Barbarians Remix: Do you really need to learn to write characters to study Chinese?

Warning: GEEKY CONTENT Hosting solo in this week’s episode, David takes a geeky deep dive into the digital revolution in Chinese language learning in conversation with Chinese language pedagogy expert Matt Coss. The Sisyphean task of learning to write hundreds of Chinese characters has long been the bête noire of Chinese language students. The explosion of digital devices and apps for processing Chinese characters is giving rise to a radical rethinking (no pun intended) of the handwriting and dictation components of Chinese language curricula. Matt Coss is on the front line of a new generation of Chinese language educators who advocate a drastic reduction, if not outright elimination, of the handwriting requirement for Chinese language learners. Topics covered include the disturbing drop in the number of American students studying Mandarin, the implications of AI tools such as ChatGPT for Chinese language learning, and the escalating problem of native Chinese speakers forgetting how to write common characters (“character amnesia” tíbǐ wàngzì提笔忘字).

You can listen to Barbarians Remix: Do you really need to learn to write characters to study Chinese? online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Barbarians Remix: Do you really need to learn to write characters to study Chinese? is an episode from Barbarians at the Gate by Barbarians at the Gate.

This episode is 0:27:43 long.

This episode was published on Apr 7, 2026.

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