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A new commissioned by the China Daily Youth newspaper has found many young Chinese people are forgetting how to write Chinese. Chinese schoolchildren grow up well over 3,000 different characters. However, the study shows they need to write them by hand and are forgetting their . , young people are using their phones and computers to write. On these, they type in a called ‘pinyin,’ which is the sounds of the Chinese characters written on an English . A list then appears showing the character in Mandarin. The report said 83% of the 2,072 respondents have problems writing characters while 43% said they only write when they need to something.

The problem is so that there is a name for it: ‘tibiwangzi,’ which means “take pen, character”. Chinese characters are the oldest writing system in the world in use. They back over 3,000 years. University student Li Hanwei, 21, said: "I can remember the shape, but I can’t remember the that you need to write it…It’s a bit of a problem." The is known as “character ” and is also common in Japan, where Chinese characters are one of four different used in writing. Ayumi Kawamoto, 23, why she often forgot how to recall and write characters she learnt at school: "We rely too much on the function on our phones and PCs."