I wanted to write in cursive a few years ago and realized I had completely forgotten. It didn’t take long to remember with the help of a cursive alphabet, but I was still completely unable to get started without it.

We have this too! It’s not just treble clefs and ampersands- while everyone can read both forms of g, what fraction of people can draw both forms of g? Of course it doesn’t have the cultural baggage in the US.

OTOH, the pinyin-based typing systems on computers and phones has been a godsend to students of Chinese.

I started to learn Chinese in the 80s at my high school and then in the 90s in Taiwan and was laughably bad at writing. Literally, people would laugh at my characters not only because they looked terrible, but also because I was using the wrong stroke order.

Now, it is possible for me to get away with not knowing how to write characters or the stroke order. Using pinyin and recognizing the characters (or certain radicals) is enough to take me very far in social media, texting, etc.

For instance, for one of the phrases in the article ti2bi3wang4zi4 knowing the last character (zi, 字) and kind of remembering wang is enough to recognize the entire colloquialism when I type in the pinyin tibiwangzi: 提筆忘字

In Taiwan they have a TV game show featuring college students, basically like a crossword featuring 4-character colloquialisms and other phrases that have obscure characters. It's quite fun for the audience to watch, almost everyone is writing characters in the air in front of them as they try to remember the hard characters.

In Japan, they call them "wapuro-baka" (idiot who's forgotten how to write stuff because he's only using WADO-PUROCESSA).

Chinese writing system is a language in itself. You can translate Mandarin, Cantonese and even English to that language. To learn that language is harder because it has to support more than one spoken language.

Using an alphabet would make things far more easier, but then how would people from different parts of China understand each other?

This is actually one of the main reasons I don't think China will become a global hegemon. English, with all its flaws, is far easier to speak, read, and write.

Languages are the walls between cultures.

China should make another attempt at simplifying their written language. Yes it’s a monumental task, but Korea managed to mostly transition off of Chinese characters.

I think this is not as complicated as it sounds; it's same as how NN classifiers aren't always built to do label to image, only image to label. Being able to do former through a parallel pipeline helps(that's like GAN), but that ability isn't required in training or in inference.

Your OCR engine in the brain might generate "𰻞" for 'zh_hant_適' if reversed, doesn't mean it can't recognize the latter.

It's simply people stop writing stuffs on paper. Nothing too surprising. I myself cannot spell some English words because I rely too much on auto-correction.

I wonder is the increase in external input from a growing world that is full of distraction competes with storage for these kinds of things. Such an intricate writing system might have been easier to contain in the mind before it was bombarded with limitless electronic entertainment and communication. How many people actually sit down and put a pencil to paper these days?