I've had Chinese colleagues who, when asked to write a word they'd just used in a sentence, were simply unable to. At first I thought they were playing a joke on me. But nope, they'd just forgotten the appropriate hanzi, and they couldn't even hazard a guess. It's a totally different failure mode than imperfectly-phonetic languages like English.
> I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence between sound and spelling.
To be fair, you can also "come up with something" in Chinese. Since there aren't all that many sounds, you can write in generic characters for the sound of the word that you can't remember.
Yep. The analogy I use is, it's a bit like if someone walked up and asked you to draw the logo of this or that company. Even if you've seen the logo a million times, you might not be able to summon up a mental picture of it, or you might remember the rough shape but have no idea how many lines go where.
