Simplified or Traditional Chinese Characters?
Thursday March 19, 2009
A recent forum poster to the thread Simplified characters - Learning Mandarin Chinese suggests that simplified characters are more useful to Mandarin students than traditional characters.
I don't get a lot of feedback about this from readers, so I'd like to know what you think - do you prefer to learn traditional or simplified Chinese characters? Please take the poll and/or post any comments here.
Comments
Actually, I know most Chinese people currently use simplified character. That’s why we need to learn simplified character in studying Chinese language. However, traditional Chinese characters are still used in many other countries, such as Taiwan, Korea and Japan. So many of Korean like me want to learn Chinese Mandarin with both of characters and it is very useful to learn both and understand the meaning of the word more efficiently by comparing the characters.
Many thanks always.
I have sure that Mandarin is learn in the most chinese school outside China.
Written language (traditional, simplified, with accents, grammatical genders, complicated grammar ) will always co-exist with shortcuts,abbreviations and total disregard for spelling. This is not a cultural hiatus. People who eat fast food give it up or sometims not at all. I think that we can and should learn every variation.No one can lose weight by pushing on the TV remote control
I prefer the Simplified characters personally because they are less busy, and so much easier to read as the size of the print gets smaller. However, since the actual number of characters that have both variations is comparatively small, I plan to learn both eventually as I would want to be able to read a newspaper, wether it comes from Taiwan, or Mainland China.
I previously wrote expressing my opinion that Simplified characters were being studied by more people than Traditional and requested that your responses to questions should not be limited to traditional characters.
Simplified characters are “not” more important than Traditional characters.
To the best of my knowledge, almost all American universities offering Mandarin courses only teach Simplified characters; students wishing to learn Traditional characters are encouraged to do so on their own.
I’ve always preferred the classical characters; I want to remain able to read the classical literature, and especially poetry. Luckily they’re still abundantly available.
To my astonishment modern movies from the PRC are also exclusively using the simplified characters in subtitling. It seems to me a subtle but effective way of forcing readers of Chinese all over the world to learn the simplified forms. No problem, they’re much easier, so more people can become literate in a shorter time.
No fair making us choose one or the other! “Both” is the obvious answer. (And there’s no question learning traditional first would be the easiest method in the long run.)
I’m currently studying Mandarin, and am being taught to use Simplified characters, which, frankly, I prefer at this stage of my learning; compared to the Latin, or even the Cyrillic alphabet, memorising (let alone writing!) Chinese characters is challenging enough without having to deal with Traditional characters at the same time. Interestingly, in London, where I live, almost all of the half-dozen free Chinese newspapers that one can pick up in Chinatown, are written in Traditional characters, presumably the legacy of the long British association with Hong Kong. As far as I’m aware, there is only one free Chinese newspaper here that uses Simplified characters.
I want that poll to have a fourth option: Both!
Here’s an article about the simplified vs. traditional decision.
The traditional Chinese characters are the real Chinese words. Simplified characters have missing meanings and symbolism. If you want to learn Chinese properly, you should study using traditional Chinese characters. Simplified Chinese is for simplified minds.
U.S. universities, as far as I am aware, generally require students to learn both the orthodox (traditional) characters and the Chinese government’s simplified characters. Since the majority of overseas Chinese people in the U.S., along with the entire Chinese-speaking nation of Taiwan and the Chinese SAR of Hong Kong, use full-form characters, teaching only the simplified variants would be incredibly short-sighted. At my school, even professors straight from PRC China teach traditional Chinese characters, even emphasising them at the first-year level.