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Wired youth from China, Japan suffer from ‘character amnesia’
Like every Chinese child, Ms Li Hanwei spent her schooldays memorising thousands of the intricate characters that make up the Chinese writing system.
However, the 21-year-old university student now finds that when she picks up a pen to write, the characters for words as simple as “embarrassed” have slipped from her mind.
“I can remember the shape but I can’t remember the strokes that you need to write it,” she says. “It’s a bit of a problem.”
Surveys indicate the phenomenon, dubbed “character amnesia”, is widespread across China, causing young Chinese to fear for the future of their ancient writing system.
There is even a Chinese word for it: “Tibiwangzi”, or “take pen, forget character”.
A poll commissioned by the China Youth Daily in April found that 83 per cent of the 2,072 respondents admitted having problems writing characters.
“When I can’t remember, I will take out my cellphone and find it (the character) and then copy it down,” Ms Li says.
Young Japanese also report the problem, which is caused by the constant use of computers and mobile phones with alphabet-based input systems.
Tokyo student Maya Kato, 22, said: “I hardly write anymore, which is the main reason why I have forgotten so many characters.”
Character amnesia matters because memorisation is so crucial to character-based written languages, says Ms Siok Wai Ting, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Hong Kong University. Forgetting how to write could eventually affect reading ability.
“Through writing, we memorise the characters. Reading and writing are more closely connected in Chinese,” she says.
Chinese reading even uses a different part of the brain from reading the Roman alphabet, Ms Siok’s research has found. It is a part closer to the motor area, which is used for handwriting.
Some argue that the perceived decline in character knowledge is, in fact, nothing to worry about.
A survey by the Chinese news portal Dayang Net found that 80 per cent of respondents had forgotten how to write some characters but 43 per cent said they used handwritten characters for signatures and forms.
“The idea that China is a country full of people who write beautiful, fluid literature in characters without a second thought is a romantic fantasy,” wrote the blogger and translator C Custer on his Chinageeks blog.
“Given the social and financial pressures that exist for most people in China … (and) given that nearly everyone has a cellphone, it really isn’t a problem at all.”
