When China decided to move to a simplified version of written Mandarin, Taiwan failed to follow suit.
Its people continue to use the more complex traditional characters, but it is now under threat as more people communicate digitally.
To read and write to a high standard of the characters used in the country, around 8,000 individual characters need to be memorised.
To allow such a huge vocabulary to be written electronically, on-screen shortcuts and keyboards have been developed.
Proper, accurate depiction, as when writing them with a stroke of a pen, is lost with the digital-era workarounds.
Al Jazeera’s Harry Fawcett reports from Taipei.