天空вℓσи∂ @skyblond@qoto.org

@freemo @SpaceLifeForm

You're right on that part. And now it's still the practise. How to make society stable? Raise salary? Make social security takes care of everyone? No. Just make house price super expensive and offers a 30 years loan. If it takes 3 generations' effort to buy a house in a family, then people won't have time/energy to care other problems.

@freemo @SpaceLifeForm

If you rewind back to 200 years ago, in Qing Dynasty, the government actually enforced a style of essay called eight-legged essay. It defined the structure of a essay and is very limited. It's a standardized essay at that time. Writing anything other than that will be considered as non-mainstream and will be rejected by officals.

@SpaceLifeForm @freemo

And yes, if you're talking conformity, in China you are forced to write in right hand if you're a left-handed. Maybe now it's better? When I was young there is a student is left-handed. But for my parent's generation, everyone is forced to write in right hand. It's not law or something, just because writing in left hand will make you different and your parent don't want that.

@freemo @SpaceLifeForm

Maybe? I actually don't know. But I found some (most?) order are actually matches very well on how I developed my own writing style. If the orders are right, they can be combined to 1 stroke and won't looks mess. But some are not that intuitive (actually I'll call them counterintuitive).

Also, a friend of mine just send this video to me: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Mb4y1P75q

It's a Chinese lecture talking about Chinese shorthand, hosted on Chinese website, so good luck :)

@freemo @SpaceLifeForm

I don't know, I didn't fully get the idea of stroke order. But from top to bottom and left to right does help shape your character.
----

It's a hard question since I never thought about it. Some anwser suggest it's part of the standard. Eventually you will write the same character no matter how you write it, but to resolve any ambiguity, there has to be a standard way to write. And some suggest the correct stroke order can help you learn cursive.

@freemo @SpaceLifeForm

Actually we use pen and pencil daily. Now we only use brushes when doing calligraphy or we need write something big.

The left side is how you should write and print. And you should write like that if you want others to easily read what you write. And in school it's required to be written in the correct order of storkes, which I think some are reasonable, some are not.

This passage is write for japanese but most of the idea works for Chinese too.
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kanji-stroke-order/

And now we're using simplified Chinese, which means much less strokes. In Taiwan and HongKong they still use traditional Chinese, which looks nicer, but with a lof ot strokes.

Some traditional Chinese looks like (copied from wikipedia):
漢字簡化運動可追溯至新文化運動中關於文字及語文教言和國家發展的討論。

The same text but in simplified Chinese:
汉字简化运动可追溯至新文化运动中关于文字及语文教言和国家发展的讨论。

@m @freemo

Apparently it should be PRC, People Republic of China, not RPC.

@freemo

Just a simple demo to show how I normally write. The standard one is shown on the left side, they are 7, 5 and 8 strokes. And the left side is how I write those, the first one is 2 strokes because there is a separate dot there. The rest are 1 stroke.

A fun fact: In school teacher will not allow you to write like this.I was being criticized a lot when I was in school.

And because school don't allow and of course won't teach you how to write like this, almost everyone will develop their own way to write. So when talking about handwriting, unless it's intentionally write for others, it's hard to read other people's handwriting.

And I think I won't say it's cursive. The real cursive is much beautiful than this :)

@SpaceLifeForm

@m

Oh, that's called ZhuYin, it's before RPC government decide to reform and simplify Chinese to make it easier to learn. It's a little bit easier than Pinyin, but still need at least 2 part to represent a pronunciation

@freemo

@m

I think you mean PinYin. For example you can represent a word like 我们 (means `we`) as wo3men2, but 我门 (means `my door`) is also pronounced as wo3men2. That will be tricky if you write something like wo3men2huai4le, it can be either 我们坏了 (means we are badass), or 我门坏了 (meaning my door is broken). And that's why early pinyin input method is a nightmare to use, because it often suggest unrelated candidate. Now with smarter software, the input method is more likely to suggest the later option instead of saying you're badass.

@freemo

@freemo Not really, for madarin and most dialect we use the character as is. We do use acronym for curse words. But Cantonese might be different, they use some latin letter to represent pronunciation (I guess?), but I don't know Cantonese so I might be wrong.

@SpaceLifeForm @freemo

In handwriting, as myself never learnt how to do shorthand, I do have my way to write, mainly keep the pen stay on paper (aka reduce strokes). But sometimes I can't read what I write, so that's the downside.

@freemo And for professional shorthand usage, PinYin is not the only option, there are special keyboards which designed to use custom key combinations to input character and/or word. But most of the time a qwert keyboard is working just fine. I think that special keyboard is not that need as we now have more advanced method to infer which word might fit your need based on your input context. I still remember when I was young, the default Chinese input method from WindowsXP is a nightmare to use. So we have to install dedicated software to replace it. Nowadays I'm super fine with the default input method from Windows10. And for linux, I think Rime is not that bad.

@freemo Yeah, those website said wpm, but it really character per minutes. I did two test and I got 99 and 110.

And apparently I forgot we also digitialized medical records so I don't need to guest what doctor writes.

@freemo If I'm not misunderstanding, there is some sort of short hand in Chinese, but mostly for professional usage, like clerk, but nowadays we almost exclusively use computer and use PinYin to type Chinese charactors, I can achive about 90 to 100 wpm (or cpm, c for character).

Here is a picture I found on the internet, it shows the markers for some character.

I think the doctor still use that kind of shorthands? I can never read those.

@trinsec Yes. Despit there are cats wondering around, I finally saw some bird land and eat :)

My excitement is beyond what language can express.

Oh f*uck it's 1am again.

Yeah... lucky I don't do any stock and cryptocurrency treat market investment. I know I'm not capable of doing that. Whoo, now I can sleep well.