一个学中文的老外的真实故事

说一次在他北京，和三个北大的博士生吃饭，突然他问他们，"喷嚏"两个字怎么写.结果三个人一个人都没写出来, 而且一笔也写不出来. 他然后感叹中文难看来对中国人来说也是一样的.他说不敢想象三个美国哈佛博士生拼不出 "sneeze".

原文:

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 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.

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html