From 2013 to 2016, millions of viewers in China tuned in each year for the Chinese Characters Dictation Competition – an annual spelling bee in China that tested schoolchildren’s ability to write notoriously difficult Chinese characters. In the American equivalent, Scripps National Spelling Bee, words that stumped contestants and viewers alike include “psammophile” – a plant or animal that thrives in sandy environments – and “moorhen” – a type of bird. In the Chinese Characters Dictation Competition? “Toad.” Not only did 70% of contestants spell the character incorrectly, so too did 90% of adults tested in the audience.
Although Western audiences may be quick to judge the apparent lack of literacy, “Toad” in Mandarin consists of 46 individual strokes whose stroke order also needs to be memorized and perfected. Furthermore, a mistake as small as forgetting just one of the 46 strokes on the character is enough to warrant disqualification – as occurred with an unfortunate 14-year-old contestant.
This difficulty is not new. Chinese characters have long been considered almost impractically difficult to truly learn. So much so that writing reform had been among the chief goals of Chinese intellectuals and administrators since at least the days of the Republic of China in the 1910s. Still, writing reform did not truly come into effect until after a series of Maoist reforms in the 1950s that aimed to promote Chinese literacy. In 1957, Pinyin – a romanized Chinese language system – became the official way to transliterate the thousands of existing Chinese characters into the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet. Unlike Chinese characters which are logographic, Pinyin is phonetic meaning that each Chinese character is written in Pinyin based on how it sounds.
In the digital age, Pinyin has become an essential part of how Chinese speakers communicate in a system that was not designed for their language. Rather than having an impractical 1000-key keyboard, Chinese speakers instead use the QWERTY keyboard layout common in the west to type out characters phonetically in Pinyin, then select the Chinese character they want from a generated menu of likely options. Besides being highly convenient, the use of Pinyin has allowed the Chinese-speaking world to enter the digital age relatively unencumbered, but also has a worrying side effect: Chinese speakers are forgetting how to handwrite characters.
Called Tibiwangzi in China, literally “take pen, forget character,” this phenomenon has also been dubbed “Character Amnesia” by Western observers. Character Amnesia has also been noted to exist in Japan which also has a logographic character system, signifying that the root cause of Character Amnesia may be the complexity of East Asian language scripts paired with “the constant use of computers and mobile phones with alphabet-based input systems.” According to the Los Angeles Times, “The more gadgets people own… the less often they go through the elaborate sequence of strokes that make up Chinese characters.” And just as technology is becoming more and more common in daily Chinese life, handwriting Chinese characters is becoming increasingly uncommon as few Chinese people have any reason to handwrite in the age of touchpads and keyboards.
Character Amnesia in China is especially worrying as logographic characters hold an almost sacred position in China, being seen as a cornerstone of Chinese culture. In fact, China prides itself on the complexity of their characters which allows them to convey equally complex ideas in a language chock-full of homophones. In a famous example, the Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao wrote the poem “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” to demonstrate the benefits of a logographic character system and the weaknesses of romanized Chinese.1 Below is the first line of the poem:
Traditional Chinese Pinyin Translation
石室詩士施氏 shí shì shī shì shī shì A poet named Shi lived in a stone
room.
To many Chinese officials, Character Amnesia presents worrying implications for the future of not just Chinese literacy, but also Chinese culture. This has led the Chinese government to formally respond to stave off a potential cultural disaster. In 2011, The Chinese Education Ministry mandated calligraphy classes in primary schools to teach children the correct way to write Chinese characters but also to preserve the ancient Chinese cultural practice of calligraphy. As a result, the government mandate directly tied the issue of Character Amnesia with the preservation of Chinese culture. Still, this was met with mixed reactions by educators, who believe Character Amnesia stems not necessarily from a lack of practice spelling in-class, but from an overuse of technology outside of class. Complicating matters further, this raises the question of whether Character Amnesia is necessarily a problem worth addressing in the first place. In the same way that technology is the cause of Character Amnesia, technology is also conveniently the solution for the problem it helped create – at least in the short term. As one Chinese graduate student from Beijing explained, “If I don’t know a character, I take out my phone to check.”
Yes, an overdependence on technology causes Chinese people to forget how to handwrite characters, but in an era where writing by hand is going to the wayside and technology continues to dramatically change the world, is that such a problem? As technology constantly improves and changes how we interact with the world, it is simply inevitable that certain skills – especially those made irrelevant with advancements made in technology – will decline in usage. After all, no one mourned the decline of horseback riding following the advent of the automobile. But it seems that in China, forgetting how to write a character is more than just forgetting a skill – it’s forgetting a piece of history in exchange for a step into the future.
Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: “Wang Yi-zhi 001 – An Old Chinese Writing on a Piece of Paper,” Image source from Picryl | CC License, no changes made
- Behr, Wolfgang. “DISCUSSION 6: G. SAMPSON, ‘A CHINESE PHONOLOGICAL ENIGMA’: FOUR COMMENTS.” Journal of Chinese Linguistics 43, no. 2 (2015): 719–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24774984. ↩︎