Chinese vs. English: Stroke Order

Chinese writing is cool. All characters are meant to fit in an equal-sized box. There are no spaces to break up words. Many characters are made from two other characters smushed into the same-size box. And clearly, these characters are complex compared to what we see in English.

Here's what English-speakers don't appreciate, or at least what I didn't appreciate until I started writing Chinese characters: Stroke order matters. Stroke order goes a long way towards forming the character correctly and making it "look" right. Stroke order helps manage the total space of the character within the box and it helps stay consistent with the proportions of angles and line segments within the characters. You might not appreciate it when learning to write 十 (shí, "ten"), or even 不 (bù, "no" or a generic negation), but you definitely appreciate it when writing a character like 我 (wǒ, "I"). Stroke order can make all the difference.

Just try drawing 我 some other way. I think you'll find this stroke order funnest, fastest, and most effective.
Source: wenlininstitute.org

My Chinese friends have commented that my Chinese handwriting is good (when I remember how to draw the characters at all). There's a counterintuitive explanation I hold for this: my handwriting is good because I am a beginner. As a beginner to Chinese characters, my knowledge of characters is not yet built-up enough to know when a sloppily written version of one character becomes another character entirely. My knowledge of only a few dozen characters, knowing there are yet thousands more, causes me to pay attention to penmanship.

English has 26 letters. Multiply by two for capitals. Add 10 digits. Now add in that we put in spaces between our words and that we pick up frequencies of letters and tuples of letters (rarely a q without a u, common suffixes -ing, -er, -ed, etc.). Just a smattering of punctuation added on top. A lifetime of English allows me the luxury of sloppy penmanship, secure in the knowledge that other English speakers will aggressively prune my hastily-spewed chicken-scratch into something intelligible.

Many software developers cite their poor penmanship as a source of pride. For me, this is related to the cryptic signatures doctors leave on prescriptions. The sloppier the penmanship, the harder to duplicate, and therefore the more status afforded to the owner of the hand. I saw to it that the signature I would develop for credit card receipts would skirt any pretension to legibility. But now I'm studying Chinese, so let's take another look at stroke order for English letters. A quick Google search turned up the following:

From superenglishkid.com

There are a few other competing stroke orders for English letters (noted by this Quora answer), because there are so few characters compared to Chinese that we can usually puzzle our way from intention to representation as writers and back again from representation to idea as readers.

What I found common to the few English stroke-order diagrams was that they heavily favored downward strokes for many characters. When I write A, V, v, W, or w, the diagrams start each stroke at the top, whereas my strokes have developed an up-and-over or down-and-around quality, linking the first two strokes of A and V into one and turning my W/w into one continuous stroke. It's kind of fun to try to follow this other stroke order. The capital M in the above diagram really sticks out to me. My M is a left-down stroke, a single stroke for a half-height 'v' in the middle linked to the right downstroke as a finisher. The above diagram shows M as four strokes, the first two setting up left and right goal posts. I can't help seeing something similar to the Chinese way of writing diverse characters into repeatable square boxes.

It's been a joy to continue studying English and Chinese. The languages are so distant from one another. The greater the distance, the greater the appreciation for human thought and reasoning that transcends expression.

Why tonal languages can be tricky

Tonal languages are hard for westerners not because we lack tones in the West, but because tones carry extra-semantic meaning. Superimposing this extra-semantic meaning where it isn't needed is disinformative but deeply ingrained in the way we speak.

Tones suggest to other English speakers that we asking a questions, being sarcastic, begging, and more. You can say the same sentence in several ways, and some parts of what you're varying are tones. So it's not that we don't hear tones, it's that we don't recognize tones as having to do with distinguishing one syllable from another but deciding whether someone is happy, upset, or confused. In English, tones are melodies. In Chinese, they're verses.

misspandachinese.com

Hearing sounds vs. hearing language

We don't hear languages the same way they hear sounds. It's not possible. We translate the sounds of spoken words and phrases to their meaning far faster than we realize. Let me prove it.

You know you think faster than you can talk.

You hear faster than you talk, also. Watch a video at 2x speed and you can still follow along just tine. It takes training of hearing familiar patterns of sounds over and over again.

My most convincing experience was my flight to Beijing. I hadn't been studying Mandarin very long, but I was listening closely to the conversations around me and to the Mandarin translations of the announcements, hoping to identify a word here or there. That's where it hit me that not only did I not understand the words, I couldn't even play them back to myself in my head.

The capacity of human short-term memory is commonly cited as 7 "thingies" plus or minus 2. I've heard more recent research suggests this capacity is much more towards the lower end of that range. How can we communicate when we have such a limited short-term memory? Look at any of these sentences. How many have more than 7 words? How many have more than 7 syllables? But are you having a hard time following? Not really. The reason is that we've built up a lifetime of experience using our language. We expect certain phrases to follow others, certain words to follow others, and certain syllables to follow others. The real information conveyed by our language is the series of surprises against that baseline of expectations. As a native English speaker studying Mandarin, I didn't have that any more. I don't even have cognates.

What about music? We can remember melodies longer than 7 notes, along with their rhythms. This is even more true if we have a grounding in music theory, which partially plays a role in compressing the universe of sounds into a chromatic scale of 12 notes followed with patterns of intervals, chords, chord progressions, phrases, etc. This grounding of theory gives our puny human brains the amazing ability to repeat complex melodies verbatim when truncating these sounds to this limited scheme.

Given that we aggressively chunk language into concepts during routine conversation, we can safely move beyond thinking or even reading in words (subvocalization). Speak to communicate. Read to comprehend. Think to explore. The expression in words is not the thought, but how we communicate the thought. The organization of the thought in our minds will depend its relationship to the other thoughts in our minds. Given the physical structure of neurons, this makes sense.

Since we don't think in words to begin with, don't limit yourself to thinking only in words. Think also in diagrams and animations (the right video games can be tremendously good for the brain). Think in terms of other senses.

"We have a big-ass gym."

She was courteous, beautiful, and professional. I managed to avoid laughing; I couldn't, however, suppress a big-ass smile at the Beijing Kerry Hotel receptionist's suddenly-familiar phrasing while describing the hotel's other amenities. She's correct: "big-ass" appropriately describes the size of their gym. I didn't have the heart to explain her moment of incongruity.

This receptionist speaks good English. She's probably heard that Americans are informal by Chinese standards. I'm probably not the first person she's described the gym to this way. Previous patrons also probably stifled a laugh and most of a smile, but their eyes likely lit up. She may have marked this response as a moment of rapport. She might also just think that American businessmen really like their gyms.

We arrived at the hotel at around 9:30pm Beijing time. I fumbled around for a tip for the bellhop, who I tried to refuse. I would have carried my own bags but I wanted to accept the tea they offered me at the front desk. After fumbling for some time with RMB that all seemed exactly the wrong denominations, I settled on a $5 bill. I flipped through the TV channels for a few minutes to see if I could pick out any characters or syllables, then set an alarm and went to bed.

The hotel was luxurious. Major chords were the elevator chimes. Do-not-disturb signs are operated by a switch instead of a placard hung on the door. I discovered this when a note informed me I had left the do-not-disturb signal on, preventing the servicing of my room. There were a lot of switches on the wall.

The room's toilets were push-button operated for flushing, bidet-ing, and drying. There were even buttons for raising and lowering the seat. The thought, unbidden, arrived in my mind as "and here we are in America, raising our own seats like chumps!"

I wasn't able to find an alarm clock in the room, so I installed an alarm clock app on my laptop instead. The bathroom mirror had a built-in digital clock. My stay was at the height of luxury, and not what I expect is the normal standard of living in most of China. Or most of America, for that matter.

Speaking to software

Users of software! Who among you doesn't want this feeling?



A lot of effort goes into making software as simple as possible to use. Classics like Don't Make Me Think! catalog ways to make user interfaces intuitive. On the whole, this is a good thing. Competition in our choice of software is driving everything to be as simple as possible, and no simpler. But software can be more, much more. And not later: right now. The catch? You have to work for it. You have to learn your software's language.

Software is built of thoughts. What you see on a screen are images and words. What you hear are sounds: alerts, sometimes voices. What you feel are vibrations. These are all approximations of the logical world in which your software lives. You interact with this world by typing, clicking, tapping and speaking. Most of our typing, clicking, tapping and speaking is directed against objects presented to us by the user interface: pre-canned and pre-suggested actions. The user interface is a guide to the software's world of thoughts, helping you navigate your way to the solutions you seek.

What if you could interact with your software without a guide? What if you could describe your intent without having to navigate pre-trod logical paths? What if you could construct entire sentences for your software to interpret, beyond the limited vocabulary of "this thing" and "that action"? What if you could bypass the interpreter between your carbon and silicon brain and tell your computer what to do in a language it already speaks instead of trying to hunt for the way to prod the guide to suggest the action you already knew you wanted in the first place?

Think of Plato's Cave. The UI is just the shadows against the wall. Rather than limiting yourself to grasping at these shadows, with a lot of software there is an underlying language you can use to give direct orders. Think "keyboard shortcuts times one hundred."

Just past the covers, a lot of software that you already use has such languages. Excel has formulas. Outlook has rules. All of office has macro support. Your operating system has a command line and a shell you can use to help automate common tasks. If you build web pages, getting to know HTML, CSS and maybe even a little JavaScript will give you much more freedom than what you can experience from within a graphical editor.

Some software is built to be used primarily through its language. If you edit a lot of text for work, you might be familiar with the great vi or emacs. For the price of learning a small grammar and simple vocabulary for text manipulation, you can multiply your productivity at the keyboard.

But this is all on you. Nobody is going to make you think. A world of riches and reclaimed productivity is waiting for you if you can speak to the software you use day-to-day in its native language, not just through a graphical interpreter. Learning the language of a piece of software has the same thrills as learning a foreign language: pride in being able to guide yourself around a new country and the fun of figuring out how to most effectively curse.

This is why software developers should study foreign languages. Studying languages is the study of expressing thoughts, and we are a business of constructing goods made of thoughts. The best software and services enable us to do more than we could by translating our intent into action. The more we can express, the more efficient this communication becomes. In a way, we're all cyborgs now. We can either passively consume via our silicon brains, or we can use them to bend the world to our will.