为什么小学生学写字这么难？为什么你会“提笔忘字”？为什么这种现象“没治”，而且注定越来越严重？

家里小学生似乎挺擅长语言。8岁时词汇量过万，读英文书比我还快，零教培通过了剑桥五级的FCE（≈雅思6分，英语六级。没考过KET和PET）。

但是，小学生在默写生字时可真费劲啊。写错字的情况可不少，读书时读错字也正常。

如何解释这种现象？要不是为人父母真了解自己的孩子，而且有其他证据支持，岂不会觉得自己孩子不行？然后“五行缺教培”？🤣

如果脱离科学，脱离语言学原理，脱离知识，停留在主观经验主义中……那么，大厦崩塌时，别怪自己“生活在经验里”。尤其是在agi时代，还生活在前科学时代的经验里。

只有认识表象背后的科学真相，才能解释世界、解决问题。这篇文章，我阅读过好几遍，忍不住想分享给你，于是精心制作了双语对照版。

读完后，你对自己民族的文字和语言，理解会更深一点，也能真正理解：为什么小学生学写字这么难？为什么你会“提笔忘字”？为什么这种现象“没治”，而且注定越来越严重？（所以，小学生写汉字的事情，不值得大惊小怪，更不值得生气啦～）

祝阅读愉快～

中国的提笔忘字现象

英文标题：Character Amnesia in China

作者：David Moser

日期：2024年10月22日

David Moser（戴维·莫泽）拥有美国密歇根大学的硕士和博士学位，在北京居住已有30年，曾在多所院校和留学项目教授语言学课程。2017至2019年期间，他担任北京大学燕京学堂副院长。

Moser 著有《十亿个声音：中国寻求共同语言的历程》（2016年企鹅出版社出版）。目前，他是北京首都师范大学外国语学院的副教授。

During a visit to Beijing many years ago, I was having lunch with three PhD students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all of whom were native speakers of Chinese. I happened to have a cold that day and was trying to write a brief note to a friend to cancel an appointment that afternoon. I found that I could not recall how to write the Chinese characters for the word ‘sneeze’. I asked my three friends to write the characters for me and, to my surprise, all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the characters. I thought to myself: Peking University is usually considered the ‘Harvard of China’. Can one imagine three PhD students in the English Literature Department at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word ‘sneeze’? Yet, this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. This was my first encounter with an increasingly widespread phenomenon in China known as ‘character amnesia’. Chinese people, even the well-educated, are forgetting how to write common characters. What is the explanation for this peculiar problem?

在很多年前的一次北京之行中，我和北大中文系的三位博士生一起吃午饭，他们都是以中文为母语的中国人。那天我正感冒，想写张便条给朋友，取消下午的一个约会。我突然发现自己记不得“喷嚏”这个词的汉字怎么写了。我请那三位朋友帮忙写出这个词的汉字，令我惊讶的是，他们只是尴尬地耸耸肩——竟没有一人能正确写出这些字。我心想，北京大学一向被誉为“中国的哈佛”。试问哈佛大学英语系的三个博士生，会忘记如何拼写 sneeze 这个英文单词吗？然而，这种情况在中国绝非罕见。这是我第一次见识到中国一种日益普遍的现象——人们称之为“提笔忘字”（_character amnesia_）。即便受过良好教育的中国人也在逐渐忘记一些常用汉字的写法。这种奇怪的问题究竟该如何解释呢？

Chinese Characters and the Problem of Literacy

汉字与识字问题

Chinese characters constitute one of the world’s oldest writing systems and these iconic symbols are so intertwined with Chinese history, philosophy, and the arts that they are virtually a semiotic representation of the culture itself. The staggering number of Chinese characters makes the system unique among the scripts of the world. The exact number of characters appearing in the historical record is debated, but is certainly in the tens of thousands. The latest version of the official Xinhua Dictionary contains more than 13,000 characters, but only 4,000–4,500 are necessary for full literacy. The process of mastering the system has thus been a daunting task for Chinese children throughout the centuries and up to the present. During the dynastic era, only the offspring of the wealthy elite had the time and wherewithal to spend their childhoods practising characters with a calligraphy brush, and therefore the literacy rate at the turn of the twentieth century was roughly 10–15 per cent—a number that was virtually unchanged when Mao Zedong took power in 1949 (Ross et al. 2006).

汉字是世界上最古老的文字体系之一。这些具有象征意义的符号与中国的历史、哲学和艺术紧密交织，可以说几乎成了文化本身的符号化体现。汉字数量之庞大在世界文字中独树一帜。历史上出现过的汉字究竟有多少，众说纷纭，但肯定达到了数以万计。最新版的官方《新华字典》收录了超过13,000个汉字，不过一般认为完全识字只需掌握4,000–4,500个常用字。几个世纪以来直到当下，学会这套文字体系对中国儿童而言一直是艰巨的任务。在封建王朝时期，只有富裕精英的子弟才有时间和条件用毛笔反复练习汉字。因此，二十世纪初中国的识字率大约只有10–15%，到1949年毛泽东执政时，这一数字几乎没有变化（Ross 等 2006）。

After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, the May Fourth intellectuals under the new Republic of China turned their attention to language reform, with the focus on the problem of Chinese characters and literacy. After China’s century of foreign aggression and exploitation, the Chinese reformers recognised the need to cultivate an educated populace and the formidable task of memorising thousands of characters was seen as a stumbling block to that goal. Many prominent public intellectuals such as Lu Xun, Hu Shi, and, later, even Mao Zedong advocated eliminating the characters altogether, while transitioning to an alphabetic system (Moser 2016). The developed Western countries were in the middle of an information revolution and the Chinese intelligentsia was keenly aware that the myriad Chinese characters were ill-suited to the alphabet-based world of typewriters, telegrams, and teletype. For decades, Chinese linguists and inventors struggled mightily to develop phonetisation methods, character classification schemes, and character input systems to bring the ancient Chinese characters into the twentieth-century information environment (Tsu 2022).

1912年清朝覆灭后，新成立的中华民国时期，“五四”时期的知识分子把目光投向了语言文字改革，重点关注汉字与全民识字的问题。经历了一个世纪的外来侵略和剥削之后，中国的改革者认识到培养有文化的民众十分必要，而让人人都去死记硬背成千上万个汉字显然是实现这一目标的绊脚石。许多著名的公共知识分子（如鲁迅、胡适，后来甚至包括毛泽东）都提倡干脆废除汉字，改用字母文字体系 (Moser 2016)。当时西方发达国家正处于信息革命的浪潮中，中国知识界敏锐地意识到，成千上万的汉字并不适应以字母为基础的打字机、电报和电传机时代。几十年来，中国的语言学家和发明家们竭尽全力研究拼音化的方法、汉字分类方案和字符输入系统，试图将古老的汉字带入二十世纪的信息环境 (Tsu 2022)。

When Mao took power in 1949, for pragmatic reasons, he chose not to abolish the characters, but instead initiated a policy of character simplification, streamlining, and reducing the number of strokes for hundreds of the most common characters. A comparison of texts with traditional versus simplified characters provides an intuitive understanding of the timesaving advantage:

1949年毛泽东执政后，出于务实的考虑，他没有废除汉字，而是推行了汉字简化政策，通过精简笔画来减少数百个常用字的笔画数量。用繁体字和简体字书写的文本对比，可以直观理解这种精简在时间上的优势：

繁体： 他們幾個畢業生都在廣州藝術學院學習書法和國畫。
简体： 他们几个毕业生都在广州艺术学院学习书法和国画。
拼音： Tāmen jǐge bìyèshēng dōu zài Guǎngzhōu yìshù xuéyuàn xuéxí shūfǎ hé guóhuà.
翻译： Those several graduate students all studied calligraphy and Chinese painting at the Guangzhou Art Academy.

While this streamlining yielded a reduction of 12.5 per cent in the average number of strokes for the 2,000 most common characters (DeFrancis 1984), the simplified set of symbols still required years of practice to master, and their efficacy in raising the literacy rate is uncertain. Many analysts note that Taiwan and Hong Kong have continued to use the complex traditional characters to this day yet enjoy literacy rates roughly equal to that of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

尽管这次简化使最常用的2000个汉字平均笔画数减少了12.5%（DeFrancis 1984），但要真正掌握这些简化字仍然需要多年的练习，而且简化字对提高识字率的效果也不确定。很多分析人士指出，台湾和香港至今依然使用繁复的繁体字，但它们的识字率却和中华人民共和国相差无几。

Another important step in the post-1949 education system was to develop an alphabetic system for teaching the sounds of Mandarin to the large number of citizens who spoke other Sinitic languages. Under the leadership of linguist Zhou Youguang, the PRC language committees developed a romanisation method called Pinyin (literally, ‘spell the sounds’) for use in the education system and PRC foreign-language publications. Pinyin is now a world standard and the default Chinese character input method for the internet and most digital devices.

1949年之后，中国教育系统的另一重要举措是为众多讲其他方言的公民开发一套教授普通话语音的字母体系。在语言学家周有光的带领下，新中国的语言文字工作委员会制定了一种罗马字母拼写法——拼音（字面意思是“拼读声音”）用于推广普通话和编写外语读物。如今，拼音已成为通行全球的标准，也是互联网和大多数数字设备上默认的汉字输入法。

After decades of improvements in the education system, the literacy rate in China now stands at an impressive 97 per cent (Statista 2024), though experts note that the official Chinese standard for literacy is a rather low bar. The 1988 State Council document ‘Regulations on the Eradication of Illiteracy’ stipulates a two-tier standard for basic literacy: the ability to read 1,500 characters for the rural population, and 2,000 characters for urban dwellers. This standard, which is below the Ministry of Education requirement of 2,500 characters for sixth-grade students, remains unchanged to the present day (Wikipedia 2024b).

经过数十年的教育改进，中国的识字率如今已达到惊人的97%（Statista 2024）。不过专家指出，中国官方对“识字”的标准定得很低。1988年国务院发布的《扫除文盲工作条例》对基本识字水平划定了双重标准：农村人口能认读1500个汉字，城市人口认读2000个汉字，即算基本脱盲。这个标准低于教育部对小学六年级毕业生要求掌握2500字的要求，而且这一标准至今未作调整（Wikipedia 2024b）。

Chinese Characters in Cyberspace

网络空间中的汉字

By the turn of the twenty-first century, the birth of the internet and the new digitised information environment brought both challenges and breakthroughs with the processing of Chinese characters. Thanks to the exponential growth of computer memory, Chinese word processing had become routine and user-friendly. The standard QWERTY keyboard could now accommodate not only Pinyin entry, but also a host of other entry systems, allowing Chinese characters to take their place comfortably alongside the alphabet in cyberspace (Mullaney 2024). Leapfrogging over several stages of information technology, Chinese citizens almost overnight began to incorporate smartphones, laptops, and e-pads into their daily lives, taking full advantage of Pinyin alphabetic character input, e-handwriting pads, and speech-to-text technology. Today Chinese people are enthusiastically following the inexorable global trend, increasingly moving away from pen and paper and transitioning to fully digital language processing.

到了21世纪开端，互联网的兴起和数字化的信息环境在汉字处理方面既带来了挑战，也带来了突破。随着计算机存储能力的指数级增长，中文文字处理变得日常且易于使用。标准的 QWERTY 键盘如今不仅可以用于拼音输入，还支持多种其他输入方案，使汉字能够与字母文字一道在网络空间中自如运用 (Mullaney 2024)。中国跳过了信息技术发展的若干阶段，国人几乎在一夜之间就将智能手机、笔记本电脑和平板电脑融入了日常生活，充分利用拼音输入、电子手写板和语音转文字技术。如今，中国人正热情地追随全球不可阻挡的趋势，日益远离纸和笔，全面转向数字化的语言处理。

However, for China (and, to a lesser extent, Japan), these technological breakthroughs result in a special problem: Chinese people are increasingly forgetting how to write characters by hand. Of course, such lapses are not a new phenomenon. Due to the sheer number of symbols to be memorised and the limits of human memory, Chinese people have always to some extent suffered from what is called tíbǐwàngzì (提笔忘字; literally, ‘lift the pen, forget the character’)—a term that is usually translated as ‘character amnesia’ (Mair 2010). However, this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character. Highly literate people are forgetting how to write the characters in words like ‘kitchen’ (厨房), ‘lips’ (嘴唇), ‘cough’ (咳嗽), and ‘broom’ (扫帚). Victor Mair (2014) provides a striking example of the severity of the character amnesia problem. The following image is of a shopping list hastily written by a social science researcher from the PRC. The writer of the list struggled to remember the characters in ‘egg’ (鸡蛋), ‘shrimp’ (虾仁), and ‘chives’ (韭菜), and simply resorted to Pinyin.

然而，对于中国（以及程度稍轻的日本）来说，这些技术突破带来了一个特殊的问题：人们越来越想不起来怎样用笔写字。其实，由于汉字数量极其庞大、人类记忆力又终有极限，“提笔忘字”的现象古已有之（Mair 2010）。不过，数字时代引发的这种新型遗忘，不再只是偶尔记不起某个生僻字的几个笔画而已；如今，就连识字水平很高的人有时也会忘记诸如“厨房”、“嘴唇”、“咳嗽”、“扫帚”等常用词里的字怎么写。Victor Mair（2014）提供了一个典型例证：一位中国社会科学研究者在匆忙写下购物清单时，发现自己在“鸡蛋”、“虾仁”、“韭菜”等词上都卡了壳，最后不得不用拼音来代替。

How common is this problem? There have been very few empirical studies assessing the extent of the phenomenon. Informal surveys carried out by China Daily and other publications report that roughly 80 per cent of respondents experience character amnesia in their daily life (Wikipedia 2024a). Some research projects have been initiated to examine the factors that contribute to the problem (Wang et al. 2020; Langsford et al. 2024), but the data are hard to assess in terms of differences in occupation and level of education.

这个问题到底有多普遍？有关这一现象的实证研究寥寥无几。据《中国日报》等媒体的非正式调查，大约80%的受访者表示在日常生活中遇到过提笔忘字的情况（Wikipedia 2024a）。一些研究项目已经启动，试图探讨导致这一问题的各种因素（Wang 等 2020；Langsford 等 2024），但由于受访者职业、教育程度等差异，这些数据尚难以细分分析。

Can the Education System Solve the Problem?

教育系统能解决这个问题吗？

Several years ago, I conducted informal class discussions with my Beijing Capital Normal University undergraduate students about the frequency of the character amnesia problem. Given a choice between ‘seldom’, ‘occasionally’, or ‘often’, most students chose ‘often’. Yet, despite the perceived frequency of character amnesia, the students seemed to accept the problem as a mild annoyance. ‘When I can’t remember a character, I just look it up on my mobile phone’, they would report with a shrug.

几年前，我曾在首都师范大学跟本科生进行过几次课堂讨论，话题是他们出现提笔忘字的频率。当我给出“很少”、“偶尔”和“经常”三个选项时，大多数学生都选择了“经常”。尽管大家觉得提笔忘字的情况很常见，但这些学生似乎只把它当成一种小烦恼。“每当我想不起一个字怎么写的时候，就用手机查一下。”他们耸耸肩，如此说道。

Chinese college students may not be concerned about character amnesia, but among educators and cultural preservationists, there has been a considerable gnashing of teeth over the issue. It is difficult to fully convey the profound reverence that Chinese characters hold for Chinese people. Traditionally, the importance of the Chinese characters extended far beyond the mere dissemination of texts. One’s calligraphic style was believed to reflect the writer’s moral character and understanding of nature and the human realm. The enduring cultural and ethical values embodied in Chinese characters were thought to be passed on to future generations through the very act of writing itself. Even today, many regard the practice of writing characters as an affirmation of patriotism and cultural identity, making it an essential component of the Chinese education system.

中国的大学生也许不以为意，但教育界和文化遗产的守护者们对此却颇为焦虑，甚至大伤脑筋。要想充分传达汉字在中国人心目中的深厚敬意是很困难的。传统上，汉字的重要性远不止于传递文本内容。一笔一画的书写被认为反映着书写者的品行修养，以及他对自然与人世的领悟。人们相信，汉字所承载的悠久文化和伦理价值，通过写字这一行为得以传承后世。即便在今天，许多人仍将书写汉字视为爱国与文化认同的象征，认为它是中国教育体系中不可或缺的一环。

In 2011, the Ministry of Education promulgated measures intended to address the perceived crisis. On its website, the ministry set forth requirements for elementary school students to undergo one hour of calligraphy class every week, and high schools were to add calligraphy to the curriculum as an optional course (China Daily 2011). The high school teachers to whom I have talked complained that such measures seemed to be a misdiagnosis of the problem (the skill of writing characters with brush and ink is largely unrelated to the character amnesia problem), and such additions to the curriculum were only met by students with boredom and frustration.

2011年，教育部出台了若干措施来应对这一被认为“严峻”的局面。教育部在官网上要求，小学每周必须开设一小时的书法课，高中则将书法列为选修课程 (China Daily 2011)。我采访过的一些高中教师抱怨说，这些措施其实是对症下药不对病——用毛笔写字的技能与提笔忘字问题几乎毫无关联。而把书法课加进课程表，只会让学生感到无聊和沮丧。

To promote among young people the notion that writing Chinese characters can be fun, the Chinese Government enlisted the medium of television. In 2013, China Central Television (CCTV) and Henan TV premiered two game shows, Chinese Character Heroes (汉字英雄) and Chinese Characters Dictation Competition (中国汉字听写大会). These programs were structured according to the standard reality show format, featuring interviews with the young contestants about their daily life, hobbies, and their passion for writing characters. At the beginning of each round of competition, the host would present the contestants with the target word or idiom and, as the clock ticked, there would be close-ups of the children, pen in hands, wracking their brains to recall the assigned characters. After each round, the camera followed the contestants backstage, where the winning students were met with hugs and kisses from their family and friends, while the tearful losing contestants were comforted by their supportive parents.

为了让年轻一代觉得写汉字也可以很好玩，中国政府甚至动用了电视这个媒介。2013年，中央电视台和河南卫视推出了两档益智真人秀节目——《汉字英雄》和《中国汉字听写大会》。这些节目采用了典型的真人秀模式，有对少年选手们日常生活、兴趣爱好以及他们对汉字热爱的访谈。在每轮比赛开始时，主持人会给出要书写的词汇或成语。计时开始后，镜头特写这些孩子手握钢笔、绞尽脑汁回忆字形的样子。每轮结束后，镜头跟随选手们来到幕后：获胜的孩子拥抱着前来助阵的家人欢欣雀跃，而泪洒当场的失利者则在父母的安慰下平复心情。

These programs made for great reality TV, but rather than spurring zeal for writing characters, they only served to increase public awareness of how serious the problem had become. Some of the contestants on Chinese Characters Dictation Competition were stumped by characters in words like ‘elbow’ (胳膊肘), ‘toad’ (癞蛤蟆), ‘hip’ (髋部), and, of course, ‘sneeze’ (打喷嚏).

这些节目作为综艺秀的确非常精彩，但与其说它们激发了大家书写汉字的热情，不如说只是让公众更加清晰地认识到问题的严重程度。例如，在《中国汉字听写大会》中，一些选手被“胳膊肘”、“癞蛤蟆”、“髋部”，当然还有“打喷嚏”等词难住了。

The Root of the Problem

问题的根源

Given that users of alphabetic languages are also writing mostly on a computer or smartphone, the question arises: why is this character amnesia syndrome so prevalent in Chinese (and, to a lesser extent, Japanese), while users of alphabetic scripts manage to retain both typing and handwriting ability?

既然使用拼音文字的人也大多主要通过电脑或手机来写字，那么问题就来了：为什么提笔忘字这种“失忆症”在中文（以及程度略轻一些的日文）中如此普遍，而使用字母文字的人却依然保有键盘输入和手写这两方面的能力？

The answer is complicated, but it has to do with the feeble ‘phoneticity’ of Chinese characters, as opposed to other scripts that were specially devised to convey the sounds of a language. In writing systems whose symbols represent phonetic information, there is a ‘virtuous circle’ in which the four functions of language—speaking, listening, writing, and reading—are mutually reinforcing.

⁠⁠答案错综复杂，但关键在于汉字微弱的“表音性”——这点不同于那些专门为了传达语音而设计的文字体系。在符号代表语音的书写系统中，语言的四种功能（说、听、写、读）之间形成了一个相互强化的“良性循环”。

The orthography may be inconsistently phonetic, as is the case with English spelling, or highly consistent, such as the Korean Hangul system. No writing system is perfectly phonetic. But phonetic systems enable the native speaker, with just a few dozen symbols, to reliably write whatever they can speak, and read out loud anything they can read.

文字的正字法或许并非完全表音（英语拼写就很不规则），也可能高度规则（韩语的谚文就非常一致）。没有任何书写系统能做到完美的音形对应。但拼音文字让母语者凭借区区几十个符号就能把自己能说出的任何内容写出来，并且看到文字就能准确读出声音。⁠⁠

For many complex historical reasons, the function of Chinese characters is based on a very different paradigm. Originally all Chinese characters were ‘logograms’ that represented semantics but did not provide any clue as to the sounds of the linguistic units. These graphs are analogous to the adjunct symbols we use alongside the alphabet, such as $, %, &, @, etcetera—symbols that must be memorised. Later in history, as the number of Chinese characters proliferated, phonetic components were added to the characters as a hint to the pronunciation of the syllable. Unfortunately, in modern times, the phonetic components have become so unreliable, inconsistent, ambiguous, and variable that they fall hopelessly short of constituting a useful phonetic system. In this sense, the Chinese writing system breaks the self-reinforcing ‘virtuous circle’ that alphabets provide.

而由于一系列复杂的历史原因，汉字的运作遵循完全不同的模式。最初，所有汉字都是表意的“⁠⁠词素文字”（logogram），只表达意义，并不给出任何读音线索⁠⁠。这些文字类似于我们在字母书写中使用的附加符号（如 $、%、&、@ 等）——需要逐一记忆。后来，随着汉字数量剧增，人们给汉字加上了声旁，以提示该字的读音。然而遗憾的是，在现代汉字中，这些声旁提示已经变得极不可靠、不一致、含糊且多变，远远称不上是一套有效的拼音系统。从这个意义上说，⁠⁠汉字书写体系中断了字母文字自我强化的“良性循环⁠⁠”。

In Chinese, the sound of a character contains no clue as to the corresponding written form, and the written form yields little or no information about the sound. This means that the association of sound, semantics, and symbol must be accomplished by years of rote learning.

⁠⁠在中文里，一个字的读音丝毫无法让人联想到相应的字形，而看到一个字形也几乎无法推断出它的读音⁠⁠。因此，只有经过多年重复的死记硬背，才能将字的音、义、形对应起来。

As Victor Mair (2010) describes it:

Because of their complexity and multiplicity, writing Chinese characters correctly is a highly neuromuscular task. One simply has to practice them hundreds and hundreds of times to master them. And, as with playing a musical instrument like a violin or a piano, one must practice writing them regularly or one’s control over them will simply evaporate.

正如 Victor Mair（2010）所描述的：

“由于汉字笔画复杂而数量庞大，要正确书写汉字是一个高度需要肌肉记忆配合的任务。一个人必须将每个字练习上数百遍才能熟练掌握。而且就像拉小提琴或弹钢琴一样，如果不经常练习，写字的能力就会迅速消退。”

For users of an alphabetic language, the process of typing reinforces the orthography—that is, the rules for matching the symbols with the sounds. For Chinese speakers, inputting characters by typing only reinforces the Pinyin spellings, not the shapes of the characters themselves.

⁠⁠对于使用拼音字母的人来说，打字的过程本身会强化拼写规则——即符号与读音之间的对应关系。然而对中国人而言，用键盘输入汉字只会强化对字母拼音的记忆，却无助于巩固对汉字字形的掌握。⁠⁠

Accepting the New Normal?

接受新常态？

It must be noted that character amnesia does not entail illiteracy. The skill that is eroding in the digital era is the physical writing of the characters, not the recognition of them. Chinese speakers can still easily recognise the characters, as attested by the fact that character amnesia has had no effect on the literacy rate. To take an analogous example, most people can easily recognise the musical symbol for treble clef (𝄞), but very few could draw it by memory. The same is true of Chinese characters; recognition is not dependent on the physical ability to write the symbol. There is a bit of irony in all this: the digital technology is both a cause of and a solution to the problem. Is the solution worth it? In the next century, will Chinese people no longer be able to write in Chinese?

需要说明的是，提笔忘字并不意味着文盲。在数字时代逐渐退化的是手写汉字的技能，而非认字能力。中国人依然可以轻松认出汉字，这从提笔忘字并未对识字率造成任何影响就可见一斑。⁠⁠打个比方，大多数人都能认出乐谱上的高音谱号𝄞，但很少有人能凭记忆把它准确画出来。汉字⁠⁠也是同理——识别一个字并不依赖于能否将其默写出来。有点讽刺的是：数字技术既是问题的成因，也是问题的解药。那么这样的解决之道值得吗？再过百年，中国人会不会已经不会拿笔写字了？

Some will say that the erosion of handwriting is just another inevitable loss of cultural tradition in the wake of technological progress. Those who use calculators on their phones do not mourn the extinction of the abacas. Others will justifiably lament the disappearance of a time-honoured ritual that links the Chinese mind and soul to the very origins of Chinese culture itself. That culture has a saying: Yǒu dé yǒu shī 有得有失; ‘You gain something, you lose something’).

有人会认为，书写能力的衰退只是科技进步大潮中不可避免的又一种传统流失。毕竟，用计算器的人并不会为了算盘的淘汰而感伤。也有人会对这一古老仪式的消逝感到惋惜——手写汉字曾将中国人的心灵与文化之源紧密相连。中国文化里有句话：“有得有失”。我们在获得什么的同时，也失去了些什么。

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