I never needed glasses until I was 26 years old and began to spend all my waking hours peering at weird letters with tiny -- but very important -- marks atop them. I am convinced these are correlated.
When I was a kid feeling bitter about the move to Miami, where it was too hot to play outside and no kids lived in my neighborhood, so I was always inside on the TV or the video games, I blamed my need for glasses on the move. My parents, both eyeglass wearers, were unimpressed.
Otherwise than what? Myopia? Isn't that a bit of an "apart from that, how was the play?" situation?
Hmm. I found all three characters in about the same length of time. Also, the article lumps South Korea together with Singapore and Taiwan, but Korean alphabet characters are much simpler and less dense than Chinese, and text is segmented.
Korea would be an interesting case to study for this theory, actually, because older generations tended to use both Korean and Chinese characters, and younger generations primarily use the Korean alphabet. So, other factors being accounted for, you would expect the older generation to be more myopic than the younger, which I don't think is necessarily the case. (Anecdata: I grew up reading primarily English, and am far more myopic than my parents or my grandmother, who grew up reading Korean and Chinese characters.)
Hmm. I found all three characters in about the same length of time. Also, the article lumps South Korea together with Singapore and Taiwan, but Korean alphabet characters are much simpler and less dense than Chinese, and text is segmented.
Korea would be an interesting case to study for this theory, actually, because older generations tended to use both Korean and Chinese characters, and younger generations primarily use the Korean alphabet. So, other factors being accounted for, you would expect the older generation to be more myopic than the younger, which I don't think is necessarily the case. (Anecdata: I grew up reading primarily English, and am far more myopic than my parents or my grandmother, who grew up reading Korean and Chinese characters.)
Use of exclusively Korean characters is associated with double posting, however.
Wouldn't you then expect rates of myopia to have risen significantly in the UK and USA, at least in urban areas, over the past 20 years or so, as kids have been spending less time outside?
I can't speak about China, but when we were living in Osaka (until last year) my children spent far more time playing outdoors than they do now in England, as Japanese children are trusted to play outside unsupervised from a much younger age than they are here. From first grade, they would arrange their own playdates and head straight off to the park after school almost every day, staying out with their friends until dusk. That would have changed after starting junior high school, with longer school hours, after-school clubs, and cram schools to take up time, but at least for Japanese elementary school children it seems unlikely that lack of sunlight would have a major impact.
I am surprised by the certainty in the linked article about the environmental and developmental causes of myopia. That certainly marks a change from when I was young and most authorities I found thought it was a genetic predisposition predominantly.
Playing outside is one hypothesis, weakly supported IMO. The empirical fact about myopia rates was surprising to me.
Pedagogy style would I guess play a role, maybe quality of indoor lighting also (ie, memorizing dense text in poor light is a trifecta of trouble)
It's a topic that makes people myopic. Go see a biopic.
Weird! When I was a kid my grandmother would always tell my mom that she needed to keep me from reading so much because it would ruin my eyesight. My mom (and my eye doctor) said that was a myth.
My old optometrist told me that some people have more eye flexibility, but others get used to focusing near and it can lead to some myopia.
That means you need to take breaks to look away, and it can be useful to have reading glasses. This may be all pseudo whatever, but I was able to train my eyes to get better depth perception, and for a while I needed a less strong prescription when I did the exercises regularly.
It seems plausible to me that spending a lot of time focusing on smallish things close up would make your eyes worse at seeing details at a distance, but that might just be that my nearsightedness looks exactly like eyes that naturally focus at exactly the point where I would normally hold a book (so the glasses come off whenever I read). That could easily be a coincidence though.
I eventually found the 搞, but I still don't see the 已 and now my eyes hurt. Sadist.
There may be another culprit: in Chinese schools, three times a day the PAs blast a soporific counting song for five minutes so that the students may do weird eye exercises. They claim it strengthens their eyes, yet more than half wear glasses. Even the ones that don't need them do, because they are "fashion".
I was an avid reader as a kid, and my eyesight deteriorated rapidly when I was around seven years old. I had bifocals prescribed when I was eight in an effort to get my eyes to work a little harder.
I'd believe that there's a genetic predisposition to develop myopia that's more affected by closework in some people than it is in others. My eyes are just really good at adapting to reading books!
Re otherways: Pre-google days, I'm helping my (much) younger brother with his math homework, and we had what must have been a 30 minute argument over whether a right-angle was 90 degrees or not. He kept insisting it WAS NOT, and he KNEW IT WAS NOT, because his teacher SAID it was not.
My mom (and my eye doctor) said that was a myth.
As did Linus Van Pelt's ophthalmologist.
Hello guys. In Taiwan in 1983 I came to feel that glasses were sexy and a sign of high class, like wrist watches. Chinese culture is sex roled and male dominated, but the ideal Chinese male doesn't have much of the dorky jock macho that the ideal American male does.
/ essentializing, orientalism
I have had to get a ne w pair of readign glasses to read my fine-print Chinese dictionary. I am very near-sighted but that isn't a problem with reading. You just move your nose closer to the page. But when your eyes start to stiffen up with old age you get more farsighted and your distant vision actually improves slightly (I think) but you no longer can move your nose closer to the page.
豔 isn't in common use but it might be seen as part of a restaurant name or in a lyric poem or ceremonious proclamation. It is one of the most intricate of all characters and is seen toward the very end of dictionaries organized by numbers of strokes.
靐 (39 strokes) is the most complex character I can find. My feeling is that beyond about 30 strokes Chinese characters are a sort of luxurious extravagance used for esthetic purposes.
You don't have to be that old. I got bifocals at 43 because I couldn't hold my phone far enough away from my eyes to read it.
Of course, I started out far sighted.
You know what they say: "Short arms means short early bifocals."
My close vision is deteriorating, but my ophthalmologist doesn't think I need bifocals yet. I think I had unusually good close vision, and that's going, but I'm still at or close to normal uncorrected vision. Annoying as anything, though.
#22 (which can be read after about 4 applications of Control +) is just the most complicated radical character tripled. Someone was having fun. It probably means exactly the same thing as the single character.
At least not from here. I suppose they are underrepresented in the flying to the midwest or southwest on the day before Thanksgiving demographic.
But no: "tà --the appearance of a dragon walking. Glad I got that cleared up.
Yes. It is awkward to ask people in airports.
Chinese culture is sex roled and male dominated
Although sexism is supposed to have disappeared the moment Mao said that women hold up half the sky.
"Biang", a kind of noodle, is the most complicated character I know. It's not in Unicode, as it's pretty regional (Shaanxi), but it weighs in at 58 strokes. Those in the Boston area can eat this delicious ideogram at Gene's Chinese Flatbread Cafe in Chinatown and Woburn.
31: The good half or the part that's mostly just over empty ocean?
32: Whoa. And it looks as though there's a variant with...71?
Crazy Kanji Highest Stroke Count
Unique strokes = 44
I thought Korean kids still had to learn some of the Chinese based character set in school.
It also astounds me that with so much reliance on recent Chinese urban data, they don't mention air pollution as a reason kids are kept inside.
I was already nearsighted but like oudemia, experienced free fall in vision at 20 and 21 learning intensive ancient greek and sanskrit. my 13-year-old is very near-sighted, and getting more so all the time. "this is your fault" she mutters, doing mandarin homework, while japanese homework, being fun, is not my fault. she does say she's glad we didn't move to taiwan.
36: right? who the fuck wants to go outside?
Taiwan has a lot of advantages over Singapore. More relaxed, looser, more fun, less authoritarian, cheaper. You should speak sharply to the daughter.
37: Get her glasses that are .50 diopters less strong to wear when she reads. or +.50 over contacts.
I wonder how much of this myopia is simply due to font size, and not some fundamental aspect of Chinese writing? I never understand why they can't just use bigger fonts, the information density is plenty high already.
Also, myopia might have been much less common in the past simply because literacy was much less common. Half of my grandparents were illiterate.
||40: BG, I addressed your question about the grapefruit in that older thread.|>
Several thoughts
1. Screen usage. Reading might not damage eyes, but isn't there strong evidence backlit screens do? People under 50 in contemporary China are glued to the cellphones in a way which makes Americans look like technophobes. Also, reading on cellphones is probably way worse for the eyes than reading on a computer. There's a move towards tablets, but most people still just read on their cell phones. Reading by young people is almost 100% on cell phones (see cell phone novels).
2. I'm not sure how character density would affect myopia. With character recognition, a general sense of the shape of the character is necessary, but making out each individual stroke is not. Similar complex characters which differ solely by 1 or 2 strokes are not that common and are easily differentiable by context. With typing and texting, the ability to write in daily life requires the same sorts of skills as reading rather than complete stroke recall.
3. Illiteracy, as Torrey Pine mentions. I haven't done a formal survey, but I'd estimate about 90% of villagers over 80 and 60% of villagers over 60 (inc. almost all the women) are illiterate or don't have any formal education (many of them have learned to read very basic things). Working class people over 30 and anyone over 40 is well educated if they have a high school education, but now even working class kids tend to get some sort of higher education. A typical Chinese family here would have a 60 YO grandma with no education, a 40 YO mom with a middle school education, and an 18 YO daughter with a HS diploma who is enrolled in the local technical college.
Reading might not damage eyes, but isn't there strong evidence backlit screens do?
Not as far as I know. I hope not, given that (like so many of us) I spend a lot of my work life looking at a backlit screen.
My last optometrist said there's no evidence linking screen usage with eye problems.
My favorite overly complex Chinese character--and obviously intentionally so--is the zhé meaning "verbose"--a depiction of a flock of dragons. Pain to write.
41: Yes, seems to me a bigger font size wouldn't hurt. Especially given Chinese is usually shorter in translation than letter-based systems. There is actually more information encoded per character. It's not just they like pretty pictures.
Doesn't seem to be the convention though, going by Chinese online papers and such. Now I think of it I do tend to zoom in more, but someone who was literate since primary school would be a better source.
my daughters say chinese people really have a leg up on twitter, where they can say about 10 times as much stuff in 140 characters. they don't need spaces between the characters. japanese some savings also, obviously.