Health

Young peope forget how to write in China and Japan
by Magdalena Rosova

A new phenomenon named “character amnesia” is widespread across China. Young people using modern technology such as cell phones and laptops forget how to write with an ordinary pen. They do remember the shape, but can not remember the strokes to write it down. Chinese are afraid that their ancient writing system will extinct in the future. Young people in Japan are having the same problem as in China. The constant use of computers and cell phones with alphabet-based input systems has made them to forget how to write. Chinese has already found a word for this new phenomenon - “tibiwangzi”, which means “take pen, forget character”. The Chin! a Youth Daily carried out a poll in April which showed that 83 percent out of the 2,072 respondents had problems with writing characters. As a result, people are becoming almost dependent on the and computers. The reason why character amnesia is so spread in China is that the most young people use electronic input systems based on pinyin, that translates Chinese characters into the western Roman alphabet. That means that the users enter each word by pinyin and then the device offers them a menu of characters that match. They only have to recognize and choose the character, they do not need to write it down. In Japan, there are three different writing systems combined into one. Mobiles and computers use only the two simpler systems hiragana and katakana. That means users do not use the kanji, a third strand of Japanese writing similar to Chinese.

related story (sgx18083): http://uk.asiancorrespondent.com/asia! society/ character-amnes...

by Magdalena Rosova for Cantell TV (http://cantell.tv)

Cantell TV is the fastest growing provider of digital broadcasting coupled with telecommunications, allowing people to easily control, view, upload and share digital content through proprietary interface coupled with free phone calls. Cantell TV is committed to delivering infinite choices to your world of entertainment at the tip of your fingers.

posted by Blog TechSource @ 12:45 PM