It has been reported that the Chinese themselves are forgetting how to write with a pen. The reason is that many people have switched to using the computer to write Mandarin. As computer writing of Mandarin goes through input of Western characters (hanyu pinyin), the person writing won’t have to build up each character from the ground up, stroke by stroke. It is the frequent repetition that keeps writing skills fresh and available.
While I was taking courses, my teachers did emphasise a lot on writing characters, and while I think it’s a great memory exercise, I do realize that once I stopped following courses, I have almost entirely stopped writing Chinese with a pen.
When I come to think about it, except for to-do lists and shopping lists, I don’t really write anything with a pen anymore. It’s just not convenient in this digital age, since most written communication is through e-mail, websites, blogs, SMS, etc. At times I even e-mail my wife.
Some would make the point that you can improve your reading though writing. Do I agree? I think it does make sense to get a feel of at least a basic set of a few hundred characters. You are forced to look at a character differently when you start with an empty sheet of paper. But to learn writing several thousands of characters is probably not the best time investment if you want to use Chinese to communicate. Just learn how the characters look, read lots of articles, and get your pronounciation and hanyu pinyin right and you’ll be able to do anything the Chinese can do too. Even tests have evolved.
The BCT test, for example, allows you to write with a digital pen, but you can also do the composition exercises using the normal hanyu pinyin computer input method. I think this is realistic, as the test looks at people’s skill level of Chinese for business use, and writing with a pen is simply not a part of that.
I do find writing characters fascinating and would hate to lose the skill level that I have at the time, but I guess learning them would be more of a hobby pursuit than an important component of learning the Chinese language.
Learning to write the characters is the most fun bit! Of course, your article is correct, because I hardly ever even write English any more, but I could hardly consider myself “fluent” in English if I couldn’t write! And as it is my goal (one day …) to be fluent in Mandarin, I have to accept that writing is an important part of the learning process
Hi David,
Totally agree it’s the most fun bit once you get the hang of it. In fact, my ability had slipped a bit and while it didn’t directly affect my speaking or even reading, I somehow felt ‘disconnected’ with the language when I realized I had forgotten how to write even relatively basic phrases like ‘自己’，‘已经’ etc.