OTOH, the pinyin-based typing systems on computers and phones has been a godsend to students of Chinese. I started to learn Chinese in the 80s at my high schoo

OTOH, the pinyin-based typing systems on computers and phones has been a godsend to students of Chinese. I started to learn Chinese in the 80s at my high school and then in the 90s in Taiwan and was laughably bad at writing. Literally, people would laugh at my characters not only because they looked terrible, but also because I was using the wrong stroke order. Now, it is possible for me to get away with not knowing how to write characters or the stroke order. Using pinyin and recognizing the characters (or certain radicals) is enough to take me very far in social media, texting, etc. For instance, for one of the phrases in the article ti2bi3wang4zi4 knowing the last character (zi, 字) and kind of remembering wang is enough to recognize the entire colloquialism when I type in the pinyin tibiwangzi: 提筆忘字 In Taiwan they have a TV game show featuring college students, basically like a crossword featuring 4-character colloquialisms and other phrases that have obscure characters. It's quite fun for the audience to watch, almost everyone is writing characters in the air in front of them as they try to remember the hard characters.