They concluded the benefits of communicating digitally may come with a cost in proficient learning of written Chinese. This is due to the dramatic difference between English and Chinese orthographies. Chinese characters are not transparent compared with alphabetic writing systems such as English. Because learning to read and write Chinese characters are among the biggest obstacles for Chinese learners in the United States, most beginning-level learners often do not go beyond the introductory level. The difficulty of learning Chinese characters is reflected in the early Chinese literacy acquisition research in the United States. Those early studies debated whether or not teachers should teach Chinese characters to beginning-level learners at all. During the 1990s, Chinese literacy research shifted to character recognition and the effectiveness of teaching various character learning strategies. In these studies, experiments were conducted on Chinese learners to identify which character learning strategies they were using. These researchers conducted the learners who utilized character learning strategies performed better in character recognition tests as well.