Which is the better way to pass on Chinese culture, the hanzi or the keyboard?

In the course of human history, the pronunciation of every language is always changing, so when the writing system is an ideographic writing system, the writing also changes with the pronunciation, such as the great difference between modern English and Middle English. The Chinese characters, which are the carrier of Chinese culture, are completely different. They are a typical ideographic writing system, and they do not change with pronunciation. In this way, although there is also a huge difference between the pronunciation of the modern Chinese language and the pronunciation of the Middle Chinese language, Chinese people in any era can read the writings and written records of their predecessors and understand their thoughts well, thus promoting the Chinese civilization to be passed on from generation to generation and never stopping. For more than 5,000 years, Chinese characters have been an important carrier of traditional Chinese culture, and the foundation and bond of our economic, political and cultural unity. It can be said that the Chinese language and writing system has contributed to the fact that Chinese civilization has been the only civilization in the world that has remained unbroken for thousands of years.

However, the transfer of writing tools from traditional pen and paper to computers, which are electronic devices born from the epigraphic writing system, has made Chinese characters encounter serious challenges in the inheritance and promotion of traditional Chinese culture. Chinese character input methods based on the Western keyboard of computers, especially the widely used pinyin input method, have made our familiar characters become rusty, and many characters that we used to know how to write have become only readable, so that "forgetting the characters when putting pen to paper" has become more and more common and more and more frequent. With the popularization of computers, cell phones and other smart electronic devices, students, adults and even teachers are no longer willing to seriously appreciate and understand the pronunciation and writing form of each character, and have the mentality that "as long as we can read, we don't need to write, and computers will take care of it anyway". This phenomenon has become so common that many students are not able to fulfill the requirements of writing Chinese characters as required by the New Language Curriculum Standards. It can be asserted that the end of ideographic writing of Chinese characters is the beginning of the tearing apart of Chinese culture.

The writing of Chinese characters is related to the inheritance of Chinese culture

"Chinese characters are the most important carrier of information for the unification, continuity, reproduction, and development of the Chinese nation, and at the same time, they are themselves a special form of culture, and therefore, when we talk about Chinese culture, we can't get away from Chinese characters, and when we talk about Chinese characters, we have already entered into the Chinese culture. " . The shallow, at-a-glance value of learning Chinese characters is that it allows us to become literate, communicate, and master other word-based knowledge, and the deeper, unconscious value is that it allows us to pass on and promote Chinese culture on the basis of fulfilling the shallow value. The cornerstone of China, the major birthplace of the world's civilizations, as the representative of Chinese culture, which has stretched on for more than 5,000 years, as has Chinese civilization, with a single, unbroken branch, is the ideographic writing system of Chinese characters. Other major civilizations originated from the use of the ideographic writing system, and their scripts, such as the Mayan script in the Americas, the sacred script of ancient Egypt in the Nile Valley, and the nail-head script of the Sumerians in the two river valleys, have all gone up in smoke along with their countries in the long river of history.

It can be seen from the process of human language and writing development and the direction of development that all human languages and writing are as simple as possible under the premise of clarity in order to facilitate communication. The ideographic nature of Chinese characters makes it easy to express the ultra-abstract multi-dimensional space of time and space, unlike epigraphic characters which can only express the one-dimensional space of pronunciation, so Chinese characters can be both clear and simple. Clear and simple characters represent the direction of human language development. As Dr. Sui-Hsin Lu pointed out, the highest stage of human writing development is not purely phonetic writing, but ideographic writing, and the position of Chinese characters in the transmission of Chinese culture is unshakeable. National scholar Rao Zongyi has also pointed out that "Chinese characters are the backbone of the Chinese nation's texture, and can be said to be a factor in the composition of the entire Chinese culture." "It is the Chinese characters that cause the core of Chinese culture and have become the flag of China's spiritual civilization." . From the point of view of "writing in the same language", we can think that "without Chinese characters, there would be no Chinese nation". Chinese language and writing is not only to improve the scientific and cultural literacy of the Chinese people and the strength of the country, but also to carry forward the excellent traditional Chinese culture and promote the unity of all ethnic groups, harmony and stability of the important foundation.

Third, the computer Chinese character input method

Computer by the use of epigraphic writing system invented by the United States, the main component of its text input keyboard is based on the English language layout, to facilitate the input of the English language text. The overall characteristics of the software and hardware of the computer system, coupled with the great differences between the epigraphic and ideographic scripts themselves, made it impossible to reconstruct a text input keyboard with a layout based on Chinese language scripts after the introduction of computers into China. For this reason, we must encode Chinese characters based on the layout of the Western keyboard to realize the computer input of Chinese characters, and this method of encoding Chinese characters is the Chinese character input method. The Chinese character code consists of two basic classes: phonetic code and morphology code, as well as extended classes such as phonetic code and morphology code. The phonetic code is based on the Hanyu Pinyin Scheme approved and announced by the National People's Congress of China on February 11, 1958, and is based on the pronunciation of Chinese characters, while the morphology code is based on the basic elements of Chinese characters, such as strokes and radicals, and is based on the shape of Chinese characters in writing. The phonetic code reflects the fact that you can input Chinese characters as long as you know how to read them. Currently, popular input methods such as Sogou Pinyin, Baidu Pinyin, QQ Pinyin, etc. are all coded in the phonetic code. Shape code, on the other hand, makes full use of the characteristics of Chinese characters, such as ideograms and representations, to codify the two-dimensional plane shapes of Chinese characters into one-dimensional linear codes. It utilizes people's existing knowledge of writing Chinese characters, and reflects the purpose of inputting Chinese characters as long as one knows how to write. The five-stroke character input method, which is an input method that encodes Chinese characters based entirely on the characteristics of strokes and glyphs, is an outstanding representative of the shape code. Obviously, as far as these two kinds of codes are concerned, the shape code is more capable of expressing the meaning of Chinese characters, while the sound code cannot express the meaning of Chinese characters at all, except for hieroglyphic words.

Because the Hanyu Pinyin program uses Western alphabets as pinyin symbols, it is easier to get started with phonetic input methods than with code input methods. In addition, in recent years, various pinyin input methods have made great efforts to input phrases or sentences, and even whole sentences, making pinyin input methods much easier to use. As for 5-stroke input method, although its coding conforms to the strokes and stroke order of Chinese characters, it allows users to input Chinese characters as if they were "writing". However, it has hardly been improved since its invention, making it significantly more difficult to use than the Pinyin input method. Of course, in addition to the two types of input methods that require coding, namely phonetic and morphological, there are also handwritten input methods that do not require coding, but they are not only slow and their performance is not comparable to that of a pen and paper, so there are very few users of these input methods.

Fourth, the counterproductive effect of computerized Chinese character input method in the transmission of Chinese culture

The counterproductive effect of computerized Chinese character input in the transmission of Chinese culture is mainly manifested in two aspects: firstly, the trend of pinyinization of the Chinese language and characters; and secondly, it brings about a crisis in the writing of Chinese characters.

(1) The Trend of Pinyinization of Chinese Language Characters

The ideograms of Chinese characters have contributed to the fact that Chinese culture has a history of more than 5,000 years, and that it has been able to flourish in the face of the fact that other civilizations have long since disappeared. In today's computer age, the opportunities for handwriting Chinese characters are greatly reduced, and people rely more and more on computers. The intensive research on Pinyin input methods and the relentless promotion by major software companies, coupled with the fact that Pinyin input methods are indeed lower than barriers to use, such as the five-stroke font, have led to the dominance of Pinyin input methods in Chinese civilization in recent years. It can be expected that as time goes by, the status of Pinyin input method will be further consolidated, and the shape code input method will be further marginalized. With the consolidation of computers and pinyin input methods, the pinyinization of the Chinese language and script will become inevitable, which is extremely dangerous for the inheritance of Chinese culture.

(2) Crisis of Chinese Character Writing

In May 2011, the Ministry of Education and the State Language Commission released the "2010 Report on the State of Language Life in China," pointing out that not only is the Chinese language proficiency of Chinese schoolchildren declining, but also their ability to write Chinese characters is deteriorating. 2011 and 2012 reports explicitly mentioned the need to "improve the language proficiency of the nation," and in 2013 the need to "improve the language proficiency of the nation. In 2011 and 2012, the report explicitly proposed to "improve the national language ability", in 2013, it proposed to "carry forward the Chinese language and culture in various aspects", and in 2014, "the issue of language ability has received unprecedented attention in 2014". It is rare for such a national authoritative organization to point out the problems in Chinese language and writing for four consecutive years, indicating that there is a rift between contemporary Chinese people and traditional Chinese culture, and that China's mother tongue culture is being weakened. What causes the decline of Chinese language and writing ability of the Chinese people? We believe that the popularity and high reliance on smart devices such as computers and cell phones, coupled with the overuse of pinyin-based Chinese character input methods, have made it so that not only do people rarely have the opportunity to write by hand, but they even have the opportunity to "write by heart" (the process of entering Chinese characters in the Pinyin-based Chinese character input method is a form of writing silently in one's mind). Scholar Di Peipei also pointed out that it is the replacement of handwriting by computerized input that has led to the phenomenon of "forgetting one's own words". The "forgetting of characters" phenomenon warns us that there is a crisis in the writing of Chinese characters.

Some scholars have called the phenomenon of "forgetting words when putting pen to paper" and other similar phenomena in the use of Chinese characters "computerized agraphia", which is a phenomenon in which people rely on computers for a long time to input Chinese characters, and thus gradually lose the ability to write Chinese characters. Agraphia was originally a medical problem, which refers to the partial or total loss of the original writing function caused by damage to the human brain. "Agraphia is not a medical problem, but a social problem. Through a literature search, we found 3,860 Chinese articles in Google Scholar using the Chinese character "computer agraphia" as a keyword, and all of these articles studied the social problem of "agraphia"; while the Chinese character "computer agraphia" ("电脑失写症")（"computer agraphia") is a medical problem, and it is not a medical problem. computer agraphia" (i.e., searching for documents containing both "computer" and "agraphia"), there were 4010 English documents, but these studies were all about social problems of "dysgraphia". Although there were 4010 articles in English, all of these studies utilized computers as a tool to study "agraphia" in medicine. The results of this search indicate that "computerized dysgraphia" mainly occurs in people who use Chinese language scripts.

Why is it that people who use Chinese characters are prone to "computerized dysgraphia" while those who use English are virtually free of it? We believe that the method of computerized text input is an important reason for this phenomenon. The computer input and handwriting of English use the same set of symbols, and what is input through the computer keyboard is handwritten, so the English-speaking population does not suffer from "computer dysgraphia" because of their dependence on the computer. The Pinyin input method, which is widely used in the computer input of Chinese characters, is different in that there are no more strokes, but only Pinyin, which is a symbol that has nothing to do with the writing of Chinese characters, so that people only think about pronunciation and no longer think about and utilize Chinese characters directly, and over time, "computer dysgraphia" is naturally unavoidable. Some studies have shown that the associative function, fuzzy sound function, and pinyin abbreviation function of the intelligent pinyin input method have an impact on students' memory gaps, fuzzy memory of Chinese characters, and errors in writing Chinese characters, etc.

V>These are the main reasons why students have to use pinyin input method in the future.

V. Conclusion

As an outstanding representative of human ideographs, Chinese characters do not change in meaning due to changes in pronunciation, which makes it easy for us to read and understand the written works and thoughts of our predecessors, and promotes the inheritance of Chinese civilization. The arrival of the computer age has brought us a very serious challenge for the inheritance and promotion of Chinese language and culture. The wide application of computers, cell phones and other information technology devices has changed our traditional handwriting habits, especially the excessive popularity of pinyin Chinese character input method has made the trend of pinyinization of the Chinese language script extremely high and brought about a serious writing crisis. How to maintain the ideographic characteristics of Chinese language and script in the computer age, avoid epigraphicization, and ensure that the carrier of Chinese culture will not be degraded or even disappeared, is a major event that every Chinese should be alerted to and work for.