The Influence of Technology to Hand Writing Chinese Character Ability

Abstract

Nowadays students mostly used a pinyin input method to study Chinese, which had adverse effects on their Chinese character writing skills. The research method using qualitative method, where the researcher gave two types of tasks to 58 students, some of whom used the pinyin input method and some who did not. According to the findings, there are 67.25% of the students (38 out of 58) making errors when writing by hand. These errors included 47.44% of errors related to similarities between Chinese characters, which could be categorized into three types: word formation similarities (5%), character component similarities (15.25%), and single letter similarities (27.11%). Additionally, 25% of the errors were sound equation errors, such as “�” as “_f” (“shì”). Furthermore, 27% of the errors were related to the formation of new Chinese characters. When the students used the pinyin input method, the percentage of errors decreased significantly to 25.86%, most of the errors made using this method were due to word selection errors (60%) and vowel errors (40%). The research suggests that using the pinyin input method may have a negative impact on students’ motivation to write Chinese characters, which, in turn, can affect their handwriting skills.