Yes, well said! The fact that the same 面 is used for noodles and face, somehow I feel that's offensive and unfair to the noodles and also a rather lazy way to treat the language.
And btw I can see that 面 was kind of a lazy move because they didn't think it was necessary to simplify the left radical at all, however I have no idea why they chose to use the 后 Empress character to also mean back, maybe it's purely a pronunciation choice.
I love your analogy of the Mona Lisa! I never really considered the idea of going to the bother of learning one thing when really it's not any more trouble to learn the other. At first glance, and as someone who didn't know anything about the writing until a few years ago, traditional can look complicated. However, when you break it down a bit it's less so i.e. 樂 = 幺+白+幺+木. Or 饅 = 食+昷+又. Like the spoken language, some parts might not mean much on their own but you add them together and it starts to make sense (mostly! 🤣). I feel the simplified is more disconnected from the meanings and to me that seems harder.
the analogy made me think about what happened to ecce homo but unlike that 'restoration' its difficult to see simplified characters as comical, theyre just kind of sad..
@@RadiAnssi I didn’t know what you meant but just looked it up and 😅😅😅 ! It’s nice people can see the humorous side of the “ecce mono” 🐵 - but yeah, no humor in simplified at all!
What I can see after watching this video is that the components are extremely important to analyze words, especially new words that you might not know at all, but thanks to the characters and its components you can guess it. I feel like traditional to simplified was a necessary thing to do to make sure that currently used characters had a simpler form, however I do see how in many cases they just F'd up and destroyed some information. This can be compared to a lossy compression algorithm, as opposed to a lossless one. Something that I notice now is that if Chinese characters were completely replaced by romanization alone then it would be a real challenge to know how words originated and developed. True that there might be little ambiguities thanks to context, however when you see new words you're no longer going to be able to understand where it came from. In English we know that most words that start in "pre" have something to do with "previous", like "prehistory", "preapproval", "preclude"... In the Chinese languages it would be much harder without characters because: 1 the different languages/dialects, and 2 a lot of characters have the same pronunciation but mean different things...
very true. even simplified is already difficult enough to read in smaller sizes, let alone traditional traditional characters were used to be written with a brush with thick strokes on a huge piece of paper, not cramped into small spaces with a size smaller than your pinky. so in terms of practical use, the age of the internet actually demands the use of simplified due to better readability
I lived in Shanghai for 15 years and i was the only one not to understand traditional characters (though im a foreigner). Any Chinese i met could read traditional characters, regardless of the level of education. Traditional characters are actually quite common in Mainland China, as often commercial lines often use them and KTV (which are ever popular) were often dubbed in traditional in the past for many years. Honestly, the debate should include the facts that young people learn print characters and at same time the handwritten version of it, because nobody writes with a pen the print characters, Chinese people always produced a "simplified" version handwritten version, like forever.. way before the various waves of simplifications during the 20th century. To fuel the debate, i can see one advantage of simplified over traditional: they remain intelligible on any small screens such as mobile or watches, whereas traditional characters which can easily have 15 stokes are impossible to understand if the screen is too small.
Exactly because of your last point, I strongly believe simplified characters are a good thing 🤔 OK, maybe they fxkd up some characters like 后 and 面, however there are few of those and for the most part you can switch between the two systems quickly
@@Staarkalinou 简and繁 is not the same character, 业 几 尔 were replaced by other Chinese characters with the same sound, and are not the original Chinese characters, so it is not a matter of simplification.
@@user-hq3ht2hp6x There are several methods of simplification but usually the 简体字 relates to the 繁体字 in one way or another. If you search 简化字 on 百度百科, you'll find a short yet interesting article on this topic. You can also check on the Wikipedia page of it, and search inside the page for 尔 as you suggested. They mentioned about the cursive script i was talking about. Anyway the Chinese government and Chinese scholars (including 鲁迅) themselves call it simplification so it's enough for me to be convinced 🙂
What I love is that even if you don’t know the character, with traditional characters you can generally deduce its meaning and how it’s pronounced based on the radical and the components. I’ve learnt both. I find traditional more familiar as I grew up with it (thanks tvb haha) and I went to Cantonese Saturday school as a kid. Also the Chinese books, magazines and newspaper in my household were always traditional. However, when I learnt mandarin later in life, some of the similarities did help with memorising the patterns of simplifying. Back in the day, my mandarin teacher would mark me incorrect if I used the traditional character (more habit and being unable to visualise the simplified version), whilst in HK, people seem to be more accepting of using a mixture of both. I’ve also seen some Taiwanese people use the odd simplified character here and there. This is more for written rather than typed, I guess for faster writing if in a rush or writing a lot? Of course, this goes both ways and some people can’t accept simplified. It’s mostly about familiarity, and whatever you learnt first, that’s what you will learn towards. There’s no right or wrong but I do find traditional characters more beautiful, but the ease and speed of simplified has its perks too. I sometimes will handwrite the simplified character on my phone (on the traditional keyboard) and it’ll transform to traditional, purely because there are less strokes and faster for me to write what I want… Just my two cents worth…
I can't agree more. Japan has the same problem, which actually is on-going. We use the traditional Chinese characters, which some people insist we shouldn't because they are too hard. On top of that, there are people who assert simplifying our grammar which they say is too complicated. Modern Japanese history is a constant struggle with the people who want to destroy our culture. This has been going on for almost 200 years.
You are very amazing to understand very well about Chinese characters, speaking and writing Cantonese. I did write little simplified characters sometimes for time saving but now I would insist using the precious traditional characters, that’s one of the beautiful features in HK.
Honestly even though I'm learning Traditional characters I think simplified isn't that bad because even if some meanings get completely gone to the original character it still beauty and considered Chinese characters. if you're learning traditional or simplified, your still learning Chinese so if you pick either one it still counts of learning Chinese no matter if the characters is traditional or simplified. I'm learning Mandarin and honestly, I picked traditional because I wanted to challenge myself and learn the original first and then go back to simplified.
I became interested in Mandarin since I first heard a Chinese pop singer born in mainland China, the video clips of her songs are subtitled in Simplified Mandarin Chinese. I found the music and lyrics so beautiful, even I didn't speak a hint of Chinese! that inspired me to learn the language. I think the simplified characters, long before watching your video, are like little masterpieces, they are beautiful to me, but the traditional ones are more complicated, whether they both have the same meaning or not.
I'm a HKer and a strong supporter of traditional characters. Years ago, I had this debate with students from the mainland in uni. And I showed them the 2nd-round simplified characters and asked them whether they liked the 2nd-round simplified characters and how they'd feel if someone were to force them to adopt the 2nd round simplified characters and stop writing the 1st round simplified characters. And, first of all, they didn't know there'd been a 2nd round of simplified characters published, which didn't get implemented in the end, and look even nastier than the 1st round that people are using. And the mainland students were quite surprised to find that out. But once they had the chance to "goggle" at the 2nd round simplified characters, I knew they felt how I'd always felt about simplified characters (and u could tell from their faces, too). And the debate died down right away. After all, the arguments for the 1st round simplified characters would be equally applicable for the 2nd round, and they would never want to adopt the 2nd round at all.
Did you know the 1st round was at first made by Roc (and even before), which include a lot of component simplification based on cursive and simple variant like 话, but after, the CCP add some weird characters in it like 汉 with component without context 又， and merge some homonyms characters for no reason like 麵 noodle and 面 face... 😢 (only in mandarin of course, sometime not in other Chinese languages).
“the arguments for the 1st round simplified characters would be equally applicable for the 2nd round” No, this doesn't applicable at all.Maybe it was in your dream that you perfectly refuted the students from mainland China. You couldn't refute me at all.The first round of simplified characters and the second round of simplified characters are completely incomparable, because most of the first round of simplified characters are Chinese characters that have existed in the past two thousand years of Chinese history, or the cursive writing of this Chinese character has been passed through for thousands of years. of inspection.However, the second round simplified characters are completely new characters created by modern linguists. Due to oversimplification, a lot of confusion was caused. This set of simplified characters failed to pass the test of people's daily life, so it was abolished. Returning to the topic of simplified and traditional Chinese characters, modern Chinese began to use vernacular instead of classical Chinese. The number of Chinese characters that need to be written has doubled than before. The most commonly used words in classical Chinese are words with one Chinese character, but the most commonly used words in vernacular are words with two Chinese characters. Vocabulary, so simplifying characters is a must, otherwise it will be very tiring when writing by hand.And because traditional Chinese characters are designed for classical Chinese, each of its Chinese characters carries a lot of information, and each Chinese character is very complicated. When it becomes a vocabulary of two Chinese characters, there is no need to be so complicated. Finally, on print and electronic displays, simplified characters can be displayed very very small, but if traditional characters are very small, they will be completely unreadable.To sum up, simplified Chinese characters are far more suitable for modern people to use than traditional Chinese characters, and there is an inheritance relationship between simplified characters and traditional Chinese characters, which does not cut off the cultural heritage of modern Chinese and ancient Chinese. Mainland students can even use simplified characters to learn classical Chinese. This is the perfect solution.
Watching the beginning of the video, I thought to myself, but Hong Kong and Taiwan do not have a literacy problem -- then of course you made the same point! Thank you for this. Sound arguments
That is not a sound argument at all, when you consider Taiwan is a small island and Hong Kong is a city-state. China, on the other hand, is a giant country that is hundreds of times bigger than either, with a much wider range of environments, and had a much lower literacy rate to begin with, for a much, much larger population. Both Taiwan and Hong Kong were urbanized much earlier than China was. The fact that the literacy rate in China is only a few percentage points lower than those of Taiwan or Hong Kong, when in the past that gap was several magnitudes larger, is in fact proof of the success of simplification. I also find issue with the view that Simplifying the characters is "dumbing down" the language, especially when now China is becoming a huge hub of academic output, with several Chinese universities rivaling Western universities. The language itself did not change; the means through which it is expressed was. When a Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese person and a Mandarin-speaking Chinese person converse, it's not as though the Taiwanese person's speech is inherently more sophisticated than the Chinese person's.
Simplified Chinese is not dumbed-down Chinese. The difference is always typographic, they just changed the font, to something way more simple. Dumbing dow would be to remove some characters and switch to sylabary (like katakana in Japan) or to an alphabet (like Hangul in Korea).
Love to have an ambassador like yourself Sue Marguerite promoting Traditional Chinese and Cantonese. And your rendition of Karen Carpenter's are excellent as well!
So first off, I love your channel and thank you for being a champion/ally in the Cantonese language, including Traditional Chinese. I personally prefer Traditional Chinese characters, but that’s only because I learned it in Hong Kong when I was a child. I think instead of good vs bad, or pretty vs ugly, a better question for me to ponder is what should the written Chinese language be? Should it be based on preservation, evolution/adaption, or something else altogether? For example, Japanese used to use Kanji (Chinese characters) for the majority of writing until WWII when they standardized the use of Hiragana for natural Japanese and Katagana for foreign words. In a way, I don’t think it’s bad for them to simplify and standardize their writing system. Similarly, English is notoriously a melting pot of other languages, which regularly introduce foreign words like Kimchi and Umami into the English dictionary. French, on the other hand, is very protective and constantly restrict to a small number of words. So - what should the Chinese language be? So while I personally 100% agree with your points, I do see value of simplifying the writing system to enable higher literacy (internationally, not just for Chinese people), or evolving over time to encourage language adaption. I agree that Traditional is “prettier”, but that’s really subjective right? Who’s to say no one will find the “Mona Lisa with stick figure” just as pretty? :)
Traditional characters is not just about beauty. The system is poetic. The CCP simplified version removed the essence of the character and eliminated many words. Furthermore, I rarely see simplified Chinese set vertically from right to left……Let’s teach acronym instead of words because it is easier to pick up.
The thing about simplified Chinese is that it's not really simpler. It's just less strokes and less intimidating for new learners, more user friendly if anything. But ultimately the system is the same, Memorization and pictographs. To truly simplify it the whole Chinese language would need a overhaul.
@@lordkent8143 To a certain extent. First, what is the need to simplify a good system? Each word has so much meaning. Calligraphy is an art form that many Western artists adorn. Second, the CCP is not just simplifying the stroke but also eliminating words. Imaging in English, "would" and "wood" sounds similar. Let's use "wood" to replace "would." In a big picture, CCP is erasing culture. If we really want to preserve our culture, teach traditional writing as foundation. Then, simplified form (the National Party version) come afterwards.
Having past lives in China and being an American who has tried to teach myself chinese, It was just a gut feeling that I did not care for simplified chinese. I believe it comes from me living in a time with traditional chinese.
I have one! OK, I just made it available to preview and download for free over at www.cantolingo.com. Just click on my Level 1 course and scroll down to where the curriculum comes up and then you can read and/or download the vocab notebook where I talk all about the Yale System and give a tone chart and things. I hope that helps! :)
@@CantoneseCorner Yeah, I'm Cantonese but I haven't been using on a regular basis so I am very sloppy. Hoping to get back to regular sessions with my friends and family.
How's your life back in USA? I assume you're from Miami? Ive been in HK nearly 2 years but plan a long holiday in London and re-evaluate my future here in HK.
I don't mind simplified for short hand writing. But when you see simplified for official names and even historical places that's when it's ugly. It should be like print and cursive. Simplified for hand writing but traditional for all news media, Signs, and names.
For cantonese speakers, some simp-chin words are based on mandarin, so we can't read the words out by looking at the sound components (燈->灯). But to be fair, most of the time we just memorise the trad-chin words without understanding the meaning of the components in the words. But maybe we should also look at japanese - they simplified their kanji (chin characters) decades ago, and of course the 2 sets of alphabets are kinda ultimate ver. of simp-chin in their own way, which should we say has been indeed successful?
"The 'big deal' that I have with it is that it was done chop-change, immediately, out with the old in with the new, done. That is not what's called a 'gradual change', a 'natural change' in the language." Every change to a standard language is made this way. By definition standard languages exist when some group defines a standard, and by definition they only change when a new standard is created. That process is always "chop-change, immediately." For example, while I was studying Spanish as an American high school student in the 1990s, the alphabet changed. Out with the "ch" and "ll" in with the "c, h" and "l,l." Chop-change, immediately. Next years dictionaries were organized differently. Would that have been better somehow if it had been gradual? Around the same time there was a German language spelling reform. Same story, chop-change, out with the eszet in with the esses. The Russian alphabet I learned in college isn't quite the same as the alphabet Tolstoy used. Out with the extra "i" and the theta. Chop change. Did this make it harder to study Church Slavonic later, which includes those letters? No, it didn't. So your complaint here is basically a complaint about the existence of standardized languages. As a lingophile myself, I appreciate your affinity for natural language change. If you looked hard enough you would find comments from me encouraging Chinese language TH-camrs to include examples from their non-standard local language varieties. On the other hand, though, as a poor person I appreciate the considerable economic impact on poor people of language diversity. Standardizing language was one of many steps China took in the process of lifting *800 MILLION human beings* out of poverty over the course of a few decades. As an American, if I get cancer tomorrow I won't find out until I'm dying a horrible death, because the United States doesn't provide healthcare as a human right. China does. And China is partly able to do that because people from opposite ends of their large country are educated in the same language. Could China have had these enormous economic successes without Simplified Characters, even in the face of non-stop economic warfare from the western hegemony? That's not clear, and more relevantly it certainly wasn't clear when the decision was made. Taiwan and Singapore don't stand up as examples for two big reasons: they're both relatively tiny geographically, and they are both economic allies of the United States. As much as I love the natural process of language change, human suffering is simply more important. *It IS elitist* to ignore this impact.
I agree with you for the most part, especially I don't like how "unpretty" the simplified characters are. If they want of simplify then they should just reduce the number of strokes for the more complicated characters and leave the rest alone. BTW, did you make your "bold prediction"? I must have missed it.
I have been learning both, simplified and traditional, and because I learned simplified first, it is still easier for me to use them. But since I started learning classical Chinese and Cantonese, I realized that simplified characters lack of something... they lost some of the original meaning, they lost the beauty of Chinese characters, which is really sad. Your video reminded me to study harder on traditional characters, especially writing.... thank you so much. Love from Germany :)
I'm so glad! Thank you for watching and commenting and for "getting it" .... because for me, it's all about how sad to have lost a part of the culture. It's interesting, because if you never knew it, you can't mourn its loss .... but once you know it and lost it, it's almost unbearable. I think of Hong Kong in this way .... if one has never lived there and experienced the awesomeness that it was, one can't understand how tragic the current situation is. It makes it hard for people to relate to each other .... and I guess that's the challenge -- to realise that we have to meet each other halfway. To allow HK people to grieve what was lost, while also encouraging them to be open to the inevitable changes. It's not easy and is being managed horribly at the moment. Thanks again .... I'm really glad you commented! Love from the US ❤️🇺🇸🇭🇰❤️
I agree with your points. I just wanted to add my two cents as a longtime Mandarin learner. I don't know about Cantonese, but in Mandarin, it would be completely impractical to try to Romanize the language due to the high number of homophones. Yes, traditional characters are harder to write, but in my experience, they're not more difficult to recognize when typing.
And I also agree that recognizing and typing characters is pretty easy once you've done it for long enough, however I prefer Simplified characters because they have less strokes and are easier to read when they're small
"The beauty of the characters" Traditional characters really are beautiful when you blow them up this big, with 8 on the whole screen (and to be fair, i figure you could pack in another dozen at that size). They can get totally illegible at *practical font sizes* however. I totally agree that Traditional Characters are great for any artistic design. But I think it's hard to argue that they're better for practical day-to-day usage. I don't think the Mona Lisa is even available as an emoji. I kinda hope not.
Although I understand both traditional and simplified characters, I have to say the former has a much in-depth substance in terms of beauty and meaning than the latter.
Consider going to eat noodle, simplified form is 食面, traditional is 食麵, in simplified form is it easting face or eating noodle, without the context of the rest of conversation or text it's impossible to find out, traditional form benefit from having the context built in. In terms of utility it fit the purpose. Sadly because of the population size, simplified it more dominant.
Here is my opinion. Before literacy became widespread, there were the elites, who could read, and the the rest, who could not read. After introducing simplified characters, there are still the elite, who communicate with each other using traditional characters, and the rest, who must use the simplified script. Thus, where there were two levels of educated society in the past (the literate and the illiterate), there are now two new levels of educated society (those can read the traditional characters and those who can’t). Those who only know simplified characters may be limited, therefore, in their choice of profession, etc.
using less functional simplified characters isnt the main problem. but abandon the original one. not giving you more choices but remove your choice. making people feel like using traditional character is "illegal" and "wrong" reading and writing are in different difficulty levels. a s6 primary school student in modern day can read most of the characters. so i dont think theres benefit to only allow using simplified characters in printings. for writing, using simplified characters has a long history. it always be a choice. and now forcing people use a specific character type is much less meaningful for keyboard typing
You’re not taking into account the fact that they didn’t have unified characters for traditional forms, they had the same character written in several different ways in traditional form, and they tried to unify it as well as simplify it so everyone would write the same character. I get that they could’ve chosen one traditional character to represent all the other versions of it buuuut they thought it would be easier to teach, since most people didn’t know how to write anyway, so it wasn’t like everybody had to relearn the characters, mostly teachers had to update their knowledge. 汉字叔叔 has a mini documentary on this whole thing, it’s very interesting. I used to think simplified characters were stupid until I saw that documentary and really understood why they did it. Also, it got to a point where even the people that knew how to write were confused because there wasn’t a clear rule character writing, which meant the government was decided at first to ban characters all together like the Korean did for example. I highly recommend the hanzishushu documentary to clear all this up. As for students, I think using books that contain both forms, like integrated Chinese helps us understand both, maybe learn how to write both. But maybe learning how to write simplified but being able to recognize traditional is a more logical approach.
People who are against simplified Chinese characters seem to not understand at all why the Chinese characters were simplified. It was simplified for the purpose of increasing literacy in China quickly and effectively, not for ''aesthetic'' or ''traditional'' reasons. The majority of people in China previously did not know how to read or write, it was urgent to teach people to read and write as quickly as possible in order to educate the population in more important aspects. It is more important to teach people about science, politics, philosophy than to learn the ''beauty'', ''tradition'' and ''history'' of Chinese characters. Therefore, it's necessary that they first know how to read and write . Learning traditional hanzi takes more time, that time could be saved on other things like science, but how are you going to teach them about science if they don't even know how to read and write? It must be taken into account that a large part of the population in China was illiterate before Mao's time. Maybe it may be that the traditional hanzi is more ''artistic'', but you don't teach a child or an illiterate person art first before reading and writing. Also people who are against simplified hanzi fall into the myth of believing that traditional hanzi are prohibited in mainland China. People in mainland China still often use the traditional hanzi for obviously traditional reasons such as festivals or art. Simplified Chinese is more practical, that was and is the purpose, not the ''beauty''. Furthermore, Simplified Chinese was not simplified arbitrarily, but radicals were simplified in a logical way (mostly), phonetic radicals were changed to simpler ones, unnecessary radicals were removed, some were simplified as in their traditional cursive form, others adopted phonetic radicals, and others to simply phonetic. For practical purposes, simplified Chinese is the best. Now if we talk about history and beauty, you can use the traditional one. Also, simplified chinese doesn't look ugly to me, it looks nice as well as traditional. More radicals and more strokes does not mean more 'beauty', if that were the case, Hangul would be a horrible writing system for being so simple, which is obviously not the case. The beauty of Chinese characters has more to do with how the strokes are made and not their quantity, both simplified and traditional can look good if they are written in the correct way, that is, with pressure, consistency, good handwriting, ink, brush , softness, and so on. The traditional one can also look ugly if it is written by a person whose hand shakes a lot. Quantity is not synonymous with quality. And I have to admit that the simplified one also has certain mistakes, but it doesn't make it worse than the traditional one, in fact the traditional one also has mistakes such as phonetic radicals that today don't make sense, or radicals that are simply there and don't contribute anything, neither phonetically nor semantically. Both have their illogical things at times, one lacks semantics, and the other has unnecessary radicals and extra strokes.
I am HKer and am filled with sadness erosion of culture, including language. How much more longer will traditional characters last with now govt? Taiwan will be last bastion. HK Chinese will need to keep up with tradition and make sure we pass knowledge of traditional characters including publication of books and newspapers in traditional characters, and both canto and mandarin classes taught in traditional characters. Change to simplified characters is partly a result of time (throughout history how a character is written had changed) but worse travesty is work of the mainland govt. There is so much history involved with a traditional character and you can trace back to its roots and pictorials. I would even go as far as saying what has been done by mainland govt is almost cultural genocide.
Wow. Describing Simplified as “dumbed down” and that advocacy for simplified characters implies that people are being insulted for being stupid, seems unnecessarily simplistic. The Roman alphabet is written more simply than it was 200 years ago for efficiency’s sake. I love the way all of the characters look, Traditional or Simplified. They are all works of art. I do find the Simplified easier to see on a screen. Since Chinese children all learn pinyin now before they learn the characters, and adults type their texts in pinyin then choose from among the characters served up to the user, I wonder if time itself will not relegate both Chinese writing systems to history.
I appreciate the beauty of traditional characters but as a illiterate abc, I wonder if learning simplified would've made me less illiterate. The Chinese schools in the U.S. teaches with traditional and I always felt overwhelmed by the complexity and ended up relying on pinyin to read. Also, when you showed the comparison image, the laziness in me wants to learn the simplified version but the traditional does look so much better.
I think it also depends on the character! I don't mind the characters which are basically just adaptations of common simplifications already attested/in usage, since in my mind, they're just as historically valid. The completely new characters, as well as the characters which have completely disappeared where you have one character representing previously multiple characters drives me round the bend. As a Japanese learner, we did have a similar phenomenon known as 'shinjitai' but they were far less simplified most of the time in comparison to Chinese. One defence I do have for simplified characters, however, is that while the Japanese literacy rate is technically 99%, the amount of people who cannot read or write a book without a dictionary is pretty astounding. Even my Japanese teachers usually need a dictionary on hand whenever they write. I'm not sure if the same is true in Mainland China, but my impression has been that simplified characters are easier to write without needing other resources.
Both are beautiful in it's area, I prefer to read traditional characters, but sincerely I prefer to write "学" than "學", also for some reason "鸟" looks more beautiful to me that "鳥". But in general I prefer traditional. For me traditional is far better looking but at the moment of writing I prefer simplified, with exceptions obviously but yeah.
Take my class! :) I'm getting ready to launch my third Level 1 Traditional Chinese Characters in Cantonese Pronunciation course in September 2022. If you're interested, you can find out more at www.cantolingo.com. I use materials from Chinese University that are really REALLY good at teaching you characters. If you have any questions or want to contact me directly, email hello@cantolingo.com! Thanks! :)
Great video! I also prefer the traditional script. I've studied Mandarin on and off for over 15 years and I'm now getting into Cantonese. Traditional script makes perfect sense for Cantonese, but for someone learning Mandarin, simplified is essential - unless you're only using Taiwanese resources - which are hard to come by unless you live in Taiwan. I hate to say it, but sadly, I think the CCP is going to push the Mandarin/Simplified agenda until everyone in Hong Kong is using it. ☹
I agree ... it's just a matter of time .... schools will be forbidden to teach in Cantonese and traditional characters; street signs will be replaced .... movies only in Mandarin perhaps? Ugh, it's just so sad.
@@CantoneseCorner I was just thinking about how things could have been different if Taiwan claimed independence when they had the chance. Would the UK have handed over Hong Kong to the Republic of China instead of the PRC? I am hopeful that Hongkongers will continue to value their culture and traditions even if on the surface they have to comply with the CCP.
@@hvuvtjs This has nothing to do with whether the CCP is in power or not. As long as the Chinese government is the whole main land‘s gov, it will definitely implement simplified Chinese characters, because there was already a simplified Chinese character program in the ROC before the PRC, but it was not officially promulgated because of the war.After the Kuomintang was defeated by the CCP and retreated to the Taiwan, in order to politically oppose the CCP, the CCP implemented simplified Chinese characters. The Kuomintang had to oppose simplified Chinese characters, even though they were originally compiled by the Kuomintang in the 1930s.
i hate simplified too but your reasons dont really add up to me,, china never forbade anyone from learning traditional, they just thought it would be easier to teach someone how to write with less strokes. and the elitism thing is also uhhhh what you just said doesnt make sense at all. i agree with the last part where you said traditional just looks better, but calligraphy only uses traditional characters because the practise was most popular before simplified was a thing. i personally use traditional because its just more historically timeless and its easier to understand the character based on it's components, besides, its not any harder to communicate using it now that we all just type
No…the original intent was and has never been good. It was always about control, so that people can only read papers and books that the communist party publishes.
@@snowheader2200 I thought it was meant to teach farmer back in early days to read and write o well ...I never liked it anyway Despite I have difficulty to learn Chinese but still think traditional Chinese is the best😄
After watching this video I finally understood why 面 means both face and noodles, and 后 means both back and Empress 😭😭💀💀 this has puzzled me for a long time
Korea simplified Chinese into Hangul. Koreans love that. America tried to simplify "real" English flavour, colour etc. We allow whatever we feel is good. We don't use Gothic script anymore which is way more beautiful We should all agree to disagree. The real beauty of Chinese characters is truly amazing. Watch the film "Hero"
Also, Hongkongers have been proven by at least one study as the people with the highest IQ in the world. This proves that using traditional Chinese characters makes people smarter haha (of course, this is a fallacy but those who insist on using simplified Chinese are too stupid to learn about these fallacies anyway).
I mean, it's not like Singaporeans, who also use simplified, are among the highest-performing in the world, and Chinese universities are increasingly joining the ranks of prominent Western universities in global rankings. You are the worst type of the pro-Traditional camp. And that is coming from me, someone who also strongly prefers Traditional Characters. If you have to insult millions of people you don't even fucking know, deriding them as stupid because their linguistic choice differs from yours, then you are most likely the dull one, clinging onto any possible minute detail that can distract you from your own mediocrity.
I have this discussion with my kids and my example is: 糞。 Whether people should pick up the poo with a tool "糞'' or pick up with their hands "粪" without the tool should be their own choice. However the choice of not picking up the poo with their hands is not allowed somewhere on earth.
This makes me wonder about the discussion back in the day when the powers-that-be were deciding how to simplify the characters. Oh, to be a fly on that wall! I wonder if anyone was brave enough to make this argument and what the response was. Thank you for sharing! 🙏
As an American living in Taiwan for the last decade who does read / write / speak Mandarin, I can tell you that traditional characters are MUCH EASIER TO READ (and therefore LEARN) than simplified... Yes, to write some of them (such as 鬱金香、烏龜、芭蕾舞、電影、or even my name: 魏穎斌) takes some perseverance but... They are easier to read because the meanings (and sometimes pronunciation clues) haven't been stripped away... Best examples : 廣東 vs 广东 愛 vs 爱 書 vs 书 國 vs 国 臺灣 vs 台湾 Intuitively you would think the "simpler" one is easier, but the meaning as well as many pronunciation clues (not to mention beauty / artistry) have been destroyed.....
Actually 书 is 書. No joke. That simplified character is created by converting the cursive form into standard strokes. Same thing with 东. Other examples include 马 and 门。 And 国 is an archaic vulgar form that Japan also uses. Before simplified Chinese, the ROC tried using 口 + 王 making it a logograph of a king surrounded by the city walls. But now its 口 + 玉 which is jade (representing the emperor) surrounded by the city walls. And 台 has always existed for place names in Chinese. It just got repurposed to mean 臺 removing the later from the dictionary. It does look a bit less cool but it's not BS.
@@PeterLiuIsBeast I'm aware of where the characters originated and why they are the way they are... I just find it unnecessary to "simplify" (being nice) it when studies have shown it hasn't done its job at all (to improve literacy)... There's no gap in literacy of children OR adults in countries (regions so as not to offend anyone) that use simplified versus traditional Chinese characters...
7:58 in Chinese we call this 歧異 this the major problem comes from Simplified Chinese characters even President XING feels embarrassing about his surname 习 this word looks like 刁 I don't know how to translate this word 刁 directly into English but this word is very negative It is used to describe a group of civilians who make trouble in all ways against the establishment U can find that the Chinese government use 習 instead of 习 in all official articles
I also want to talk about changes Any changes must follow its basics element for music it is: do re mi fa sol la ti do for Chinese words it is: 部首 筆順 形聲 會意 指示 It thinks Simplified Chinese is a failed version of copycat
"They have every much a right to learn the language passed down to them as anybody else." As you surely know as a student of Cantonese, the written language passed down to them wasn't Standard Chinese at all but was Classical Chinese, which by the way Chinese people still learn in high school. Standard Chinese, even in Traditional Characters, is not the language that was passed down to them. So are you upset that illiterate people were taught how to write a living spoken language instead of being taught to write a dead classical language, or are you upset that they were taught to write Standard Chinese in a system developed to write Standard Chinese instead of using precisely the same set of characters as the classical language? Are you equally upset ðat English isn't still written wiþ the letters þ and ð? Do you think we should be taught to read and write the language of Gilgamesh instead of contemporary English? There were a few decades of Standard Chinese being written with Traditional Characters before advent of Standard Chinese. Is that the material you're afraid of losing? Do you recognize that *far more* Standard Chinese has been written in Simplified Characters than in Traditional Characters? I find your position very confusing, except when I allow myself to imagine that this is all an emotional reaction to communism.
I'm born and raised in the US but still speak Cantonese with family and I tried learning Mandarin in high school and for a person who had to learn how to read and write (and speak to some degree), I find that Simplified was easier to learn. I think looking back at it, if I had to learn Traditional, I'm not sure I would have been able to pick up much of it because Simplified was hard enough to learn as it was but this was also a time in my life when learning a second language wasn't very high on my priority list so I didn't put too much time and effort to learn it. That said, Traditional is definitely more aesthetically pleasing and because it was what my ancestors used, I feel like it should be something that we continue to use regardless of how difficult it is to learn.
I appreciate you are learning Chinese. Traditional Chinese characters are not only used by our ancestors. They are currently use in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Simplified characters is inferior not aesthetically but the structure of each word. The essence of our language/culture is eliminated in the simplified version. The main problem is that CCP omitted vocabulary. One example is the word “behind 後.” It is replaced by the word “queen 后.” Very destructive in many levels… Please learn traditional Chinese characters to preserve our beautiful language 🙏🏼
@@lapompom1010 indeed. Furthermore the increased ambiguity with 殘體字 due to some characters having the same meaning actually makes it more difficult to use.
Yes. It will take longer. It worth the time. It helps one to understand the essence of Chinese language. Some commented that captions are easier in simplified version. HongKonger and Taiwanese are reading traditional version captions. We don’t have the problem. Simplified version eliminates the structure of a word and the language itself. Imagine this-wood and would sounds similar. Wood is simpler; and replaced the word “would.” The result: wood you help me please? Anyhow, if you choose to learn a language, learn the best not dismantled version.
Hello, if I could add a few counterarguments and points: 1. the poll didn't take a fair cross section of the Chinese speaking population. Your followers are predominantly from HK and would naturally choose traditional. Given simplified is used in Mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore, the result would've been different if more ppl from those regions participated in the poll (based on total population in the world alone, simplified would win given ppl are naturally biased towards what they are familiar with). 2. In the computer/mobile/print age, there is no difference between efficiency in handwriting. But by the nature of less strokes in simplified, then simplified surely would've improved (often dramatically) the efficiency of written communication. That was another consideration for adopting simplified on top of the literacy consideration 3. traditional characters are not banned in mainland china. To ensure efficient and consistent administration, the laws mandate that the official writing of mainland china be simplified. However, traditional texts are still appreciated in mainland china in literature, culture and caligraphy. It has become an art form. 4. Unfortunately, there has been negative sentiment in HK towards mainland chinese (can somewhat appreciate source of bias, and won't comment further to keep post short). This negative sentiment therefore has given rise to negative feeling associated with mainland chinese incl. spoken mandarin and simplified chinese. This has negatively affected how some people in HK perceive the language. Unfortunately language do change quickly (see hangul korean) or gradually (see french words in english), and this can be threatening to the minority. However, history demonstrates that change to any language is inevitable.
Surely, if the goal had originally been to improve the efficiency of written Chinese communication, and the benefits of an efficient writing system had been paramount, then, perhaps, the Chinese government would have fully implemented the second round of simplified characters. And the fact that the Chinese government chose not to implement the second simplicification scheme and even retracted the those second-round simplified characters speaks volumes about the arguments of having characters with fewer strokes and improving the efficiency of writing. But if you believe in the advantage of writing with fewer strokes and faster, perhaps you should consider campaigning for the full implementation of the second simplification scheme. After all, the second-round simplified characters already got created in the late 1970s and have been lying around ever since. These simplified characters are waiting to be fully adopted, and they also do what the first-round simplified characters do, making writing more efficient with fewer strokes.
@@Magnetlarry thx for the reply. I do not know what policy decision went into not implementing the second round of changes, but it could be that the cost of re-learning those changes had outweighted the benefit of even less strokes. However the fact that the second round was not implemented does not mean the first round was a failure - it's not an all or nothing reform. Separately, draw an analogy to the efforts to reform and promote simple english by the legal education system in the western countries. Archaic legalese like hereunder and aforesaid have been used in famous judgments but modern legal education promote simpler and more easier to understand expressions. Does that remove the rich history of the legal expression? Maybe. Does it make legal writing more accessible to the broarder population? Yes.
Completely agree with you. Making the writing language more accessible was the goal of the simplification. Still people try so hard to degrade SC and mainland people. It's so sad how this rethoric has become the mainstream in the west.
@@mackwan88 really? You are trying to justify the Chinese character simplification with the English legalese (no BS) reform movement advocated by the legal education sectors in western countries as if Chinese law/legal opinions written in simplified characters were currently well understood by the general public without proper legal training or the help from qualified lawyers? To be frank, I just find it extraordinary that you use the English legal language as a comparable example to what is supposed to be used by the general public in the Far East in everyday life, especially when the English writing system heavily relies on sound/phonetic elements whereas the Chinese system relies on visual elements. But if you insist on their comparability, perhaps you should consider advocating the governments of English-speaking western countries to pass law to simplify English words as well, getting rid of all the silent letters, like the s in "island", the h in "hour", or the k in "knee", just to name a few. And also, you are saying the first round was a success and the cost of the second round did not justify the move. Then, how did they measure the success which was solely attributable to the character simplification but not something else? What were the relevant figures? How much did it cost for the 1st round? What had been the estimated figure before the implementation of the 1st round? How much would have cost the society for not having the 1st round implemented? What were all the estimated figures for the 2nd round in the late 1970’s? I would really appreciate it if you could share these figures with me as my quick search of the internet gave me nothing.
@@aaarodrigo degrade SC? Wow, then, I'd say the Chinese gov showed to the world how best to degrade SC ==> by deciding to publish all those 2nd round SC and then just to throw them away
I personally think simplified Chinese is great as a western learner. Coming into Chinese I viewed it as a nearly impossibly task self studying (even with prior language learning success). Now that I am feeling like I’m getting somewhere with simplified, however, I have growingly become fascinated with traditional characters. I 100% will learn them in my lifetime, especially after having gained some confidence with simplified. I think simplified is a great gateway, especially for practicality purposes, and true lovers of the language will take the extra step of also learning traditional later down the road.
I think your road is pretty typical and I'm so happy to hear you're interested now in traditional characters! Honestly, since I started working with Gloria, it really has been fun learning the differences in the simplified and traditional. I can totally see how and why simplified are so useful ... but just wish it were the other way around ... learn traditional and then simplify. Similar a bit to learning proper written English and then choosing to later simplify to wanna and gotta and ain't and ppl and brb, etc .... maybe one day that's all ppl will learn and then only true lovers of the language will take that extra step to learn that ppl once was spelled people. :)
I understand your point why a nation would not dump her own national language and switch to a sinplefied form. But that was not the only historical fiasco in the century, sad to say.
As an ABC I learned traditional growing up. Unfortunately when I was a child I really did not want to learn Cantonese and was forced to go to Chinese school. Traditional was hard to memorize to me and I was not taught things like phonetic components to help. With the more complex strokes and me not wanting to learn needless to say I did not retain very much. In college I wanted to learn Chinese and chose to learn traditional since that was what I grew up with. It looked better and well, it was “traditional “. Our class allowed us to choose which we wanted to learn. T they only also mandarin classes so that’s what I took. Looking back I felt as if I may have been able to retain more characters if I learned simplified instead. It wasn’t as if they randomly cut down the number of strokes, but many words were replaced with similar sounding components so that they were easier to remember (which I think may apply more to mandarin than canto). Often times I would remember only part of a traditional character, whereas that part works have just been the whole word in simplified (like 丽in麗). I understand the argument about not assuming your peoples intelligence. However with my experience I feel that I unnecessarily made it harder for myself to learn Chinese. I’m pretty sure traditional was also a simplified version of a previous script so i don’t know if we should have such absolute attitudes towards it. I definitely used to be traditional only until my experience learning Chinese and how it helped improve literacy in the 20th century. Japan also simplified their characters and Korea literally did away with the whole system and went syllabic. I really hope to get better at Chinese though! For me I’m going to try to learn it in simplified but know how to read both!
One thing I learned recently is that Mandarin, likely due to its fewer tones and therefore higher likelihood of homophones, tends to have more words that are expressed with two characters/syllables whereas they might only require one in Cantonese. I wonder if this is partly what drove the unification of multiple meanings into a single character in Simplified Chinese, namely the move toward multi-character words and having fewer base characters to learn. Although I, as a heritage Cantonese speaker, certainly prefer the aesthetics, history, and etymological value of traditional characters, I can see how moving toward a more multi-character vocabulary could be a sensible direction, especially if it follows suite with Mandarin. That said, I am compelled to learn Traditional first (along with Cantonese more thoroughly) in spite of the relative impracticality because preserving that culture and heritage is more important to me.
If it is true as you say, Mandarin cannot abandon traditional Chinese characters, because the information density of traditional Chinese characters is greater than that of simplified Chinese characters.The fact is that although Mandarin has only four tones, there is an extra soft tone, and Mandarin has flat and raised tongues, and there are Er sounds. These can help increase recognition, which is equivalent to adding several more tones.Therefore Mandarin is no more confusing than Cantonese.
But over centuries or at least a long, long time .... It would be interesting if we all still spoke like they wrote in Beowulf or even Shakespeare's time.
I think a better equivalent would be spelling reforms like in Spanish or German. The example of "simplifying" the language in order to talk to non-native speakers or children has more to do with limiting grammar and vocabulary, while the simplification of Chinese characters are about modifying the script to be easier to write and memorize.
Thank you! I'm not familiar with the spelling reforms, but could it be the same as British English versus American English with the extra letters in both (enroll vs enrol; colour vs color, etc.)? I guess my point about limiting grammar and vocabulary is that you're not using the full richness of the language ... and one could argue that the simplification of Chinese characters was as much about gutting the cultural and linguistic heritage that is every Chinese person's right as it was simply making it easier to write and memorize. Four for the price of one!
@@CantoneseCorner In a way it's similar to that, yes, though much more extensive. One could make the argument that character simplification is also similar to how the Latin alphabet evolved from always being what we now refer to as uppercas carved in stone to "simpler" lowercase letters that facilitated writing. Of course, the Chinese simplification was a lot more artificial and sudden, and also comes with a lot of political baggage due to its association with communist China. I personally don't think the intentions of the Chinese government lay beyond simply making the language easier to write (albeit perhaps without giving much thought to the history of certain characters). Especially when considering that the learning and usage of traditional characters were never banned.
It's very bad policy coming from Mainland China. I'm not convinced that simplifying the language did anything of value. It might take just 8-12 strokes instead of 15-20 strokes to complete a written character, BUT you still have to learn the characters one by one. It's still hard. It's still time-consuming. And, you STILL need the traditional characters if you want to read Tang poetry and all the classical philosophical texts. It actually makes it harder for one to access their cultural history because now you have to learn two sets of characters. As someone who grew up outside of China but as part of the Chinese diaspora, I believe culture and language is supposed to bring people together. This is very divisive.
Consider though that dividing the people from their history and traditions may have been intentional and by design (think Cultural Revolution...) However it's not popular to say so (at least not anymore), so the historical purpose has been papered over with other semi-plausible rationalizations (basically propaganda) dictated by authorities... (Incidentally this would also follow a familiar pattern of how the CCP operates in many other areas...)
@@darren93575 I'm not against linguistic reform if it makes sense. The Vietnamese and the Koreans eliminated Chinese characters from their normal day-to-day written languages and now use phonetic writing forms. But, in doing that, they did not destroy the culture. People choose to study Chinese characters in Korea and Vietnam for specific educational purposes, but they learn the characters as they were used several hundreds of years back. You either go all the way or don't go at all. But do not just go half-way and tamper with the characters and ruin their meanings and appearance and think that you are boosting literacy when what you have really done is disconnect people from ancestral thought. That's wrong.
It's not the only advantage: with simplified characters you also save more ink, and having less strokes makes them easier to read on screens when the font isn't that big. Overall I think that less strokes is better but at the same time I don't like that many characters lost their full meaning when they got simplified to forms that don't hint anymore at the original character. If every component/radical had been always systematically simplified in the same way, then it would have been better.
@@sasino Actually, you made me think of something interesting. Handwriting is becoming less and less common. People use technologies. People will leave voice messages on WeChat. People will also use voice typing tools, so that the computer prints out what they say. Actually, Chinese and Japanese forget to write characters because of lack of practice. If that is the case, then it does not even matter if the characters are simplified or traditional because all that matters then is that you be able to read and recognize the characters. The rationale to use simplified characters is actually weaker if people can get by without handwriting.
晚上好，你好嗎？ While I'm not a Cantonese learner, my major being for Mandarin Chinese, I have to agree with you. While I do think that it would be better to keep the status quo of Simplified and Traditional, I think that it's a shame that the government thought that rural farmers were too dumb to be able to learn Traditional characters. I mean, I get the logic behind what they must have been thinking: How do we get them to read as quickly as possible? So they did things like merge characters together, used cursive vulgar variants of traditional characters, or took out radicals to make it “faster” to write。 Examples of these could be 头、发、对、难。。。。 They look easy but you can tell they've either been merged or are missing something. Especially with 发 which can be both hair （髮）or to emit out （發）. When I started learning Chinese, and was planning before COVID to go to China to study later when I was more proficient, I was using Simplified. Not knowing much about Chinese characters and how they worked, I thought that Simplified compared to Traditional was easier. Then I was told that my Chinese flagship program at the university would only allow people to study abroad in Taiwan. So I started to learn Traditional. And I have to say, Traditional is nice. I can see how the language, being a logographic language, survived for so long in that natural state. The characters usually have some type of radical meaning and a phonetic meaning, even if the phonetic hint might be from centuries ago and not sound at all like the modern one. It's the beauty of learning characters, right? Though, some of the Simplified characters aren't too bad and make sense such as tears 泪 instead of 淚。And yet , some of them do not much make sense and it really makes me scratch my head such as 麵（面）or 廣（广）or 億（亿）or even 頭 （头)。While I get some of these such as 亿 are made by cursive variants from centuries or even as far back as the Han Dynasty, it wasn't meant to be official, more or less just quick shorthand when you want to scribble a few notes down. Anyways, it was good to hear your thoughts on this in a respectful manner. You really did make good arguments and I'm glad that people in the video comments are civil.
Hi there! I really enjoyed reading your post -- thank you for sharing your thoughts and isn't it funny how covid has changed so much of our lives ... and it's cool how you now have that unique perspective of having learned simplified and then traditional and get to go to Taiwan! Thanks for bringing up the point about how the scribbles weren't meant to be official. I guess it would be like if Gregg Shorthand were to be implemented as the way everyone should write English? Maybe not as extreme, though? I don't know enough about shorthand, I just remember people learning it a long time ago and thinking it was sooooo weird and illegible. :) I hope you enjoy your time in Taiwan -- I'll never forget once we drove up this mountain in the middle of Taiwan it was the scariest ride of my life .... like you're literally 6 inches away from falling down the side of the mountain the whole way up. Maybe they have guard rails now, but it was scary then! Beautiful when you got to the top and we stayed overnight in this gorgeous house, but couldn't really enjoy it cause knew the next day we had to drive back down. lol
there's no way to simplify English, because English doesn't have any characters, they are what they are. But Chinese has characters, which means you have to learn these thousands of characters to understand Chinese. In English there are just 26 letters and most people get to know these letters very fast, compared to learning Chinese characters. That different.
Of course there are ways to simplify English. Have you heard of shorthand writing? How are abbreviations? English speakers have ways to speed up writing too, but at the end, the formal writing is the standard. It's like text messaging vs newspaper. If newspaper articles are written like text messages, it wouldn't look educated to me.
@@ericleung1578 I think I didn't make myself clear. When you said shorthand writing, it is probably like "ppl" to "people", but when you say this word, the pronunciation is still "people", nobody is saying like pi-pi-eil. But in Chinese, there are a bunch of characters with the same pronunciation, which means you need to learn the characters one by one, how they should be pronounced, and how to write them. In the past, a lot of Chinese didn't write because they were not educated, they were able to communicate but had no way to write. Simplified Chinese is easier to learn, and more Chinese are able to understand it and write. I love traditional Chinese though, the usage of simplified Chinese help most Chinese get educated, which is a brilliant idea.
@@rikkawu4773 Ooh! This brought back such memories .... I'm wondering if @Eric Leung meant shorthand as in Gregg Shorthand en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregg_shorthand which really does simplify English into lines that make zero sense to someone who doesn't know shorthand (like me :) . I suppose to your point about how there are a bunch of Chinese characters with the same pronunciation but different meanings, that might be similar to the English words "their, there, they're" perhaps? But I understand what you mean .... we can't or don't simplify the letters themselves -- like we won't write an "F" with only one horizontal line or an "A" as an upside down "V" with no horizontal line across it. Whereas Chinese characters themselves can be and were simplified. But if we are comparing apples to apples, then the English word (not letter) would more closely match a Chinese character, as it has meaning all by itself. I guess the only letters that also have meaning as words would be the letter "A" which is also an article meaning "one of something" or "I" meaning me, myself. But other than those two, our words are made up of more than one letter, so we would be simplifying the word, not the individual letter. It's interesting to think about! And I have to ask again .... what is wrong with Chinese people on the mainland that made them/makes them incapable of learning traditional characters? Of course, nothing! Which is why it baffles me when people imply that without simplified characters the vast majority of Chinese would still be illiterate. It just cannot be true, and smacks of superiority when you really think about it.
@@CantoneseCorner, according to your last question which you might have asked a lot of people, personally I have no trouble reading traditional characters, so I can't tell you why the traditional characters are difficult to learn. Still, I can say, that the simplified Chinese character is much easier to remember. At that time, workers spent a few months learning characters, and then they were able to work following books or any protocols, but for traditional Chinese, I guess they might spend more time and vigor. And traditional characters have a long history so it has a lot of characters that are not used anymore, and for the same meaning or even the same character, there is more than one symbol (or form? not sure how to describe it) sometime. The simplified Chinese firstly deleted those difficult but not frequently used symbols and then reduce the stroke of single characters. There is once that the specialist over-simplified characters, which let me feel like "letter" to "L'::r" (something like that, z.B. 早餐 to 早歺), but then they realized (feel like I was one of them knowing how they were thinking, lol) that this over-simplified characters can't take that many messages and mess up a lot of characters with different meanings, then they gave up. Finally, we have the simplified Chinese you see today. Going back to why Chinese find it hard to learn traditional characters, since simplified Chinese, as a language, is able to carry messages, and has fewer strokes for writing, I have no reason to reject learning or writing it, though I am a fan of traditional Chinese. Nowadays, if sb spends time and vigor in learning traditional, I am pretty sure that he or she could learn it very well. But still the question, if simplified Chinese is enough for being a language, why should we go back?
I heard that Mao Tse Tung (Wade-Giles spelling) wanted to eliminate Characters all together and was talked out of it by Yosef Stalin. Of course he killed tens of millions of “his people”, so dumbing them down was “before breakfast” easy for him.
I agree with you. I just find it frustrating over the prejudice I faced whenever I use simplified. The general attitude are hostile with undertones of "you are not capable of reasoning" "you already lost the argument when you use simplified". I get where the attitude comes from (given the situation) but there are people who are using simplified and are not from China, and people just stop listening and refuse to communicate.
I like simplified characters. I personally use them and love how they look. I saw a lot of comments saying they have less 底蕴 than complex characters but most of the simplified forms come from 草书、俗字 and radical simplification. Chinese characters have a tendecy to be simplified, one example is 集, it's original form was 3 隹 in top of a 木. Another is 爱(愛)：本为形声字本义为行走之貌，后讹变作从爪从冖心从攵,假借为仁爱。早在《魏崔勤造像》 上,爱字就已经和现在的简体字字形接近。隋智果、唐太宗书法作品中有 把下部的“心、攵”连笔草化为“友” 的，友爱一体,“爱”字从友，显然是合理的。至元代,草书楷化的“爱”作 为俗字即常见运用。Another one is 义, it is a 俗字 and phonetic loan, comes form 乂 and to distinguish it a dot is added. I think the percption of them comes from where you see them, If you just start seeing how common people use them handwritten, in all kinds of creations, songs, streets, illustrations, etc I think you will start to like them. Still simplified characters have a limitation wich is Mandarin, they have been simplified for Mandarin and are not totally compatible with other languages. Obviously people will prefer what they're used to and it's totally fine but Simplified characters deserve just as much respect as 繁体字. Simplifying it's not dumbing down, it was a necessity of the era, most people were illiterate, characters wher mostly written by hand. These exercise of simplification was started in the Republic of China era and most people, including the leaders were supportive of it, the first simplification attempt done in 1934 wiht the 第一批简体字表. It was retracted beacuse of fierce opposition from a minority of elites. This rethoric of saying Simplified characters are dumbed down characters is extremely harmful. Please stop making these kind of comparisons.
Hi there! I really appreciate your comment -- and I'm really trying to take in what you've written and also to see the beauty in SC, but I guess considering only their appearance, I just prefer a more symmetrical look, perhaps. But I am wondering a few things: Like why then, in your opinion, were simplified characters created? Why were they a necessity? Was reading or writing more important for the masses? Why did the minority of elites reject it? And how would you describe simplified characters relative to traditional characters? I'm not being facetious, I truly want to know and learn more about how people who like simplified over traditional see the arguments. Because for me, to believe the arguments for simplified, I have to believe that the government was acting out of benevolence, and that's where I get stuck.
@@CantoneseCorner People should also keep in mind that a lot of the supposed historical "facts" used to justify the forced adoption of simplified characters (like how they were, supposedly, in widespread use already) should be taken with a grain of salt, like much of what is taught as historical fact in Mainland China. Shocked by how naive people can be (like, oh, nothing ever happened at Tiananmen Square, why the government said so, they would never lie or make things up of course...) I have yet to see independent research confirm such "facts".
@@CantoneseCorner Benevolent or not I'm not sure. You can see for yourself how simplified characters came to be. Go into a dictionary from the Ming or even older dynasty and check yourself. The logic OP is relaying is mostly correct. There was a 2nd round of simplification in the 70s that actually did end up botching the script by making it unnatural. They had characters that were never used officially or unofficially in any capacity. So that was overturned within a few years after its introduction. (note this is why 闫 became a much larger surname. Many people changed to writing it the 2nd round way and just never changed back). On top of that Chinese historically has had many variant forms that would get used in the different provinces across the nation. Every dynasty had their set of official use characters. If I recall correctly the Qin dynasty was the first for all kinds of standardization (language, measurements, etc). Personally I don't care for either. Use whatever you want. But I say nope to just using the Latin alphabet. I don't think is a CCP plot to destroy the language. We don't bash Japan for simplifying. We don't bash Korea for removing Chinese characters either.
@@PeterLiuIsBeast Thanks! I appreciate knowing the historical context. I also find it so interesting how important trust or perceived trust is when it comes to how people view this issue. As you say, no one bashes Japan or Korea, but the CCP is the bad guy, when maybe for this instance, they didn't have a hidden agenda or plot to destroy the language. But because of perceived or real mistrust, it's almost automatic to think the worst. I mean, with most decisions, there is always a downside .... a winner and a loser. And I can totally see how they were willing to sacrifice beauty and tradition and culture in the name of progress. That's the way of most things ... handmade gives way to machine made ... people lose their jobs, end products aren't as special, etc. I digress, but it's just painfully sad these days how "progress" and technology has brought the world forward, but also taken in backwards in so many ways and made it lose what was special before. Or maybe I'm just getting old and reminiscing on the good ol' days which weren't really that great to begin with? LOL 😂
![[Watch Party] RoV Pro League 2024 Winter | ( Bacon Time Vs PSG )](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/zM25REvnJW4/mqdefault.jpg)
一位學者說：漢字簡化後；親不見，愛無心，產不生，厰空空，麵無麥，運無車，導無道，兒無首，飛單翼，有雲無雨，開關無門，鄉里無郎。
講得好！
Yes, well said!
The fact that the same 面 is used for noodles and face, somehow I feel that's offensive and unfair to the noodles and also a rather lazy way to treat the language.
講得好x2👍
@@siobhonc As a student of simplified characters, that had puzzled me for a long time. Same thing with 后.
And btw I can see that 面 was kind of a lazy move because they didn't think it was necessary to simplify the left radical at all, however I have no idea why they chose to use the 后 Empress character to also mean back, maybe it's purely a pronunciation choice.
I love your analogy of the Mona Lisa! I never really considered the idea of going to the bother of learning one thing when really it's not any more trouble to learn the other. At first glance, and as someone who didn't know anything about the writing until a few years ago, traditional can look complicated. However, when you break it down a bit it's less so i.e. 樂 = 幺+白+幺+木. Or 饅 = 食+昷+又. Like the spoken language, some parts might not mean much on their own but you add them together and it starts to make sense (mostly! 🤣). I feel the simplified is more disconnected from the meanings and to me that seems harder.
the analogy made me think about what happened to ecce homo but unlike that 'restoration' its difficult to see simplified characters as comical, theyre just kind of sad..
@@RadiAnssi I didn’t know what you meant but just looked it up and 😅😅😅 ! It’s nice people can see the humorous side of the “ecce mono” 🐵 - but yeah, no humor in simplified at all!
Thank you! And thanks for explaining more …. Feel exactly the same 🤗❤️
But we don't need mona lisa to cross a road
What I can see after watching this video is that the components are extremely important to analyze words, especially new words that you might not know at all, but thanks to the characters and its components you can guess it. I feel like traditional to simplified was a necessary thing to do to make sure that currently used characters had a simpler form, however I do see how in many cases they just F'd up and destroyed some information. This can be compared to a lossy compression algorithm, as opposed to a lossless one.
Something that I notice now is that if Chinese characters were completely replaced by romanization alone then it would be a real challenge to know how words originated and developed. True that there might be little ambiguities thanks to context, however when you see new words you're no longer going to be able to understand where it came from. In English we know that most words that start in "pre" have something to do with "previous", like "prehistory", "preapproval", "preclude"... In the Chinese languages it would be much harder without characters because: 1 the different languages/dialects, and 2 a lot of characters have the same pronunciation but mean different things...
In the age of keyboard and internet, there isn't much reason for simplified Chinese imo
Yeah there is 💀 I can't read traditional chinese text with a small font without fatiguing my eyes
very true. even simplified is already difficult enough to read in smaller sizes, let alone traditional
traditional characters were used to be written with a brush with thick strokes on a huge piece of paper, not cramped into small spaces with a size smaller than your pinky. so in terms of practical use, the age of the internet actually demands the use of simplified due to better readability
What does this even mean? Over billion of Chinese use simplified
I lived in Shanghai for 15 years and i was the only one not to understand traditional characters (though im a foreigner).
Any Chinese i met could read traditional characters, regardless of the level of education.
Traditional characters are actually quite common in Mainland China, as often commercial lines often use them and KTV (which are ever popular) were often dubbed in traditional in the past for many years.
Honestly, the debate should include the facts that young people learn print characters and at same time the handwritten version of it, because nobody writes with a pen the print characters, Chinese people always produced a "simplified" version handwritten version, like forever.. way before the various waves of simplifications during the 20th century.
To fuel the debate, i can see one advantage of simplified over traditional: they remain intelligible on any small screens such as mobile or watches, whereas traditional characters which can easily have 15 stokes are impossible to understand if the screen is too small.
Exactly because of your last point, I strongly believe simplified characters are a good thing 🤔
OK, maybe they fxkd up some characters like 后 and 面, however there are few of those and for the most part you can switch between the two systems quickly
For those interested in going further, a few characters whose simplified and traditional are looking quite different:
简 繁
业 業
几 幾
尔 爾
铁 鐵
@@Staarkalinou 简and繁 is not the same character, 业 几 尔 were replaced by other Chinese characters with the same sound, and are not the original Chinese characters, so it is not a matter of simplification.
@@user-hq3ht2hp6x
There are several methods of simplification but usually the 简体字 relates to the 繁体字 in one way or another. If you search 简化字 on 百度百科, you'll find a short yet interesting article on this topic.
You can also check on the Wikipedia page of it, and search inside the page for 尔 as you suggested. They mentioned about the cursive script i was talking about.
Anyway the Chinese government and Chinese scholars (including 鲁迅) themselves call it simplification so it's enough for me to be convinced 🙂
What I love is that even if you don’t know the character, with traditional characters you can generally deduce its meaning and how it’s pronounced based on the radical and the components.
I’ve learnt both. I find traditional more familiar as I grew up with it (thanks tvb haha) and I went to Cantonese Saturday school as a kid. Also the Chinese books, magazines and newspaper in my household were always traditional. However, when I learnt mandarin later in life, some of the similarities did help with memorising the patterns of simplifying.
Back in the day, my mandarin teacher would mark me incorrect if I used the traditional character (more habit and being unable to visualise the simplified version), whilst in HK, people seem to be more accepting of using a mixture of both. I’ve also seen some Taiwanese people use the odd simplified character here and there. This is more for written rather than typed, I guess for faster writing if in a rush or writing a lot? Of course, this goes both ways and some people can’t accept simplified.
It’s mostly about familiarity, and whatever you learnt first, that’s what you will learn towards. There’s no right or wrong but I do find traditional characters more beautiful, but the ease and speed of simplified has its perks too. I sometimes will handwrite the simplified character on my phone (on the traditional keyboard) and it’ll transform to traditional, purely because there are less strokes and faster for me to write what I want…
Just my two cents worth…
i honestly prefer japanese kanji. they only simplify the absurdly large characters, whilst retaining the beauty of characters like oie love
I can't agree more. Japan has the same problem, which actually is on-going.
We use the traditional Chinese characters, which some people insist we shouldn't because they are too hard.
On top of that, there are people who assert simplifying our grammar which they say is too complicated.
Modern Japanese history is a constant struggle with the people who want to destroy our culture. This has been going on for almost 200 years.
The traditional characters are really beautiful. Simplified characters don't even look like Chinese.
A billion or so Chinese people would disagree with you.
You are very amazing to understand very well about Chinese characters, speaking and writing Cantonese. I did write little simplified characters sometimes for time saving but now I would insist using the precious traditional characters, that’s one of the beautiful features in HK.
Honestly even though I'm learning Traditional characters I think simplified isn't that bad because even if some meanings get completely gone to the original character it still beauty and considered Chinese characters. if you're learning traditional or simplified, your still learning Chinese so if you pick either one it still counts of learning Chinese no matter if the characters is traditional or simplified. I'm learning Mandarin and honestly, I picked traditional because I wanted to challenge myself and learn the original first and then go back to simplified.
"your" is not the same as "you're". "your" means it belongs to you. "you're" means " you are".
I became interested in Mandarin since I first heard a Chinese pop singer born in mainland China, the video clips of her songs are subtitled in Simplified Mandarin Chinese. I found the music and lyrics so beautiful, even I didn't speak a hint of Chinese! that inspired me to learn the language. I think the simplified characters, long before watching your video, are like little masterpieces, they are beautiful to me, but the traditional ones are more complicated, whether they both have the same meaning or not.
I would use traditional Chinese characters for reading and writing, since we are used to this style, which is easier to understand.
I'm a HKer and a strong supporter of traditional characters. Years ago, I had this debate with students from the mainland in uni. And I showed them the 2nd-round simplified characters and asked them whether they liked the 2nd-round simplified characters and how they'd feel if someone were to force them to adopt the 2nd round simplified characters and stop writing the 1st round simplified characters. And, first of all, they didn't know there'd been a 2nd round of simplified characters published, which didn't get implemented in the end, and look even nastier than the 1st round that people are using. And the mainland students were quite surprised to find that out. But once they had the chance to "goggle" at the 2nd round simplified characters, I knew they felt how I'd always felt about simplified characters (and u could tell from their faces, too). And the debate died down right away. After all, the arguments for the 1st round simplified characters would be equally applicable for the 2nd round, and they would never want to adopt the 2nd round at all.
Did you know the 1st round was at first made by Roc (and even before), which include a lot of component simplification based on cursive and simple variant like 话, but after, the CCP add some weird characters in it like 汉 with component without context 又， and merge some homonyms characters for no reason like 麵 noodle and 面 face... 😢 (only in mandarin of course, sometime not in other Chinese languages).
Then Roc considering this simplification as "made by ccp", it don't follow.
“the arguments for the 1st round simplified characters would be equally applicable for the 2nd round”
No, this doesn't applicable at all.Maybe it was in your dream that you perfectly refuted the students from mainland China. You couldn't refute me at all.The first round of simplified characters and the second round of simplified characters are completely incomparable, because most of the first round of simplified characters are Chinese characters that have existed in the past two thousand years of Chinese history, or the cursive writing of this Chinese character has been passed through for thousands of years. of inspection.However, the second round simplified characters are completely new characters created by modern linguists. Due to oversimplification, a lot of confusion was caused. This set of simplified characters failed to pass the test of people's daily life, so it was abolished.
Returning to the topic of simplified and traditional Chinese characters, modern Chinese began to use vernacular instead of classical Chinese. The number of Chinese characters that need to be written has doubled than before. The most commonly used words in classical Chinese are words with one Chinese character, but the most commonly used words in vernacular are words with two Chinese characters. Vocabulary, so simplifying characters is a must, otherwise it will be very tiring when writing by hand.And because traditional Chinese characters are designed for classical Chinese, each of its Chinese characters carries a lot of information, and each Chinese character is very complicated. When it becomes a vocabulary of two Chinese characters, there is no need to be so complicated.
Finally, on print and electronic displays, simplified characters can be displayed very very small, but if traditional characters are very small, they will be completely unreadable.To sum up, simplified Chinese characters are far more suitable for modern people to use than traditional Chinese characters, and there is an inheritance relationship between simplified characters and traditional Chinese characters, which does not cut off the cultural heritage of modern Chinese and ancient Chinese. Mainland students can even use simplified characters to learn classical Chinese. This is the perfect solution.
二简字和一简字完全无法相提并论。
一简字是过去两千年以来，书法家在日常书写中逐渐形成的“俗体字”，已经通过两千年日常使用的检验了，另外一个最主要的来源是草书，比如“书”和“龙”就是草书体，使用“又”取代“雚”和“堇”也是草书写法。
而二简字完全就是语言学家人为制造出来的文字，没有任何传承，造字逻辑混乱，存在大量同音字替代，没有通过日常使用的检验，所以最终被废除。
所以一简字也是有文化传承的，也经过了日常使用的检验，白话文需要书写的文字数量大大超过了文言文，手写非常累，笔画就需要减少。
另外印刷体和电脑上的文字显示，简体字可以印刷的非常小依旧可以辨认，繁体字做不到，太小了就糊成一团了。
我在台湾的一个节目上看到一个嘉宾举着一个牌子，上面全是密密麻麻的黑点，我很困惑，直到镜头拉近我才发现，原来上面都是汉字😂
简体字的混淆程度被你们夸大了，内地中学的学生都是使用简体字学习文言文的，我也是这样学习文言文的，但同样很少有混淆的文字，极少数也会被标注出来。
像内地这样，既能适应现代化的生活需要，又不会切断我们与古代中国人的文化传承，这才是最完美的解决方案，像韩国人、越南人那种彻底抛弃汉字是最失败的做法，韩语非常容易混淆，所以不得不在每个词之间都空一格。而香港台湾则是要付出不方便的代价，手写费力，记忆困难，印刷需要大字体等。
文言文多数都是单字词，比如“面：这个简化字，你們總說沒有”麥：會無法分辨，但是在白話文中，面不會單獨出現。而是以“面条”、“方便面”、“牛肉面”等词汇形式出现，所以不会混淆。同理，经常被当做简体字反面典型的“干”字也是一样，他不会单独出现，而是以“干部”、“干燥”、“干活”的形式出现，所以不会混淆。
Watching the beginning of the video, I thought to myself, but Hong Kong and Taiwan do not have a literacy problem -- then of course you made the same point! Thank you for this. Sound arguments
That is not a sound argument at all, when you consider Taiwan is a small island and Hong Kong is a city-state. China, on the other hand, is a giant country that is hundreds of times bigger than either, with a much wider range of environments, and had a much lower literacy rate to begin with, for a much, much larger population. Both Taiwan and Hong Kong were urbanized much earlier than China was. The fact that the literacy rate in China is only a few percentage points lower than those of Taiwan or Hong Kong, when in the past that gap was several magnitudes larger, is in fact proof of the success of simplification. I also find issue with the view that Simplifying the characters is "dumbing down" the language, especially when now China is becoming a huge hub of academic output, with several Chinese universities rivaling Western universities. The language itself did not change; the means through which it is expressed was. When a Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese person and a Mandarin-speaking Chinese person converse, it's not as though the Taiwanese person's speech is inherently more sophisticated than the Chinese person's.
Simplified Chinese is not dumbed-down Chinese. The difference is always typographic, they just changed the font, to something way more simple. Dumbing dow would be to remove some characters and switch to sylabary (like katakana in Japan) or to an alphabet (like Hangul in Korea).
Love to have an ambassador like yourself Sue Marguerite promoting Traditional Chinese and Cantonese. And your rendition of Karen Carpenter's are excellent as well!
So first off, I love your channel and thank you for being a champion/ally in the Cantonese language, including Traditional Chinese. I personally prefer Traditional Chinese characters, but that’s only because I learned it in Hong Kong when I was a child. I think instead of good vs bad, or pretty vs ugly, a better question for me to ponder is what should the written Chinese language be? Should it be based on preservation, evolution/adaption, or something else altogether?
For example, Japanese used to use Kanji (Chinese characters) for the majority of writing until WWII when they standardized the use of Hiragana for natural Japanese and Katagana for foreign words. In a way, I don’t think it’s bad for them to simplify and standardize their writing system. Similarly, English is notoriously a melting pot of other languages, which regularly introduce foreign words like Kimchi and Umami into the English dictionary. French, on the other hand, is very protective and constantly restrict to a small number of words. So - what should the Chinese language be?
So while I personally 100% agree with your points, I do see value of simplifying the writing system to enable higher literacy (internationally, not just for Chinese people), or evolving over time to encourage language adaption. I agree that Traditional is “prettier”, but that’s really subjective right? Who’s to say no one will find the “Mona Lisa with stick figure” just as pretty? :)
Traditional characters is not just about beauty. The system is poetic. The CCP simplified version removed the essence of the character and eliminated many words. Furthermore, I rarely see simplified Chinese set vertically from right to left……Let’s teach acronym instead of words because it is easier to pick up.
The thing about simplified Chinese is that it's not really simpler. It's just less strokes and less intimidating for new learners, more user friendly if anything. But ultimately the system is the same, Memorization and pictographs. To truly simplify it the whole Chinese language would need a overhaul.
@@lordkent8143 To a certain extent. First, what is the need to simplify a good system? Each word has so much meaning. Calligraphy is an art form that many Western artists adorn. Second, the CCP is not just simplifying the stroke but also eliminating words. Imaging in English, "would" and "wood" sounds similar. Let's use "wood" to replace "would." In a big picture, CCP is erasing culture. If we really want to preserve our culture, teach traditional writing as foundation. Then, simplified form (the National Party version) come afterwards.
Ultimately, what is your bold, as you described it, prediction on Chinese characters?
Having past lives in China and being an American who has tried to teach myself chinese, It was just a gut feeling that I did not care for simplified chinese. I believe it comes from me living in a time with traditional chinese.
I believe it comes from you living a time of anti-China propaganda.
how to study and understand cantonese romanization (yale). Is there a table where you can study the phonetic possibilities?
I have one! OK, I just made it available to preview and download for free over at www.cantolingo.com. Just click on my Level 1 course and scroll down to where the curriculum comes up and then you can read and/or download the vocab notebook where I talk all about the Yale System and give a tone chart and things. I hope that helps! :)
唔該晒，Sue老師。你嘅解釋好容易明解！我覺得繁體字好有意思因為每一個筆劃都有重要嘅意味。Sorry, my Cantonese isn't great. Hope you understood.
我係香港人我明白你講咩啊
I am Hong Konger and I understand what you said
我係香港人。我睇得明！我認同你嘅睇法 🤗
I totally understood and I'm glad you thought my explanations were easy to understand! Are you learning Cantonese? If yes, YAY!!! 💖🎉
@@CantoneseCorner Yeah, I'm Cantonese but I haven't been using on a regular basis so I am very sloppy. Hoping to get back to regular sessions with my friends and family.
@@soncheuk 你好我有个问题，为什么香港政府不推广广东话正字，我记得每个粤语字都是有正字的，而不是一些口字旁的字，与字意毫无关系，感觉像是一种拼音。推广正字不是更容易推广广东话教育吗
I'm sorry but I prefer Simplified characters because I prefer not to ruin my eyes when reading small fonts on a screen 😅
There is truth to that! :)
多謝你🙏🏼😊Thank you very much HongKonger
Hello Marguerite！你好！
對呀，那個‘’簡化‘’跟本唔係簡化，而係模糊化。
無論如何，我很欣賞你講的這番說話，還很驚訝妳能夠看到漢字的美，學生有你這樣的老實真幸福。
期待你下條片！
How's your life back in USA? I assume you're from Miami? Ive been in HK nearly 2 years but plan a long holiday in London and re-evaluate my future here in HK.
I don't mind simplified for short hand writing. But when you see simplified for official names and even historical places that's when it's ugly. It should be like print and cursive. Simplified for hand writing but traditional for all news media, Signs, and names.
For cantonese speakers, some simp-chin words are based on mandarin, so we can't read the words out by looking at the sound components (燈->灯). But to be fair, most of the time we just memorise the trad-chin words without understanding the meaning of the components in the words.
But maybe we should also look at japanese - they simplified their kanji (chin characters) decades ago, and of course the 2 sets of alphabets are kinda ultimate ver. of simp-chin in their own way, which should we say has been indeed successful?
Decades ago? I think they've done that centuries ago...
"The 'big deal' that I have with it is that it was done chop-change, immediately, out with the old in with the new, done. That is not what's called a 'gradual change', a 'natural change' in the language."
Every change to a standard language is made this way. By definition standard languages exist when some group defines a standard, and by definition they only change when a new standard is created. That process is always "chop-change, immediately." For example, while I was studying Spanish as an American high school student in the 1990s, the alphabet changed. Out with the "ch" and "ll" in with the "c, h" and "l,l." Chop-change, immediately. Next years dictionaries were organized differently. Would that have been better somehow if it had been gradual? Around the same time there was a German language spelling reform. Same story, chop-change, out with the eszet in with the esses. The Russian alphabet I learned in college isn't quite the same as the alphabet Tolstoy used. Out with the extra "i" and the theta. Chop change. Did this make it harder to study Church Slavonic later, which includes those letters? No, it didn't.
So your complaint here is basically a complaint about the existence of standardized languages. As a lingophile myself, I appreciate your affinity for natural language change. If you looked hard enough you would find comments from me encouraging Chinese language TH-camrs to include examples from their non-standard local language varieties. On the other hand, though, as a poor person I appreciate the considerable economic impact on poor people of language diversity. Standardizing language was one of many steps China took in the process of lifting *800 MILLION human beings* out of poverty over the course of a few decades. As an American, if I get cancer tomorrow I won't find out until I'm dying a horrible death, because the United States doesn't provide healthcare as a human right. China does. And China is partly able to do that because people from opposite ends of their large country are educated in the same language.
Could China have had these enormous economic successes without Simplified Characters, even in the face of non-stop economic warfare from the western hegemony? That's not clear, and more relevantly it certainly wasn't clear when the decision was made. Taiwan and Singapore don't stand up as examples for two big reasons: they're both relatively tiny geographically, and they are both economic allies of the United States.
As much as I love the natural process of language change, human suffering is simply more important. *It IS elitist* to ignore this impact.
I agree with you for the most part, especially I don't like how "unpretty" the simplified characters are. If they want of simplify then they should just reduce the number of strokes for the more complicated characters and leave the rest alone. BTW, did you make your "bold prediction"? I must have missed it.
I have been learning both, simplified and traditional, and because I learned simplified first, it is still easier for me to use them. But since I started learning classical Chinese and Cantonese, I realized that simplified characters lack of something... they lost some of the original meaning, they lost the beauty of Chinese characters, which is really sad. Your video reminded me to study harder on traditional characters, especially writing.... thank you so much. Love from Germany :)
I'm so glad! Thank you for watching and commenting and for "getting it" .... because for me, it's all about how sad to have lost a part of the culture. It's interesting, because if you never knew it, you can't mourn its loss .... but once you know it and lost it, it's almost unbearable.
I think of Hong Kong in this way .... if one has never lived there and experienced the awesomeness that it was, one can't understand how tragic the current situation is. It makes it hard for people to relate to each other .... and I guess that's the challenge -- to realise that we have to meet each other halfway. To allow HK people to grieve what was lost, while also encouraging them to be open to the inevitable changes. It's not easy and is being managed horribly at the moment.
Thanks again .... I'm really glad you commented! Love from the US ❤️🇺🇸🇭🇰❤️
I agree with your points. I just wanted to add my two cents as a longtime Mandarin learner. I don't know about Cantonese, but in Mandarin, it would be completely impractical to try to Romanize the language due to the high number of homophones. Yes, traditional characters are harder to write, but in my experience, they're not more difficult to recognize when typing.
I agree, romanization would make it hard to know where a word originated from without prior knowledge.
And I also agree that recognizing and typing characters is pretty easy once you've done it for long enough, however I prefer Simplified characters because they have less strokes and are easier to read when they're small
"The beauty of the characters"
Traditional characters really are beautiful when you blow them up this big, with 8 on the whole screen (and to be fair, i figure you could pack in another dozen at that size). They can get totally illegible at *practical font sizes* however. I totally agree that Traditional Characters are great for any artistic design. But I think it's hard to argue that they're better for practical day-to-day usage.
I don't think the Mona Lisa is even available as an emoji. I kinda hope not.
Although I understand both traditional and simplified characters, I have to say the former has a much in-depth substance in terms of beauty and meaning than the latter.
Consider going to eat noodle, simplified form is 食面, traditional is 食麵, in simplified form is it easting face or eating noodle, without the context of the rest of conversation or text it's impossible to find out, traditional form benefit from having the context built in. In terms of utility it fit the purpose. Sadly because of the population size, simplified it more dominant.
Here is my opinion. Before literacy became widespread, there were the elites, who could read, and the the rest, who could not read. After introducing simplified characters, there are still the elite, who communicate with each other using traditional characters, and the rest, who must use the simplified script. Thus, where there were two levels of educated society in the past (the literate and the illiterate), there are now two new levels of educated society (those can read the traditional characters and those who can’t). Those who only know simplified characters may be limited, therefore, in their choice of profession, etc.
hehe controversial...(sipping tea). saving this video to watch later :) support!
using less functional simplified characters isnt the main problem. but abandon the original one. not giving you more choices but remove your choice.
making people feel like using traditional character is "illegal" and "wrong"
reading and writing are in different difficulty levels. a s6 primary school student in modern day can read most of the characters. so i dont think theres benefit to only allow using simplified characters in printings. for writing, using simplified characters has a long history. it always be a choice. and now forcing people use a specific character type is much less meaningful for keyboard typing
Traditional characters are not illegal in China. Nor are they viewed as wrong. In fact, you are regarded as erudite if you are knowledgeable of them.
@@romanr.301 *feel LIKE* you cant use it freely under the pressure
@@ysts3452 And I am explaining to you that no one feels that way because there is no stigma against traditional in China.
Does it really take much longer to learn Traditional or is that also a myth?
You’re not taking into account the fact that they didn’t have unified characters for traditional forms, they had the same character written in several different ways in traditional form, and they tried to unify it as well as simplify it so everyone would write the same character. I get that they could’ve chosen one traditional character to represent all the other versions of it buuuut they thought it would be easier to teach, since most people didn’t know how to write anyway, so it wasn’t like everybody had to relearn the characters, mostly teachers had to update their knowledge. 汉字叔叔 has a mini documentary on this whole thing, it’s very interesting. I used to think simplified characters were stupid until I saw that documentary and really understood why they did it.
Also, it got to a point where even the people that knew how to write were confused because there wasn’t a clear rule character writing, which meant the government was decided at first to ban characters all together like the Korean did for example.
I highly recommend the hanzishushu documentary to clear all this up.
As for students, I think using books that contain both forms, like integrated Chinese helps us understand both, maybe learn how to write both. But maybe learning how to write simplified but being able to recognize traditional is a more logical approach.
People who are against simplified Chinese characters seem to not understand at all why the Chinese characters were simplified. It was simplified for the purpose of increasing literacy in China quickly and effectively, not for ''aesthetic'' or ''traditional'' reasons.
The majority of people in China previously did not know how to read or write, it was urgent to teach people to read and write as quickly as possible in order to educate the population in more important aspects. It is more important to teach people about science, politics, philosophy than to learn the ''beauty'', ''tradition'' and ''history'' of Chinese characters. Therefore, it's necessary that they first know how to read and write . Learning traditional hanzi takes more time, that time could be saved on other things like science, but how are you going to teach them about science if they don't even know how to read and write? It must be taken into account that a large part of the population in China was illiterate before Mao's time. Maybe it may be that the traditional hanzi is more ''artistic'', but you don't teach a child or an illiterate person art first before reading and writing.
Also people who are against simplified hanzi fall into the myth of believing that traditional hanzi are prohibited in mainland China. People in mainland China still often use the traditional hanzi for obviously traditional reasons such as festivals or art.
Simplified Chinese is more practical, that was and is the purpose, not the ''beauty''. Furthermore, Simplified Chinese was not simplified arbitrarily, but radicals were simplified in a logical way (mostly), phonetic radicals were changed to simpler ones, unnecessary radicals were removed, some were simplified as in their traditional cursive form, others adopted phonetic radicals, and others to simply phonetic.
For practical purposes, simplified Chinese is the best. Now if we talk about history and beauty, you can use the traditional one.
Also, simplified chinese doesn't look ugly to me, it looks nice as well as traditional. More radicals and more strokes does not mean more 'beauty', if that were the case, Hangul would be a horrible writing system for being so simple, which is obviously not the case. The beauty of Chinese characters has more to do with how the strokes are made and not their quantity, both simplified and traditional can look good if they are written in the correct way, that is, with pressure, consistency, good handwriting, ink, brush , softness, and so on. The traditional one can also look ugly if it is written by a person whose hand shakes a lot. Quantity is not synonymous with quality.
And I have to admit that the simplified one also has certain mistakes, but it doesn't make it worse than the traditional one, in fact the traditional one also has mistakes such as phonetic radicals that today don't make sense, or radicals that are simply there and don't contribute anything, neither phonetically nor semantically. Both have their illogical things at times, one lacks semantics, and the other has unnecessary radicals and extra strokes.
I am HKer and am filled with sadness erosion of culture, including language. How much more longer will traditional characters last with now govt? Taiwan will be last bastion. HK Chinese will need to keep up with tradition and make sure we pass knowledge of traditional characters including publication of books and newspapers in traditional characters, and both canto and mandarin classes taught in traditional characters. Change to simplified characters is partly a result of time (throughout history how a character is written had changed) but worse travesty is work of the mainland govt. There is so much history involved with a traditional character and you can trace back to its roots and pictorials. I would even go as far as saying what has been done by mainland govt is almost cultural genocide.
Wow. Describing Simplified as “dumbed down” and that advocacy for simplified characters implies that people are being insulted for being stupid, seems unnecessarily simplistic. The Roman alphabet is written more simply than it was 200 years ago for efficiency’s sake. I love the way all of the characters look, Traditional or Simplified. They are all works of art. I do find the Simplified easier to see on a screen. Since Chinese children all learn pinyin now before they learn the characters, and adults type their texts in pinyin then choose from among the characters served up to the user, I wonder if time itself will not relegate both Chinese writing systems to history.
I appreciate the beauty of traditional characters but as a illiterate abc, I wonder if learning simplified would've made me less illiterate. The Chinese schools in the U.S. teaches with traditional and I always felt overwhelmed by the complexity and ended up relying on pinyin to read.
Also, when you showed the comparison image, the laziness in me wants to learn the simplified version but the traditional does look so much better.
I think it also depends on the character! I don't mind the characters which are basically just adaptations of common simplifications already attested/in usage, since in my mind, they're just as historically valid. The completely new characters, as well as the characters which have completely disappeared where you have one character representing previously multiple characters drives me round the bend.
As a Japanese learner, we did have a similar phenomenon known as 'shinjitai' but they were far less simplified most of the time in comparison to Chinese. One defence I do have for simplified characters, however, is that while the Japanese literacy rate is technically 99%, the amount of people who cannot read or write a book without a dictionary is pretty astounding. Even my Japanese teachers usually need a dictionary on hand whenever they write. I'm not sure if the same is true in Mainland China, but my impression has been that simplified characters are easier to write without needing other resources.
Both are beautiful in it's area, I prefer to read traditional characters, but sincerely I prefer to write "学" than "學", also for some reason "鸟" looks more beautiful to me that "鳥". But in general I prefer traditional.
For me traditional is far better looking but at the moment of writing I prefer simplified, with exceptions obviously but yeah.
Japan had a simplification process too, albeit not as much as drastic as China's. I think as a middle ground, Japanese simplification is a good job.
Thank you for the video - HKer living in YYZ
You're welcome! I really hope to be able to visit the YYZ some day. I don't have much excuse now as I'm a lot closer than I used to be! :)
What would be a good way to learn chinese characters?
Take my class! :) I'm getting ready to launch my third Level 1 Traditional Chinese Characters in Cantonese Pronunciation course in September 2022. If you're interested, you can find out more at www.cantolingo.com. I use materials from Chinese University that are really REALLY good at teaching you characters. If you have any questions or want to contact me directly, email hello@cantolingo.com! Thanks! :)
beauty
history
freer from homonym confusion
Great video! I also prefer the traditional script. I've studied Mandarin on and off for over 15 years and I'm now getting into Cantonese. Traditional script makes perfect sense for Cantonese, but for someone learning Mandarin, simplified is essential - unless you're only using Taiwanese resources - which are hard to come by unless you live in Taiwan. I hate to say it, but sadly, I think the CCP is going to push the Mandarin/Simplified agenda until everyone in Hong Kong is using it. ☹
I agree ... it's just a matter of time .... schools will be forbidden to teach in Cantonese and traditional characters; street signs will be replaced .... movies only in Mandarin perhaps? Ugh, it's just so sad.
@@CantoneseCorner I was just thinking about how things could have been different if Taiwan claimed independence when they had the chance. Would the UK have handed over Hong Kong to the Republic of China instead of the PRC? I am hopeful that Hongkongers will continue to value their culture and traditions even if on the surface they have to comply with the CCP.
@@hvuvtjs This has nothing to do with whether the CCP is in power or not. As long as the Chinese government is the whole main land‘s gov, it will definitely implement simplified Chinese characters, because there was already a simplified Chinese character program in the ROC before the PRC, but it was not officially promulgated because of the war.After the Kuomintang was defeated by the CCP and retreated to the Taiwan, in order to politically oppose the CCP, the CCP implemented simplified Chinese characters. The Kuomintang had to oppose simplified Chinese characters, even though they were originally compiled by the Kuomintang in the 1930s.
yes chinese is not only restricted about standard mandarin and simplified characters…
我非常喜欢使用甲骨文. 甲骨文太阳是圆的. 繁体的太阳不是圆的 . 非常错误
i hate simplified too but your reasons dont really add up to me,, china never forbade anyone from learning traditional, they just thought it would be easier to teach someone how to write with less strokes. and the elitism thing is also uhhhh what you just said doesnt make sense at all. i agree with the last part where you said traditional just looks better, but calligraphy only uses traditional characters because the practise was most popular before simplified was a thing. i personally use traditional because its just more historically timeless and its easier to understand the character based on it's components, besides, its not any harder to communicate using it now that we all just type
Original intention for Simplified Chinese are good, I get that.. but now it become language of commy,🤣
No…the original intent was and has never been good. It was always about control, so that people can only read papers and books that the communist party publishes.
@@snowheader2200 I thought it was meant to teach farmer back in early days to read and write o well ...I never liked it anyway
Despite I have difficulty to learn Chinese but still think traditional Chinese is the best😄
Is that why Singapore, one of the most capitalistic countries in the world, uses Simplified? Dunce.
After watching this video I finally understood why 面 means both face and noodles, and 后 means both back and Empress 😭😭💀💀 this has puzzled me for a long time
I'm so glad the video could help clear up the confusion! 🙌🤩
Thanks for sharing
You're welcome! Sorry it took me so long to reply 💖
Have you read 1984? Simplified Chinese is the NewSpeak in China.
感謝你的解説！
令世人明白這究竟是怎麼一回事，更珍惜傳統正體中文。
希望有朝一日，我華夏文明恢復使用正體中文，方可偉大復興。
Korea simplified Chinese into Hangul. Koreans love that. America tried to simplify "real" English flavour, colour etc. We allow whatever we feel is good. We don't use Gothic script anymore which is way more beautiful We should all agree to disagree. The real beauty of Chinese characters is truly amazing. Watch the film "Hero"
I haven't seen it yet, but thanks for the recommendation. I will watch it as soon as I can -- I love Jet Li. ❤️
那些字是古時設計給半人獸學的 , 殊不知後世竟然有蠻 (粵音民) 族把它視作經典 , 並說成是祖先遺傳 , 難怪漢人稱它們為蠻族矣 !
i like simplified chinese
Also, Hongkongers have been proven by at least one study as the people with the highest IQ in the world. This proves that using traditional Chinese characters makes people smarter haha (of course, this is a fallacy but those who insist on using simplified Chinese are too stupid to learn about these fallacies anyway).
I mean, it's not like Singaporeans, who also use simplified, are among the highest-performing in the world, and Chinese universities are increasingly joining the ranks of prominent Western universities in global rankings. You are the worst type of the pro-Traditional camp. And that is coming from me, someone who also strongly prefers Traditional Characters. If you have to insult millions of people you don't even fucking know, deriding them as stupid because their linguistic choice differs from yours, then you are most likely the dull one, clinging onto any possible minute detail that can distract you from your own mediocrity.
I have this discussion with my kids and my example is: 糞。 Whether people should pick up the poo with a tool "糞'' or pick up with their hands "粪" without the tool should be their own choice. However the choice of not picking up the poo with their hands is not allowed somewhere on earth.
This makes me wonder about the discussion back in the day when the powers-that-be were deciding how to simplify the characters. Oh, to be a fly on that wall! I wonder if anyone was brave enough to make this argument and what the response was. Thank you for sharing! 🙏
As an American living in Taiwan for the last decade who does read / write / speak Mandarin, I can tell you that traditional characters are MUCH EASIER TO READ (and therefore LEARN) than simplified... Yes, to write some of them (such as 鬱金香、烏龜、芭蕾舞、電影、or even my name: 魏穎斌) takes some perseverance but... They are easier to read because the meanings (and sometimes pronunciation clues) haven't been stripped away... Best examples :
廣東 vs 广东
愛 vs 爱
書 vs 书
國 vs 国
臺灣 vs 台湾
Intuitively you would think the "simpler" one is easier, but the meaning as well as many pronunciation clues (not to mention beauty / artistry) have been destroyed.....
I love this comment .... thank you for sharing. ❤️
Actually 书 is 書. No joke. That simplified character is created by converting the cursive form into standard strokes. Same thing with 东. Other examples include 马 and 门。
And 国 is an archaic vulgar form that Japan also uses. Before simplified Chinese, the ROC tried using 口 + 王 making it a logograph of a king surrounded by the city walls. But now its 口 + 玉 which is jade (representing the emperor) surrounded by the city walls.
And 台 has always existed for place names in Chinese. It just got repurposed to mean 臺 removing the later from the dictionary.
It does look a bit less cool but it's not BS.
@@PeterLiuIsBeast I'm aware of where the characters originated and why they are the way they are... I just find it unnecessary to "simplify" (being nice) it when studies have shown it hasn't done its job at all (to improve literacy)... There's no gap in literacy of children OR adults in countries (regions so as not to offend anyone) that use simplified versus traditional Chinese characters...
7:58 in Chinese we call this 歧異 this the major problem comes from Simplified Chinese characters
even President XING feels embarrassing about his surname 习
this word looks like 刁
I don't know how to translate this word 刁 directly into English but this word is very negative
It is used to describe a group of civilians who make trouble in all ways against the
establishment
U can find that the Chinese government use 習 instead of 习 in all official articles
I also want to talk about changes
Any changes must follow its basics element
for music it is: do re mi fa sol la ti do
for Chinese words it is: 部首 筆順 形聲 會意 指示
It thinks Simplified Chinese is a failed version of copycat
"They have every much a right to learn the language passed down to them as anybody else."
As you surely know as a student of Cantonese, the written language passed down to them wasn't Standard Chinese at all but was Classical Chinese, which by the way Chinese people still learn in high school. Standard Chinese, even in Traditional Characters, is not the language that was passed down to them. So are you upset that illiterate people were taught how to write a living spoken language instead of being taught to write a dead classical language, or are you upset that they were taught to write Standard Chinese in a system developed to write Standard Chinese instead of using precisely the same set of characters as the classical language? Are you equally upset ðat English isn't still written wiþ the letters þ and ð? Do you think we should be taught to read and write the language of Gilgamesh instead of contemporary English? There were a few decades of Standard Chinese being written with Traditional Characters before advent of Standard Chinese. Is that the material you're afraid of losing? Do you recognize that *far more* Standard Chinese has been written in Simplified Characters than in Traditional Characters?
I find your position very confusing, except when I allow myself to imagine that this is all an emotional reaction to communism.
I'm born and raised in the US but still speak Cantonese with family and I tried learning Mandarin in high school and for a person who had to learn how to read and write (and speak to some degree), I find that Simplified was easier to learn. I think looking back at it, if I had to learn Traditional, I'm not sure I would have been able to pick up much of it because Simplified was hard enough to learn as it was but this was also a time in my life when learning a second language wasn't very high on my priority list so I didn't put too much time and effort to learn it. That said, Traditional is definitely more aesthetically pleasing and because it was what my ancestors used, I feel like it should be something that we continue to use regardless of how difficult it is to learn.
I appreciate you are learning Chinese. Traditional Chinese characters are not only used by our ancestors. They are currently use in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Simplified characters is inferior not aesthetically but the structure of each word. The essence of our language/culture is eliminated in the simplified version. The main problem is that CCP omitted vocabulary. One example is the word “behind 後.” It is replaced by the word “queen 后.” Very destructive in many levels…
Please learn traditional Chinese characters to preserve our beautiful language 🙏🏼
@@lapompom1010 indeed. Furthermore the increased ambiguity with 殘體字 due to some characters having the same meaning actually makes it more difficult to use.
@@lapompom1010in your opinion, will it take a foreigner much longer to learn Traditional or is that a myth?
Yes. It will take longer. It worth the time. It helps one to understand the essence of Chinese language. Some commented that captions are easier in simplified version. HongKonger and Taiwanese are reading traditional version captions. We don’t have the problem. Simplified version eliminates the structure of a word and the language itself. Imagine this-wood and would sounds similar. Wood is simpler; and replaced the word “would.” The result: wood you help me please? Anyhow, if you choose to learn a language, learn the best not dismantled version.
Hello, if I could add a few counterarguments and points:
1. the poll didn't take a fair cross section of the Chinese speaking population. Your followers are predominantly from HK and would naturally choose traditional. Given simplified is used in Mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore, the result would've been different if more ppl from those regions participated in the poll (based on total population in the world alone, simplified would win given ppl are naturally biased towards what they are familiar with).
2. In the computer/mobile/print age, there is no difference between efficiency in handwriting. But by the nature of less strokes in simplified, then simplified surely would've improved (often dramatically) the efficiency of written communication. That was another consideration for adopting simplified on top of the literacy consideration
3. traditional characters are not banned in mainland china. To ensure efficient and consistent administration, the laws mandate that the official writing of mainland china be simplified. However, traditional texts are still appreciated in mainland china in literature, culture and caligraphy. It has become an art form.
4. Unfortunately, there has been negative sentiment in HK towards mainland chinese (can somewhat appreciate source of bias, and won't comment further to keep post short). This negative sentiment therefore has given rise to negative feeling associated with mainland chinese incl. spoken mandarin and simplified chinese. This has negatively affected how some people in HK perceive the language. Unfortunately language do change quickly (see hangul korean) or gradually (see french words in english), and this can be threatening to the minority. However, history demonstrates that change to any language is inevitable.
Surely, if the goal had originally been to improve the efficiency of written Chinese communication, and the benefits of an efficient writing system had been paramount, then, perhaps, the Chinese government would have fully implemented the second round of simplified characters. And the fact that the Chinese government chose not to implement the second simplicification scheme and even retracted the those second-round simplified characters speaks volumes about the arguments of having characters with fewer strokes and improving the efficiency of writing. But if you believe in the advantage of writing with fewer strokes and faster, perhaps you should consider campaigning for the full implementation of the second simplification scheme. After all, the second-round simplified characters already got created in the late 1970s and have been lying around ever since. These simplified characters are waiting to be fully adopted, and they also do what the first-round simplified characters do, making writing more efficient with fewer strokes.
@@Magnetlarry thx for the reply. I do not know what policy decision went into not implementing the second round of changes, but it could be that the cost of re-learning those changes had outweighted the benefit of even less strokes. However the fact that the second round was not implemented does not mean the first round was a failure - it's not an all or nothing reform. Separately, draw an analogy to the efforts to reform and promote simple english by the legal education system in the western countries. Archaic legalese like hereunder and aforesaid have been used in famous judgments but modern legal education promote simpler and more easier to understand expressions. Does that remove the rich history of the legal expression? Maybe. Does it make legal writing more accessible to the broarder population? Yes.
Completely agree with you. Making the writing language more accessible was the goal of the simplification. Still people try so hard to degrade SC and mainland people. It's so sad how this rethoric has become the mainstream in the west.
@@mackwan88 really? You are trying to justify the Chinese character simplification with the English legalese (no BS) reform movement advocated by the legal education sectors in western countries as if Chinese law/legal opinions written in simplified characters were currently well understood by the general public without proper legal training or the help from qualified lawyers? To be frank, I just find it extraordinary that you use the English legal language as a comparable example to what is supposed to be used by the general public in the Far East in everyday life, especially when the English writing system heavily relies on sound/phonetic elements whereas the Chinese system relies on visual elements. But if you insist on their comparability, perhaps you should consider advocating the governments of English-speaking western countries to pass law to simplify English words as well, getting rid of all the silent letters, like the s in "island", the h in "hour", or the k in "knee", just to name a few.
And also, you are saying the first round was a success and the cost of the second round did not justify the move. Then, how did they measure the success which was solely attributable to the character simplification but not something else? What were the relevant figures? How much did it cost for the 1st round? What had been the estimated figure before the implementation of the 1st round? How much would have cost the society for not having the 1st round implemented? What were all the estimated figures for the 2nd round in the late 1970’s? I would really appreciate it if you could share these figures with me as my quick search of the internet gave me nothing.
@@aaarodrigo degrade SC? Wow, then, I'd say the Chinese gov showed to the world how best to degrade SC ==> by deciding to publish all those 2nd round SC and then just to throw them away
I personally think simplified Chinese is great as a western learner. Coming into Chinese I viewed it as a nearly impossibly task self studying (even with prior language learning success).
Now that I am feeling like I’m getting somewhere with simplified, however, I have growingly become fascinated with traditional characters. I 100% will learn them in my lifetime, especially after having gained some confidence with simplified.
I think simplified is a great gateway, especially for practicality purposes, and true lovers of the language will take the extra step of also learning traditional later down the road.
I think your road is pretty typical and I'm so happy to hear you're interested now in traditional characters! Honestly, since I started working with Gloria, it really has been fun learning the differences in the simplified and traditional. I can totally see how and why simplified are so useful ... but just wish it were the other way around ... learn traditional and then simplify. Similar a bit to learning proper written English and then choosing to later simplify to wanna and gotta and ain't and ppl and brb, etc .... maybe one day that's all ppl will learn and then only true lovers of the language will take that extra step to learn that ppl once was spelled people. :)
I understand your point why a nation would not dump her own national language and switch to a sinplefied form. But that was not the only historical fiasco in the century, sad to say.
It seems that what you actually hate is the perceived politics that you associate with simplified Chinese. Not particularly objective.
As an ABC I learned traditional growing up. Unfortunately when I was a child I really did not want to learn Cantonese and was forced to go to Chinese school. Traditional was hard to memorize to me and I was not taught things like phonetic components to help. With the more complex strokes and me not wanting to learn needless to say I did not retain very much.
In college I wanted to learn Chinese and chose to learn traditional since that was what I grew up with. It looked better and well, it was “traditional “. Our class allowed us to choose which we wanted to learn. T they only also mandarin classes so that’s what I took. Looking back I felt as if I may have been able to retain more characters if I learned simplified instead. It wasn’t as if they randomly cut down the number of strokes, but many words were replaced with similar sounding components so that they were easier to remember (which I think may apply more to mandarin than canto). Often times I would remember only part of a traditional character, whereas that part works have just been the whole word in simplified (like 丽in麗). I understand the argument about not assuming your peoples intelligence. However with my experience I feel that I unnecessarily made it harder for myself to learn Chinese.
I’m pretty sure traditional was also a simplified version of a previous script so i don’t know if we should have such absolute attitudes towards it. I definitely used to be traditional only until my experience learning Chinese and how it helped improve literacy in the 20th century. Japan also simplified their characters and Korea literally did away with the whole system and went syllabic.
I really hope to get better at Chinese though! For me I’m going to try to learn it in simplified but know how to read both!
One thing I learned recently is that Mandarin, likely due to its fewer tones and therefore higher likelihood of homophones, tends to have more words that are expressed with two characters/syllables whereas they might only require one in Cantonese. I wonder if this is partly what drove the unification of multiple meanings into a single character in Simplified Chinese, namely the move toward multi-character words and having fewer base characters to learn. Although I, as a heritage Cantonese speaker, certainly prefer the aesthetics, history, and etymological value of traditional characters, I can see how moving toward a more multi-character vocabulary could be a sensible direction, especially if it follows suite with Mandarin. That said, I am compelled to learn Traditional first (along with Cantonese more thoroughly) in spite of the relative impracticality because preserving that culture and heritage is more important to me.
I personally don't think that's the reason, simplified characters have been invented pretty recently but Mandarin is an old language
If it is true as you say, Mandarin cannot abandon traditional Chinese characters, because the information density of traditional Chinese characters is greater than that of simplified Chinese characters.The fact is that although Mandarin has only four tones, there is an extra soft tone, and Mandarin has flat and raised tongues, and there are Er sounds. These can help increase recognition, which is equivalent to adding several more tones.Therefore Mandarin is no more confusing than Cantonese.
Modern english is indeed simplified, doing away old english grammatical cases
But over centuries or at least a long, long time .... It would be interesting if we all still spoke like they wrote in Beowulf or even Shakespeare's time.
I think a better equivalent would be spelling reforms like in Spanish or German. The example of "simplifying" the language in order to talk to non-native speakers or children has more to do with limiting grammar and vocabulary, while the simplification of Chinese characters are about modifying the script to be easier to write and memorize.
Thank you! I'm not familiar with the spelling reforms, but could it be the same as British English versus American English with the extra letters in both (enroll vs enrol; colour vs color, etc.)?
I guess my point about limiting grammar and vocabulary is that you're not using the full richness of the language ... and one could argue that the simplification of Chinese characters was as much about gutting the cultural and linguistic heritage that is every Chinese person's right as it was simply making it easier to write and memorize. Four for the price of one!
@@CantoneseCorner In a way it's similar to that, yes, though much more extensive.
One could make the argument that character simplification is also similar to how the Latin alphabet evolved from always being what we now refer to as uppercas carved in stone to "simpler" lowercase letters that facilitated writing. Of course, the Chinese simplification was a lot more artificial and sudden, and also comes with a lot of political baggage due to its association with communist China. I personally don't think the intentions of the Chinese government lay beyond simply making the language easier to write (albeit perhaps without giving much thought to the history of certain characters). Especially when considering that the learning and usage of traditional characters were never banned.
It's very bad policy coming from Mainland China. I'm not convinced that simplifying the language did anything of value. It might take just 8-12 strokes instead of 15-20 strokes to complete a written character, BUT you still have to learn the characters one by one. It's still hard. It's still time-consuming. And, you STILL need the traditional characters if you want to read Tang poetry and all the classical philosophical texts. It actually makes it harder for one to access their cultural history because now you have to learn two sets of characters. As someone who grew up outside of China but as part of the Chinese diaspora, I believe culture and language is supposed to bring people together. This is very divisive.
Beautifully said and I couldn't agree more. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. ❤️
Consider though that dividing the people from their history and traditions may have been intentional and by design (think Cultural Revolution...) However it's not popular to say so (at least not anymore), so the historical purpose has been papered over with other semi-plausible rationalizations (basically propaganda) dictated by authorities... (Incidentally this would also follow a familiar pattern of how the CCP operates in many other areas...)
@@darren93575 I'm not against linguistic reform if it makes sense. The Vietnamese and the Koreans eliminated Chinese characters from their normal day-to-day written languages and now use phonetic writing forms. But, in doing that, they did not destroy the culture. People choose to study Chinese characters in Korea and Vietnam for specific educational purposes, but they learn the characters as they were used several hundreds of years back. You either go all the way or don't go at all. But do not just go half-way and tamper with the characters and ruin their meanings and appearance and think that you are boosting literacy when what you have really done is disconnect people from ancestral thought. That's wrong.
It's not the only advantage: with simplified characters you also save more ink, and having less strokes makes them easier to read on screens when the font isn't that big. Overall I think that less strokes is better but at the same time I don't like that many characters lost their full meaning when they got simplified to forms that don't hint anymore at the original character. If every component/radical had been always systematically simplified in the same way, then it would have been better.
@@sasino Actually, you made me think of something interesting. Handwriting is becoming less and less common. People use technologies. People will leave voice messages on WeChat. People will also use voice typing tools, so that the computer prints out what they say. Actually, Chinese and Japanese forget to write characters because of lack of practice. If that is the case, then it does not even matter if the characters are simplified or traditional because all that matters then is that you be able to read and recognize the characters. The rationale to use simplified characters is actually weaker if people can get by without handwriting.
the sad thing is that today, a lot of learner only learn simplified without being interesting in the traditional characters.
I know .... it makes me so sad to know that I'm fighting a losing battle sometimes 😭
a billion Chinese may not agree
@@mcinnis58 why ?
晚上好，你好嗎？
While I'm not a Cantonese learner, my major being for Mandarin Chinese, I have to agree with you. While I do think that it would be better to keep the status quo of Simplified and Traditional, I think that it's a shame that the government thought that rural farmers were too dumb to be able to learn Traditional characters. I mean, I get the logic behind what they must have been thinking: How do we get them to read as quickly as possible? So they did things like merge characters together, used cursive vulgar variants of traditional characters, or took out radicals to make it “faster” to write。 Examples of these could be 头、发、对、难。。。。 They look easy but you can tell they've either been merged or are missing something. Especially with 发 which can be both hair （髮）or to emit out （發）.
When I started learning Chinese, and was planning before COVID to go to China to study later when I was more proficient, I was using Simplified. Not knowing much about Chinese characters and how they worked, I thought that Simplified compared to Traditional was easier. Then I was told that my Chinese flagship program at the university would only allow people to study abroad in Taiwan. So I started to learn Traditional.
And I have to say, Traditional is nice. I can see how the language, being a logographic language, survived for so long in that natural state. The characters usually have some type of radical meaning and a phonetic meaning, even if the phonetic hint might be from centuries ago and not sound at all like the modern one. It's the beauty of learning characters, right?
Though, some of the Simplified characters aren't too bad and make sense such as tears 泪 instead of 淚。And yet , some of them do not much make sense and it really makes me scratch my head such as 麵（面）or 廣（广）or 億（亿）or even 頭 （头)。While I get some of these such as 亿 are made by cursive variants from centuries or even as far back as the Han Dynasty, it wasn't meant to be official, more or less just quick shorthand when you want to scribble a few notes down.
Anyways, it was good to hear your thoughts on this in a respectful manner. You really did make good arguments and I'm glad that people in the video comments are civil.
Hi there! I really enjoyed reading your post -- thank you for sharing your thoughts and isn't it funny how covid has changed so much of our lives ... and it's cool how you now have that unique perspective of having learned simplified and then traditional and get to go to Taiwan!
Thanks for bringing up the point about how the scribbles weren't meant to be official. I guess it would be like if Gregg Shorthand were to be implemented as the way everyone should write English? Maybe not as extreme, though? I don't know enough about shorthand, I just remember people learning it a long time ago and thinking it was sooooo weird and illegible. :)
I hope you enjoy your time in Taiwan -- I'll never forget once we drove up this mountain in the middle of Taiwan it was the scariest ride of my life .... like you're literally 6 inches away from falling down the side of the mountain the whole way up. Maybe they have guard rails now, but it was scary then! Beautiful when you got to the top and we stayed overnight in this gorgeous house, but couldn't really enjoy it cause knew the next day we had to drive back down. lol
亿 makes sense because it uses 乙, the second Heavenly Stem, as a phonetic component just like 億 in the full-form character.
there's no way to simplify English, because English doesn't have any characters, they are what they are. But Chinese has characters, which means you have to learn these thousands of characters to understand Chinese. In English there are just 26 letters and most people get to know these letters very fast, compared to learning Chinese characters. That different.
Of course there are ways to simplify English. Have you heard of shorthand writing? How are abbreviations? English speakers have ways to speed up writing too, but at the end, the formal writing is the standard. It's like text messaging vs newspaper. If newspaper articles are written like text messages, it wouldn't look educated to me.
@@ericleung1578 I think I didn't make myself clear. When you said shorthand writing, it is probably like "ppl" to "people", but when you say this word, the pronunciation is still "people", nobody is saying like pi-pi-eil. But in Chinese, there are a bunch of characters with the same pronunciation, which means you need to learn the characters one by one, how they should be pronounced, and how to write them. In the past, a lot of Chinese didn't write because they were not educated, they were able to communicate but had no way to write. Simplified Chinese is easier to learn, and more Chinese are able to understand it and write. I love traditional Chinese though, the usage of simplified Chinese help most Chinese get educated, which is a brilliant idea.
@@rikkawu4773 Ooh! This brought back such memories .... I'm wondering if @Eric Leung meant shorthand as in Gregg Shorthand en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregg_shorthand which really does simplify English into lines that make zero sense to someone who doesn't know shorthand (like me :) .
I suppose to your point about how there are a bunch of Chinese characters with the same pronunciation but different meanings, that might be similar to the English words "their, there, they're" perhaps?
But I understand what you mean .... we can't or don't simplify the letters themselves -- like we won't write an "F" with only one horizontal line or an "A" as an upside down "V" with no horizontal line across it. Whereas Chinese characters themselves can be and were simplified.
But if we are comparing apples to apples, then the English word (not letter) would more closely match a Chinese character, as it has meaning all by itself. I guess the only letters that also have meaning as words would be the letter "A" which is also an article meaning "one of something" or "I" meaning me, myself. But other than those two, our words are made up of more than one letter, so we would be simplifying the word, not the individual letter.
It's interesting to think about!
And I have to ask again .... what is wrong with Chinese people on the mainland that made them/makes them incapable of learning traditional characters? Of course, nothing! Which is why it baffles me when people imply that without simplified characters the vast majority of Chinese would still be illiterate. It just cannot be true, and smacks of superiority when you really think about it.
@@CantoneseCorner, according to your last question which you might have asked a lot of people, personally I have no trouble reading traditional characters, so I can't tell you why the traditional characters are difficult to learn. Still, I can say, that the simplified Chinese character is much easier to remember. At that time, workers spent a few months learning characters, and then they were able to work following books or any protocols, but for traditional Chinese, I guess they might spend more time and vigor.
And traditional characters have a long history so it has a lot of characters that are not used anymore, and for the same meaning or even the same character, there is more than one symbol (or form? not sure how to describe it) sometime. The simplified Chinese firstly deleted those difficult but not frequently used symbols and then reduce the stroke of single characters. There is once that the specialist over-simplified characters, which let me feel like "letter" to "L'::r" (something like that, z.B. 早餐 to 早歺), but then they realized (feel like I was one of them knowing how they were thinking, lol) that this over-simplified characters can't take that many messages and mess up a lot of characters with different meanings, then they gave up. Finally, we have the simplified Chinese you see today.
Going back to why Chinese find it hard to learn traditional characters, since simplified Chinese, as a language, is able to carry messages, and has fewer strokes for writing, I have no reason to reject learning or writing it, though I am a fan of traditional Chinese. Nowadays, if sb spends time and vigor in learning traditional, I am pretty sure that he or she could learn it very well. But still the question, if simplified Chinese is enough for being a language, why should we go back?
@@CantoneseCorner these are just my personal ideas about simplified Chinese, didn't mean to offend anyone.
I heard that Mao Tse Tung (Wade-Giles spelling) wanted to eliminate Characters all together and was talked out of it by Yosef Stalin. Of course he killed tens of millions of “his people”, so dumbing them down was “before breakfast” easy for him.
我唔鐘意繁體字因為係中共發明。
the reason is simply political
For you, maybe. Not for me, or many others.
But nothing the one party dictatorship did was ever "political", of course. Only the dissent is "political".
从小学简体字长大的中国人阅读繁体字没有任何问题。我老人家专门看繁体直排的古书，你行吗？
I agree with you. I just find it frustrating over the prejudice I faced whenever I use simplified. The general attitude are hostile with undertones of "you are not capable of reasoning" "you already lost the argument when you use simplified". I get where the attitude comes from (given the situation) but there are people who are using simplified and are not from China, and people just stop listening and refuse to communicate.
I'm so sorry to hear this 😔
I like simplified characters. I personally use them and love how they look. I saw a lot of comments saying they have less 底蕴 than complex characters but most of the simplified forms come from 草书、俗字 and radical simplification. Chinese characters have a tendecy to be simplified, one example is 集, it's original form was 3 隹 in top of a 木. Another is 爱(愛)：本为形声字本义为行走之貌，后讹变作从爪从冖心从攵,假借为仁爱。早在《魏崔勤造像》 上,爱字就已经和现在的简体字字形接近。隋智果、唐太宗书法作品中有 把下部的“心、攵”连笔草化为“友” 的，友爱一体,“爱”字从友，显然是合理的。至元代,草书楷化的“爱”作 为俗字即常见运用。Another one is 义, it is a 俗字 and phonetic loan, comes form 乂 and to distinguish it a dot is added. I think the percption of them comes from where you see them, If you just start seeing how common people use them handwritten, in all kinds of creations, songs, streets, illustrations, etc I think you will start to like them. Still simplified characters have a limitation wich is Mandarin, they have been simplified for Mandarin and are not totally compatible with other languages. Obviously people will prefer what they're used to and it's totally fine but Simplified characters deserve just as much respect as 繁体字. Simplifying it's not dumbing down, it was a necessity of the era, most people were illiterate, characters wher mostly written by hand. These exercise of simplification was started in the Republic of China era and most people, including the leaders were supportive of it, the first simplification attempt done in 1934 wiht the 第一批简体字表. It was retracted beacuse of fierce opposition from a minority of elites. This rethoric of saying Simplified characters are dumbed down characters is extremely harmful. Please stop making these kind of comparisons.
Hi there! I really appreciate your comment -- and I'm really trying to take in what you've written and also to see the beauty in SC, but I guess considering only their appearance, I just prefer a more symmetrical look, perhaps.
But I am wondering a few things: Like why then, in your opinion, were simplified characters created? Why were they a necessity? Was reading or writing more important for the masses? Why did the minority of elites reject it? And how would you describe simplified characters relative to traditional characters?
I'm not being facetious, I truly want to know and learn more about how people who like simplified over traditional see the arguments. Because for me, to believe the arguments for simplified, I have to believe that the government was acting out of benevolence, and that's where I get stuck.
@@CantoneseCorner People should also keep in mind that a lot of the supposed historical "facts" used to justify the forced adoption of simplified characters (like how they were, supposedly, in widespread use already) should be taken with a grain of salt, like much of what is taught as historical fact in Mainland China. Shocked by how naive people can be (like, oh, nothing ever happened at Tiananmen Square, why the government said so, they would never lie or make things up of course...) I have yet to see independent research confirm such "facts".
@@CantoneseCorner Benevolent or not I'm not sure. You can see for yourself how simplified characters came to be. Go into a dictionary from the Ming or even older dynasty and check yourself. The logic OP is relaying is mostly correct.
There was a 2nd round of simplification in the 70s that actually did end up botching the script by making it unnatural. They had characters that were never used officially or unofficially in any capacity. So that was overturned within a few years after its introduction. (note this is why 闫 became a much larger surname. Many people changed to writing it the 2nd round way and just never changed back).
On top of that Chinese historically has had many variant forms that would get used in the different provinces across the nation. Every dynasty had their set of official use characters. If I recall correctly the Qin dynasty was the first for all kinds of standardization (language, measurements, etc).
Personally I don't care for either. Use whatever you want. But I say nope to just using the Latin alphabet.
I don't think is a CCP plot to destroy the language. We don't bash Japan for simplifying. We don't bash Korea for removing Chinese characters either.
@@PeterLiuIsBeast Thanks! I appreciate knowing the historical context. I also find it so interesting how important trust or perceived trust is when it comes to how people view this issue. As you say, no one bashes Japan or Korea, but the CCP is the bad guy, when maybe for this instance, they didn't have a hidden agenda or plot to destroy the language. But because of perceived or real mistrust, it's almost automatic to think the worst. I mean, with most decisions, there is always a downside .... a winner and a loser. And I can totally see how they were willing to sacrifice beauty and tradition and culture in the name of progress. That's the way of most things ... handmade gives way to machine made ... people lose their jobs, end products aren't as special, etc. I digress, but it's just painfully sad these days how "progress" and technology has brought the world forward, but also taken in backwards in so many ways and made it lose what was special before. Or maybe I'm just getting old and reminiscing on the good ol' days which weren't really that great to begin with? LOL 😂
白话文运动那帮人还准备把汉字给废了呢，你怎么不说。