I recently had occasion to remark in another place that:

At least America’s college class of 2014 can write in some fashion. Over in China, where writing is a much more complicated business, the younger generation has largely given up on it. The great majority of Chinese words transmitted from a pair of 18-year-old hands to the eyes of a coeval, are tapped out on a keyboard, via a trick that uses the Latin alphabet. To watch a Chinese college student trying to hand-write a note is painful — lots of head-scratching, staring at ceiling for inspiration, final recourse to dictionary.

The wire services (in this case Agence France-Presse) have now caught up with me:

A poll commissioned by the China Youth Daily in April found that 83 percent of the 2,072 respondents admitted having problems writing characters…

Zeng Ming, 22, from the southern Guangdong province, says: “I think it’s a young people’s problem, or at least a computer users’ problem.”

One notoriously forgettable character, Zeng says, is used in the word Tao Tie — a legendary Chinese monster that was so greedy it ate itself.

Still used as a byword for gluttony, the Tao Tie is one of many ancient Chinese concepts embedded in the language.

“It’s like you’re forgetting your culture,” Zeng says.

For the curious, here are the characters for taotie, defined in Mathews’ Dictionary as: “avaricious and gluttonous — name of a greedy man who was banished by Shun [a mythical Emperor]; a fierce animal having a head and no body; a fabulous race of men who were fierce savages.” I note with mild interest that they seem not to have been simplified, as most knotty characters were in the Maoist period. They appear in modern Chinese dictionaries just as they are in Mathews’ still-indispensible 1931 tome. The first character requires 22 strokes of the brush or pen; the second, 18.