A poll commissioned by the China Youth Daily in April 2010 found that 83 percent of the 2,072 respondents admitted having problems writing characters, forgetting how to write traditional Chinese characters – literally, “take pen, forget character” or character amnesia.
Chinese boffins say that character amnesia happens because most Chinese people use electronic input systems based on Pinyin, which translates Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet.
The user enters each word using Pinyin, and the device offers a menu of characters. So users must recognise the character, however they don’t need to write it any more.