August 22, 2012

BEIJING — When around 200 million Chinese children start school on Sept. 1, a major — perhaps the major — task facing them will be to learn 400 to 500 new Chinese characters over the year. Next year will bring the same amount. It’s a challenge all the children struggle to meet, to varying degrees.

Perhaps foolishly, this week I tried to psych up my son, who isn’t looking forward to returning to his state elementary school in Beijing and those new characters. Chinese characters lack systematic visual clues for pronunciation, meaning they must be learned individually, via repeated hand-copying to build motor memory. As Zhang Guangzhao, a former philosophy professor in Beijing and a commentator on the Web site of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote in an essay: “Just as people can hear a sound but cannot see it, see a picture but cannot hear it, our eyes and ears don’t meet in Chinese.”

“It might be fun to start school again,” I said to my son, hopefully. “See your friends and all that?”

“Mum, learning Chinese is never fun,” he replied, dispassionately.

Some people, particularly adults, may disagree with that, pointing to the aesthetic pleasure of ideograms and the enjoyment of the rich culture they unlock. And, just to be clear, I would partly agree with the view that learning to write Chinese is enjoyable, having spent more than two decades doing so. However, it is also a difficult, circular process of learning, forgetting and re-learning. As Mr. Zhang said in a telephone interview: “Right now, I can write about 3,000 characters.”

“The government identifies 2,500 ‘commonly used’ characters,” he said, adding that a scholar would need to recognize more, perhaps around 5,000. “People can write fewer characters than they recognize, however.”

So my son’s reaction got to the root of a serious issue: Is written Chinese suited to a digitalizing, globalizing world?

Wu Wenchao, who worked at the United Nations as an interpreter for 25 years, thinks it is not especially well-suited. Characters are “inefficient and archaic,” he wrote in an e-mail.

“Chinese language is difficult to learn in comparison with alphabetic languages,” Mr. Wu wrote.

“Chinese students work very hard and would have to spend two more years in learning in order to reach the same level of a Western intellectual,” he said, adding: “The difficulty in learning is analogous to long boot-up time in computer terminology, which means system delay in becoming operational.”

Already, people on the Chinese mainland use pinyin, a romanization system introduced by the government in the 1950s, to type into computers and mobile phones. This is easier, but is weakening their ability to write characters, specialists say.

So are there any attempts to make written Chinese more manageable by increasing its alphabetization, perhaps moving to a digraphic system that includes both ideograms and a sound-based alphabet? This territory, too, is controversial. Calls to extend the alphabetization of Chinese, beyond the limited use of pinyin, quickly run into opposition in China from ordinary people, officials and many scholars.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009, where China was guest of honor, I witnessed a revealing moment when Wang Meng, a former Chinese minister of culture, declared in ringing tones that China must keep its characters “or its culture will be extinguished!” Many young Chinese in the audience rose to their feet, clapping wildly.

In a counterintuitive argument, Mr. Zhang believes Chinese isn’t actually difficult to learn, merely badly taught. For thousands of years, he said, scholars and officials deliberately mystified it to protect their privileges.

The ruling official class “do not want to make culture worldly and turn it into a kind of public resource shared by the public,” he wrote in another essay. “They consciously or unconsciously provided a roadblock to make it difficult to learn.”

That legacy lingers to this day, he believes.

William C. Hannas, a linguist and author who speaks or writes 10 languages including Chinese, says the debate on going to an alphabetized writing system, which flourished into the 1950s, is over.

“There is no debate in China — or anywhere today — on writing reform,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We resent being asked to give up a tradition, or hearing from an outsider especially, that a piece of our identity is flawed.”

Nevertheless, something along those lines is happening unofficially, he says.

Especially online, Chinese are experimenting with the Roman alphabet: government, “zhengfu” in pinyin, is often shortened to “ZF.” An interpersonal competition is a “PK” (taken from video game terminology). To digitally alter images with a program like Photoshop is to “PS.” To make love is to “ML.”

“Digraphia — the coexistence of character and alphabetic writing — is happening in China not by policy from the top down, but by default from the bottom up,” Mr. Hannas wrote.

In an e-mail, Jiang Beining, a blogger who believes characters are holding China back, making it “unscientific,” wrote: “Characters are an invisible wall between China and the world.”

For 200 million schoolchildren, including my son, a year of hard memorization lies ahead. It’s just a step on the road to becoming literate in Chinese, but to gaining a beautiful language, too.