Text Speak
Much like text speech is slowly ruining children’s ability to spell in America it is also slowly ruining children’s ability to write in Taiwan. Here characters are built in several ways on keyboards and cellphones. One is literally building characters from their component parts. The other, which leads to problems, is a system of inputting phonetic letters, then choosing the character you want based on the pronunciation. As I’ve been studying for and recently passed the 2nd level of the Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language my Chinese is not too rusty. So I thought this was funny.
My students were passing around notes in class. I took the note to which my students almost always respond in Chinese, “don’t worry, he can’t read Chinese.” (Not according to your government kiddos.) So I think they were a little surprised when I said this.
Essentially, “You spelled ‘Do you know who I like?’ ‘Do you no who you like?’” I thought I had them there, but it was not to be had.
A somewhat aloof ‘whatever’ was all I got.
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