Where the PC Is Mightier Than the Pen

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

Published: February 1, 2001

YANGSHUO, China—
WHEN Li You picks up a pen, he finds that with increasing frequency he can't remember how to write the Chinese characters he learned to write as a child. The delicate strokes scramble themselves in the hazy recesses of his memory, eluding his brain's insistent summons to order.

''There are some characters that I can't write with a pen, but if you give me a computer I can type it out,'' said Mr. Li, a 23-year-old computer teacher who lives in rural Yangshuo in Guangxi province, in southern China.

It has been more than six years since Mr. Li started using a computer for Chinese word processing. It has been just under six years since the characters started slipping away. He estimates that more than 95 percent of his writing is now done by computer.

''I can go for a month without picking up a pen,'' Mr. Li said.

Among Chinese speakers, anecdotal evidence suggests that the use of computers for word processing is mounting a slow but steady assault on their ability to write characters by hand. Many Chinese say that could undermine the written language.

''It's a cultural loss,'' said Ye Zi, a coworker of Mr. Li's. ''A long time ago, we all wrote much better.''

But Mr. Li waved off the idea of sentimentality. ''I have no regrets,'' he said. ''This is the natural trend of societal progress. You use your hands less, but you use your brains more.''

The problem faced by Mr. Li and others as old skills yield to advancing technology is nothing new in China or elsewhere. Educators, for example, engage in fierce debates about whether the calculator has decreased or increased students' mathematical skills.

For many people, language and literacy are intimately linked to what it means to be human. For the Chinese, writing has additional cultural weight. Throughout the country's history, written language has played a critical role in China as a symbol of both unification and division. It was used to bridge the hundreds of variations in spoken Chinese, but it has also been a symbol of political division, as evidenced by the different writing systems used by Taiwan and China, one traditional and one simplified. And handwriting is often used to evaluate character.

The slow erosion of writing skills is the frequent subject of conversations, jokes and self-consciousness in China and Taiwan. The characters are not forgotten completely, but the writer often simply needs prompting from a dictionary or a friend. Or the writer's memory is jogged by trial and error. But Chinese writers say that in the last five years or so, their lapses in memory have become more frequent and more annoying.

Complicated and rarely used characters are usually the first to fade from memory, but even common characters are being lost. ''My friends will tease me, 'How you can forget such a simple character?' '' Mr. Ye said.

The Chinese have a name for the written equivalent of having something on the tip of the tongue that translates as ''forgetting characters upon lifting the pen.''

But many in China take a pragmatic approach to the language, not a sentimental one. ''The role of language is communication,'' said Zhou Liwei, a consultant in Beijing who said he had not written in Chinese without a computer for several years. He carries a laptop with him wherever he goes.

The conflict is a result of forcing the complexities of the Chinese language to conform to a standard Roman-alphabet keyboard. Becoming literate in Chinese requires mastering characters that range from the simple to the intricate. Pupils spend thousands of hours copying character after character for homework. ''The task of Chinese characters is enormously complex, more than any other language or any other script,'' said Dr. Brendan Weekes, a cognitive neuropsycholinguist at the University of Kent in England who has done research on Chinese character recognition.

But Chinese typing requires users only to recognize characters and not construct them from scratch. More than 97 percent of computer users in China type by phonetically spelling out the sounds of the characters in a transliteration system, called pinyin, that is based on the Roman alphabet. The software then either offers users a choice of characters that fit the pronunciation, or it automatically guesses the characters that the user wants, based on context.

As spoken, Chinese is a tonal language, and typing ''ma'' on a keyboard, for example, will bring up a list of numbered choices for characters that include ''horse'' or ''mother,'' which have different tones. Entering a number selects one of the characters. On average, there are 17 characters that correspond to each typed pinyin spelling like ''ma.''

The pinyin system of typing and selection is time-consuming and awkward, but it is popular because it requires less training. Other systems involve a large amount of memorization but are faster.

The Japanese, which also use Chinese-based characters in writing, have long complained about the effect of word processing on their writing abilities. But computers have become widespread in China only in the last five years, although they have had a sizeable presence in Taiwan for almost a decade.