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The most astounding example I encountered back in my early days studying Chinese was during a lunch with three graduate students in the Peking University Chinese department. I had a bad cold that day, and wanted to write a note to a friend to cancel a meeting. I found that I couldn’t write the character ti ? in the word for “sneeze”, da penti ???, and so I asked my three friends for help. To my amazement, none of the three could successfully retrieve the character ti ?. Three Chinese graduate students at China’s most prestigious university could not write the word for “sneeze” in their own native script! One simply cannot imagine a similar situation in a phonetic script environment, e.g., three Harvard graduate students unable to write a common word like “sneeze” in the orthography of their native language.

What was even more amazing--and puzzling--was that the Chinese people I dealt with showed almost no concern for this phenomenon. Most tended to explain away the situation as due to low educational standards, or merely natural everyday memory lapses. “And besides,” they would say to me, “Don't you sometimes forget how to spell a word in English?” And I slowly began to realize that part of the problem is that, for most native Chinese, who have not grown up using an alphabetic system of writing, the contrast between the systems is not at all evident--they simply have no basis of comparison. Such people tend to assume that their difficulties are with the process of writing itself, rather than the particular writing system they are using.

"Forget the word Pen"