The Chinese character for “forget”

The Los Angeles Times had a recent story about how some are worried that the increasingly frequent use of electronic devices in place of pen and paper is causing Chinese people to gradually forget how to write their native tongue. This is something I can definitely relate to. When I moved to the United States at age 10, I was in the fifth grade and had a decent grasp on Chinese writing. However, due to the lack of practice, it only took a few years for me to forget how to write a significant chunk of the characters I knew.

This doesn’t mean that I can’t read Chinese anymore. I can, in fact, read and comprehend probably about 65 percent of the Chinese text I come across on news sites. However, recognizing Chinese characters on sight is quite different from being able to write them out from memory. Last year, while we were visiting family in China, I was talking to one of my cousins and setting up a time to go visit his home. He handed me a piece of paper and a pen and told me his address, and somewhat embarrassingly, I could only write out two of the characters in the address (thankfully, my cousin wrote the whole address out for me).

As someone who has struggled to remember how to write his native tongue, I’m quite thankful for computerized Chinese character-input programs (such as this one) that allow me to punch out a comprehensible (if somewhat simple) e-mail to my relatives just by typing in the way the character is pronounced and then picking out that character from a list of homophones. This process does take a while, but it sure beats not knowing how to write a letter or not being able to trade IMs in Chinese with my relatives. On the other hand, it’d be a real shame if more and more people end up forgetting how to write Chinese characters because they are too used to picking them out from a list on a gadget. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.