by David Moser（Beijing Capital Normal University）
During a visit to Beijing many years ago, I was having lunch with three PhD students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all of whom were native speakers of Chinese. I happened to have a cold that day and was trying to write a brief note to a friend to cancel an appointment that afternoon. I found that I could not recall how to write the Chinese characters for the word ‘sneeze’. I asked my three friends to write the characters for me and, to my surprise, all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the characters. I thought to myself: Peking University is usually considered the ‘Harvard of China’. Can one imagine three PhD students in the English Literature Department at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word ‘sneeze’? Yet, this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. This was my first encounter with an increasingly widespread phenomenon in China known as ‘character amnesia’. Chinese people, even the well-educated, are forgetting how to write common characters. What is the explanation for this peculiar problem?Chinese Characters and the Problem of Literacy
Chinese characters constitute one of the world’s oldest writing systems and these iconic symbols are so intertwined with Chinese history, philosophy, and the arts that they are virtually a semiotic representation of the culture itself. The staggering number of Chinese characters makes the system unique among the scripts of the world. The exact number of characters appearing in the historical record is debated, but is certainly in the tens of thousands. The latest version of the official Xinhua Dictionary contains more than 13,000 characters, but only 4,000–4,500 are necessary for full literacy. The process of mastering the system has thus been a daunting task for Chinese children throughout the centuries and up to the present. During the dynastic era, only the offspring of the wealthy elite had the time and wherewithal to spend their childhoods practising characters with a calligraphy brush, and therefore the literacy rate at the turn of the twentieth century was roughly 10–15 per cent—a number that was virtually unchanged when Mao Zedong took power in 1949 (Ross et al. 2006).
After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, the May Fourth intellectuals under the new Republic of China turned their attention to language reform, with the focus on the problem of Chinese characters and literacy. After China’s century of foreign aggression and exploitation, the Chinese reformers recognised the need to cultivate an educated populace and the formidable task of memorising thousands of characters was seen as a stumbling block to that goal. Many prominent public intellectuals such as Lu Xun, Hu Shi, and, later, even Mao Zedong advocated eliminating the characters altogether, while transitioning to an alphabetic system (Moser 2016). The developed Western countries were in the middle of an information revolution and the Chinese intelligentsia was keenly aware that the myriad Chinese characters were ill-suited to the alphabet-based world of typewriters, telegrams, and teletype. For decades, Chinese linguists and inventors struggled mightily to develop phonetisation methods, character classification schemes, and character input systems to bring the ancient Chinese characters into the twentieth-century information environment (Tsu 2022).
When Mao took power in 1949, for pragmatic reasons, he chose not to abolish the characters, but instead initiated a policy of character simplification, streamlining, and reducing the number of strokes for hundreds of the most common characters. A comparison of texts with traditional versus simplified characters provides an intuitive understanding of the timesaving advantage:
Traditional 他們幾個畢業生都在廣州藝術學院學習書法和國畫。
Simplified 他们几个毕业生都在广州艺术学院学习书法和国画。
Pinyin: Tāmen jǐge bìyèshēng dōu zài Guǎngzhōu yìshù xuéyuàn xuéxí shūfǎ hé guóhuà.
Translation: Those several graduate students all studied calligraphy and Chinese painting at the Guangzhou Art Academy.
While this streamlining yielded a reduction of 12.5 per cent in the average number of strokes for the 2,000 most common characters (DeFrancis 1984), the simplified set of symbols still required years of practice to master, and their efficacy in raising the literacy rate is uncertain. Many analysts note that Taiwan and Hong Kong have continued to use the complex traditional characters to this day yet enjoy literacy rates roughly equal to that of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Another important step in the post-1949 education system was to develop an alphabetic system for teaching the sounds of Mandarin to the large number of citizens who spoke other Sinitic languages. Under the leadership of linguist Zhou Youguang, the PRC language committees developed a romanisation method called Pinyin (literally, ‘spell the sounds’) for use in the education system and PRC foreign-language publications. Pinyin is now a world standard and the default Chinese character input method for the internet and most digital devices.
After decades of improvements in the education system, the literacy rate in China now stands at an impressive 97 per cent (Statista 2024), though experts note that the official Chinese standard for literacy is a rather low bar. The 1988 State Council document ‘Regulations on the Eradication of Illiteracy’ stipulates a two-tier standard for basic literacy: the ability to read 1,500 characters for the rural population, and 2,000 characters for urban dwellers. This standard, which is below the Ministry of Education requirement of 2,500 characters for sixth-grade students, remains unchanged to the present day (Wikipedia 2024b).
Chinese Characters in Cyberspace
By the turn of the twenty-first century, the birth of the internet and the new digitised information environment brought both challenges and breakthroughs with the processing of Chinese characters. Thanks to the exponential growth of computer memory, Chinese word processing had become routine and user-friendly. The standard QWERTY keyboard could now accommodate not only Pinyin entry, but also a host of other entry systems, allowing Chinese characters to take their place comfortably alongside the alphabet in cyberspace (Mullaney 2024). Leapfrogging over several stages of information technology, Chinese citizens almost overnight began to incorporate smartphones, laptops, and e-pads into their daily lives, taking full advantage of Pinyin alphabetic character input, e-handwriting pads, and speech-to-text technology. Today Chinese people are enthusiastically following the inexorable global trend, increasingly moving away from pen and paper and transitioning to fully digital language processing.
However, for China (and, to a lesser extent, Japan), these technological breakthroughs result in a special problem: Chinese people are increasingly forgetting how to write characters by hand. Of course, such lapses are not a new phenomenon. Due to the sheer number of symbols to be memorised and the limits of human memory, Chinese people have always to some extent suffered from what is called tíbǐwàngzì (提笔忘字; literally, ‘lift the pen, forget the character’)—a term that is usually translated as ‘character amnesia’ (Mair 2010). However, this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character. Highly literate people are forgetting how to write the characters in words like ‘kitchen’ (厨房), ‘lips’ (嘴唇), ‘cough’ (咳嗽), and ‘broom’ (扫帚). Victor Mair (2014) provides a striking example of the severity of the character amnesia problem. The following image is of a shopping list hastily written by a social science researcher from the PRC. The writer of the list struggled to remember the characters in ‘egg’ (鸡蛋), ‘shrimp’ (虾仁), and ‘chives’ (韭菜), and simply resorted to Pinyin.
Handwritten shopping list. Source: Mair (2014).
How common is this problem? There have been very few empirical studies assessing the extent of the phenomenon. Informal surveys carried out by China Daily and other publications report that roughly 80 per cent of respondents experience character amnesia in their daily life (Wikipedia 2024a). Some research projects have been initiated to examine the factors that contribute to the problem (Wang et al. 2020; Langsford et al. 2024), but the data are hard to assess in terms of differences in occupation and level of education.
Can the Education System Solve the Problem?
Several years ago, I conducted informal class discussions with my Beijing Capital Normal University undergraduate students about the frequency of the character amnesia problem. Given a choice between ‘seldom’, ‘occasionally’, or ‘often’, most students chose ‘often’. Yet, despite the perceived frequency of character amnesia, the students seemed to accept the problem as a mild annoyance. ‘When I can’t remember a character, I just look it up on my mobile phone’, they would report with a shrug.
Chinese college students may not be concerned about character amnesia, but among educators and cultural preservationists, there has been a considerable gnashing of teeth over the issue. It is difficult to fully convey the profound reverence that Chinese characters hold for Chinese people. Traditionally, the importance of the Chinese characters extended far beyond the mere dissemination of texts. One’s calligraphic style was believed to reflect the writer’s moral character and understanding of nature and the human realm. The enduring cultural and ethical values embodied in Chinese characters were thought to be passed on to future generations through the very act of writing itself. Even today, many regard the practice of writing characters as an affirmation of patriotism and cultural identity, making it an essential component of the Chinese education system.
In 2011, the Ministry of Education promulgated measures intended to address the perceived crisis. On its website, the ministry set forth requirements for elementary school students to undergo one hour of calligraphy class every week, and high schools were to add calligraphy to the curriculum as an optional course (China Daily 2011). The high school teachers to whom I have talked complained that such measures seemed to be a misdiagnosis of the problem (the skill of writing characters with brush and ink is largely unrelated to the character amnesia problem), and such additions to the curriculum were only met by students with boredom and frustration.
To promote among young people the notion that writing Chinese characters can be fun, the Chinese Government enlisted the medium of television. In 2013, China Central Television (CCTV) and Henan TV premiered two game shows, Chinese Character Heroes (汉字英雄) and Chinese Characters Dictation Competition (中国汉字听写大会). These programs were structured according to the standard reality show format, featuring interviews with the young contestants about their daily life, hobbies, and their passion for writing characters. At the beginning of each round of competition, the host would present the contestants with the target word or idiom and, as the clock ticked, there would be close-ups of the children, pen in hands, wracking their brains to recall the assigned characters. After each round, the camera followed the contestants backstage, where the winning students were met with hugs and kisses from their family and friends, while the tearful losing contestants were comforted by their supportive parents. These programs made for great reality TV, but rather than spurring zeal for writing characters, they only served to increase public awareness of how serious the problem had become. Some of the contestants on Chinese Characters Dictation Competition were stumped by characters in words like ‘elbow’ (胳膊肘), ‘toad’ (癞蛤蟆), ‘hip’ (髋部), and, of course, ‘sneeze’ (打喷嚏).
How common is this problem? There have been very few empirical studies assessing the extent of the phenomenon. Informal surveys carried out by China Daily and other publications report that roughly 80 per cent of respondents experience character amnesia in their daily life (Wikipedia 2024a). Some research projects have been initiated to examine the factors that contribute to the problem (Wang et al. 2020; Langsford et al. 2024), but the data are hard to assess in terms of differences in occupation and level of education.
Can the Education System Solve the Problem?
Several years ago, I conducted informal class discussions with my Beijing Capital Normal University undergraduate students about the frequency of the character amnesia problem. Given a choice between ‘seldom’, ‘occasionally’, or ‘often’, most students chose ‘often’. Yet, despite the perceived frequency of character amnesia, the students seemed to accept the problem as a mild annoyance. ‘When I can’t remember a character, I just look it up on my mobile phone’, they would report with a shrug.
Chinese college students may not be concerned about character amnesia, but among educators and cultural preservationists, there has been a considerable gnashing of teeth over the issue. It is difficult to fully convey the profound reverence that Chinese characters hold for Chinese people. Traditionally, the importance of the Chinese characters extended far beyond the mere dissemination of texts. One’s calligraphic style was believed to reflect the writer’s moral character and understanding of nature and the human realm. The enduring cultural and ethical values embodied in Chinese characters were thought to be passed on to future generations through the very act of writing itself. Even today, many regard the practice of writing characters as an affirmation of patriotism and cultural identity, making it an essential component of the Chinese education system.
In 2011, the Ministry of Education promulgated measures intended to address the perceived crisis. On its website, the ministry set forth requirements for elementary school students to undergo one hour of calligraphy class every week, and high schools were to add calligraphy to the curriculum as an optional course (China Daily 2011). The high school teachers to whom I have talked complained that such measures seemed to be a misdiagnosis of the problem (the skill of writing characters with brush and ink is largely unrelated to the character amnesia problem), and such additions to the curriculum were only met by students with boredom and frustration.
To promote among young people the notion that writing Chinese characters can be fun, the Chinese Government enlisted the medium of television. In 2013, China Central Television (CCTV) and Henan TV premiered two game shows, Chinese Character Heroes (汉字英雄) and Chinese Characters Dictation Competition (中国汉字听写大会). These programs were structured according to the standard reality show format, featuring interviews with the young contestants about their daily life, hobbies, and their passion for writing characters. At the beginning of each round of competition, the host would present the contestants with the target word or idiom and, as the clock ticked, there would be close-ups of the children, pen in hands, wracking their brains to recall the assigned characters. After each round, the camera followed the contestants backstage, where the winning students were met with hugs and kisses from their family and friends, while the tearful losing contestants were comforted by their supportive parents. These programs made for great reality TV, but rather than spurring zeal for writing characters, they only served to increase public awareness of how serious the problem had become. Some of the contestants on Chinese Characters Dictation Competition were stumped by characters in words like ‘elbow’ (胳膊肘), ‘toad’ (癞蛤蟆), ‘hip’ (髋部), and, of course, ‘sneeze’ (打喷嚏).
A contestant in the 2015 edition of the Chinese Characters Dictation Competition attempts to write the characters for ‘sneeze’. Source: YouTube.
An unfortunate contestant in Chinese Character Heroes has written the word for ‘cook’ (烹) incorrectly. Source: YouTube.
The Root of the Problem
Given that users of alphabetic languages are also writing mostly on a computer or smartphone, the question arises: why is this character amnesia syndrome so prevalent in Chinese (and, to a lesser extent, Japanese), while users of alphabetic scripts manage to retain both typing and handwriting ability?
The answer is complicated, but it has to do with the feeble ‘phoneticity’ of Chinese characters, as opposed to other scripts that were specially devised to convey the sounds of a language. In writing systems whose symbols represent phonetic information, there is a ‘virtuous circle’ in which the four functions of language—speaking, listening, writing, and reading—are mutually reinforcing.
The Root of the Problem
Given that users of alphabetic languages are also writing mostly on a computer or smartphone, the question arises: why is this character amnesia syndrome so prevalent in Chinese (and, to a lesser extent, Japanese), while users of alphabetic scripts manage to retain both typing and handwriting ability?
The answer is complicated, but it has to do with the feeble ‘phoneticity’ of Chinese characters, as opposed to other scripts that were specially devised to convey the sounds of a language. In writing systems whose symbols represent phonetic information, there is a ‘virtuous circle’ in which the four functions of language—speaking, listening, writing, and reading—are mutually reinforcing.
‘Virtuous circle’ with the four functions of language. Source: David Moser.
The orthography may be inconsistently phonetic, as is the case with English spelling, or highly consistent, such as the Korean Hangul system. No writing system is perfectly phonetic. But phonetic systems enable the native speaker, with just a few dozen symbols, to reliably write whatever they can speak, and read out loud anything they can read.
For many complex historical reasons, the function of Chinese characters is based on a very different paradigm. Originally all Chinese characters were ‘logograms’ that represented semantics but did not provide any clue as to the sounds of the linguistic units. These graphs are analogous to the adjunct symbols we use alongside the alphabet, such as $, %, &, @, etcetera—symbols that must be memorised. Later in history, as the number of Chinese characters proliferated, phonetic components were added to the characters as a hint to the pronunciation of the syllable. Unfortunately, in modern times, the phonetic components have become so unreliable, inconsistent, ambiguous, and variable that they fall hopelessly short of constituting a useful phonetic system. In this sense, the Chinese writing system breaks the self-reinforcing ‘virtuous circle’ that alphabets provide.
The orthography may be inconsistently phonetic, as is the case with English spelling, or highly consistent, such as the Korean Hangul system. No writing system is perfectly phonetic. But phonetic systems enable the native speaker, with just a few dozen symbols, to reliably write whatever they can speak, and read out loud anything they can read.
For many complex historical reasons, the function of Chinese characters is based on a very different paradigm. Originally all Chinese characters were ‘logograms’ that represented semantics but did not provide any clue as to the sounds of the linguistic units. These graphs are analogous to the adjunct symbols we use alongside the alphabet, such as $, %, &, @, etcetera—symbols that must be memorised. Later in history, as the number of Chinese characters proliferated, phonetic components were added to the characters as a hint to the pronunciation of the syllable. Unfortunately, in modern times, the phonetic components have become so unreliable, inconsistent, ambiguous, and variable that they fall hopelessly short of constituting a useful phonetic system. In this sense, the Chinese writing system breaks the self-reinforcing ‘virtuous circle’ that alphabets provide.
The broken ‘virtuous circle’. Source: David Moser.
In Chinese, the sound of a character contains no clue as to the corresponding written form, and the written form yields little or no information about the sound. This means that the association of sound, semantics, and symbol must be accomplished by years of rote learning.
As Victor Mair (2010) describes it:
Because of their complexity and multiplicity, writing Chinese characters correctly is a highly neuromuscular task. One simply has to practice them hundreds and hundreds of times to master them. And, as with playing a musical instrument like a violin or a piano, one must practice writing them regularly or one’s control over them will simply evaporate.
For users of an alphabetic language, the process of typing reinforces the orthography—that is, the rules for matching the symbols with the sounds. For Chinese speakers, inputting characters by typing only reinforces the Pinyin spellings, not the shapes of the characters themselves.
Accepting the New Normal?
It must be noted that character amnesia does not entail illiteracy. The skill that is eroding in the digital era is the physical writing of the characters, not the recognition of them. Chinese speakers can still easily recognise the characters, as attested by the fact that character amnesia has had no effect on the literacy rate. To take an analogous example, most people can easily recognise the musical symbol for treble clef (𝄞), but very few could draw it by memory. The same is true of Chinese characters; recognition is not dependent on the physical ability to write the symbol. There is a bit of irony in all this: the digital technology is both a cause of and a solution to the problem. Is the solution worth it? In the next century, will Chinese people no longer be able to write in Chinese? Some will say that the erosion of handwriting is just another inevitable loss of cultural tradition in the wake of technological progress. Those who use calculators on their phones do not mourn the extinction of the abacas. Others will justifiably lament the disappearance of a time-honoured ritual that links the Chinese mind and soul to the very origins of Chinese culture itself. That culture has a saying: Yǒu dé yǒu shī 有得有失; ‘You gain something, you lose something’).
References
In Chinese, the sound of a character contains no clue as to the corresponding written form, and the written form yields little or no information about the sound. This means that the association of sound, semantics, and symbol must be accomplished by years of rote learning.
As Victor Mair (2010) describes it:
Because of their complexity and multiplicity, writing Chinese characters correctly is a highly neuromuscular task. One simply has to practice them hundreds and hundreds of times to master them. And, as with playing a musical instrument like a violin or a piano, one must practice writing them regularly or one’s control over them will simply evaporate.
For users of an alphabetic language, the process of typing reinforces the orthography—that is, the rules for matching the symbols with the sounds. For Chinese speakers, inputting characters by typing only reinforces the Pinyin spellings, not the shapes of the characters themselves.
Accepting the New Normal?
It must be noted that character amnesia does not entail illiteracy. The skill that is eroding in the digital era is the physical writing of the characters, not the recognition of them. Chinese speakers can still easily recognise the characters, as attested by the fact that character amnesia has had no effect on the literacy rate. To take an analogous example, most people can easily recognise the musical symbol for treble clef (𝄞), but very few could draw it by memory. The same is true of Chinese characters; recognition is not dependent on the physical ability to write the symbol. There is a bit of irony in all this: the digital technology is both a cause of and a solution to the problem. Is the solution worth it? In the next century, will Chinese people no longer be able to write in Chinese? Some will say that the erosion of handwriting is just another inevitable loss of cultural tradition in the wake of technological progress. Those who use calculators on their phones do not mourn the extinction of the abacas. Others will justifiably lament the disappearance of a time-honoured ritual that links the Chinese mind and soul to the very origins of Chinese culture itself. That culture has a saying: Yǒu dé yǒu shī 有得有失; ‘You gain something, you lose something’).
References
David Moser
David Moser holds a master’s degree and a PhD from the University of Michigan. He has been in Beijing for 30 years, teaching linguistics at various universities and US study abroad programs. From 2017 to 2019, he was the Associate Dean of the Yenching Academy at Peking University. Moser is author of the book A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language (Penguin, 2016). He is currently Associate Professor in the Foreign Languages Department of Beijing Capital Normal University.
David Moser holds a master’s degree and a PhD from the University of Michigan. He has been in Beijing for 30 years, teaching linguistics at various universities and US study abroad programs. From 2017 to 2019, he was the Associate Dean of the Yenching Academy at Peking University. Moser is author of the book A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language (Penguin, 2016). He is currently Associate Professor in the Foreign Languages Department of Beijing Capital Normal University.
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