From Overseas Press

Texting, typing hurt Chinese writing

(chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-07-13 11:28

CNSphoto file photo

As texting and typing on gadgets begin to replace elaborate Chinese writing on paper, more and more Chinese are realizing they suddenly don't remember how to write even a familiar character, the Los Angeles Times reported on Monday.

The newspaper said such a strange illiteracy, peculiar to China, is more exactly dysgraphia, the inability to write, since typical victims are young and well-educated, like 18-year-old college freshman Cheng Jing.

The other day Cheng was writing a note by hand and came to the word zaijian [goodbye], "I did sort of a double-take because I wasn't sure I'd written the zai correctly," he said to the Times.

The newspaper observed that more and more digital gadgets, like smart phones and computers, are eating into people's practice of the elaborate writing of strokes on paper. And most Chinese gadget-users type out the sounds of the word, not its stroke sequence, further alienating the traditional writing.

The rampant phenomenon -- it even has a nickname, tibiwangzi, or "take pen, forget character" -- poses to be a cultural crisis since the Chinese characters epitomize thousands of years of tradition, the Times said.

Chinese is the oldest continuously used writing system in the world; the characters used today can be traced to pictographs found on bones and turtle shells dating to 1200 BC. Moreover, writing is not merely about communication. In Chinese culture, it is an art form and spiritual exercise, the newspaper said.

"These characters are in the soul of every Chinese person. They are our cultural heritage," said Wang Jianxue, a 38-year-old calligraphy teacher from Harbin.

The Chinese government is in fact beginning to take notice of the problem. In 2008, the Education Ministry found 60% of the country's teachers were complaining about the decline in students' writing ability. Thus the ministry last year launched a writing contest with 10 million participants and has begun pilot programs to make students do more handwriting, the Times reported.

"It is not about producing beautiful calligraphy," said Yu Hong, who runs the ministry's program on writing language. "We want to help students come back to writing again."