In one episode of China's latest hit TV show, a handwriting version of America's Scripps National Spelling Bee, only one-third of the studio audience correctly wrote the Chinese characters for "gan ga," meaning embarrassed, the Beijing Review magazine reported.
Almost 99% admitted to forgetting how to write words in a survey reported by the China Youth Daily newspaper in August. For many Chinese, proud of their ancient and complex writing system, such amnesia spells crisis.
The culprit appears clear in a country increasingly hooked on digital devices. Instead of writing out by hand the many strokes they learned through endless repetition at school, most Chinese these days write characters on cellphones and computers by typing in pinyin, the system that uses Roman letters to write Mandarin based on pronunciation.
Click the link to see more: China's spelling bees aim to punctuate written word
