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I've heard that character amnesia is becoming more and more common.


  2. Under the same situation do the Taiwanese use bopomofo?

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From watching Chinese people write, the usual reaction is to sit there thinking "F***! How did I forget how to write that?!?" – jsj Feb 23 '13 at 10:50
@user836 lol lol – Kyson Jan 15 at 3:39
we have cellphone any time. in older time, we have dictionary instead of computer. if really don't have these, we can write PINYIN instead, and edit it later . – GongT Jan 15 at 8:18
up vote 9 down vote accepted



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This is a difficult question to answer without generalizing.


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Please think: as a native speaker of English (or maybe some other languages), how often do you forget how to spell a word? I guess that situation hardly happens.

As a native Chinese speaker, I seldom forget how to write characters. If I do forget, I would look it up with phones, computers or dictionaries, or ask someone around. If I can do none of these, I tend to write a character which looks similar, and try to use that as an aid to recall. If that doesn't work either (which is very unlikely to happen), I will write Pinyin, or just find a synonym to replace the word, or try to rewrite the sentence.

When one forgets how to write it, he/she does not have totally no clue about it. Usually it happens when a character is infrequent and has seldom used parts. A common example would be 嚏 in the word 喷嚏 (sneeze). This character is only used in this word, and consist of an extremely uncommon part 疐. Thus, many people may forget how to write it.

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