SCIENCE & EDUCATION

Two thirds of Japanese people admit they are losing the ability to pen the "kanji" characters used in the written language because of their reliance on emails and mobile phone messages.

Of those to replied to a survey by the Cultural Affairs Agency, 66.5 per cent said they feared they were forgetting all the required strokes in some of the characters, up more than 25 percentage points from the last survey, which was conducted 10 years ago.

Even more worrying for purists of the Japanese language, which uses thousands of characters originally from China, is that 42 per cent of the people also said that it was "a bother" to write by hand, up more than 10 percentage points from the last study.

Source: NewsOnJapan