【Haichuan New Technology】See how foreigners type Chinese characters

Source: Zhihu. Copyright belongs to the author. For commercial reuse, please contact the author for permission; for non-commercial reuse, please indicate the source. Since modern times, there have been three waves of enthusiasm for the Romanization of Chinese in China’s intellectual circles. 【The first wave of efforts to transliterate Chinese characters into pinyin】 It originated in the 1910s (along with the New Culture Movement). Reason: Over the modern era, China had been poor and weak and subject to foreign humiliation; as a result, some intellectuals began to deeply reflect on the question of why China was weak. Among them, the literacy rate is considered an important factor contributing to the gap between China and other countries. A society in which the vast majority are illiterate is, first and foremost, unable to adapt to mass machine production and the industrial age ； Secondly, and more fatally, the people are unable to read their own language’s magazines, newspapers, and cultural books; they cannot develop a sense of cultural and national identity, and it is difficult for them to become aware of major events. In such a situation, it cannot be considered a modern nation-state. As a result, the populace becomes indifferent and ignorant, lacking cohesion. While these intellectuals were striving for the rejuvenation of their nation and establishing new schools, Chinese proved to be much more difficult to learn than Spanish, thus becoming a significant obstacle. Some background information is needed first: since the level of productivity in that era was not as high as it is today, countries around the world were more or less on the same level, and the length of education received by the general public was actually quite short. In the world of that time, one could become a legal worker at the age of 12, and children from ordinary families might start working as apprentices at around 8 or 9 years old. At that time, the laws did not impose as strict penalties on factory owners who employed child laborers as they do today; in fact, many financially struggling families would have their children, aged 5 or 6, learn a little reading in kindergarten, and then send them to work as child laborers at the age of 7. To prevent this phenomenon, Germany enacted special legislation at the time to ban kindergartens from teaching primary school curriculum. (This German law was recently brought up on Weibo by some people who used it as an opportunity to make their points; many people might be familiar with it.) Back to the main topic. In short, intellectuals at that time found that people who spoke Spanish could learn to read in just 1 to 3 months, and could write within at most half a year (although their writing might be full of spelling mistakes). What about China? Even when teaching modern Mandarin, three years in elementary school only allow one to learn a few hundred Chinese characters; one can only read texts written specifically for semi-literate people or those with low educational levels. It is not until one finishes middle school that they can master 1,500 Chinese characters, which enables them to read more complex modern Mandarin texts with some difficulty. 1,500 Chinese characters, 6 years. 26 letters, three months. Is the gap large? Of course it’s big. Given the social conditions in China at that time, 6 years of primary school was actually beyond the financial means of most families. It’s not just the issue of tuition fees. **No money for compulsory education ； Even if there were free compulsory education, ordinary families still need their children to work to make a living. Thus, it was only natural for the intellectuals to shout this slogan:

Conclusion: Turbulent times in China in the first half of the 20th century. **Ethnic groups, various regimes on this land, and even every ordinary person, whether willingly or not, have been drawn into the torrent of history. It took over a decade of turbulent changes before everything was completely transformed in 1949. There is no time to implement the phonetic spelling of Chinese characters. Aside. During the New Culture Movement, the promotion of vernacular language was successful, which gave the language spoken by modern Chinese people basic grammatical rules and a relatively coherent logic. And it was changed from vertical to horizontal writing. At least, we can write scientific papers in Chinese today, although the wording can be a bit complicated sometimes. Today, after conducting comparative analyses, someone found that English has the grammar most similar to Chinese among Spanish languages. When you consider your height, it’s of course similar, because modern Chinese emerged in recent times as a result of the knowledge community combining colloquial language with English grammatical structures and transforming them! Professor Hu Shi, am I correct?

【The Second Wave of Pinyinization of Chinese Characters】: The 1950s (early years of the People’s Republic of China). Reason: The reason for proposing this pinyinization of Chinese characters was actually the same as that for the first attempt. Pinyin-based Chinese characters help reduce the time required to achieve literacy, simplify primary education, thereby shortening the duration of the school system or reducing the proportion of literacy-related courses within a given period of study, while allowing more science courses to be included. There are two groups of proponents: one consists of older intellectuals who hope that, after the establishment of the country, they will be able to achieve what they proposed thirty years ago but were unable to realize ； The other group consists of those who remain in Russia and Russian advisors in China. Outcome: After thorough consideration, the authorities believed that transliterating Chinese characters into pinyin would lead to various side effects, primarily the inability to read old documents directly and a significant cultural disconnect; as a result, it was not implemented. To shorten the duration of literacy and education programs, simplified Chinese characters were adopted. Furthermore, after the deterioration of relations between China and the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, the Chinese character phonetic system based on the Cyrillic alphabet (Russian) was considered politically incorrect, and hardly anyone dared to mention it from 1960 to 1980.

【The Third Wave of Simplifying Chinese Characters with Pinyin】: Early 1980s. Reason: This trend of transliterating Chinese characters into pinyin is different from the previous two times. At that time, most people in China were no longer illiterate; primary education had become widespread, and a 9-year compulsory education system was being introduced. The reason behind this trend of transliterating Chinese characters into pinyin is: well, it’s not hard to guess, right? The problem of entering Chinese characters using computers! In the 1980s, it was really troublesome and expensive to enter Chinese characters into computer systems! So, pinyinized Chinese characters have once again been mentioned by some people. Of course, this trend toward using Pinyin did not spread widely; there were few advocates for it, and these advocates were not traditional intellectuals but rather some professionals from the IT industry. Therefore, sometimes people forget that there was also a third wave of efforts to phonetize Chinese characters. Outcome: The third wave of efforts to romanize Chinese characters was killed by Moore’s Law. With the rapid development of computer hardware and software, typing Chinese characters was no longer a problem, nor was storage an issue, so no one raised the topic of \"how Chinese characters can survive in the computer-centric 21st century.\"