Word-processor idiot (Japanese expression)

China is seeing a somewhat similar phenomeno too. The ubiquity of pinyin-based digital input methods is causing a lot of younger generations to lose the ability to write Chinese characters by hand without looking them up online. Abbreviated acronyms due to a mix of censorship/laziness is also becoming common making a lot of online messages look rather cryptic to anyone who doesn't know the lingo.

When you read word-processor, you probably think Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, not Xerox 6016 Memorywriter (thanks wikipedia) or any other type of electronic typewriter. Maybe it&#x27;s a generational thing, but the only use of ワープロ I know of is for the latter (do a google image search for ワープロ, and compare to a google image search for word processor).<p>I&#x27;d say the expression ワープロ馬鹿 is probably very outdated.

This affliction is now near-universal in Japan. A friend of mine was recently ribbed for forgetting how to handwrite an admittedly somewhat complex but still very common character (橋 <i>hashi</i>, &quot;bridge&quot;) in her own name.

How many WPM can the average Japanese adult write by hand?<p>Are kanji more efficient to write out than phonetic writing systems, or is proficiency with them more valued for tradition&#x27;s sake?<p>Is almost everyone a word-processor idiot these days?<p>When I think of writing things by hand in English, it&#x27;s hard to ever really want to do it. I type literally 10x faster than I can write, and when I write I cramp super quickly. In my life, at least, handwriting is obsolete.

Over here we have the digital clock idiots, that cannot read an analog clock.<p>This constitutes a higher level of idiocy than not being able to write kanji (knowing each kanji stroke order, having good calligraphy).

This is good, right? Having to learn all those characters seems like a dead-weight loss, from the outside.

Somewhat relatedly, I recently went on a months long mission to reacquaint myself with cursive. I hadn&#x27;t used it since grade school, and had almost totally forgotten many characters.<p>It was fun, and felt good to accomplish something so useless.

I have a new nickname!<p>ワープロ馬鹿<p>I should be a doctor, with my handwriting.<p>TBF, my handwriting sucked <i>before</i> I started using computers, but they didn&#x27;t help.<p>My entire family has awful penmanship (and it&#x27;s an Ivy-league family). I used to dread trying to decipher my mother&#x27;s notes.

If you go ask a native Chinese speaker from China nowadays, I can most likely guarantee you that nine out of ten of them don’t know how to write the second character in the word “sneeze” (喷嚏）

I recently found out cursive (aka. joined up writing aka. running writing aka. .... Handwriting) isn&#x27;t thought in US schools any more.<p>This blew my mind. I understand the reasoning behind dropping it from the curriculum, but hearing that students couldn&#x27;t do cursive really, blew my mind. And I&#x27;m not even sure why it surprised me so much!

Not really surprised. The most I write during month:<p>* the logbook for keys for when I leave office last<p>* signature when receiving mail&#x2F;package.<p>and... that&#x27;s about it for a month. Few lines at most.<p>But I was diagnosed with agraphia (i think that&#x27;s how its called in english) as kid (something about eye-hand coordination IIRC) so my hand-writing always been fucking ugly even when I wrote a lot during school, so I don&#x27;t particularly care about it

This Japanese is (just barely) legible and makes for a great example of what the OP is talking about. And since Japanese is a surprisingly popular language for HN posters - if you are able to read Japanese - I challenge you read this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;lse8JR0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;lse8JR0</a><p>It was written by a JP native - using a mouse - but her handwriting is typically this bad so having to write using a mouse only made it very slightly worse than usual.<p>It made me feel better about my own handwriting. I don&#x27;t sweat the details at all - writing better than natives might get me minor praise but doesn&#x27;t really benefit me in the long run vs expanding my vocabulary or learning how to read more kanji by spending less time focusing on writing them. I only write kanji nowadays to help with memorization of new kanji and to make sure I can still write the first few &quot;grade levels&quot; of kanji for how natives learn.

Can’t remember the last time I saw baka written in kanji and not katakana.

Also somewhat amusing is that &quot;idiot&quot; breaks down into the characters &quot;horse deer&quot;.

This same phenomenon is present in western languages. Except instead of being unable to write difficult characters, the sufferers are just generally idiots.<p>They have no knowledge of navigation in the citries they grew up in, they have reduced ability in face-to-face human interaction, they suffer major inability in understanding that the physical world is the universal host of all of their &quot;virtual&quot; reality including the corporate products they concieve of as &quot;community&quot; and the chatbots they think of as &quot;friends&quot;.<p>In general, the internet idiot...

Self-professed English speaking word-processor idiot speaking. Before I was introduced to writing with a computor, my handwriting was illegible even to me, and my spelling was execrable.

similarly, i recently discovered that the japanese equivalent for a CLI one-liner is 一行野郎, or &quot;one line bastard&quot;. which i think is a very fitting description

reminds me geo location idiots that are lost because of gps use

Apparently the vernacular these days is 「スマホ馬鹿」, “Smart Phone“ idiot. Same principle, different device.

I feel called out

I have two write modes. Write and not write. Two shades of gray.<p>But I have a cursive world of words. I paint the air with my ability to temporarily change the density of the surrounding medium &quot;air&quot; through and by means of generating waves at arbitrary, sometimes repetitive patterned, frequencies, which ever started reach their destination, usually a opening of an ear, or the wall, sometimes.<p>That must be enough.

Pretty offensive to people with a real disability called Dysgraphia.<p><pre><code> Dysgraphia is a neurological disorder of written expression that impairs writing ability and fine motor skills. It is a learning disability that affects children and adults, and interferes with practically all aspects of the writing process, including spelling, legibility, word spacing and sizing, and expression.</code></pre>