The death of handwriting?

I've blogged about handwriting in the computer age before, but this story on Breitbart.com just reinforced it: handwriting is going the way of the dodo.

I never really thought about it before. Yes, we westerners, with our relatively easy alphabet, have been getting away from actual handwriting over the last few years. But the alphabet's so easy that there's no way we would actually forget the characters.

What about more complex written languages, like Chinese?

As you know, Chinese writing (and many other Asian languages) uses a lot of different figures and shapes to represent words, and writing each of those shapes can be a laborious process. I'm not a language scholar or expert, and I don't know any other languages like this, so I can only go by what I've seen, but it looks labor-intensive (any of my Chinese readers care to comment?).

So I guess in this age of computers, texting, typing, and the like, it's no surprise that people are not only writing less, but actually forgetting how to do some of the characters!

"Like every Chinese child, Li Hanwei spent her schooldays memorising thousands of the intricate characters that make up the Chinese writing system.

Yet aged just 21 and now a university student in Hong Kong, Li already finds that when she picks up a pen to write, the characters for words as simple as "embarrassed" have slipped from her mind.

"I can remember the shape, but I can't remember the strokes that you need to write it," she says. "It's a bit of a problem.""

Now, my penmanship has always been horrible, but at least I know *how* to do it! I can't imagine what it would be like trying to write a language that is that intricate, and one that I don't use that often because I'm on a computer all the time.

They call it "character amnesia," and it's basically the forgetting of how to form language characters in your writing. Now that so many Chinese and Japanese young people are using devices and programs to translate their characters into a Roman alphabet, they are learning to recognize characters but not necessarily how to draw them for themselves.

"Character amnesia matters because memorisation is so crucial to character-based written languages, says Siok Wai Ting, assistant professor of linguistics at Hong Kong University. Forgetting how to write could eventually affect reading ability.

"There is no way we can learn the writing systematically because the writing itself is not systematic -- we have to memorise, we have to rote learn," she says.

"Through writing, we memorise the characters. Reading and writing are more closely connected in Chinese.""

We think it's bad in the West? We think that grammar and spelling has become atrocious because too many people these days speak in text-speak? (Have you ever said "LOL" rather than actually laughed?). We have nothing on these character-based languages, languages that might disappear as more and more young people use electronic devices that end up using a Roman alphabet to communicate.

But do many people see it as a problem?

"A survey by the southern Chinese news portal Dayang Net, found that 80 percent of respondents had forgotten how to write some characters -- but 43 percent said they used handwritten characters only for signatures and forms.

"The idea that China is a country full of people who write beautiful, fluid literature in characters without a second thought is a romantic fantasy," wrote the blogger and translator C. Custer on his Chinageeks blog.

"Given the social and financial pressures that exist for most people in China... (and) given that nearly everyone has a cellphone, it really isn't a problem at all.""

So what do you think? Again, if I have any Chinese readers (and I know of at least one), I'd love your input on this. But everybody else too. Is handwriting dying? And are Asian character-based languages the canary in the coal mine for it?