The Times: “A televised contest that has become hugely popular in China has led to nationwide hand-wringing over the population’s increasing inability to write Chinese characters.
The rapid rise of computers and smartphones has left most young people barely able to write by hand, with many unable to recall the estimated 10,000 characters used in daily life without an electronic prompt.
The state broadcaster CCTV launched the Chinese Character Dictation Competition this month to improve the population’s handwriting amid fears that the country’s fiendishly complex writing system, a highly prized symbol of its ancient culture, is entering an inexorable decline.
While contestants on the show are school pupils, it was found that 70 per cent of adults in the audience were unable to recall how to portray the word for “toad”. Tests showed that fewer than half could write common Mandarin words such as “thick”.
Mastering the language’s estimated 50,000 pictograms takes children years of learning by rote. Yet the predictive text used on digital devices allows people to type characters simply by entering pinyin, the Romanised system of Chinese pronunciation, removing the necessity to remember how to write.“While the keyboard era has not affected other languages, relatively speaking, it has had a big impact on the handwriting of Chinese characters,” Guan Zhengwen, who designed and directs the show, said. “The impact of electronic technology on people’s writing habits is irreversible, there is nothing we can do about this trend.”
However, he added that he hoped to engage people with his mission to keep it alive as an art form, in line with centuries of the tradition of calligraphy.
Educated young Chinese freely admit forgetting how to write all but the most common Chinese words. “I usually write at a very slow pace,” Zang Xiaosong, 29, a newspaper journalist from Nanjing, said. “Most of the time, it seems the characters are somewhere in my head, it’s just that I can’t remember how to write them. Sometimes I use a computer to help me retrieve them.”
Hao Mingjian, the editor of a magazine devoted to Chinese characters, said: “The learning of Chinese characters is a lifelong process. If you stop using them for a long time, it is very likely you would forget them.””
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