However, for China (and, to a lesser extent, Japan), these technological breakthroughs result in a special problem: Chinese people are increasingly forgetting how to write characters by hand. Of course, such lapses are not a new phenomenon. Due to the sheer number of symbols to be memorised and the limits of human memory, Chinese people have always to some extent suffered from what is called tíbǐwàngzì (提笔忘字; literally, ’lift the pen, forget the character’–a term that is usually translated as ’character amnesia’ (Mair 2010).

Source: Character Amnesia in China