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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 มิ.ย. 2024
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✍️ SYNOPSIS: This video will recount the language reforms of the 1950s in mainland China, which led to the simplification of Chinese characters (Hanzi). However, the simplified characters we have today were very nearly destroyed in favor of a Latin writing system set to revolutionize the Chinese written language...
📍TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - The Oldest Writing System on Earth
0:36 - "Chinese Characters MUST DIE"
2:49 - Language Reform Begins (and so does the drama)
5:05 - Canto to Mando Blueprint
6:18 - Simplified Chinese is Born
7:55 - The Hilarious Drama that SAVED Chinese
10:33 - Legacy of the Language Reforms
▶️ History of Pinyin (1/3): • Why Chinese Created an...
▶️ Simplification of Chinese (2/3): This video;)
▶️ The Truth About Simplified Chinese (3/3): • The TRUE Origins of Si...
⚠️ NOTES:
1) Regular Script/Kaishu (楷书) is a brush writing style that became the standard for Chinese characters. [00:15] The term Kaiti (楷体) refers to modern digital fonts that model this style.
2) 汉字不灭，中国必亡 [0:39] were the words Luxun spoke in 1936, reportedly on his deathbed.
3) The book [1:51] that kicked off the Movement for a Phonetic Alphabet (切音字运动) in 1892 was《一目了然初阶》。
4) The May Forth Movement [2:19] was originally a student protest against the unfair terms of the Treaty of Versailles post-WWI, but became a broader movement that questioned traditional Chinese values and social structure.
5) Even before WWII, the Communist party in China had been gathering support and fighting against the Nationalist party [2:43] since the late 1920s. The Chinese civil war was put on hold during WWII as they combined forces to fight the Japanese, and ended with the Communists' victory in 1949.
6) The Chinese Written Language Reform Association [3:01] was not a government group, but was working in close ties with the government.
7) The Chinese Written Language Reform Research Committee [4:00] formed in 1952 was an official government organization. They continued the work of the earlier association and merged a lot of the members as well.
8) Mao said the proposed 6 systems [4:59] were still too difficult for the common countrymen.
9) The first round of simplified characters were introduced in several stages [7:03]. The first set of 57 characters were used in select newspapers and periodicals in May 1955, the second set of 84 in August 1955, and the rest were implemented in 1956 when all the simplified forms became official.
10) The first draft of simplified characters in January 1955 contained 798 simplified characters, 251 simplified components (constituent elements), and a reduction of 400 obsolete variant forms; compared to the 515, 54, 1050 in the final draft [7:17].
11) The conference [7:45] also officially recognized the use of Arabic numerals in dates and quantities in Chinese writing.
12) During the Hundred Flowers Campaign [8:44], the people criticized all aspects of government, not just the language reform committee.
13) Pinyin suffered further pushback during the cultural revolution because it was seen as foreign influence, and many people also blamed the language reform committee for turning against Mao's orders for a "national in form" writing system.
📚 REFERENCES:
Linguistic Unification (read this first): www.globalasia.org/v12no2/fea...
Fact and Fantasy: www.academia.edu/31091890/The...
Language Reform in China: doi.org/10.2307/2941922
Language Revolution: doi.org/10.2307/3023892
Chinese Alphabetization Reform: core.ac.uk/download/pdf/21284...
百年汉字简化: hlj.ifeng.com/culture/detail_2...
1935 List of simplified Chinese: www.toutiao.com/article/64374...
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there's a fun wrinkle in this saga that you came close to talking about: while all this drama was going on in the mainland, the ministry of education in singapore, for unknown reasons (maybe just impatience idk), went ahead and created their own simplified characters. these were in use in the 60s and 70s (and you can still see them on documents from that time). however after a few years singapore kind of just fell back to whatever the prc guys were using, and that's where we are today
can you point me to any resources to see what those characters were like?? 👀 I don’t know any Chinese so idk how far I can get using just English keywords/resources lol
@@dankmemewannabe7692 wikipedia has a page called "Singapore Chinese Characters" which lists them all :)
unfortunately it seems that the default wikipedia font struggles to display some of the weirder ones, so you may see a box symbol instead
Thanks for sharing! I briefly saw something about Singapore's simplifications in my research but didn't get around to diving deeper
Used to write 宀 with 加 underneath it for 家 and 又 with 女 underneath as 要。
Yea, Japan was doing the same, and they ended up with with own version of Kanji...
Each Chinese character generally has many different variants throughout history. China also standardized which character to use and to consider as the preferred choice several times. Even during Qing Dynasty, China made another round of standardization, see 1875年清朝"大清钦定正体字" (roughly translates to Character Standardization Guideline, Qing Dynasty, 1875) which actually changed some of the simpler characters into the more complex ones. So it's not correct to say it remain unchanged until the present day.
For someone who's not Chinese, let me make a further explanation that the video didn't say☺.
1. Traditional Chinese characters (TCC) are NOT like a new language for those who use simplified Chinese characters (SCC); actually, it's quite easy for Chinese speakers to read and recognise another writing system (both TCC→SCC and SCC→TCC). Then how do we feel when reading?
WELL, IT'S LIKE THIS, NOT THAT USUAL TO SEE, BUT YOU STILL CAN READ😉.
2. Many SCC are much OLDER than you think. Why? Because TCC are too tiring to write, and ancient Chinese also understood this, which is why we implement SCC today. You can say that TCC contains more beauty of the Chinese characters. I completely agree with this point as I also write traditional Chinese characters when I practice Chinese characters calligraphy. However, there is no dispute that SCC are more labour-saving in daily life writing🤔.
3. TCC are actually very close to the users of SCC.
SCC: 繁体字实际上离简体字的使用者非常近。有多近？只需切换输入法到繁体输入就好了。
TCC: 繁體字實際上離簡體字的使用者非常近。有多近？只需切換輸入法到繁體輸入就好了。
How close? Just switch the input method to TCC mode, that's it😉.
My opinion is, there is no need to force someone to change to your writing system; whatever you use (SCC or TCC), just continue using it😄.
Heresy!!! 😛😜
As a native Chinese. I totally agree! I write TCC for calligraphy and scc for daily needs
Well said!
People think that China completely abandoned TCC, but in reality in china most school/industry that teach traditional culture/movie/art/history etc still using both TCC and SCC.
I even think it's wrong to translate 繁体中文 as "traditional chinese", more accurate to translate it as "complicated chinese". There are some characters in 繁体中文 which wasn't really "traditional" as Qing emperor picked the more complicated characters to replace the originally less complicated ones.
IMPORTANT TO KNOW. of the 3500 most commonly used characters ( if you know this much you can read 99.5% of characters in media in china ) only 30% have a simplified written version. So if you say yoo want to learn traditional you learn 100 % traditional . When you say you want to learn simplified what you learn is about 70 % traditional and about 30 % is simplified.
Vietnamese is a tonal language and some could argue their tones are a bit more complicated than Mandarin tones. However they reformed to a latin alphabet quite successfully. Of course they have some unique markings for tones and vowel sounds but it very much simplified their writing system from traditional Characters to a nice looking and practical system.
The literacy rate jumped from 10% to 100%. But the meanings of the words lost 90%. That's why, as a Vietnamese, I have to study Chinese.
Mandarin (4 tones) and Cantonese tones (6 tones) are easier than Vietnamese (6 tones). In comparison to Viet they're more "flat". Besides that, Viet has more than 50% Chinese vocab (closer to Cantonese). This is coming from a Vietnamese who's learning Cantonese and Mandarin
Japan also went through rounds of discussion regarding simplification of the kanji (Chinese characters) that had been in use in Japan for centuries. This apparently included simplifying the way the kanji were written, but it looks like some current Japanese kanji look like traditional Chinese characters. The government has a list called jōyō kanji ("regular-use Chinese characters"). These are the kanji that are permitted in government documents as well as a baseline for literacy. There was a period right after WWII where there was a serious discussion about moving Japanese over to Latin characters, but that got thoroughly squashed.
@GLODELANIA It has already Latinized, called Roma-ji, Roman Writing.
well japanese feel better to keep some kanji for daily usage over korean, only lawyer understand kanji. pure sound based language doesnt work that well for east asian language
I noticed many Kanji have been simplified, for example 中国共産党, 医学, 天気, 台湾 these are similar to the simplified Chinese characters 中国共产党, 医学, 天气, 台湾 used in mainland China but different from traditional Chinese characters 中國共產黨, 醫學, 天氣, 臺灣 used in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
@@icebaby6714And you know what's interesting? I believe we get our Chinese translation of 共产党 from Japanese Kanji🤣。这就是语言奇妙的地方，东亚文化圈真的很有意思。
@@darkraisnorlax1853 Yes, you are right, but do you know 40% of modern Chinese words were adopted from Japanese Kanji? During Japan’s Meiji Reform in 1860s, Japanese wanted to learn from the west and Japanese scholars had translated huge volumes of western books range from philosophy, medicine, politics, technology, military and music & arts from England, America, Germany, France, Italy and Russia, and they invented tens of thousands of new Kanji words based on the original meaning of the words in European languages that are not available in ancient Chinese vocabulary. And many Chinese students who studied in Japan in late 19th century and early 20th century brought these new set of Kanji back to China and adopted them as part of modern Chinese vocabularies. In the beginning some conservative Chinese scholars were against the idea and invented own set of new Chinese words, however these words were awkwardly created and hard to be accepted by the general public, in the end they gave up.
Below are examples of these new Kanji most Chinese don’t even realize these are loan words from Japanese. If we remove all these Kanji in modern Chinese you can hardly construct a sentence as they are already part of Chinese language.
逻辑
哲学
民主
民主主义
人民
共和
阶级
独裁
物理学
电话
退化/进化/演化
民族
社会
经济
同情
资本
造反/革命
科学
形而上学
进步
文明
宪法/法典
自由
圆
暴力
人气
写真
料理
That is why when Chinese visit Japan they can understand Kanji in public signboards to some extent even if they never learned Japanese.
While Japan adopted Chinese writing and made it as part of its own script Japanese scholars have contributed a great deal to the formation of modern Chinese vocabularies that are not available in ancient Chinese writings.
Here are more examples of modern Chinese words adopted from Japanese Kanji.
规定、经验、审美、形成、个人、工业、政治、幸福、政策、参加、时期、重要、速度、地球、代表、制作、发展、物质、理想、温度、体操体育、记录、代表、优势劣势、入口出口、大型小型、市场、组合、绝对相对、直接间接、左翼右翼、主体客体、主观客观、时间空间、理性感性、预算决算、动脉静脉、商业工业、理想理念、重工业轻工业、石油、出版、支配、民主民族、政党、原子电子、电波、保险、国际、协定、社会、企业投资、广告、景气、历史科学、农民总理、漫画、世纪、注射、资本家、百货店、传染病、图书馆、所得税、所有权、自然科学、土木工学
Chinese characters is the beautiful part of the Chinese language. It should never be removed or changed to a latin version.
The Same thing Vietnam did!
@@Ilsun1231is that true vietnam used chinese symbols?
@@hirotofy7653 They were using Hanji(Chinese Characters) but later they adopted Latin version.
@@Ilsun1231damn french
Yes it should
Awesome video! AWESOME! As someone interested in learning both Mandarin and Cantonese, as well as Japanese, this was Totally Awesome. Thanks a lot!!!
I appreciate the notes and references, thank you so much!
Awesome video. I don't really know any Chinese, but as someone who loves to read Japanese I would have hated to lose the Chinese characters from it. They make Japanese so much easier to read and can express nice nuances in meaning that a latin alphabet couldn't. But I would guess they work even better in the language they were designed for as opposed to in Japan just stapling China's writing system onto their own spoken language. I really gotta learn Mandarin at some point, I love the way it sounds and it would be fun to visit China some day and be able to meet and talk to people.
I think that mandarin is beautiful and the language is a staple of world history, but I think language should first and foremost be a tool for communication. Me, as long as many other chinese friends and a majority of people who do not keep up with their chinese studies, FORGET HOW TO READ AND WRITE CHINESE!! How can you speak a language and forget how to write it? Its totally inefficient no matter how beautiful and rich it is.
If i stopped reading and writing english for 10 years I gaurantee you that if not instantly, it would not take me more than a few days to learn how to read it again.
As a country they seem to be doing fine with high literacy rates but damn it makes it hard to keep up with chinese without constant practice.
Also I'm not sure if this is true, but I hear many japanese people dont know meanings of Kanji aswell unless its very commonly used, wouldnt it be easier for the japanese language if you just added spaces and punctuation? (This is a question not an assumption) Thanks
@@WebsiteLover If language is for communication. Why bother to learn Chinese? Just learn English
I believe a system like the Chinese characters can be used with any language and it's superior to a regular alphabet
@@WebsiteLover no, I don't think it's because of spacing that Kanji make Japanese easier to read, for example in Chinese all characters are just one after another, and after 8 months of studying Chinese, as long as I know the characters in a certain text or article I can read it pretty quickly. It's the simple fact that once your brain sees a certain combination of characters you automatically read it that what, the same is true for English and any other language. You just don't read letter by letter, your brain creates a picture. English is my 3rd lang, and it's happened to me to find new words and not know how to pronounce them for sure
Well, English writing is also basically the Latin alphabet stapled onto a language it wasn't designed for, which was then made even worse by the failure to reform after the Great Vowel Shift. If you want to see Latin characters in use for a Latin-like language, read Spanish. That is basically how it is meant to work. ;)
your content is insanely good, i hope your channel growns
You should cover "The Simplification of Modern Chinese Sounds" next!~
For example, you could address how some of the languages/sub-languages/dialects started dropping the 入声 "tone" (A.K.A. final consonants); whereas others kept it.
I'm so glad China and Japan managed to preserve one of the last non-alphabetic writing systems remaining despite all the attempts to end it. I hope this beautiful and interesting part of East Asian culture stay alive for many generations to come.
especially for taiwan, who preserved traditional Chinese 👍
It was more of a necessity. What's good of a Latin based system when you got a bunch of characters that have the same pronunciation but different meanings. It's even worse in Japanese, because they don't have tones for their borrowed Chinese words, so even more confusion if there's no Kanji for reference.
@@user-mn9cv6uz8d Not anymore. Taiwan is now being politicized and influenced too much by political propaganda that many Taiwanese youths despise and deny themself as Chinese. To stay separated and disconnected from China, the Taiwan govt DPP has been slowly erasing and removing Chinese literature and Chinese history from Taiwan textbooks. Not sure how long they will keep traditional Chinese.
@Hamood Grünstein, we have that problem in English (and other PIE languages) too:
My right to have unique pronunciation to every block of text goes right out the window because it sits at a right angle to reality...the right side of my brain says you are 100% right but the left knows it's wrong.
Simplification won't help. We could burn every dictionary that doesn't change the spelling to "rite" (or Singaporean English may try to go with "rait") but we'd also be expanding the problem by merging in with even more phonograms, such as "write" and "rite" (as they look in current or "traditional" English spelling). It's a tradeoff, but the writing system isn't the root cause OR the magic answer. We'd have to change the language itself, or better yet, supplant English to an engineered language that doesn't have any problems (I'll hold my breath)
😑 😤 😒
We INVENT new glyphs all the time in logos, symbols, and icons.
I love your history videos, you have such a fun video style and I learn many things 😁
Love your videos! I have learned so freaking much. You’re a great teacher with how Interesting you make your videos!
Thank you, very interesting. I read somewhere that there was concern with the simplification of certain characters in that the original meaningful units of the character were being lost or erased.
Great video! I hope to see more videos like this in the future!
Cultural vs. Utilitarian? There's room for both. History is an incredible gateway into culture across time, and it can be studied, appreciated, and even celebrated through writing, art, and music. Stories retold, instruments played, paintings made. And yet, we can still have this simplified, albeit more utilitarian, method of conveyance such that society moves forward as a whole.
It's all very fascinating. Keep these videos going!
It would have been disastrous to move to a latin alphabet because people wouldn’t be able to read the classics (like how us Westerners can’t read Latin, Greek, etc, and so don’t know where we come from). Simplified is a smart compromise.
Interesting video. Thank you.
So is informative. 👏🏾 This has made me interested in the history of Chinese language. This is better than a soap opera.
great video, very interesting, thank you. quality content for such a young lad!
Great informative video!
Thank you for always putting a lot of effort into your videos! :)
I can finally understand it now.
This was a very informative video, thank you based ABC
I enjoyed the style of this video, it was great! 👌👍
Im Indonesian, as an Asian, i agree with you basically Chinese is easy especially when it comes to the pronounciation. Thai is more hard for me. But when it comes to the characters Chinese need more effort to remembering 😂. When it comes to the grammar, Chinese also more easy than my native language (Bahasa Indonesia) because its very simple 😂. But again the hardest thing is only the characters 😂
Easy?
I am a Spanish speaker, the pronunciation is a nightmare to me. Not just the tones. The r, sh, zh, z, x, j, LOL! And the pinyin is not so easy, it has its weird logic. Bahasa Indonesia seems easier, but I never tried to learnt it, not yet. 😊
@@MohammedAhmed-py4rk if you compare Chinese with another tonal language like Thai, you would recognize that Chinese is more simple than Thai
@@myriampro4973 it’s true what he’s saying Thai pronunciation is way harder. But also as a native Spanish speaker those sounds are quite hard. Grammar is not that hard at the beginning but later on, it gets really confusing as it is a totally diferent language, not to mention all the particles for counting.
For me (Brazilian) Chinese grammar is easy, but pronunciation is hard lol
Great information thanks
Very interesting history - thank you!
This video was so funny. I love your videos man. They teach me so much and are always fun to watch
Meanwhile Vietnam ditched their Chinese based script altogether in favor of the Latin based alphabet. Vietnamese could do this though, because the modern Vietnamese alphabet was developed earlier in the 19th century and promoted during the French colonial era. The language itself also has less problem with homophones as in Chinese or Japanese, so writing with the phonetic alphabet doesn't really impede the reading comprehension of the common people. One big downside of this is nowadays the knowledge of more complex Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary of young Vietnamese is much more limited, which is a shame because Sino-Vietnamese makes up between 30-70% of all words in texts and daily speech, depending on the context and formality.
FYI, Homophones in Japanese are the major reason why Japanese is still written like that to this day. That's just how that language works by the way.
@@ankokunokayoubi Yeah I already mentioned that in my comment. Vietnamese could switch to a phonetic script because it has a very rich phonology allowing to it to distinguish between slightly differently pronounced characters. Even with the still somewhat large number of homophones that Vietnamese has, normally the Sino-Vietnamese words are used as compound words, and most of the time only one character among the homophones is more frequently used than most, so homophones are not much of a problem in Vietnamese.
I guess it has to do with the fact that in Vietnam the spoken language is basically Vietnamese only, while in China there are many spoken languages like Hokkien, Cantonese etc. Then you would have to romanize each one of these languages separately.
Isn't actually the reason why ancient China started using characters in the first place that it's the written not spoken form that was understood by all the "Chinese" (including even Koreans and Vietnamese as the members of Sino-civilization)?
@@ankokunokayoubi Granted, many homophones in Japanese are not true homophones; when speaking they are frequently distinguished by tone contour. e.g. 機能 vs 昨日, which are both 「きのう」phonetically, but have very distinct tones.
@@rob6927 Qin dynasty united the land and standardized writing system and many other tool equipment currency measurement etc. it was a disaster before that.
Love your videos!
Super cool video! Thought it already had thousands of hundreds of views...
Interested to hear where you came to the conclusion that reading vertically is naturally slower than reading horizontally. This is definitely true in languages where vertical reading is essentially not a thing, but chinese has traditionally been written in every combination of cardinal directions, sometimes three or four combinations in a single composition or on a sign (including bottom-to-top, left-to-right); feel like if it mattered, the most efficient one would be naturally preferred.
I love your videos! :]
Nice one at 9:16, as someone from Malaysia I would know what this is, also you forgot to mention that simplified form is also officially adopted in Malaysia
Are there any pictures of the other writing sistems/reforms?
Because I've read many times about these other writing reforms that the Chinese government would've used, but I've never seen a picture of them to know how they looked. 🤷♀️
By the way, nice video!
It's really interesting to know more about the Chinese history and how it evolved.
Thanks! Here's the set of simplifications from 1935: www.toutiao.com/article/6437442550848274690/?channel=&source=search_tab
But the other systems and reforms were really hard to find, I'm sure most were lost, especially if they didn't get much traction. I did see some systems from the Movement for a Phonetic alphabet, but lost the website...:(
@@ABChinese thank you so much!
@@user-pp7gb8vy3i Maybe you are looking for 二简字 (second round of Chinese character simplification)?
Note:
Alongside Taiwan, Hong Kong also uses Traditional Chinese as the official written language. As a Hongkonger, I have never been taught to read Simplified Chinese. We do know Pinyin tho through 9 years of mandatory Mandarin education. There's also the Cantonese Pinyin dedicated to Cantonese, but those aren't taught/used outside of dictionaries, similar to English Phonetics :)
does Cantonese have pinyin?? :0 I thought they only had the Yale-something system (I forget the actual name)
You don't need to learn the amputated characters since you learned the true Chinese characters already.
@@dankmemewannabe7692
Cantonese to standard Chinese is like Portugese to French. They have different tones (8 instead of 4?) and preserve the pin-and-zhe in the pronunciation. I think they have different phonetic symbols for Cantonese.
@@ChaohsiangChen amputated characters? The Chinese government needs to take into consideration of the other 55 ethnic groups who are not Han Chinese. This is a compromise made to encourage them to learn the Chinese language.
@@newstar346
Some are like Manchurians, which most speak Chinese today as they forgot their own language long time ago. The other half of those are like ethnic Hmongs, Koreans or Russians, who already adapted and learned Chinese. And there are Uighurs and Tibetans, which the current Chinese policy is imperialistic and despotic on their ancestral lands.
And 92% of Chinese population are Han Chinese. But changing Han cultural icon to cope with ethnic minority..... LOL.
OMG! I want that font that you showed at the begining of the video! It's the one with the Chinese characters and below them their pinyin and then their meanings in English. Where can I get it??? I love it!!! 😍
Is there any proposals of what this system based on Chinese characters would look like? Or what the other symbol based systems look like
Yeah, after watching this video learning this both funny and sad history of Chinese writing, this made me think of a couple of funny things. For one, I find it funny that the ancient Qing rulers blamed their own writing system for not advancing fast enough. As a Japanese, I actually remember learning this interesting piece of history that there were a couple of times in which they tried to get rid of Chinese writing (or kanji as its called in Japanese) out of Japanese because, similarly to the Qing rulers, some thought that studying this writing system at school would hold Japan's education back. There was also a time during the Meiji Restoration in which an American Naval officer tried to make Japan switch their writing system to use entirely Latin writing and tried to prove that Chinese writing is terrible by testing a bunch of people in a writing test, but the guy ended up failing because the people who took his test were highly literate. Japanese kanji may have gone through their own simplification process, but the fact that places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau are places that speak Chinese and still use Traditional Chinese just proves this belief so wrong.
I’m new to all of this but am very interested in Chinese history and Mandarin. Thanks!!!
As an ethnic Chinese, I can definitely see why reform of the writing system was done in the past with great difficulty. Learning some traditional characters (TC) definitely made me realize why there’s a system based on simplified characters (SC). While traditional characters have more depth and soul (especially with regard to meaning of things), simplified characters have more pragmatism and logical explanation.
While we’re at it, I am definitely curious as to why Hong Kong and Macau used TC as a main writing system prior to the handover. Perhaps it’s out of fear? Spite? Consistency?
from what my friend told me the reason the places you mentioned used TC was to distinguish themselves from the politics of China (I haven’t done my own research tho)
@@dankmemewannabe7692 makes sense. Chiang Kai Shek was pushing forward the TC movement at first but abandoned it when he fled to Taiwan, so that he can distinguish ROC from PRC, and make ROC to look more legitimate (the real China, so to speak).
Because it was no longer practical to switch. You see in the 1950s, the mainland Chinese population was barely educated. Literacy wasn't widespread at less than 20%, including semi-literacy. Since most of the population didn't know how to read or write before that, it was easy to switch by just introducing the new SC instead of having people to relearn how to read and write.
Fast forward to the 90s. Most people in Hong Kong were literate in traditional Chinese. That was because Hong Kongers were much more educated, and educated in traditional Chinese. Hong Kong already have a compulsory education of 6 years by the 60s, which was extended to 9 years in 1972. So having an educated, literate population to switch would have been difficult and counterproductive.
In conclusion, it is easier to draw something new on a new paper, than to rub off everything and redraw on an old paper.
IMO it is just because there is no push for a switch.
People get to use whatever characters they please.
As an ethnic Chinese who is native to standard Chinese and fluent in modern as well as literary Chinese, I say that "simplified Chinese" is a practical joke is not practical at all.
In Taiwan or HK, people know and use Chinese akin to older forms, and use a lot of references from literary Chinese. The official documents in Taiwan is still written in literary forms. So people write less characters as compared to mainland way, which is actually a vulger interpretation of vernacular Chinese designed to separate Chinese population from classical literature, religious text and oral tradition.
It is a big joke since humanity studies in mainland Chia train students to recognize traditional Chinese.
And nobody writes nowadays anyway.
Excellent video I have waiting for a long time.
Thank you, I don't know your name yet.
谢谢 ！謝謝 ！
Thank you for that interesting video. I didnt know about Zhuyin yet. It would have been a great idea to try to make that work.
Thank you!
High quality content! Thanks for your hard work. Looking forward to the next video!
Glad you like it Josh🥰
I've always wondered what would happen if China stuck with its Latin alphabet plan. Maybe Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan would be pressured to join? Maybe overseas Chinese communities will also adopt Mandarin written in Latin and today public signage would look more like Vietnamese. It's weird, but it was something that almost happened.
It did happen. It is called Vietnamese. Vietnamese is only a vestige of Chinese. Only 10% of Chinese, like MP3 is only 10% of CD which is only 10% of LP.
China tried several ways to romanize Chinese, but it turned out quite bad, since there are too many characters that have same pronunciation.
This was a good overview, and I appreciate the humor.
As difficult as hanzi are, I think they are appropriate since Mandarin has so many homophones. It's probably the reason ancient Chinese developed and adopted characters instead of an alphabet in the first place. I imagine romanization would be feasible for Sinitic languages that have significantly more phonological diversity, which is the reason Korean and Vietnamese were able to successfully make the shift.
Chinese people understand each other just fine in speech, despite there being no characters in speech.
Of course it's possible to write Mandarin in a phonetic system and have it remain understandable - it would, however, require a decently long period of getting used to, where people would have a harder time reading, similar to if an English person had to learn to read English written in the Greek alphabet.
If you manage to include all phonemic elements in the alphabet, it should be basically equivalent to spoken language. And if you can understand each other in spoken language, it should be possible in written as well.
@@wasmic5z Speech allows for nonverbal contextual cues that are typically unavailable in the writing medium.
@@sayven Spoken language allows for nonverbal contextual cues that are typically unavailable in the writing medium.
Ancient Chinese people use Yue (Cantonese) instead of Mandarin. Cantonese has 9 tones (instead of Mandarin's 4 tones) so homophones aren't a big issue. The majority of the Chinese population actually speaks Cantonese before Mandarin was declared the national language. Nowadays, only Hong Kong still recognizes Cantonese as the official language :(
As a Vietnamese learning Chinese, tbh, it is more easy to learn how to pronounce Chinese words. Since Vietnam was undergone a Northern colonial period for more than 1000 yrs, that's why many of Chinese words and Vietnamese words are similar in pronunciation (we just don't realize that but we still use it in everyday talk). Yet, Chinese characters is still somewhat difficult to remember.
It wasn't colonialism. The truth hurt and you might not want to accept it. But Ancient Northern Vietnam was a part of Ancient China.
Back then, people in Northern Vietnam and people in all parts of China were considered the same people in the same nation. Like Han people, Tang people...Because they all had the same culture, wore the same style of clothes and used the same Han Chinese written language (which even today still can be seen in ancient Vietnamese buildings).
Native ancient Vietnamese and ancient Han Chinese had lived together and mixed together for 1000 years. So even when later Northern Vietnam broke away from China, many Vietnamese Kings had ancient Han Chinese heritage in them and even considered/declared themself ancient Han Chinese descendants...
It's just like how Southern Vietnam back then was the ancient Champa Kingdom, but after becoming part of Vietnam for hundreds of years, everyone in South Vietnam considered themself Vietnamese not "Champa people" anymore...
@@The_Art_of_AI_888 Thankyou for your information.
Actually, not many Vietnamese know this ugly truth but consider a thousand-year war that grows their hatred against China.
It is true that native ancient Vietnamese was the Baiyue located in southern of China (part of today Guangdong).
Unfortunately, a large number of Vietnamese people do not care much where we were from or what cross-cultural value is.
This is just my subjective opinion. At school, we did not study much about culture, maybe couple few pages and then turned to Vietnamese history against China, France, American and how our father bravely protect the country. I just do not get it why we have learn those events again but not something new. And those events appeared over and over again during 12-year-education. That's why Vietnamese people tend to be more aggressive with China.
My major is linguistics and education. I have to say that our education system have problems. However, it still remains the same for decades. Even though there was a reform several years ago, the result did not show any better. Perhaps, education system is the main factor that can change people' view. Of course, there are tons of information with reliable source but they choose to stick to the course book.
And one more interesting thing I would like share. My ancient is Southern Vietnamese people and once my grandmother told me it was very easy to distinguish Northern Vietnamese and Southern Vietnamese just by their looks. Of course that Northern Vietnamese somewhat similar to our neighbor Chinese. I know this might raise disagreement but Southern people took it for granted.
简体和繁体和发音有什么关系啊？我不理解
@@scoopimmortal1297 为什么我不理解？ 我学习语言和文化，都是我的专业。你会说越南语吗？怎么可能说它们没有关系？虽然英语和中文的发音有关系。
As chinese who grown up in mainland china, I prefer traditional chinese because it's more beautiful to me and more importantly I can read most characters from ancient stone tablet. But the simplified characters are easier to read with modern smaller font. Some traditional characters are not that friendly for people without a good eye vision.
Me too, but if I had to write anything longer than a few sentences by hand, SC all the way.
In this computerized world tho, I feel like TC can and should make a comeback.
I am learning chinese and i love your vids you should totaly do more duolingo vids!
Thank you for another insightful and entertaining video! 🙏
Thanks for always coming around and watching!❤️
@@ABChinese The earliest writing in China is actually pottery. The Chinese inscribed on ceramics unearthed in Shaanxi Province has a history of more than 6,000 years. Oracle bone inscriptions took 2,800 years to form systematic writing on the basis of ceramic writing. Chinese affairs will never give up Chinese characters. Chinese characters have influenced the whole of East Asia.
Your production values are insane. I thought this was a channel with already a large audience, since the quality was so good!
I really liked the writing and the way you presented it. On top of that the recording and the editing was really clean.
I was kinda shocked to see just above 1k views! Your content punches way above it's weight-class. Now only youtube needs to realize that too ;)
Wish you the best!
I hope so too😭😭😭 This video took sooo long to make
Chinese characters simplification started at least 2200 years ago basically since we have characters guys, characters back then were even more complicated, it's a fundamental law that things go from complicated to simple, language is a tool for people to communicate, if you want it complicated you use it then, as a Chinese, we use simplified Chinese daily and use traditional chinse as an art from primary school to high school, we learn old poems and articles, those are all in traditional Chinese characters, understand?
You don't understand. Language is sacred. Language has its roots in religion. To understand Latin based words, you have to go back to the Latin roots.
"Holiday" is synonymous with vacation day. Rest stay. Off day. The original word is "Holy Day". See the difference?
To understand words, you have to go back to its roots.
@@quach8quach907 no you don't understand, do you even speak Chinese, do you know how we use it, Chinese is different, it has its own system, and also people who created it are even more sacred, in China its the people who decide the future and development of the language, not the language itself, and I can say without doubt that most of our people stand with the simplification as it always. Don't judge anything if you don't know about the culture and language and the history and its people.
It’s not a fundamental law that things go from complicated to simplified. If so, we would continue eating from boiled meat instead of advancing to cuisines. There’s an difference between a wholesale, government sponsored simplification program, and a decentralised, societal change of characters that takes place over time. Some characters changed over hundreds of years, one government program changed thousands of words overnight - there’s a difference. Deciding to use traditional for only artistic purposes defeats purpose of learning it. It’s like buying a jacket and putting it in a closet, never to use it
@@ksm-7184 food is sort of pleasure, language is a tool, how can you give this example, plus I can give you 1000 examples of simplification of tools, and also that's not what government forced people, it's Chinese people that wanted to simplify it, government represented people like always, it's people's choice based on our culture and language and history trend. Some people talk Bullshit about it just because those clowns anti China and it's party, they simply hate everything that China's government is doing or has done. As simple as that, admit it!
So are you from Mott St. or Flushing, where they still use the old system?
.... and computers came to rescue to save chinese characters once and for all
lol no
I am glad they did not do away with the essence of the writing system. It is vert powerful and although takes more time to learn, it is a living system. It feels much bettee to read what feel like direct concepts instead of letters one has to convert into concepts. It feels less linear and less left brained.
Enlightening
辛苦了！谢谢你的努力 😃 looking forward to the next one!
People always look at superficial easy to see thing to blame for problems. I'm glad China did not fall for that. I'm glad China decided to fix the broken parts and not throw the whole thing away and replace it with someone else's broken parts.
Interesting, so how long has Zhuyin been around for?
Since 1913
Another massive success for the CPC - improving literacy rates from 20% in 1949 to 97% today, while at the same time preserving a cherished part of Chinese culture.
pretty sure other places that use radiational chinese like taiwan/hong kong have equally if not higher literacy rates.
@@lyhthegreat Neither Taiwan nor Hong Kong had a vast population of illiterate peasants in 1949.
@@ta0304 No it isn't. You are simply wrong.
I enjoyed this video- it's a good synopsis of how 拼音was created.
I am proficient with 拼音and so so with 注音 and Wade Giles. I've studied and used all these systems, but I've never looked into the history and politics of how these systems were created. I write 简体字 and 繁体字, but seeing simplified characters on buildings and shop signs just hurts my teeth!
Wow, really well done; informative, and fun to watch!
Thanks Matt😉
you sound a little sick, I hope you get better soon. It's okay to take breaks.
Could you do a video on components and radicals ? I recently got my HSK 6 but I still don't understand the difference... Some are phonetic, some are semantic, but in a lot of characters the phonetic component does not match the pronunciation, and the semantic component does not match the meaning. They also seem to be in random places in the character, sometimes left, sometimes right or centre or centre-left. I recently learned that there are multiple component and radical systems...Some people claim it can be used to learn Chinese, but I really don't know how. Could you debunk? Thanks
The pronunciation of modern Chinese (Mandarin) have changed a lot compared to ancient Chinese. The pronunciation of many characters(hanzi) are almost the same or similar to their phonetic components(shengpang) in anciant, but not in modern. But many hanzi not similar to their shengpang in Mandarin may similar in Cantonese and Japanese onyomi😂
the components help you memorize the characters, but there is no simple rules to summarize it.
This is a good topic, will consider
Give an example.
That's a good idea 💡🥂😘,...bro! 好兄第...
if the latin script is pinyin, what is the cyrillic script?
10:43 there is an editing error. it should be "2nd" not "3rd"
Fun and fascinating
Also, the way the memes are plugged in this video is incredible 😆 😆
I am a Chinese character user. Chinese characters seem to have one more dimension than pinyin characters. They are drawn based on what you see and then optimized into symbols, such as "人" = human being, "大" = "big" Opening his hands tells his companions that he has just seen something huge. Of course, it is not just a simple meaning, there are also many words where half of the text is used to indicate the pronunciation. "半", "伴" and "绊" all have the same pronunciation, similar to "bank" without the "k". 伴 = half, companion = person + half, meaning partner, 绊 = silk thread + fall in mid-air = trip, 拌 = hand + half water, half flour = stirring, another difficulty is that Chinese has tones, similar to English "come on", different intonations have many meanings。When "人" is used as part of the character, it will be written as "亻", which means that the character is likely to be related to human beings, such as: 从 = follow, 众 = a group of people, 你 = you, 他 = him, 囚 = a person. In prison, yes, Chinese characters are so logical
Interesting thing is, all Mainland-published chinese dictionaries do have Zhuyin Fuhao annotations, as well as a conversion chart. Not that... people really use them lol
Edit: also ngl even though I usually use Simplified Characters, it's a shame they replaced vertical writing order. I honestly like it better.
Nothing's stopping you from writing vertically; though very few websites enable it, it is supported well by web browsers today, and has been an option this whole time with pen and paper. Chinese has been written in every direction conceivable (bottom to top, right to left, disjointed diagonal lines, spirals of upright characters, etc) and is still written in many directions in Taiwan and elsewhere.
@@microcolonel oh don't get me wrong I do all the time, I will happily write in whatever direction I feel like
Latin system would have been a nightmare in a tonal language full of homophones. Glad they stuck with the simplified system, kind of a middle ground of allowing people to learn quicker while preserving historical connections.
Well, it worked for Vietnamese, which is practically the same regarding tones and homophones. So I don't see how it wouldn't work with Chinese too other than cultural reasons.
@@legendarypussydestroyer6943 Vietnamese is pretty ugly to look at, and many words make sense when only when put into context. Similar issues with romanization of Chinese exist in Vietnamese. A word that’s spelt the same way means vastly different things but you can only differentiate it when it’s put into context but not on its own. Its just a problem that the Vietnamese have learned to accept but it doesn’t mean the Chinese will want to accept that as well.
@@legendarypussydestroyer6943 actually Vietnamese has more complex phonology and thus less homophones compared to Mandarin.
@@MarkMiller304 Spelled in the same way? Don't they use diacritics to signify different tones, thus different meanings?
The issue with China doing romanization would rather be that there is no such language as "Chinese", but rather a few different spoken languages like Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin etc. that are bound together only by the characters, so their written form.
Vietnam on the other hand only has one spoken form of its language.
@@rob6927 Vietnam has 6 tones, there are way more words that sound the same than 6 tones can differentiate. In China the official language is mandarin, any romanization would be done with the official language. All schools regardless of region teach in mandarin, regardless of dialect most Chinese are fluent in mandarin. Mandarin only has 4 tones the word Shi has 20 different characters all representing different meanings but all spelt Shi in Romanization. How do you represent 20 different words with 4 tones?
Anyone saying Simplified Chinese is easier and more practical, well, "后路", do I mean (a) the road to become queen or (b) plan B?
In Traditional Chinese, (a) is 后路 and (b) is 後路, no confusion which makes communications much more efficient and accurate.
Plan B. 后路 in modern day Mandarin almost never intended as (a)
@@testxxxx123 I beg to differ, ex: 凯特王妃的后路充满了困难与挑战, so... which one do I mean?
@@testxxxx123 Due to that there aren't as many monarchies as there were 110 years ago.
good video
Many times things appeared on the screen for too short a time to even see what it was. That’s ok to do sometimes to get people to go back and pause and get more watch time, but most people don’t want to do that 20 times in a video.
Thank you for the feedback! If it's on the screen for a short time, then it's probably not important or most people won't care about it. But I'll extend them a bit next time
Excuse me how many characters should you learn then I have been wondering for few years but got no answer so can you please help and tell me please answer 🙏 😊
500?
🥲
I will likely make a future video on this but you really should focus on the number of "words" you learn, not the number of "characters". Most Chinese words are compound words, and a native speaker who knows 3500 characters might know 15,000 words, for example. You need around 2000 words to carry a basic conversation in any language.
Thank you but I think I should learn words instead of characters to make it easier what do you think 🤔
Now that I think about it using zhuyin would’ve made more sense in that regards cause it’s phonetic based and it also adds the tone too. Why China didn’t adopt that is anyones guess at this point
Conservatives in the Chinese (ROC) government, who opposed any writing system reform, condemned zhuyin to be a pronunciation annotation only, and never to be used to replace Characters
太感谢了。😃👍🇨🇴
Actually the 70s version never took off because essentially, the methods of simplification used blotched the whole system. But it did make it so that some people who's surnames were simplified, permanently kept the new character when the last round of simplification was reverted.
Can you elaborate?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chinese_characters@@Anonymous-df8it
@@Anonymous-df8it e.g.「蕭」寫作「肖」
This video was so informative and funny! Im surprised you dont have a larger following :O
Thanks for the message! I only made a pivot towards high stakes videos recently, so hopefully more people will enjoy these videos in the future too:)
Wow a full language history video thats rare
Good history lesson. Thanks. Been wondering how pinyin came about!
Thank You for making this video to tell me the true. Thank you!
I need mando to canto man 😭
oldest writing system? well depends on how u look at it, u could consider the modern chinese script as a different script since it has changed so much
I’m glad you mentioned note 12 in your description. I think history like the 大跃进 and 百花活动 is essential to know for anyone that wants to know about Chinese history, let along world history. Nonetheless this is a fantastic video! I wrote a paper exactly about this during my sophomore year of college. 感谢你了这非常有用的视频！我对你的视频有感兴趣了！
Nice! What do you study?
@@ABChinese I’m getting my bachelors in business administration, but also 2 minors in Chinese and international business.
@@jackogrady6544 Good luck man! Sounds like you want to go into international business in Asia
@@ABChinese definitely! But thanks to people like you, I can be more informed and in the loop of history, culture and the language. 你真牛逼啊！
Why havent i subscribed yet
Actually it is easier to read vertically, in particular the newspaper justified-spacing column format. It was actually shown that the eye needs to make more effort for wide horizontal movement. Surprisingly the hands are like this as well but it's an unrelated topic, in a nutshell horizontal extension is bad and puts additional avoidable strain especially during the digital era where users read write and interact with devices during the most time of their lives, aka the mouse keyboard and touch devices, alas, when reading, it has indeed a dramatic effect.
So, actually for me, I'd prefer the Chinese, Japanese, etc (CJK language group), to actually keep its traditional form and format. A compromise is the newspaper column format. It works also very effectively for memorization. I urge the reader to try it out as a method! :)
Do you have the source for this? I’d love to read it
@@ABChinese I'll try to find them. It was a very long time ago that I read about it, and/but additional research was conducted for sure.
(To be clear though, the comparison to the arm extension which was also shown, was mine in the comment. The causes are probably different, however the result really seems the same though, that's why I thought it was interesting to share too.)
10:20
Holy you actually added a Tl;dr to the video
nice
0:20 I love how 金文 jīnwén looks
So glad I started learning Chinese in Taiwan
Simplified Hinanese(2040 AD)
Note:some look very similar!
Unrelated question: why do Simplified Characters use a shit font compared to Traditional Characters?
The Lava Lamp isn't turned on.
So the Roman script has been used in it's current form since at least the first century AD, there have been a few characters added for some languages but 23 of the characters are the exact same shape and are generally similar to their modern pronunciation n the languages that use them. And its predecessor Greek and prior Phoenician and proto Canaanite go back to around the same time as Chinese bone script. So the Chinese characters while old are definitely newer in their current form. Someone from the first century AD that spoke Latin while not able to speak the language would be able to make a reasonable approximation of the pronunciation. I don not believe this is possible with Chinese, though I am not as versed in it's development.
meanwhile Japan:
It is a bad idea to abandon Chinese scripts.
Script and language are different, especially when using a picture script system.