A poll commissioned by the China Youth Daily in April 2010 found that 83 percent of the 2,072 respondents admitted having problems writing characters, forgetting how to write traditional Chinese characters – literally, “take pen, forget character” or character amnesia。

《中國青年報》在2010年4月進行的一項調查顯示，在2072位被調查者中，有83%的人承認寫字的時候會遇到“提筆忘字”的情況。

Chinese boffins say that character amnesia happens because most Chinese people use electronic input systems based on Pinyin, which translates Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet。

中國的學者指出，“提筆忘字”的情況會發生是因為大部分中國人使用的電子設備輸入法都是拼音輸入法，所有漢字都通過字母來輸入。

The user enters each word using Pinyin, and the device offers a menu of characters. So users must recognise the character, however they don’t need to write it any more。

用戶輸入拼音后，電子設備就會提供一系列與之匹配的漢字供選。所以用戶只須識別這些漢字，而根本不需要把它們寫出來。