Post-6

Chinese people tend to forget characters throughout their lives because of technological progress: mobile phones, laptops, Ipads, etc. According to the video, not only can’t older people write down some characters, but also lots of teenagers find it difficult to remember such widely used characters as, for example, a tooth paste, obscene, etc. In my opinion, it’s becoming a national problem in China.

Nowadays, there are lots of surveys in China that draw people’s attention to characters and their remembrance. To begin with, such surveys have several goals to achieve: to show the Chinese people how the world has influenced their culture and language and what can be solved or done to prevent such problems to occur in the nearest future. For example, the number of people using laptops and gadgets has increased for the recent fifteen years and that is why the need in handwriting slightly decreases over the years. People would rather text each other in their gadgets than write something down. Moreover, lots of papers and home assignments nowadays are ‘written’ digitally and it occurs not only in China, but also around the world. However, China suffers from ‘digital effects’ most of all because Chinese characters are a totally different phenomenon from the Roman script where characters need to be repeated occasionally. Thus, some people claim it’s a normal situation, they say China must move with the times.

However, there is another point of view which I totally agree with. Mobile devices lead to the increase of illiteracy. For example, handwriting itself stimulates our brain to effectively memorize words whereas typing, in reverse, helps those people who are illiterate to correct their grammatical mistakes (the T9 system). What should then China do having one of the longest language history in the world? If we take children, we can see that they are becoming lazier because they’d rather type than write down characters. What’s the point in learning and writing a certain number of characters (2000-3000) at school which allow pupils to fully communicate with each other if they are going to be not so necessary because of using gadgets sooner or later? In addition, children are taught to write characters at schools, but as a teenager’s life goes further, it doesn’t require as much knowledge in writing characters as being able to simply recognize them and know how they are pronounced(pinyin).

In conclusion, I believe that children at least should be limited in the time they spent on using their devices until there comes the right time for the technological progress to gradually solve this problem.