Gary Feng’s blog, Shadow, has a number of posts of interest to readers of Pinyin.info. Recent posts include 汉字简化，得不偿失 (Hànzì jiǎnhuà，débùchángshī), Japanese Kanji that are not Chinese, 汉语拼音教学的历史与现状 (Hànyǔ Pīnyīn jiàoxué de lìshǐ yǔ xiànzhuàng), and Teaching Pinyin and word parsing in Chinese.
With apologies to Magritte:
Red-faced typo tyros up for prize over Kanji clangers
Will the winner be the blunder that turned an “easy victory after five seasons” into “cockroach extermination,” or perhaps the gaffe that transformed a “regional athletic gathering” into a “tip-off meeting?”
Thanks to the quirks of the Japanese language, a single misplaced keystroke can totally transform the way a sentence reads depending on the kanji characters the writer selects.
And now, the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation is holding a poll where competitors can vote for their favorite mistaken phrase that results from a mistyped sentence, with the winner to take home the Annual Typo Award.
Typing Japanese involves inputting simple hiragana characters and converting them into kanji. More people are now using computers to write and, unless watching the conversion closely, there is a possibility of the sentence coming out drastically different from the intended result.
Since July last year, the foundation has been seeking public submissions of wacky sentences created by conversion typos, awarding a monthly prize and a blunder prize from the 5,946 entries received.
The foundation has selected what it considers the best 22 entries — including the one that turned an “easy victory after five seasons” into “cockroach extermination” (both can be read gokiburi kaisho) — and has asked for votes from members of the general public on the entry they like best.
Voting is carried out on the foundation’s contest site until Aug. 31. Winners will be announced on the contest page on Sept. 15.
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年間変漢ミスコン：「チクリ苦情大会？」愉快な変換ミス
チクリ苦情大会を開き、ゴキブリ解消しました－－？？ 実はこれ、「地区陸上大会」と「５季ぶり快勝」の漢字変換ミス。日本漢字能力検定協会は、愉快な変換ミス作品の中から大賞の「年間変漢賞」を選ぶコンテストの投票を受け付けている。あなたも選んでみませんか。
このコンテストは、パソコンで文章を書く人が増える中、漢字を正しく使うことの大切さを改めて確認するのが狙い。
昨年７月から公募し、計５９４６作品が集まった。毎月、月間賞と次点を決めてきたが、今回は、その２２作品から最もおもしろいと思うものをオンライン投票で選ぶ。投票は３１日まで。
投票には登録が必要。９月１５日に大賞が決まり、ホームページで発表される。
Tian of the wonderfully amusing Hanzi Smatter Web site was kind enough to respond to some comments of mine by blurbing my site. I’d like to return the favor.
On a related topic, here’s a section from the Pinyin.info FAQ, which should be going up in June:
I want to get a tattoo with kanji / Chinese characters. What do you recommend?
This is probably not what you want to hear: Don’t get the tattoo. Most tattoos with Chinese characters are seriously flawed.
The chances of you getting something that looks good — and not just to you but also to others, including the hundreds of millions of people who can actually read Chinese characters and know how they’re supposed to look — are quite low. Moreover, tattoos of Chinese characters are seldom written properly or represent a correct, idiomatic translation of the wearer’s desired meaning. On the other hand, the chances of you ending up looking more or less like a fool — at least to those who know Chinese characters — are uncomfortably high. These are important considerations, given that you would need to go through pain and expense to have someone permanently stain your skin with an image that very likely will be done wrong in some important way.
Maybe with some assistance I could get a tattoo done right. Would you help me?
Sorry. I like to help people, but this just isn’t something I’d want to get involved with, especially considering all the things that could go wrong.
I already have a tattoo with Chinese characters. Can you tell me if it’s correct or not?
You might want to try Hanzi Smatter, a site “dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters (Hanzi or Kanji) in Western culture.”
TOKYO — Education minister Nariaki Nakayama on Wednesday asked a government panel on the Japanese language to come up with guidelines on the use of the honorific and polite form of speech, known as “keigo” in Japanese, to counter its widespread misuse, ministry official said.
“Although many people feel the need to use ‘keigo,’ it can hardly be said that they are using it properly,” Toshio Kojima, senior vice education minister, said in explaining the reason for making the request on Nakayama’s behalf.
The minister also asked the Council for Cultural Affairs — an advisory body to the government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs — to review the most commonly used Chinese characters in Japanese to reflect their current usage on computers.
The council’s subcommittee on the Japanese language is expected to discuss the issues and come up with a final report within two years for “keigo” and four to five years for the Chinese characters, known as the “joyo kanji.”…
As for the “joyo kanji,” Kojima said the current “joyo kanji” table should be reviewed in line with the widespread use of computers.
The current table, which specifies 1,945 common Chinese characters, has not been updated since 1981.
The subcommittee will conduct research in the next two years on the public’s ability to write and read Chinese characters, and how frequently certain ones are used for the names of people and places, as well as on some characters that are often used on computers but not included in the table.
Panel proposes guidelines to halt misuse of honorific Japanese
Thursday, February 3, 2005 at 08:07 JST
TOKYO — A government panel on the Japanese language proposed Wednesday setting up the nation’s first guidelines on the use of the honorific and polite form of speech [“keigo“] to counter its widespread misuse….The panel also calls for revaluating Chinese characters designated for common use, known as “joyo kanji,” to reflect current use of Chinese characters on computers.
The current joyo kanji table, which specifies 1,945 common Chinese characters, has not been updated since 1981. The panel notes that the table did not foresee the widespread use of computers.
The panel also suggested the need for conducting research on the public’s ability to write and read Chinese characters, and how frequently certain ones are used for the names of people and places.
An Agency for Cultural Affairs official said it is necessary to study some characters that are often used but not included in the table. (Kyodo News)
And their point is…? With computers, people are increasingly unable to write characters by hand.
From an editorial in the Asahi Shimbun:
The results of a test by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development should leave no doubt that Japanese children’s ability to read, think logically and express their thoughts is declining rapidly.
The survey was conducted last year on 15-year-olds in 41 countries and areas. It was designed to measure students’ practical ability to think independently, deal with various real problems in the world and build healthy relations with others. Since it was not a pure scholarship test, students were allowed to use calculators in solving mathematical problems.
Japanese students’ performance in the test to gauge reading skills has dropped to 14th from eighth in the previous survey in 2000. Japan registered the largest drop in scores for reading among all participating countries….
The report on the future of Japanese language education submitted in February by the Council for Cultural Affairs to the minister of education, culture, sports, science and technology reflected a strong sense of crisis about the situation….
The new curriculum guidelines implemented in the year that started in April 2002 reduced the amount of time for teaching Japanese at school. The number of children who don’t read books at all has been rising steadily.
The council report urged the government to enhance Japanese language education and provide more incentives for children to read books. As a step to achieve this goal, the report called for doubling the number of Chinese characters children learn at elementary school to cover most of the 1,945 designated by the government as basic characters. It is a very bold proposal that openly challenges the education ministry’s controversial policy of promoting “pressure-free” education….
Japanese children performed relatively well in dealing with selection problems in the OECD test but did poorly in essay questions. This should be regarded as a warning about university entrance exams in Japan.
Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward is planning to seek government approval for establishing itself as a special deregulation zone for Japanese language education. The initiative is designed to help children develop the ability to think deeply in Japanese. The plan would reduce the number of classes for comprehensive study and everyday life skills to increase the hours for Japanese language education.
Setagaya’s initiative is conspicuous amid local governments racing to create a special zone for English education. Setagaya’s sense of urgency should find a wide resonance in this country.
Japanese lost for words
Eric Johnston in Osaka
Thursday November 25, 2004
The GuardianWith its phonetic symbols and complex vocabulary, Japanese can defeat even the most talented linguists. Now it seems to be baffling native speakers, too.
Nearly a fifth of the students at Japanese private universities have the reading ability expected of 13- to 15-year-olds, according to the National Institute of Multimedia Education (Nime), which surveyed 13,000 in their first year at 33 universities and colleges.
The students were presented with a multiple choice test and asked to define nouns, adjectives and adverbs.
Two-thirds of the respondents thought that a word meaning “to grieve” actually meant “to be happy”.
The study showed that foreign exchange students who had spent some years learning Japanese could sometimes read better than locals.
The survey confirms a trend which educationists have noted for at least 10 years.
And although the Nime report gives no reason for the low standards, the Japanese have long attributed the reduced vocabulary of today’s students, at least in part, to the proliferation of comics, which use simple ideograms and sentence structures.
The research team has called on the education ministry, to which the institute is affiliated, to introduce remedial classes for the students that need them.
Foreigners have long considered Japanese to be one of the world’s most difficult written languages.
It uses two separate sets of phonetic symbols and thousands of Chinese ideograms, and some words have as many as a dozen meanings and nearly as many pronunciations.
The good news, the researchers said, was that only 6% of the students at state universities were reading at junior secondary school levels.
The national universities tend to have tougher entrance exams than private colleges.