Lessons developed on need to build characters

Time-honored art faces threat from mobile phones, computers

Writing Chinese characters is sometimes like drawing a picture, recalling a period of history or telling a story.

Almost all calligraphy lovers agree that writing characters with a brush and ink on straw paper offers a way to communicate with not only history and culture, but also oneself. It is a combination of both the artistic and spiritual.

But now the time-honored art of Chinese calligraphy is under threat from computers and mobile phones. It has become an art of the minority.

Worse, writing Chinese characters has become a headache for many.

A college graduate looking for a job in Chongqing was reportedly turned down by a company because he wrote 24 characters incorrectly in a 400-character handwritten resume.

A survey by Horizonkey, a data research company, covering people from 12 major cities in China, found that nearly one-third of those sampled often experience "character amnesia", with 94 percent saying this is a problem for them.

The main reason is overreliance on the pinyin-based Chinese language input method, which is replacing the tradition of writing characters stroke by stroke.

However, only 5 percent think the issue needs to be resolved urgently. Most believe computers and mobile phones are sufficient to help them deal with the problem.