take pen, forget character 提笔忘字

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.

《中国青年报》在2010年4月进行的一项调查显示，在2072位被调查者中，有83％的人承认写字的时候会遇到“提笔忘字”的情况。

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.

中国的学者指出，“提笔忘字”的情况会发生是因为大部分中国人使用的电子设备输入法都是拼音输入法，所有汉字都通过字母来输入。

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.

用户输入拼音后，电子设备就会提供一系列与之匹配的汉字供选。所以用户只须识别这些汉字，而根本不需要把它们写出来。