Character amnesia is a recently coined term for an interesting problem that is troubling Chinese and Japanese speakers, namely a growing inability to reproduce and write out complex characters by hand from memory.

https://globalchinapulse.net/character-amnesia-in-china/

In Chinese the phenomenon has been dubbed tíbǐwàngzì (提笔忘字)  which means “lift the brush, forget the character”. The problem has become progressively more acute ever since the advent of the modern internet and smart phone usage in China after the turn of the millenium.

Chinese speakers typically use either a physical QWERTY keyboard, or a virtual equivalent (on pads and smartphones) to generate a Pinyin romanisation of what they want to say. The system software then generates a list of characters known as a ‘candidate gallery’ of hanzi that match the romanised input string. Users highlight/select the characters they want to use, and hit return to transfer the entire string to a document or email. With look-ahead style auto-correct and modern AI software at work under the hood, the process is fast and almost effortless. The only problem is that users no longer experience the kinaesthetic reinforcement of writing out the characters they are using by hand -  stroke by stroke, and they progressively forget how to do so.

Within the last week or so I have noticed that the Chinese language course on Duolingo has now for the first time introduced calligraphic exercises where students have to memorise and reproduce the exact stroke order, brush direction and stroke count of a complex character in order to score points.

The really interesting aspect of this is that conventionally literate Chinese speakers (those who can recognise 4000 to 5000 characters) have not the slightest difficulty in reading Chinese characters, they simply can’t remember exactly how to write them.

There is a growing fad on Chinese TV for National Spelling Bee type competitions such as ‘Chinese Character Heroes’ where young contestants have to write out the character forms correctly by hand.

A recent Duolingo calligraphy exercise:

I wonder if countries with logographic languages will eventually shift to Roman - I would think the simplicity would be tempting when you have new generations less inclined towards the rigors of literacy all over the world. Who knows, even the Roman alphabet could end up reduced in letter numbers, J tossed out, with G covering two sounds (as it already does in many words, gelatin gorillas), S picking up all the Zs, hard C handling all the Ks, Q discarded (cwite cwicly), i handling the Ys, etc. That speculation aside, there would be both gains and losses from a global alphabet...there might be nostalgia for the variety of old pictographic ways - which would look like impressive feats of memorization to a romanized world.

ETA - there's sort a mild version of amnesia now in the US, where a lot of (misguided, IMNSHO) school districts are only teaching pupils to write block letters. Students are now reaching adulthood unable to form cursive letters (and reap the benefits of its greater speed in writing) or, as I encountered recently, READ cursive. Those who did have some exposure to cursive early on are now experiencing the amnesia where they can sort of recognize cursive but have forgotten how to form cursive letters.

10 hours ago, toucana said:

The really interesting aspect of this is that conventionally literate Chinese speakers (those who can recognise 4000 to 5000 characters) have not the slightest difficulty in reading Chinese characters, they simply can’t remember exactly how to write them.

I’m re-learning my Chinese at the moment (having lived in China 25+ years ago, and having forgotten most of it through lack of practice), and I can attest to this being a real issue. Visually recognising a character is much easier than writing it down from memory, and if one does not regularly practice writing, one often finds oneself unable to do it, even with relatively frequent and well-known characters.

2 hours ago, TheVat said:

I wonder if countries with logographic languages will eventually shift to Roman

In the case of Chinese at least that would be pretty much impossible, due to the large number of homophones. Also, Chinese people are very proud of their writing system (and rightly so), they would never accept its abolishing in favour of romanisation.

9 hours ago, TheVat said:

I wonder if countries with logographic languages will eventually shift to Roman - I would think the simplicity would be tempting when you have new generations less inclined towards the rigors of literacy all over the world.

Both the Chinese and Japanese authorities pondered the idea of switching to using romanized scripts quite deeply at various periods. In China reformers such as Lu Xun and Sun Yat-sen recommended such a move in the 1920s after the founding of the Kuomintang  Republic. The Communist leader Mao Zedong did much the same after the PRC took control of China in 1949, but settled in the end on a scheme of script simplification and the creation of yet another homebrew system or romanization called Pinyin in the 1950s. The problem was always one of scale, along with the expense, and a sense of cultural loss.

Another problem with Romanization confronting western students like myself who embarked on a degree in Far Eastern studies in the 1970s was the sheer number of competing romanization systems. There used to be a joke that whenever a new professor was appointed to a chair in Chinese, they were expected to spend their first year inventing a new method of romanizing Chinese, and the rest of their career campaigning for its adoption.

In my first year alone, I had to learn legacy systems of romanization like the archaic Wade-Giles (which gave us ‘Peking’ for ‘Beijing’), then the more modern Yale University system, along with the bizarre Gwoyeu Romatzyh from 1926 (which indicates tones by internal spelling changes), the 1918 Juhin Fuhao  phonetic syllabary (used in some Taiwanese dictionaries), together with the 1958 Pinyin system used in all PRC material. The latter is now the de facto standard for modern Chinese internet use and keyboard input systems.

7 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

I’m re-learning my Chinese at the moment (having lived in China 25+ years ago, and having forgotten most of it through lack of practice), and I can attest to this being a real issue. Visually recognising a character is much easier than writing it down from memory, and if one does not regularly practice writing, one often finds oneself unable to do it, even with relatively frequent and well-known characters.

The difference between learning to how read Chinese characters, as opposed to learning how to write them (in a pre-internet age) was so pronounced that I used to wonder if two different forms of brain-hemisphere access were involved - left hemisphere for semantic recognition, and right-hemisphere for spatial reconstruction ?

I spent a lot of time practising character tracing, and learning stroke orders and stroke counts back then, and part of the fun of doing the calligraphic exercises in Duolingo nowadays lies in rediscovering it all.

9 hours ago, TheVat said:

ETA - there's sort a mild version of amnesia now in the US, where a lot of (misguided, IMNSHO) school districts are only teaching pupils to write block letters. Students are now reaching adulthood unable to form cursive letters (and reap the benefits of its greater speed in writing) or, as I encountered recently, READ cursive. Those who did have some exposure to cursive early on are now experiencing the amnesia where they can sort of recognize cursive but have forgotten how to form cursive letters.

The cursive writing issue has a lot of resonance with problems in Chinese relating to Cǎoshu (草书 - ‘grass script’) a form of impressionistic ‘speed calligraphy’ that can be almost unreadable even to people familiar with normal Hanyu because of its level of abstraction  - e.g the word Cǎoshu itself written in the two forms:

10 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

In the case of Chinese at least that would be pretty much impossible, due to the large number of homophones. Also, Chinese people are very proud of their writing system (and rightly so), they would never accept its abolishing in favour of romanisation.

Yes, I wouldn't think they would abandon it lightly. That said, the pinyin system does use diacritical marks to handle the tonalities, so doesn't seem impossible.

3 hours ago, toucana said:

The cursive writing issue has a lot of resonance with problems in Chinese relating to Cǎoshu (草书 - ‘grass script’) a form of impressionistic ‘speed calligraphy’ that can be almost unreadable even to people familiar with normal Hanyu because of its level of abstraction  - e.g the word Cǎoshu itself written in the two forms:

Yikes. The cow shoe seems especially daunting to a Western learner.

Re: brain areas...have heard handwriting does use different mode than reading, which. iirc was correlated in a study with enhanced creativity and cognition overall. Writing longhand v typing seemed to unlock ideas. I know some famous authors and poets swore by it.

Edited May 30, 2025May 30 by TheVat

Just to make things even harder, when I first began learning Chinese at university back in the early 1970s, there was only one bi-language Chinese magazine widely available in the west which was called  ‘China Pictorial’ (Ren Min Hua Bao - 人民画报).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Pictorial

For ideological reasons, this was only printed in Chinese and Albanian at that time ! Because after the Sino-Soviet split and the start of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Albania was practically the only foreign country recognised by the PRC, and Albanian was the only officially sanctioned foreign language  that could be taught in China -  up until 1976 when Albanian leader Enver Hoxha split with Maoism. Which meant that budding sinologists like myself had to learn to read Albanian as well, just to read Ren Min Hua Bao in translation.

I originally posted this thread in The Lounge because it wasn’t clear quite where it belonged. On reflection the topic seems to involve, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and cultural anthropology.

8 hours ago, TheVat said:

Re: brain areas...have heard handwriting does use different mode than reading, which. iirc was correlated in a study with enhanced creativity and cognition overall. Writing longhand v typing seemed to unlock ideas. I know some famous authors and poets swore by it.

A speculative discussion of brain-area specialism in language learning seems to relate to what psychologists call procedural or implicit memory - the ‘how to’ type of memory that enables us to perform learned tasks, skills and habits without conscious thought.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/procedural-memory

14 hours ago, TheVat said:

That said, the pinyin system does use diacritical marks to handle the tonalities, so doesn't seem impossible.

The trouble is that, in general, one pīnyīn syllable - including tone markers - will correspond to several, sometimes even a substantial number of, characters. For example, if you were to look up the pīnyīn syllable jì in a standard dictionary, you will find listed 39 characters that have this reading and tone, each with a different meaning.

Of course, when given within a whole sentence, the meaning is often clear from context, but not always; ambiguities would be too frequent to make this really viable.

15 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

The trouble is that, in general, one pīnyīn syllable - including tone markers - will correspond to several, sometimes even a substantial number of, characters. For example, if you were to look up the pīnyīn syllable jì in a standard dictionary, you will find listed 39 characters that have this reading and tone, each with a different meaning.

Of course, when given within a whole sentence, the meaning is often clear from context, but not always; ambiguities would be too frequent to make this really viable.

Interesting, thanks. I had not realized that pinyin was so insufficient. English ambiguities seem trifling by comparison, like unionized (easily resolved by context if you are talking about uncharged atoms or organized workers).

Q. What happened to the man who fell into an upholstering machine?

A. He is fully recovered.

7 hours ago, TheVat said:

Interesting, thanks. I had not realized that pinyin was so insufficient.

It was never intended to replace characters, it was just meant as a means to transcribe their phonetic value where and when this is needed (language learning, typing, foreign publications etc).

That being said, I’m sure it would be possible to come up with a system that could capture both phonetic value and distinctions in meaning, ie provides a 1-1 map between character and transcription. But such a system would likely be rather cryptic and require just as much effort to learn than the characters themselves, so I don’t see an advantage. On the contrary, it would make communication between peoples of different ethnicities and/or regional dialects more difficult; in China, that’s an important consideration too.

Funny that no one talks about the opposite - replacing the alphabets in European languages with a logographic writing system, supplemented by some kind of syllabary to capture morphological elements such as endings etc, like is done in Japanese.

6 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

Funny that no one talks about the opposite - replacing the alphabets in European languages with a logographic writing system, supplemented by some kind of syllabary to capture morphological elements such as endings etc, like is done in Japanese.

There does seem to be a form of linguistic entropy at work whereby proto-languages progressively lose their ideogrammatic and pictorial features over time, and decay into syllabary systems and alphabets.

The most obvious example that comes to mind is Hieroglyphic Egyptian. The earliest decipherable forms of this date back to the 28th century BCE (Second Dynasty). As the Greek name ἱερογλυφικός (“Sacred Carvings’ ) might suggest, it was written with a mixture of ideogram pictures, phonetic syllable elements, and determinatives, and is found in ancient Egyptian monumental carvings and stone inscriptions

Two more cursive forms of written hieroglyphic developed over time that were better suited to writing the Egyptian language on papyrus - as opposed to carving symbols into stone. The first became known as Hieratic (Greek: ‘Priestly’, ‘Sacerdotal’) which was followed by the development of the Demotic script from about 650 BCE which was an even more heavily stylised and simplified form of cursive writing. Ideogram symbols continued to be used only in some special religious texts such as The Book of The Dead.

Demotic was then displaced by a new form of Egyptian writing known as Coptic in which the older Egyptian glyphs were replaced almost entirely by the letters of the Greek alphabet. This process began with the reign of the Greek speaking Ptolemaic pharaohs in 305 BC. Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemaic ruler who died in 30 BC and spoke Koine Greek as her first language was said to have been the only Ptolemaic ruler who could speak and read ancient Egyptian. Thereafter Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire, and with the growing spread of Christianity in the 3rd century AD, Coptic became the official liturgical language of the Egyptian church (and still is) - and it  remains the language of the ancient pharaohs now spelled out in Greek letters.

The famous Rosetta Stone found in 1799 which enabled modern scholars to decipher ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs is a stele dating from 196 BC which contains three versions of the same decree by Ptolemy V Epiphanes written in Hieroglyphic and Demotic Egyptian, with a translation in ancient Greek at the bottom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

18 hours ago, toucana said:

There does seem to be a form of linguistic entropy at work whereby proto-languages progressively lose their ideogrammatic and pictorial features over time, and decay into syllabary systems and alphabets.

That’s interesting, I didn’t know that. I find it a bit surprising actually, since there are some definite advantages to divorcing writing from phonetics.

13 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

That’s interesting, I didn’t know that. I find it a bit surprising actually, since there are some definite advantages to divorcing writing from phonetics.

Another striking example of an ideogram-based writing system that decayed into a syllabary is the development of hiragana in Japanese from the middle of the Heian period (794-1185 AD). Japanese scholars had first begun borrowing Chinese characters intensively to study and translate Buddhist scriptures from the 5th century AD onwards, and adapted them in a number of quite ingenious ways:

https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=honorscollege_anthro

From the 9th century AD onwards, two different cursive syllabary systems had begun to develop out of simplified Chinese characters to cope with the awkwardness of writing certain Japanese grammatical particles. One of them called hiragana was referred to as onnade or ‘woman’s hand”, and the other known as katakana was called otoko moji or “mens script”.

It was hiragana that came to be favoured for aesthetic uses in poetry and story telling at court, and two of the most famous works of classical Japanese literature were written at this time by female authors who made extensive use of hiragana  - “The Pillow Book”  (枕草子, Makura no Sōshi) by Shei Shōnagon, and  “The Tale of Genji” (源氏物語 , Genji Monogatari) by Murasaki Shikibu.

This fragment of an early 12th century illustrated  handwritten scroll version of “The Tale of Genji” shows just how cursive and far removed from Chinese characters the hiragana script had become.

Would alphabetic languages be useful where there are many new or imported words, and the culture associated with that language has crossed many borders? Let's say a new species is found on a distant Vogon planet, and it is called a gruntbuggly. In English, one can instantly devise a spelling for the gruntbuggly (known for its beautiful micturitions) and incorporate it into common parlance, with people knowing how to speak it's name. Would the gruntbuggly tread a more challenging path being introduced into Mandarin as a novel logogram?

Edited June 2, 2025Jun 2 by TheVat

2 hours ago, TheVat said:

Would alphabetic languages be useful where there are many new or imported words, and the culture associated with that language has crossed many borders? Let's say a new species is found on a distant Vogon planet, and it is called a gruntbuggly. In English, one can instantly devise a spelling for the gruntbuggly (known for its beautiful micturitions) and incorporate it into common parlance, with people knowing how to speak it's name. Would the gruntbuggly tread a more challenging path being introduced into Mandarin as a novel logogram?

One traditional way of introducing alien concepts into Mandarin Chinese is called a calque, which comes from the French word calquer meaning ‘to trace’  - i.e. a loan translation that imitates the structure and/or literal meaning of the original.

One good example of this in Mandarin is the word   铅笔    qiān bǐ   - ‘pencil’

The individual Chinese characters literally mean “lead writing-brush” because it is a calque on the English expression “lead pencil” -  which is even funnier because pencils have never been made from lead !

https://www.pensunlimited.co.uk/blog/industry-news/pencils-a-little-tale/

Pencils have always been made with graphite cores (the word graphite comes from the Greek word  γραφειν  meaning ‘to write’.) The confusion seems to have arisen in part because the Romans used lead styli for writing, and some people once thought that graphite was a form of lead ore.

There are numerous other mirthful examples of calques in Mandarin  e.g.

火车   huǒ chē    - train (lit. ‘fire chariot’)

电脑   diàn nǎo   - computer (lit. ‘electric brain’)

外星人 wài xīng rén - space alien   (lit. ‘outside star person’)

彗星,  hùi xīng         - comet           (lit. ‘broomstick star)     

犀牛   xīn niú           - rhinoceros    (lit. ‘sharp ox’)

I’m not quite sure what a Mandarin speaker would make of a ‘gruntbuggly” though I suspect the characters chosen might include:

水  shuǐ           - the water radical (in honour of its beautiful micturitions)

咕噜声 gulu sheng    -  grunt or gurgle

虫子    chóngzǐ    - bug or insect