Technology is making it easier to write and learn Chinese

Few languages are so associated with their written form as is Chinese. The mere mention of the language calls to mind an elaborate, beautiful and—to outsiders—mysterious script. The Chinese themselves are extraordinarily proud of it.

Without doubt, though, it is hard. Opinions vary on how many characters a user must know, but around 1,000 are needed for minimal function; 6,000-8,000 is a common estimate for an educated person. Characters are usually assembled from smaller pieces, one of which might give a clue to the meaning and the other to its pronunciation. But that is not always so, and in any case, which piece goes where is not fixed.

Learning to write Chinese has always been tough. As if that were not enough, for centuries the few people who could relied on its literary, classical form, equivalent to the use of Latin in medieval Europe. In the guise of poetry and proverbs, it is still in use today.

Bringing Chinese into the modern, international and digital world is the subject of “Kingdom of Characters”, a fascinating book by Jing Tsu of Yale University. First, the modernisers had to replace classical Chinese. This involved choosing one of the many mutually unintelligible spoken varieties at a heated conference in 1913. Wang Zhao, one of the key figures there, chased another delegate from the room for having called him a “son of a bitch”—or so Wang thought. The poor man had actually said “rickshaw” in his southern dialect. Wang and his allies overcame the southerners, and the Mandarin of Beijing became putonghua, the “common tongue”. The written standard was based on it.

Ms Tsu goes on to detail the creativity, false starts, rivalries and eventual triumphs that dragged Chinese into the 20th century: the first typewriters, telegraph codes and computer-input methods are at the heart of her story. A digressive chapter on the frenzied competition to create an indexing method—for a language without alphabetical order—gives a sense of the challenge the modernisers faced.

At each step, China was inevitably chasing other countries, borrowing ideas and technology. This nearly led Mao Zedong to adopt romanisation of the Chinese language, which would have simplified the task but disadvantaged speakers of non-Mandarin dialects and discarded millennia of heritage. Instead, he introduced two initiatives. A committee created a new roman-letter transcription of Chinese—called pinyin—but largely as an aid to learning characters. And thousands of characters were simplified.

Regular use of pinyin was once a rarity for most Chinese, but these days it is common: it is all but essential for day-to-day interaction with computers. People use it to write on keyboards and smartphones, entering the spelling and choosing the right character from a menu of homophones. Other systems employ the keys to combine the pieces of a Chinese character. For the skilled, this method is faster, but it is much trickier to learn.

International use of Chinese has not grown at anything like the pace of China’s economy and global clout. The difficulty of learning the written language is undoubtedly one reason why. The difficulties of using it on a computer are another. It is hard to imagine two foreigners writing to each other in Chinese as many do in English.

That might one day change, as technology finally becomes more of a help than a hindrance. Today, artificial intelligence has made inputting characters easier. Like those familiar from autocorrect and predictive text in other languages, new systems can guess which Chinese character a user wants, not just from overall frequency but from surrounding words. People who hand-write on their touchscreens have seen much-improved recognition of their intentions. And speech-to-text software has advanced for every language, meaning that fewer users even need to touch a keyboard to “write” Chinese.

More and more Chinese struggle to hand-write rare characters from memory, a “character amnesia” that worries traditionalists. But in every other way, technology, long an obstacle, is at last a boon. Learning how to read and write Chinese will still be hard. Yet with a tutor and memory-aid in every pocket, you no longer need the work ethic and prodigious memory of a scholar boning up for the imperial civil-service exam—a blessing for foreign learners as well as natives. Though unlikely to displace English, Chinese may begin to have a global role more commensurate with China’s own.

Read more from Johnson, our columnist on language:
The real problem with dangling participles (May 7th)
On the origin of languages (Apr 22nd)
As the scale of science expands, so does the language of prefixes (Apr 9th)