negatively influencing language at each level, even to level of style and content:

The marginal nature of Chinese character-based orthography is evident at each linguistic

level. Speech sounds are represented concretely. They are not analyzed into segments or
abstract phones. Morphemes—basic elements of meaning—are depicted instead of words
that correspond to complete concepts. The lack of clearly defined words leads to ill-
defined sentences, not only in classical texts, which are often nebulous and subject to
varying interpretations, but even in modern scientific writing. Sentences run on
interminably, much as in speech, with little thought given to segmenting ideas. The style
is often vague, as if East Asian writers do not appreciate the need to present their work as
an objectified, self-sustaining whole independent of personal context. (2003, p. 217)

Though Hannas places a great deal of the onus on the syllable-based writing system,
he is not claiming that other factors (cultural, historical, educational) do not play a
role. Rather, he is attempting to highlight and limn the scope of the writing system’s
role in the interconnected mix.

 Drawing upon a wide array of theories and frameworks from cognitive and brain
sciences, Hannas identifies four stages of scientific creativity: preparation,
incubation, inspiration, and verification. (Reasons of space prevent me from spelling
out what he means by these terms.) The literature on creativity is vast, and Hannas
draws on varied sources in trying to arrive at this sort of rough consensus about the
issue. More skeptical readers might wish to accuse him of “cherry picking” his
psycholinguistic data, but he has succeeded in drawing some interesting novel
conclusions from the body of existing research.21 His conclusions, however
19
Of course, the perception of the word is an artifact of written language, and the conventions of word boundary
assignment vary from language to language. Hannas’ point is that the Chinese script, which does not delimit any word
conventions at all, dealing instead with the morpheme level, excludes this level of abstraction completely.
20
For example, in my experience, few Chinese can correctly analyze a phrase like Zhonghua renmin gongheguo 中华
人民共和国 “The People’s Republic of China”, into its constituent word boundaries.
21
I was particularly pleased that Hannas had drawn upon the theories of Douglas Hofstadter, who is a sort of mentor of
mine. Hofstadter’s valuable ideas about the creative process have tended to be overlooked or marginalized in the

14
 reasonable, must stand beside a host of competing frameworks. At any rate, having
identified these four components of creativity, Hannas attempts to make his
Whorfian case, and show that the learning and use of alphabetic scripts encourages
the kinds of cognitive skills that are central to these building blocks of creativity:

Each of these stages, I submit, presupposes cognitive skills that are developed or reinforced
by alphabetic literacy. In fact, the two sets of skills correspond so well that it is tempting to
regard the alphabet as more than a facilitator of creativity. Rather, it is a model of the act
itself. (2003, p.156)

He then attempts to make a case, drawing upon various psycholinguistic,

neurolinguistic and historical evidence, that the cumulative effects of the alphabetic
tradition create a cognitive and cultural environment conducive to kinds of processes
he has identified as crucial to creativity. This link in his argument is bound to be the
most controversial aspect of his thesis. There is still a great distrust of any theory
with a Whorfian flavor (perhaps with some justification). It is also sometimes
difficult to tell if Hannas’ claim about the relationship of alphabetic literacy with
mental processes such as formal argumentation, systematic taxonomies, idealization,
quantification, and so on, involves merely a facilitating effect or plays the decisive
role. Part of his claim is that the simultaneous rise of written language and the
explosion of technological advancement 5,000 years ago is not coincidental, and the
processes of writing and literacy acted as cognitive catalysts. But if this is the case,
Hannas needs to deal more with the fact that China managed to create a stunning and
superior intellectual and technological culture within the first few thousand years of
written history without the benefit of an alphabetic writing system.
This is not the only objection to Hannas’ theory, which on the face of it might
seem perilously speculative. Coming from a lesser scholar, such broad claims about
the effect of different writing systems might be dismissed out of hand, but Hannas
knowledge of the languages involved and his extensive hands-on experience makes
his thesis worth considering.

 Hannas is perhaps the first scholar to make a comprehensive case for the common
cognitive legacy of the orthographies of China, Japan, Viet Nam and Korea (all
derived from or heavily influenced by Chinese characters). Particularly valuable is
Hannas’ observation that all Far Eastern orthographies (Chinese, Korean, Japanese,
and even Vietnamese) basically function as syllabaries, and this characteristic has
important psycholinguistic implications. According to Hannas, the very different
processing demands of the script, combined with time consuming burden of rote
acquisition and various concomitant pedagogical and social conventions, results in a
creative deficit that has been historically significant, and is still very much a problem
today. Again, Hannas does not deny the effects of aspects such as conservative
social and political institutions, or group-oriented cultural pressures, but he does wish
to maintain that these very social factors tend to derive in part from the effects that
processing the orthography has had on the minds of users.

cognitive science literature.

15
This sketchy overview cannot do justice to Hannas’ arguments, nor do I wish to raise
here certain of my own reservations about his conclusions. I will break off the discussion
here merely by saying that Hannas has done a valuable job in assembling the contentious
facts of the matter and synthesizing a lucid, uncomfortably honest appraisal of what
surely must be the most underestimated sociocultural problem facing China (and, if
Hannas is right, other East Asian cultures.) To those of us grappling with the issues of
Chinese writing, he has helped us to better see what is literally right before our eyes—and
thus invisible—and hopefully to develop more clear-sighted strategies to fix the problem.

16
 Bibliography

DeFrancis, John (1984) The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press.

DeFrancis, John (1989) Visible Speech. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Hannas, William (1997) Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma. Honolulu: University of Hawaii

Press.

Hannas, William (2003) The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs
Creativity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Mair, Victor (1986) “The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary
of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some Recent Dictionaries and Current
Lexicographical Projects” Sino-Platonic Papers No.1 (University of
Pennsylvania).

Mair, Victor (1991) “Building the Future of Information Processing in East Asia
Demands Facing Linguistic and Technological Reality.” In Victor H. Mair and
Yongquan Liu (eds.), Characters and Computers. Amsterdam: ISO Press.

Mair, Victor (2001) “Language and Script,” in Victor H. Mair (ed.) The Columbia
History of Chinese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.

Moser, David (1991) “Why Chinese is So Damn Hard,” in Victor H. Mair (ed.),
Schriftfestschrift: Essays on Writing and Language in Honor of John DeFrancis
on his Eightieth Birthday. Sino-Platonic Papers No. 27 (University of
Pennsylvania).

Yin Binyong, Su Peicheng 尹斌庸， 苏培成 (选编) (1994) 《科学地评价汉语汉

字》The Scientific Evaluation of the Chinese Language and Characters，华语教
学出版社。

Zhao Yuanren (1968) Language and Symbolic Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Zhao Yuanren (1976) Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics. Anwar S. Dil (ed.) Stanford:
Stanford University Press.

赵元任 （1992） 《中国现代语言学的开拓和发展》。 北京：清华大学出版社。

17