Mandarin Chinese can be written in two different sets of characters – traditional and simplified. Traditional characters have been in use for about two-thousand years, while simplified characters were developed in Mainland China in the 1950s.
Mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia use simplified characters, while Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and many overseas Chinese communities use traditional characters.
Traditional Characters - Features
As implied by the name “simplified”, traditional characters are more complex than their simplified counterparts. This means that they have more lines and require more pen strokes to draw them.
Take for example the character meaning “horse”. The traditional form is 馬, and the simplified form is 马. The traditional form has 10 strokes and the simplified form has 3 strokes.
History of Traditional Characters
Chinese writing dates from about 1400 BC, with the first characters being pictographs representing people, animals and objects. The earliest examples of Chinese writing are inscriptions on bones and tortoise shells. Many of these early pictographs clearly depict the objects they represent. The character for “horse”, for example, shows the mane, head, torso and legs of the animal.
As the written language became more complex, new characters were introduced and existing characters evolved. The so-called pictographs, which were the earliest forms of Chinese writing, became more stylized and less pictorial.
What we today call “traditional characters” first appeared during the Han Dynasty (207 BC – 220 AD). Han characters are standardized according to a set of 12 basic strokes, and characters may have between one and sixty-four strokes.
Chinese characters are often called hànzì 漢字(trad) 汉字 (simp), meaning “Han (Dynasty) writing”.
Traditional Characters Today
Traditional characters are used as the official writing system of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. They are also used in many overseas Chinese communities, with the exception of Singapore and Malaysia, which use simplified characters.
Mainland China uses simplified characters, but also produces printed material in traditional characters for use in overseas communities.
Number of Characters
There are more than 100,000 Chinese characters, but this number includes obsolete and specialized characters. Well-educated native speakers know on average between 4,000 and 5,000 characters, and about 2,000 characters are necessary to read a newspaper.
Of the total number of characters, about 2,000 have been simplified.
Traditional Characters and Computers
There are several computer utilities which can convert between simplified and traditional characters. However, there is not always a direct one-to-one relationship between the two sets of characters. For example, the simplified 面 can represent either of two traditional characters - 面 or 麵, - so these conversion programs may sometimes make errors.
