Simplified vs. Traditional Chinese

Great Debates
1

I’m not sure if this is definitely suited for GD or not, but it doesn’t have a factual answer so I’ve placed it here.

My understanding is that at this point simplified characters (SC) are used in the PRC and Singapore, while traditional characters (TC) are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, and by the Overseas Chinese.

I’ve read that Taiwan has finally decided to drop the Wade-Giles romanization system and are now debating whether to adopt the PRC’s pinyin system or invent one of their own. When I visited Taiwan last year my guide mentioned to me that many younger Taiwanese are learning SC in addition to TC, no doubt to ease future dealings with the mainland.

As many of the knowledgeable dopers such as China Guy have expressed the opinion that Taiwan will be rejoining the PRC in the not too distant future, I’m curious as to whether it is felt that TC will be begin a significant decline when they do. Is it destined to relegated to history books much the way that pre-1945 Japanese spelling has been?

I find SC aesthetically displeasing (to put it mildly) so I certainly hope not.

2

It was to my understanding that it’s pretty trivial to learn one system if you know the other. Certainly reading wouldn’t be a problem for most people but writing might be.

3

Having learned SC all my life (and struggling with it), I can tell you that TC is WAY more complicated for a SC person to learn. How SC and TC are related to one another is that the SC “words” (maybe imagine heliographs) are “condensed” from TC. If you knew TC, and were trying to learn the SC words, it would be a simple reduction of “strokes”, eg 4 dots become a line.

It doesn’t work the other way around, though, since you can’t tell if the line should be 4 dots in that particular situation.

In any case, SC is MUCH more friendly on the eye, and the hand. Some of the more complicated SC characters already take upwards of 20 strokes, in TC… Wow. And if you’re talking about printing in small fonts, good luck - you get this blob that anyone over 40 can’t read.

If TC were to go the way of the dodo, well, I wouldn’t be too disappointed. I am curious as to what you mean by pre-1945 Japanese, though. Do you mean the (chinese) kanji writing? Seeing as Japanese was a primarily spoken language to begin with, and the characters were only borrowed from Chinese to form a written language, I believe that the current form suits the language better.

“Aesthetically displeasing”? Gosh, YOU never had to write a composition in Chinese. :frowning: I’m so glad I never have to do THAT again.

4

I bears repeating that there were actually two simplification processes that took place in the Mainland. The first IIRC was in 1954, where PRC officially adopted what was the commonly used simplifications.

As a comparison, probably pretty close to what Japanese kanji is. For example, look at a Japanese passport and see “ribenguo” the “guo” or country is SC.

Sometime after that (but still in the 1950’s) first official adoption of what was commonly used, then there was a strategic decision to simplify the writing system. Tried to do it systematically from the radical. For example, the speech radical changed from 7 strokes down to two, looks much the same, and was more or less the way chinese wrote in the equivalent of cursive anyway.

One needs to work at being able to read both, and writing both really takes some effort. Not impossible as I’m living proof that even a non language whiz foreigner can read both, then it kinda follows that someone reading Chinese as a native language ought to be able to master it. Plenty of people write both, but it takes effort to do so.

BTW, I started with simplified and moved to TC.

Taiwan adopted the Mainland pinyin system a few years ago. I’m too lazy to find a link. It was after my time in Taiwan so I’m not sure how that came about. BTW, Taiwan uses a Wade Giles derivative, and a really meaningless one. Basically, uses Wade Giles but without the apostrophe that denotes aspiration. Thus “p” is pronounced as either a “p” or a “b”, and one has to guess. True wade giles would have it as p or p’ depending on the aspiration.

Given software, it’s really simple whether you want to type or read in SC or TC. I suspect, you’ll have both systems for a long time.

My wag is that TC are easier to remember once you learn them as they are more of a picture. For example the word “ai” or love, does not have the heart radical in the SC. :eek:

5

Prior to WW2, Japanese was similar to English in that it had many words that were not pronounced how they were spelled. For example, verbs ending in ‘u’ such as ‘au’ were written with an f: ‘afu’. After the war the spellings of words were changed to match their pronunciations.

I’ve written compositions in Japanese, which while not the same is not an utterly different experience I’d imagine. I’m sure that many of the SC characters are easier to write since many are based on handwritten forms in the first place, but that doesn’t make them any less ugly.

6

Thanks for your comments. I know that the Japanese simplifications were influenced by the introduction of SC in the PRC. I’m not sure when they changed, possibly in the mid-1960s. I think that the simplified Japanese characters (which I’ve seen referred to as ‘slightly simplified characters’ on some Chinese message boards) in general look more like ‘real’ characters than the SC simplifications, although perhaps some older Japanese would disagree with me on that.

Taiwan officially adopted their own tongyong pinyin system over the PRC’s, but apparently only at the national level. According to Wikipedia, those localities controlled by the KMT use hanyu pinyin.

Are there software programs that can convert between the two systems? I’d imagine there’d be difficulties because SC merged some of the characters.

7

For Microsoft word, all one has to do is change the font setting and instantly the document is from simplified to traditional.

First simplification in 1956. Second official PRC simplification in 1964. Pretty sure the Japanese simplification pre-dates and has no connection with the PRC simplification.

That said, the simplification process has gone on for 2,000+ years. Read all about it here: http://www.basistech.com/papers/chinese/iuc24-emerson-chinese.pdf

8

I actually prefer Traditional Chinese, as opposed to Simplified Chinese. While it takes longer to write (and it takes FOREVER to learn how to squeeze them into the squares in the writing exercise books), I find it easier to read than Simplified Chinese, since there are many characters that look so alike in simplified form.

Example off the top of my head - the characters for wind and phoenix (both feng). In Simplified Chinese, the only difference between the two characters is a tiny little stroke, which I sometimes miss when I’m reading handwritten characters. The Traditional versions of the characters are much easier to differentiate.

9

I can’t read chinese myself but my parents grew up in mainland china so they are native speakers. When they wen’t to HK, they said they had no problem reading regular signage or official forms in TC.

10

I’m learning Mandarin at uni, and we are required to recognise and write SC, yet only to recognise TC. TC would certainly be much more difficult to learn how to write, but as others have mentioned, not to read because there is less chance of confusion.

I love writing, and I don’t mind writing traditional characters, but remembering how to write them is a different matter! If you know the simplified character, often the traditional character will be easy to recognise because often the radicals are just simplified. For example, jian, the radical meaning “seeing”, is usually simplified exactly the same way when it is part of a character.

cckerberos, I’m sorry, but I really don’t want to learn to write TC just because you think they’re prettier. :slight_smile:

11

  1. I too am fairly sure that the simplification that occurred in Japan had nothing to do with those in China. The weird thing about the J’ese simplification is that I’ve never seen ANY information about it, history of it, and I’ve lived in Japan a long time and have read a heck of a lot. It really seems to be a buried part of history, but then again Japan has a lot of such pockets. (I have seen info about the effort to establish a list of “touyoukanji” before WWII–any kanji not on the list were not to be used in newspapers; instead, one would use kana.) It’s clear, however, that the simplification of J’ese occurred in the 1950s and thereafter.

  2. The simplification of kanji in Japan was fairly inept, but was not as wide-ranging as that which occurred in mainland China. Although a few of the simplifications had a rationale behind them (e.g., they were already being used by people as abbreviations), many were just plain unnecessary and have served to separate further modern Japanese from its roots.

  3. I have also studied Chinese and both sets of characters. In general, the results in both Japan and China back up my general impression that East Asians are horrible systemitizers. China took the world’s most beautiful writing system and junked it. The SC are ugly, inconsistently simplified, and in general do not make learning the system that much easier. About the only thing they could do is help make handwriting a little faster. Had the Chinese been able to foresee the advent of the word processor, they probably would not even have bothered.

To those who are learning Chinese and are grateful that the SC are a little easier to memorize, some points. Many of the things that have been simplified are systematic; that is, you learn it one and can apply it to a wide range of characters. For example, the TC for “bird” has 4 dots on the bottom; the SC has just a line in their place. But this bird character is used as the radical in a lot of characters, and the burden on the neurons for learning the 4 dots or the 1 line is basically the same. Since most of the simplifications are like this, the advantage ain’t much.

Second, are you really going to feel like the “real deal” without learning the TC anyway? If you really intend to become fluent, you’re going to have to learn 10,000 characters or more anyway. To go the extra mile to learn TC so that you can read the classics in the original, I should think, is a must for any self-respecting scholar.

The SC have really been a cultural disaster for China, which seems to have a knack for such things (Cultural Revolution, etc.). I’m surprised that anyone who loves the language would venture to defend these visual monstrosities.

12

The only book I’ve found on this subject is this one : Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan . I’m afraid that I don’t remember too much about it other than that the author was very pro-simplification and believed that Japan should scrap kanji and kana and write everything in romaji instead.

My Halpern dictionary gives 1949 as the year for kanji simplication, but I could swear that I’ve read books from the early 1960s that that discussed the new characters as unofficial.

13

Yeah, this stuff is hard to track down, isn’t it? Another thing, I’ve yet to meet a single Japanese person who even sees simplification as an issue–the pre-simp kanji are “furui” (old) and that’s that. Which is weird, really. This event happened during the lives of many old people that I know, and they don’t give a hoot either. BTW, I have seen books printed as late as the 1970s in the “old” characters, but some of these might have been reprints.

Many of the old kanji live on in various forms: people’s names, company names, and sometimes they are just used for the heck of it. I don’t have a problem with the simps that were organic (e.g., the “new” tai/karada seems to have been in wide use before it was made “official”), but so many of them amounted to quickie ways to write characters (e.g., turning the two little points in koku/kuro into a straight line) by hand, that I can’t fathom the reason to change the printed version. Sloppy stuff.

14

I must say that there is quite a difference between being a scholar in the language, and having the language as your only form of communication. One could also possibly point to the English language of old, and draw parallels. Not everyone has to read the classics, just as I would not expect everyone to have read Chaucer in it’s original form.

Or even the introduction of the new letters in the alphabet, or the “Americanisation” of “color”, etc. Hardly a difference, and certainly, I would not say that it was a “cultural disaster”. People who appreciate culture will use the TC, and the rest of us will save 13 strokes per character and make reading easier on the eye.

15

Well, I don’t know, that describes just about the whole hiragana alphabet. Sloppy, maybe, but nobody I know of writes “g” or “a” in the manner that was used in the past.
And we are waaaaaaaaay OT.

16

One of the truly great things about English is the continuity we have in both the written and spoken language. You can read Swift with the original spelling and all, and, style aside, it pretty much could have been written yesterday.

You didn’t seem to catch the point I made that if you’re going to become fluent, it’s hardly much more work to learn TC. Also, are you going to become fluent just to deal with the mainland? There is also Taiwan to consider.

I don’t think you’ll find SC much easer to read–maybe to write.

17

One of the cited advantages often quoted by TC proponents is that TC is in fact easier to read, simply because they have so many more strokes. Because of the simplification many of the SC have only a single stroke of difference while their TC are significantly different from each other. These differences can include important visual clues to aid the reader in remembering and distinguishing the character.

18

A new difference between Taiwan and PRC writing: Much writing in Taiwan will now be left-to-right.

What are the odds that Beijing will follow suit? Seems like this action will be a bit divisive with regard to the mainland. Was this a political move by one party?

And to what extent was left-to-right in use already?

19

Left-to-right is, and has been for some time, the norm in the PRC. Newspapers and most books are printed in a pretty Western style nowadays, whereas in Taiwan, my understanding is that it’s not terribly regularized.

This is one of the major irritants to me about Chinese writing; the characters really do look much more attractive written top-to-bottom. They simply are designed for the purpose - their highly vertical strokes draw the eye down the page when they’re written vertically, and create a harmonious whole. Horizontals, however, are written with an upwards slant (except in the most horrendously clumsy typed fonts) and the characters do not flow naturally when written this way.

20

I just finished driving 5 days around Zhejiang province. Occaisionally could see the odd shop or restaurant sign in traditional Chinese. Historic older sites and some temples had rock carvings written in Traditional Chinese. Maybe one out of a hundred times, someone’s name card will be in Traditional.

Honestly, I think the point is pretty moot. Simplified is what the vast majority of the Chinese world uses. Those in the traditional Chinese world that deal with Mainland China have come to terms and seem to work at reading both. Educated Mainlanders with the inclination learn how to read both. Historians of course need to read to traditional.

Computers have to a certain extent removed the need to be able to write both as one can simply change the font and it’s whatever version you want it to be.

One can argue ascetics till the cows come home