[jimmydef]

I think many non-Chinese sensationalize this problem. Yes, forgetting certain characters is common but not too an overwhelming or overproblematic extent.

What many people like to do is to confuse word difficulty with the difficult of the concept the word is representing and then generalizing it to all words, making it seem that Chinese is tougher than it really is. Yes knee is simple to write in English and it represents an easy concept, but the word (膝盖) itself is difficult to remember in Chinese. But that doesn't mean that all easy concepts are difficult to write in Chinese and vice versa. Difficult concepts may also have simple characters representing them. There's no direct correlation between these two.

Put it another way, the word "diarrhoea" is a very simple concept and very easy to write in Chinese. Almost no Chinese will forget how to write it in Chinese. But ask a native English speaker, and a large percentage will not be able to get it correct. Does this somehow mean that all English words are as difficult to write as "diarrhoea"? And then they can throw the same thing back at you. Can you imagine a well-educated native Chinese speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "diarrhoea"?

[Koshkin]

Not anymore.