> 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.
> 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.