It may be contrived, but it still highlights the key difference.
Even if sneeze was a word that you were taught once in school and hadn't used for 30 years, you would still likely get close to the correct spelling from the sound (sneaze, snease, sneeze), and seeing the misspelling also helps with recall and to self correct.
This is the "virtual circle" of speaking/listening -> reading -> writing -> referred to by the author, which is not possible with Chinese.
It's true that there are some weird non-phonetic English words that PhDs would likely misspell, but it's not 100% of the language and you still could at least make an attempt.
It's possible to just write Chinese in phonetic form (e.g. pinyin), which bypasses this issue, but you have a secondary problem, which is the extremely narrow range of syllables (~400 * 4/5 tones = 1600-2000), resulting in quite ambiguous text.
Removing the added information would make it much more difficult to parse, though. Paragraphs don't exist in oral English - or spaces between words, quotation marks, capitalization, etc. - but we still find it much more easy to read properly formatted text than improperly formatted text.
Just because people are able to understand strict phonetic transcriptions, doesn't mean it's a good way to convey information (which is why almost no language relies on just strict phonetic transcriptions).
> how many people drink an espresso every day and think it has an x in it.
Arguably, "espresso" isn't an english word, but spelling it with an "x" as "expresso" isn't as incorrect as you may think. There's two main theories behind which word to use: "espresso" meaning to "press out" the coffee, or "expresso" meaning "expressly made for the customer" as it's quicker to make than a filter coffee. This is further confused by the Latin root being "exprimire" meaning "to press or squeeze out".
Yes a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and well... diarrhoea is diarrhea
My point was addressing "tsinghua students..." and "Harvard students..." unless they were literary scholars or grammarians their wield of the language may be at the level of "educated" but still plenty fallible. I'm sure those of us who did any post grad would have met people who were smart in a given axis and otherwise very ordinary along the other axes.
Well in other comments, native Chinese speakers brought up that when you forget how to write a character you just write a homonym and readers can guess by the context - which is how Chinese speech works anyway.
I don't think that Chinese people have problems knowing how to spell a character as different characters share the same pronunciation (more or less) if they have the same phonetic component[1]. So pinyin helps literally zero.
What is harder is to distinguish the meaning of all these characters. Let's take this set as an example: 里理哩鲤鯉俚娌悝锂鋰
Ok, they are all pronounced the same, but guessing or knowing all their meanings is a different game. "鲤" has to be a fish that's pronounced li3. That might still be easy, but the more abstract the meaning-giving character radical is, the harder it becomes to distinguish all of them.
Even if sneeze was a word that you were taught once in school and hadn't used for 30 years, you would still likely get close to the correct spelling from the sound (sneaze, snease, sneeze), and seeing the misspelling also helps with recall and to self correct.
This is the "virtual circle" of speaking/listening -> reading -> writing -> referred to by the author, which is not possible with Chinese.
It's true that there are some weird non-phonetic English words that PhDs would likely misspell, but it's not 100% of the language and you still could at least make an attempt.
It's possible to just write Chinese in phonetic form (e.g. pinyin), which bypasses this issue, but you have a secondary problem, which is the extremely narrow range of syllables (~400 * 4/5 tones = 1600-2000), resulting in quite ambiguous text.