How the QWERTY Keyboard Broke the Chinese Language
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- Опубліковано 21 гру 2020
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Video written by Tristan Purdy
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The way you pronounce Zhou Youguang almost gave my grandma a heart attack, but you tried your best.
I remember a Chinese girl telling me that, in English you see an unknown word, you know how to pronounce it, but not what it means, but in Chinese you know what it means but not how to pronounce it.
Don't you just hate it when you accidentally break someone's language and they retaliate by breaking your recycling system
"Ranked 1st in population, 2nd in economy and 36th alphabetically" is such a hilarious line 🤣🤣🤣
Whether this writing system is good or bad is really a matter of a pinyin.
"For the prior generations who walked to their character-writing lessons uphill both ways" lmao
The side effect of the romanization of character-based languages is magnified because there are few situations where text needs to be written by hand in modern society. Thus it doesn't really matter for people to occasionally forget how to write a word of their native language, also it's easy for them to pick it up.
Actually, Pinyin is mostly used in China. In places like Taiwan, we use 注音符號(Mandarin Phonetic Symbols) like ㄅㄆㄇㄈ to type, so our keyboard has an English symbol, a Mandarin Phonetic Symbol(ZhuYin Symbol), a Cangjie Symbol (Which the Cangjie typing input method uses) , and occasionally punctuation marks. But because Mandarin Phonetic Symbol(Which most Taiwanese use) are not related to how the Chinese characters are written, so character amnesia is also common in Taiwan. (P.S. Although most of your images in this video are Chinese, the picture at
4:28
"the keyboard most of us use"
QWERTY comes from when they made the first type writer. To fit all of the keys they had to make it so the push pins from when you tapped the keys not get tangled or too close. So they had to put it in that order and create the staggered layout and it was never changed to much
"There is a very close connection with how you write an English word and how you say it."
This is why some of my friends and family who are chinese only write in chinese using the draw feature on their phones, rather than the keyboard.
He’s been on a streak of uploading to the right channel, good job Sam.
Hey Sam, good job on this!! Even if a few details were a bit off, you clearly put in a lot of effort to understand a complicated topic, and I appreciate you. <3
Back during my schooling days, when I didn't know how to write certain characters especially during composition (zuowen), I just put the pinyin in and didn't write the characters. I kinda failed Higher Chinese in secondary school, but luckily I did well enough that I didn't have to take Chinese lessons in junior college and could laugh at all my classmates who still had to sit for the Chinese A level examinations in their first year.
"Like when you spell 'definitely' wrong for the 500th consecutive time and autocorrect bails you out."
Here's an interesting fact about that guy who created Pinyin: he's also known for his extremely old age (even by Chinese standards), having died in 2017 the day after his 111th birthday.
My dad is a language nerd and i started getting suggestions for this channel from youtube and im starting to flood my dad with great ones like this where on one hand i learn something very interesting and also cant help but laugh at all the detailed descriptions of a keyboard.
There are many alternative input methods. Zhuyin (also based on sound), as well as Cangjie, Wubi and Sucheng which are based on the ideogram. They are faster to type with than the sound based input, but they take much longer to learn and memorize