Rubbing out Chinese characters

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By Huang Jingjing (Global Times) 08:56, August 12, 2013

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The difficulty of writing Chinese characters is not exclusive to foreigners. A majority of Chinese speakers today find it hard to write their mother tongue, despite having pride in being the modern custodians of one of the world's oldest written languages, dating back to before 1100 BC.

As the digital age takes over people's daily lives, the need to use pen and paper is getting smaller. It has become commonplace now for Chinese natives to find that words they can pronounce and read easily get lost when they try to write them.

In this summer, several new TV shows that are competing to show modern mastery of the Chinese language have attracted large audiences. These shows have even beaten out the singing and dancing contests which have traditionally dominated ratings.

Such programs have renewed people's interest in Chinese scripts but also sounded an alarm bell on the downward spiral in the nation's handwriting skill.

Many are calling for a national effort to correct this tendency but others say that handwriting is already on its way out and that it should be naturally phased out while allowing calligraphy to be cultivated as an aesthetic art form.

High-tech blamed

During the recently televised Chinese Character Dictation Contest by CCTV-10, when the host asked the 14-year-old contestant Yu Shuang from Guizhou Province to write the word for toad, the audience frowned. Yu failed as she wrote the character with one dot missing. However, among 10 adult participants offstage, only three had written the word correctly.

Meanwhile, those sitting at home also felt embarrassed during the broadcast, since on several occasions they were stumped as to how to write words that are commonly used in daily conversation.

According to a survey by Beijing-based Horizon Research Consultancy in May, up to 94.1 percent of respondents said they had encountered memory lapses concerning how to write certain characters while writing and 26.8 percent said such lapses were frequent.

"I'm afraid I would be placed in the latter group. Last week, my father asked me to write a shopping list and I forgot the correct strokes for several characters. I was only reminded after using an app on my phone which allows me to write in pinyin and then displays the characters," said Li Hui, a saleswoman from Changsha, Hunan Province.

Unlike older generations, young people today prefer typing.

"The frequency of students writing words incorrectly has become worse in recent years. The prevalence of digital devices is a major contributing factor," lamented Su Yunsheng, who has taught Chinese for more than 20 years at Hangzhou Foreign Languages School in Zhejiang Province.

"In addition, in order to reduce the burden placed on students, written homework has been largely cut," Su told the Global Times. "In an era of image-reading and voice recognition, handwriting skills have become far less vital," she added.

Cell phone and computers are common devices to most urban children.

A report on the lifestyle of Chinese children published by Beijing Women's Federation in July showed that mobile phones, instant messenger QQ, Weibo and tablets have become a major part of urban children's daily lives.

According to the report, 52.6 percent of kids aged 4 to 6 had used the Internet. The percentage for kids aged between 7 and 9 reached 58.6 percent, and 77 percent for 10 to 12-year-olds.

Yang Lincheng, deputy copy editor at Excessive Wording, a monthly magazine dedicated to promoting the standard use of Chinese language, noted that speed reading has also weakened people's knowledge of the Chinese script.

"Before, people got their information mainly from print media. But now, given the prosperity of new media, people spend less time reading traditionally written full-blown articles," Yang told the Global Times.

Many are calling for the popularity of handwriting to be revived as they are convinced it is significant to pass on Chinese history and culture.

"Chinese characters are ideograms and carry the essence of Chinese culture. Handwriting is an important way to touch this essence. As a result, we must write them and feel them," said Zhang Yiwu, professor of Chinese literature at Peking University. He deemed that opening calligraphy lessons in schools would be a meaningful method to rebuild children's interest in handwriting.

Luo Dongqing, a professor of Chinese language and literature at Nanjing Normal University, also stressed the legacy of Chinese characters.

"They are the most important part of Chinese culture. By studying the formation and evolution of a Chinese character, one is offered a window into the evolution of Chinese culture and history," he told the Global Times earlier.

There are currently over 80,000 Chinese characters and 3,500 of them are frequently used in daily life.

Yang added to this by saying that Chinese characters contain a cultural code. "By studying these pictograms, we can get closer to our ancestors' mode of thinking and their lifestyle," he said.