there's a fun wrinkle in this saga that you came close to talking about: while all this drama was going on in the mainland, the ministry of education in singapore, for unknown reasons (maybe just impatience idk), went ahead and created their own simplified characters. these were in use in the 60s and 70s (and you can still see them on documents from that time). however after a few years singapore kind of just fell back to whatever the prc guys were using, and that's where we are today
can you point me to any resources to see what those characters were like?? 👀 I don’t know any Chinese so idk how far I can get using just English keywords/resources lol
@@dankmemewannabe wikipedia has a page called "Singapore Chinese Characters" which lists them all :) unfortunately it seems that the default wikipedia font struggles to display some of the weirder ones, so you may see a box symbol instead
Each Chinese character generally has many different variants throughout history. China also standardized which character to use and to consider as the preferred choice several times. Even during Qing Dynasty, China made another round of standardization, see 1875年清朝"大清钦定正体字" (roughly translates to Character Standardization Guideline, Qing Dynasty, 1875) which actually changed some of the simpler characters into the more complex ones. So it's not correct to say it remain unchanged until the present day.
For someone who's not Chinese, let me make a further explanation that the video didn't say☺. 1. Traditional Chinese characters (TCC) are NOT like a new language for those who use simplified Chinese characters (SCC); actually, it's quite easy for Chinese speakers to read and recognise another writing system (both TCC→SCC and SCC→TCC). Then how do we feel when reading? WELL, IT'S LIKE THIS, NOT THAT USUAL TO SEE, BUT YOU STILL CAN READ😉. 2. Many SCC are much OLDER than you think. Why? Because TCC are too tiring to write, and ancient Chinese also understood this, which is why we implement SCC today. You can say that TCC contains more beauty of the Chinese characters. I completely agree with this point as I also write traditional Chinese characters when I practice Chinese characters calligraphy. However, there is no dispute that SCC are more labour-saving in daily life writing🤔. 3. TCC are actually very close to the users of SCC. SCC: 繁体字实际上离简体字的使用者非常近。有多近？只需切换输入法到繁体输入就好了。 TCC: 繁體字實際上離簡體字的使用者非常近。有多近？只需切換輸入法到繁體輸入就好了。 How close? Just switch the input method to TCC mode, that's it😉. My opinion is, there is no need to force someone to change to your writing system; whatever you use (SCC or TCC), just continue using it😄.
People think that China completely abandoned TCC, but in reality in china most school/industry that teach traditional culture/movie/art/history etc still using both TCC and SCC.
I even think it's wrong to translate 繁体中文 as "traditional chinese", more accurate to translate it as "complicated chinese". There are some characters in 繁体中文 which wasn't really "traditional" as Qing emperor picked the more complicated characters to replace the originally less complicated ones.
IMPORTANT TO KNOW. of the 3500 most commonly used characters ( if you know this much you can read 99.5% of characters in media in china ) only 30% have a simplified written version. So if you say yoo want to learn traditional you learn 100 % traditional . When you say you want to learn simplified what you learn is about 70 % traditional and about 30 % is simplified.
Vietnamese is a tonal language and some could argue their tones are a bit more complicated than Mandarin tones. However they reformed to a latin alphabet quite successfully. Of course they have some unique markings for tones and vowel sounds but it very much simplified their writing system from traditional Characters to a nice looking and practical system.
Mandarin (4 tones) and Cantonese tones (6 tones) are easier than Vietnamese (6 tones). In comparison to Viet they're more "flat". Besides that, Viet has more than 50% Chinese vocab (closer to Cantonese). This is coming from a Vietnamese who's learning Cantonese and Mandarin
Japanese kanji is the middle way. Japanese invented their own alphabets (hiragana and katagana) and at the same time keep chinese characters (kanji) for specific words, in this way they can keep the root and simplify the way to write.
@@quach8quach907The literacy rate increased because of the standardised education system, not the writing system. Taiwan still uses the same characters and has a higher literacy rate than Viet-Nam or Mainland China. Viet-Nam didn't have to abolish traditional Chinese characters to be successful, it was simply done because the educated class at the time viewed it as associated with Confucianism.
Awesome video. I don't really know any Chinese, but as someone who loves to read Japanese I would have hated to lose the Chinese characters from it. They make Japanese so much easier to read and can express nice nuances in meaning that a latin alphabet couldn't. But I would guess they work even better in the language they were designed for as opposed to in Japan just stapling China's writing system onto their own spoken language. I really gotta learn Mandarin at some point, I love the way it sounds and it would be fun to visit China some day and be able to meet and talk to people.
I think that mandarin is beautiful and the language is a staple of world history, but I think language should first and foremost be a tool for communication. Me, as long as many other chinese friends and a majority of people who do not keep up with their chinese studies, FORGET HOW TO READ AND WRITE CHINESE!! How can you speak a language and forget how to write it? Its totally inefficient no matter how beautiful and rich it is. If i stopped reading and writing english for 10 years I gaurantee you that if not instantly, it would not take me more than a few days to learn how to read it again. As a country they seem to be doing fine with high literacy rates but damn it makes it hard to keep up with chinese without constant practice. Also I'm not sure if this is true, but I hear many japanese people dont know meanings of Kanji aswell unless its very commonly used, wouldnt it be easier for the japanese language if you just added spaces and punctuation? (This is a question not an assumption) Thanks
@@WebsiteLover no, I don't think it's because of spacing that Kanji make Japanese easier to read, for example in Chinese all characters are just one after another, and after 8 months of studying Chinese, as long as I know the characters in a certain text or article I can read it pretty quickly. It's the simple fact that once your brain sees a certain combination of characters you automatically read it that what, the same is true for English and any other language. You just don't read letter by letter, your brain creates a picture. English is my 3rd lang, and it's happened to me to find new words and not know how to pronounce them for sure
Well, English writing is also basically the Latin alphabet stapled onto a language it wasn't designed for, which was then made even worse by the failure to reform after the Great Vowel Shift. If you want to see Latin characters in use for a Latin-like language, read Spanish. That is basically how it is meant to work. ;)
Japan also went through rounds of discussion regarding simplification of the kanji (Chinese characters) that had been in use in Japan for centuries. This apparently included simplifying the way the kanji were written, but it looks like some current Japanese kanji look like traditional Chinese characters. The government has a list called jōyō kanji ("regular-use Chinese characters"). These are the kanji that are permitted in government documents as well as a baseline for literacy. There was a period right after WWII where there was a serious discussion about moving Japanese over to Latin characters, but that got thoroughly squashed.
well japanese feel better to keep some kanji for daily usage over korean, only lawyer understand kanji. pure sound based language doesnt work that well for east asian language
I noticed many Kanji have been simplified, for example 中国共産党, 医学, 天気, 台湾 these are similar to the simplified Chinese characters 中国共产党, 医学, 天气, 台湾 used in mainland China but different from traditional Chinese characters 中國共產黨, 醫學, 天氣, 臺灣 used in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
@@darkraisnorlax1853 Yes, you are right, but do you know 40% of modern Chinese words were adopted from Japanese Kanji? During Japan’s Meiji Reform in 1860s, Japanese wanted to learn from the west and Japanese scholars had translated huge volumes of western books range from philosophy, medicine, politics, technology, military and music & arts from England, America, Germany, France, Italy and Russia, and they invented tens of thousands of new Kanji words based on the original meaning of the words in European languages that are not available in ancient Chinese vocabulary. And many Chinese students who studied in Japan in late 19th century and early 20th century brought these new set of Kanji back to China and adopted them as part of modern Chinese vocabularies. In the beginning some conservative Chinese scholars were against the idea and invented own set of new Chinese words, however these words were awkwardly created and hard to be accepted by the general public, in the end they gave up. Below are examples of these new Kanji most Chinese don’t even realize these are loan words from Japanese. If we remove all these Kanji in modern Chinese you can hardly construct a sentence as they are already part of Chinese language. 逻辑 哲学 民主 民主主义 人民 共和 阶级 独裁 物理学 电话 退化/进化/演化 民族 社会 经济 同情 资本 造反/革命 科学 形而上学 进步 文明 宪法/法典 自由 圆 暴力 人气 写真 料理 That is why when Chinese visit Japan they can understand Kanji in public signboards to some extent even if they never learned Japanese. While Japan adopted Chinese writing and made it as part of its own script Japanese scholars have contributed a great deal to the formation of modern Chinese vocabularies that are not available in ancient Chinese writings. Here are more examples of modern Chinese words adopted from Japanese Kanji. 规定、经验、审美、形成、个人、工业、政治、幸福、政策、参加、时期、重要、速度、地球、代表、制作、发展、物质、理想、温度、体操体育、记录、代表、优势劣势、入口出口、大型小型、市场、组合、绝对相对、直接间接、左翼右翼、主体客体、主观客观、时间空间、理性感性、预算决算、动脉静脉、商业工业、理想理念、重工业轻工业、石油、出版、支配、民主民族、政党、原子电子、电波、保险、国际、协定、社会、企业投资、广告、景气、历史科学、农民总理、漫画、世纪、注射、资本家、百货店、传染病、图书馆、所得税、所有权、自然科学、土木工学
I'm so glad China and Japan managed to preserve one of the last non-alphabetic writing systems remaining despite all the attempts to end it. I hope this beautiful and interesting part of East Asian culture stay alive for many generations to come.
It was more of a necessity. What's good of a Latin based system when you got a bunch of characters that have the same pronunciation but different meanings. It's even worse in Japanese, because they don't have tones for their borrowed Chinese words, so even more confusion if there's no Kanji for reference.
@@ディエゴ-v9v Not anymore. Taiwan is now being politicized and influenced too much by political propaganda that many Taiwanese youths despise and deny themself as Chinese. To stay separated and disconnected from China, the Taiwan govt DPP has been slowly erasing and removing Chinese literature and Chinese history from Taiwan textbooks. Not sure how long they will keep traditional Chinese.
@Hamood Grünstein, we have that problem in English (and other PIE languages) too: My right to have unique pronunciation to every block of text goes right out the window because it sits at a right angle to reality...the right side of my brain says you are 100% right but the left knows it's wrong. Simplification won't help. We could burn every dictionary that doesn't change the spelling to "rite" (or Singaporean English may try to go with "rait") but we'd also be expanding the problem by merging in with even more phonograms, such as "write" and "rite" (as they look in current or "traditional" English spelling). It's a tradeoff, but the writing system isn't the root cause OR the magic answer. We'd have to change the language itself, or better yet, supplant English to an engineered language that doesn't have any problems (I'll hold my breath) 😑 😤 😒
Cultural vs. Utilitarian? There's room for both. History is an incredible gateway into culture across time, and it can be studied, appreciated, and even celebrated through writing, art, and music. Stories retold, instruments played, paintings made. And yet, we can still have this simplified, albeit more utilitarian, method of conveyance such that society moves forward as a whole. It's all very fascinating. Keep these videos going!
It would have been disastrous to move to a latin alphabet because people wouldn’t be able to read the classics (like how us Westerners can’t read Latin, Greek, etc, and so don’t know where we come from). Simplified is a smart compromise.
Meanwhile Vietnam ditched their Chinese based script altogether in favor of the Latin based alphabet. Vietnamese could do this though, because the modern Vietnamese alphabet was developed earlier in the 19th century and promoted during the French colonial era. The language itself also has less problem with homophones as in Chinese or Japanese, so writing with the phonetic alphabet doesn't really impede the reading comprehension of the common people. One big downside of this is nowadays the knowledge of more complex Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary of young Vietnamese is much more limited, which is a shame because Sino-Vietnamese makes up between 30-70% of all words in texts and daily speech, depending on the context and formality.
@@ankokunokayoubi Yeah I already mentioned that in my comment. Vietnamese could switch to a phonetic script because it has a very rich phonology allowing to it to distinguish between slightly differently pronounced characters. Even with the still somewhat large number of homophones that Vietnamese has, normally the Sino-Vietnamese words are used as compound words, and most of the time only one character among the homophones is more frequently used than most, so homophones are not much of a problem in Vietnamese.
I guess it has to do with the fact that in Vietnam the spoken language is basically Vietnamese only, while in China there are many spoken languages like Hokkien, Cantonese etc. Then you would have to romanize each one of these languages separately. Isn't actually the reason why ancient China started using characters in the first place that it's the written not spoken form that was understood by all the "Chinese" (including even Koreans and Vietnamese as the members of Sino-civilization)?
@@ankokunokayoubi Granted, many homophones in Japanese are not true homophones; when speaking they are frequently distinguished by tone contour. e.g. 機能 vs 昨日, which are both 「きのう」phonetically, but have very distinct tones.
@@rob6927 Qin dynasty united the land and standardized writing system and many other tool equipment currency measurement etc. it was a disaster before that.
You should cover "The Simplification of Modern Chinese Sounds" next!~ For example, you could address how some of the languages/sub-languages/dialects started dropping the 入声 "tone" (A.K.A. final consonants); whereas others kept it.
Note: Alongside Taiwan, Hong Kong also uses Traditional Chinese as the official written language. As a Hongkonger, I have never been taught to read Simplified Chinese. We do know Pinyin tho through 9 years of mandatory Mandarin education. There's also the Cantonese Pinyin dedicated to Cantonese, but those aren't taught/used outside of dictionaries, similar to English Phonetics :)
@@dankmemewannabe Cantonese to standard Chinese is like Portugese to French. They have different tones (8 instead of 4?) and preserve the pin-and-zhe in the pronunciation. I think they have different phonetic symbols for Cantonese.
@@ChaohsiangChen amputated characters? The Chinese government needs to take into consideration of the other 55 ethnic groups who are not Han Chinese. This is a compromise made to encourage them to learn the Chinese language.
@@newstar346 Some are like Manchurians, which most speak Chinese today as they forgot their own language long time ago. The other half of those are like ethnic Hmongs, Koreans or Russians, who already adapted and learned Chinese. And there are Uighurs and Tibetans, which the current Chinese policy is imperialistic and despotic on their ancestral lands. And 92% of Chinese population are Han Chinese. But changing Han cultural icon to cope with ethnic minority..... LOL.
Chinese characters simplification started at least 2200 years ago basically since we have characters guys, characters back then were even more complicated, it's a fundamental law that things go from complicated to simple, language is a tool for people to communicate, if you want it complicated you use it then, as a Chinese, we use simplified Chinese daily and use traditional chinse as an art from primary school to high school, we learn old poems and articles, those are all in traditional Chinese characters, understand?
You don't understand. Language is sacred. Language has its roots in religion. To understand Latin based words, you have to go back to the Latin roots. "Holiday" is synonymous with vacation day. Rest stay. Off day. The original word is "Holy Day". See the difference? To understand words, you have to go back to its roots.
@@quach8quach907 no you don't understand, do you even speak Chinese, do you know how we use it, Chinese is different, it has its own system, and also people who created it are even more sacred, in China its the people who decide the future and development of the language, not the language itself, and I can say without doubt that most of our people stand with the simplification as it always. Don't judge anything if you don't know about the culture and language and the history and its people.
It’s not a fundamental law that things go from complicated to simplified. If so, we would continue eating from boiled meat instead of advancing to cuisines. There’s an difference between a wholesale, government sponsored simplification program, and a decentralised, societal change of characters that takes place over time. Some characters changed over hundreds of years, one government program changed thousands of words overnight - there’s a difference. Deciding to use traditional for only artistic purposes defeats purpose of learning it. It’s like buying a jacket and putting it in a closet, never to use it
@@ksm-7184 food is sort of pleasure, language is a tool, how can you give this example, plus I can give you 1000 examples of simplification of tools, and also that's not what government forced people, it's Chinese people that wanted to simplify it, government represented people like always, it's people's choice based on our culture and language and history trend. Some people talk Bullshit about it just because those clowns anti China and it's party, they simply hate everything that China's government is doing or has done. As simple as that, admit it!
As chinese who grown up in mainland china, I prefer traditional chinese because it's more beautiful to me and more importantly I can read most characters from ancient stone tablet. But the simplified characters are easier to read with modern smaller font. Some traditional characters are not that friendly for people without a good eye vision.
Me too, but if I had to write anything longer than a few sentences by hand, SC all the way. In this computerized world tho, I feel like TC can and should make a comeback.
As an ethnic Chinese, I can definitely see why reform of the writing system was done in the past with great difficulty. Learning some traditional characters (TC) definitely made me realize why there’s a system based on simplified characters (SC). While traditional characters have more depth and soul (especially with regard to meaning of things), simplified characters have more pragmatism and logical explanation. While we’re at it, I am definitely curious as to why Hong Kong and Macau used TC as a main writing system prior to the handover. Perhaps it’s out of fear? Spite? Consistency?
from what my friend told me the reason the places you mentioned used TC was to distinguish themselves from the politics of China (I haven’t done my own research tho)
@@dankmemewannabe makes sense. Chiang Kai Shek was pushing forward the TC movement at first but abandoned it when he fled to Taiwan, so that he can distinguish ROC from PRC, and make ROC to look more legitimate (the real China, so to speak).
Because it was no longer practical to switch. You see in the 1950s, the mainland Chinese population was barely educated. Literacy wasn't widespread at less than 20%, including semi-literacy. Since most of the population didn't know how to read or write before that, it was easy to switch by just introducing the new SC instead of having people to relearn how to read and write. Fast forward to the 90s. Most people in Hong Kong were literate in traditional Chinese. That was because Hong Kongers were much more educated, and educated in traditional Chinese. Hong Kong already have a compulsory education of 6 years by the 60s, which was extended to 9 years in 1972. So having an educated, literate population to switch would have been difficult and counterproductive. In conclusion, it is easier to draw something new on a new paper, than to rub off everything and redraw on an old paper.
As an ethnic Chinese who is native to standard Chinese and fluent in modern as well as literary Chinese, I say that "simplified Chinese" is a practical joke is not practical at all. In Taiwan or HK, people know and use Chinese akin to older forms, and use a lot of references from literary Chinese. The official documents in Taiwan is still written in literary forms. So people write less characters as compared to mainland way, which is actually a vulger interpretation of vernacular Chinese designed to separate Chinese population from classical literature, religious text and oral tradition. It is a big joke since humanity studies in mainland Chia train students to recognize traditional Chinese. And nobody writes nowadays anyway.
Anyone saying Simplified Chinese is easier and more practical, well, "后路", do I mean (a) the road to become queen or (b) plan B? In Traditional Chinese, (a) is 后路 and (b) is 後路, no confusion which makes communications much more efficient and accurate.
I've always wondered what would happen if China stuck with its Latin alphabet plan. Maybe Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan would be pressured to join? Maybe overseas Chinese communities will also adopt Mandarin written in Latin and today public signage would look more like Vietnamese. It's weird, but it was something that almost happened.
It did happen. It is called Vietnamese. Vietnamese is only a vestige of Chinese. Only 10% of Chinese, like MP3 is only 10% of CD which is only 10% of LP.
Im Indonesian, as an Asian, i agree with you basically Chinese is easy especially when it comes to the pronounciation. Thai is more hard for me. But when it comes to the characters Chinese need more effort to remembering 😂. When it comes to the grammar, Chinese also more easy than my native language (Bahasa Indonesia) because its very simple 😂. But again the hardest thing is only the characters 😂
I am a Spanish speaker, the pronunciation is a nightmare to me. Not just the tones. The r, sh, zh, z, x, j, LOL! And the pinyin is not so easy, it has its weird logic. Bahasa Indonesia seems easier, but I never tried to learnt it, not yet. 😊
@@myriampro4973 it’s true what he’s saying Thai pronunciation is way harder. But also as a native Spanish speaker those sounds are quite hard. Grammar is not that hard at the beginning but later on, it gets really confusing as it is a totally diferent language, not to mention all the particles for counting.
Latin system would have been a nightmare in a tonal language full of homophones. Glad they stuck with the simplified system, kind of a middle ground of allowing people to learn quicker while preserving historical connections.
Well, it worked for Vietnamese, which is practically the same regarding tones and homophones. So I don't see how it wouldn't work with Chinese too other than cultural reasons.
@@legendarypussydestroyer6943 Vietnamese is pretty ugly to look at, and many words make sense when only when put into context. Similar issues with romanization of Chinese exist in Vietnamese. A word that’s spelt the same way means vastly different things but you can only differentiate it when it’s put into context but not on its own. Its just a problem that the Vietnamese have learned to accept but it doesn’t mean the Chinese will want to accept that as well.
@@MarkMiller304 Spelled in the same way? Don't they use diacritics to signify different tones, thus different meanings? The issue with China doing romanization would rather be that there is no such language as "Chinese", but rather a few different spoken languages like Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin etc. that are bound together only by the characters, so their written form. Vietnam on the other hand only has one spoken form of its language.
@@rob6927 Vietnam has 6 tones, there are way more words that sound the same than 6 tones can differentiate. In China the official language is mandarin, any romanization would be done with the official language. All schools regardless of region teach in mandarin, regardless of dialect most Chinese are fluent in mandarin. Mandarin only has 4 tones the word Shi has 20 different characters all representing different meanings but all spelt Shi in Romanization. How do you represent 20 different words with 4 tones?
The 1977 simplifications were hilarious....as in "what the f is that?" "home" became a roof with a person (instead of a pig), etc. It...was...nuts. The previous forms pretty much made sense.
Another massive success for the CPC - improving literacy rates from 20% in 1949 to 97% today, while at the same time preserving a cherished part of Chinese culture.
Are there any pictures of the other writing sistems/reforms? Because I've read many times about these other writing reforms that the Chinese government would've used, but I've never seen a picture of them to know how they looked. 🤷♀️
Thanks! Here's the set of simplifications from 1935: www.toutiao.com/article/6437442550848274690/?channel=&source=search_tab But the other systems and reforms were really hard to find, I'm sure most were lost, especially if they didn't get much traction. I did see some systems from the Movement for a Phonetic alphabet, but lost the website...:(
As a Vietnamese learning Chinese, tbh, it is more easy to learn how to pronounce Chinese words. Since Vietnam was undergone a Northern colonial period for more than 1000 yrs, that's why many of Chinese words and Vietnamese words are similar in pronunciation (we just don't realize that but we still use it in everyday talk). Yet, Chinese characters is still somewhat difficult to remember.
It wasn't colonialism. The truth hurt and you might not want to accept it. But Ancient Northern Vietnam was a part of Ancient China. Back then, people in Northern Vietnam and people in all parts of China were considered the same people in the same nation. Like Han people, Tang people...Because they all had the same culture, wore the same style of clothes and used the same Han Chinese written language (which even today still can be seen in ancient Vietnamese buildings). Native ancient Vietnamese and ancient Han Chinese had lived together and mixed together for 1000 years. So even when later Northern Vietnam broke away from China, many Vietnamese Kings had ancient Han Chinese heritage in them and even considered/declared themself ancient Han Chinese descendants... It's just like how Southern Vietnam back then was the ancient Champa Kingdom, but after becoming part of Vietnam for hundreds of years, everyone in South Vietnam considered themself Vietnamese not "Champa people" anymore...
@@The_Art_of_AI_888 Thankyou for your information. Actually, not many Vietnamese know this ugly truth but consider a thousand-year war that grows their hatred against China. It is true that native ancient Vietnamese was the Baiyue located in southern of China (part of today Guangdong). Unfortunately, a large number of Vietnamese people do not care much where we were from or what cross-cultural value is. This is just my subjective opinion. At school, we did not study much about culture, maybe couple few pages and then turned to Vietnamese history against China, France, American and how our father bravely protect the country. I just do not get it why we have learn those events again but not something new. And those events appeared over and over again during 12-year-education. That's why Vietnamese people tend to be more aggressive with China. My major is linguistics and education. I have to say that our education system have problems. However, it still remains the same for decades. Even though there was a reform several years ago, the result did not show any better. Perhaps, education system is the main factor that can change people' view. Of course, there are tons of information with reliable source but they choose to stick to the course book. And one more interesting thing I would like share. My ancient is Southern Vietnamese people and once my grandmother told me it was very easy to distinguish Northern Vietnamese and Southern Vietnamese just by their looks. Of course that Northern Vietnamese somewhat similar to our neighbor Chinese. I know this might raise disagreement but Southern people took it for granted.
This was a good overview, and I appreciate the humor. As difficult as hanzi are, I think they are appropriate since Mandarin has so many homophones. It's probably the reason ancient Chinese developed and adopted characters instead of an alphabet in the first place. I imagine romanization would be feasible for Sinitic languages that have significantly more phonological diversity, which is the reason Korean and Vietnamese were able to successfully make the shift.
Chinese people understand each other just fine in speech, despite there being no characters in speech. Of course it's possible to write Mandarin in a phonetic system and have it remain understandable - it would, however, require a decently long period of getting used to, where people would have a harder time reading, similar to if an English person had to learn to read English written in the Greek alphabet.
If you manage to include all phonemic elements in the alphabet, it should be basically equivalent to spoken language. And if you can understand each other in spoken language, it should be possible in written as well.
Ancient Chinese people use Yue (Cantonese) instead of Mandarin. Cantonese has 9 tones (instead of Mandarin's 4 tones) so homophones aren't a big issue. The majority of the Chinese population actually speaks Cantonese before Mandarin was declared the national language. Nowadays, only Hong Kong still recognizes Cantonese as the official language :(
Nice one at 9:16, as someone from Malaysia I would know what this is, also you forgot to mention that simplified form is also officially adopted in Malaysia
Yeah, after watching this video learning this both funny and sad history of Chinese writing, this made me think of a couple of funny things. For one, I find it funny that the ancient Qing rulers blamed their own writing system for not advancing fast enough. As a Japanese, I actually remember learning this interesting piece of history that there were a couple of times in which they tried to get rid of Chinese writing (or kanji as its called in Japanese) out of Japanese because, similarly to the Qing rulers, some thought that studying this writing system at school would hold Japan's education back. There was also a time during the Meiji Restoration in which an American Naval officer tried to make Japan switch their writing system to use entirely Latin writing and tried to prove that Chinese writing is terrible by testing a bunch of people in a writing test, but the guy ended up failing because the people who took his test were highly literate. Japanese kanji may have gone through their own simplification process, but the fact that places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau are places that speak Chinese and still use Traditional Chinese just proves this belief so wrong.
I am glad they did not do away with the essence of the writing system. It is vert powerful and although takes more time to learn, it is a living system. It feels much bettee to read what feel like direct concepts instead of letters one has to convert into concepts. It feels less linear and less left brained.
Your production values are insane. I thought this was a channel with already a large audience, since the quality was so good! I really liked the writing and the way you presented it. On top of that the recording and the editing was really clean. I was kinda shocked to see just above 1k views! Your content punches way above it's weight-class. Now only youtube needs to realize that too ;) Wish you the best!
I am a Chinese character user. Chinese characters seem to have one more dimension than pinyin characters. They are drawn based on what you see and then optimized into symbols, such as "人" = human being, "大" = "big" Opening his hands tells his companions that he has just seen something huge. Of course, it is not just a simple meaning, there are also many words where half of the text is used to indicate the pronunciation. "半", "伴" and "绊" all have the same pronunciation, similar to "bank" without the "k". 伴 = half, companion = person + half, meaning partner, 绊 = silk thread + fall in mid-air = trip, 拌 = hand + half water, half flour = stirring, another difficulty is that Chinese has tones, similar to English "come on", different intonations have many meanings。When "人" is used as part of the character, it will be written as "亻", which means that the character is likely to be related to human beings, such as: 从 = follow, 众 = a group of people, 你 = you, 他 = him, 囚 = a person. In prison, yes, Chinese characters are so logical
Thank you, very interesting. I read somewhere that there was concern with the simplification of certain characters in that the original meaningful units of the character were being lost or erased.
People always look at superficial easy to see thing to blame for problems. I'm glad China did not fall for that. I'm glad China decided to fix the broken parts and not throw the whole thing away and replace it with someone else's broken parts.
Interested to hear where you came to the conclusion that reading vertically is naturally slower than reading horizontally. This is definitely true in languages where vertical reading is essentially not a thing, but chinese has traditionally been written in every combination of cardinal directions, sometimes three or four combinations in a single composition or on a sign (including bottom-to-top, left-to-right); feel like if it mattered, the most efficient one would be naturally preferred.
OMG! I want that font that you showed at the begining of the video! It's the one with the Chinese characters and below them their pinyin and then their meanings in English. Where can I get it??? I love it!!! 😍
Interesting thing is, all Mainland-published chinese dictionaries do have Zhuyin Fuhao annotations, as well as a conversion chart. Not that... people really use them lol Edit: also ngl even though I usually use Simplified Characters, it's a shame they replaced vertical writing order. I honestly like it better.
Nothing's stopping you from writing vertically; though very few websites enable it, it is supported well by web browsers today, and has been an option this whole time with pen and paper. Chinese has been written in every direction conceivable (bottom to top, right to left, disjointed diagonal lines, spirals of upright characters, etc) and is still written in many directions in Taiwan and elsewhere.
So the Roman script has been used in it's current form since at least the first century AD, there have been a few characters added for some languages but 23 of the characters are the exact same shape and are generally similar to their modern pronunciation n the languages that use them. And its predecessor Greek and prior Phoenician and proto Canaanite go back to around the same time as Chinese bone script. So the Chinese characters while old are definitely newer in their current form. Someone from the first century AD that spoke Latin while not able to speak the language would be able to make a reasonable approximation of the pronunciation. I don not believe this is possible with Chinese, though I am not as versed in it's development.
im pretty sure taiwanese is not a language tho *_unless_* youre talking about traditional hanzi used in taiwan or referring to the languages of taiwan (like mandarin, hokkien, hakka, wuqiu, matsu, etc.)
Now that I think about it using zhuyin would’ve made more sense in that regards cause it’s phonetic based and it also adds the tone too. Why China didn’t adopt that is anyones guess at this point
Conservatives in the Chinese (ROC) government, who opposed any writing system reform, condemned zhuyin to be a pronunciation annotation only, and never to be used to replace Characters
Actually the 70s version never took off because essentially, the methods of simplification used blotched the whole system. But it did make it so that some people who's surnames were simplified, permanently kept the new character when the last round of simplification was reverted.
I enjoyed this video- it's a good synopsis of how 拼音was created. I am proficient with 拼音and so so with 注音 and Wade Giles. I've studied and used all these systems, but I've never looked into the history and politics of how these systems were created. I write 简体字 and 繁体字, but seeing simplified characters on buildings and shop signs just hurts my teeth!
This isn't a bad thing as this is simply an evolution of the Chinese language. In fact there are Chinese dialects that don't even use Chinese characters such as Dungan which uses Cyrillic and Arabic Abjad: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao%27erjing en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language
The advantage of a phonetic system is that it can pass down an element of spoken language to future generations and the advantage of the symbol idea system was that people could communicate across different languages like Mandarin and Cantonese. For a multi-ethnic country like China with a number of languages the symbol version has a greater advantage. That being said complex ideas/concepts/object are constructed of simple ones by teaching just a few simple characters and the rules for combining them you can simplify the teaching of a system while allowing a degree of freedom of expression.
I’m glad you mentioned note 12 in your description. I think history like the 大跃进 and 百花活动 is essential to know for anyone that wants to know about Chinese history, let along world history. Nonetheless this is a fantastic video! I wrote a paper exactly about this during my sophomore year of college. 感谢你了这非常有用的视频！我对你的视频有感兴趣了！
Actually it is easier to read vertically, in particular the newspaper justified-spacing column format. It was actually shown that the eye needs to make more effort for wide horizontal movement. Surprisingly the hands are like this as well but it's an unrelated topic, in a nutshell horizontal extension is bad and puts additional avoidable strain especially during the digital era where users read write and interact with devices during the most time of their lives, aka the mouse keyboard and touch devices, alas, when reading, it has indeed a dramatic effect. So, actually for me, I'd prefer the Chinese, Japanese, etc (CJK language group), to actually keep its traditional form and format. A compromise is the newspaper column format. It works also very effectively for memorization. I urge the reader to try it out as a method! :)
@@ABChinese I'll try to find them. It was a very long time ago that I read about it, and/but additional research was conducted for sure. (To be clear though, the comparison to the arm extension which was also shown, was mine in the comment. The causes are probably different, however the result really seems the same though, that's why I thought it was interesting to share too.)
Sadly, the disputes between simplified and traditional characters are now more about political issues, and users in Taiwan and Hong Kong often see traditional characters as a tool to divide Chinese culture.
@@ksm-7184 In reality, this is a political issue. This is also why Chiang Kai-shek, who was once a supporter of simplified characters, finally opposed simplified characters.
They should have made an alphabet.. They could still keep the characters, have the letters look diff if it's part of a word or if the letters are desperate.
I like how North and South Korea are pretty successful with hanja reduction act even though they started the attempt way later than Chinese and Japanese. The North Korean communist party had officially abolished the hanja system by 1948, while the South Korean government also tried to remove the hanja away as well. Still, the government had to face strong opposition. However, the action was quite successful, so the usage of hangul increased over the years. A good example would be newspapers. The press used a lot of hanja in their text by the 1980s-ish, but after that, the number of used hanja decreased drastically. Nowadays, South Koreans use hanja if word distinction is needed. There was no official attempt to simplify the writing, though. There are some conflicts between people who support either 국한문혼용체(國漢文混用體) and 한글 전용(hangul 全用) so still. As always, thank you for creating great content! 大感谢了！
I often hear Chinese and Japanese say: Koreans like to apply other countries' cultures to the World Heritage List. I don't know if it's true. But I recently noticed that the costumes of ancient Korean dramas and the costumes of Dae Jang Geum dramas are very different. I wonder why Korea is revising its own history.
@@junweipan2494 That's maybe because there are some controversies or conflicts over which country made 'that' first. I didn't watch the drama at all, so I cannot answer directly about that. However, I can tell that there are things that are genuinely Korean that other countries argue they created first, and there are things that were actually from different countries that Koreans think their ancestors made them. I would say it is one of the East Asian things. So, if you want to know about the true origin of something, please try to use credible and reliable sources to find something unbiased.
Japanese can't use Kana only as writing system since Japanese have more Sino-Japanese homophones than Korean's. Just try to play JRPGs from 8 bit Era in Japanese. Chinese in other hand can't go to pinyin or zhuyin only because monosyllabic nature of Chinese language, while native Japanese and Korean words are polysillabic. Just look how complicated is Vietnamese alphabet, full of diacritics and confusing speeling, I bet many English speakers don't know that Vietnamese surname Nguyen should be pronunced close to English personal name Gwen.
@@faustinuskaryadi6610 Yes, you are right! That's why I found it interesting. Even though hangul wasn't used for official documents during the Joseon dynasty, hangul was usually used by relatively lower class people (id est except for scholars), as King Sejong the Great intended. During the Japanese rule (1910-1945), hangul researchers contributed to modernizing and unifying the hangul writing system. Also, the nationalistic movements and social agreements after WWII and the Korean War contributed to eliminating hanja in Korean writing. I think these are the why Koreans had more advantages than other countries in 漢字文化圈.
@@faustinuskaryadi6610 the vietnamese used to use their chinese writing system called"hán tự" and they created Nôm Characters based from chinese character.Now they use latin alphabet
@@ABChinese The earliest writing in China is actually pottery. The Chinese inscribed on ceramics unearthed in Shaanxi Province has a history of more than 6,000 years. Oracle bone inscriptions took 2,800 years to form systematic writing on the basis of ceramic writing. Chinese affairs will never give up Chinese characters. Chinese characters have influenced the whole of East Asia.
@@sakurakou2009 not really. I learnt traditional Chinese characters. I learnt very little simplified characters. If I'm watching a TV show with simplified characters I can get by. Put a newspaper in front of me with simplified characters I won't get that far into the paper
@@lanvu5740 intersting , I thought simplified characters mean it will help you read the traditional ones more easily but this way those who only know simplified wouldnt be able to read traditional , chinese languge really hard 🥲
@@gamechanger8908 It's an excuse they give that holds no ground when you compare the illiteracy rate in the mainland to the one in Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong. And specially nowadays that typing is more of a form of communication than pen and paper, yes, simplification has lost it's purpose alltogether
@@Vykkkk Believe what you believe, but facts and statistics show otherwise when 80% were illiterate back before simplification. When Deng Xiaoping made his reforms, simplification helped because it made it more simpler to learn hundreds of characters with less strokes. And it was either simplification or the Chinese switching to latin alphabet like Vietnam. I bet if the Republic of China won instead of the Commies, they would of done the same.
It's perfectly normal that an imperial government tries to keep the culture away from the common people, so making the writing system absurdly difficult makes sense from this point of view.
Thank you for historically contextualizing this, esp talking about the May 4th movement. Many people don't understand that charscter simplification and hybridity with Latin were ideas that predated the PRC. Having lived in the US for half my life, it was always impossible to explain how the crushing of Sinocentrism by foreign powers left so many Chinese utterly ashamed with their culture and language. In the current Western dominated world, it is still a common mentality that people express either by being openly ashamed in their culture or being rabidly nationalist to compensate. Also, thanks for explaining the logic behind simplification. I'm personally not a fan of simplified, at least not with how it was done. But it is important to understand why it happened instead of just blaming communism. Too many Americans have lectured me about how the PRC destroyed "real Chinese culture" as if all the radicalism of the Mao era occured in a historical vacuum.
Great video, thanks. As a Cantonese speaker with family roots in HK, I find that some simplified characters lack logic and consistency. I'm no scholar, but 憶 has been simplified to 忆, but 乙 is not a simplified form of 意. Simplified characters have increased literacy but, good grief, some are downright ugly and look unbalanced. Two that spring to mind are 厂 (廠) and 广 (廣); just awful! The Japanese version of 廣 (広 ) looks better.
I agree that the Japanese simplified characters often look better. There is actually logic behind 忆, however. 憶 is a phonosemantic compound where the right part tells you how it's pronounced. In simplifying it, they basically recreated the phonosemantic compound using a simpler character with the same sound. This is especially beneficial (at least for Mandarin speakers) when the pronunciations of the original semantic component and the compound character have diverged: for example, when 鐘 (zhōng) was simplified to 钟, the rebus was changed from 童 (which now sounds like tóng) to 中.
A fascinating topic. I like the beauty and harmony of traditional characters. Actually, I don't think simplification made the learning of the characters easier. What made the characters learning easier was the Latin-based pinyin. In that sense Zhou Youguang was a real revolutionary. He's my hero. Thank you for the video!
For me, simplified Chinese is much easier to write and easier to recognize. TC characters can be ridiculously complicated, it doesn't make sense. Whole Latin based system would would easy for English speakers to learn, it doesn't necessarily make it easy for Chinese. There IS a Latin version of the Chinsze language and its called Pinyin. Trust me, it was NOT easy to learn for me, even tho I already knew 3000 characters by then. Especially because there are way too many characters that produce the same pronunciation while having completely unrelated meanings, it makes no sense to rely purely on Latin alphabets. I think for Sinitic languages in general, 汉字 is here to stay. Japan and Korea partially kept the Chinese characters for the same reason.
there is nothing wrong with a language reform after thousands of years but it should have been earlier ... it's like people would write in Old Norse or Proto-Germanic but speak in modern language and of course modern English got rid of gender and cases and lot of sounds those language had, developed a couple of new ones and imposed a stricter word order.
The grammatical changes from Old English to Modern English are all natural. It is widely accepted that english lost gender and cases due to extended contact with the Latin and Norse, both of which had different noun genders and word cases, which led to confusion and inconsistency, naturally driving towards losing the gender and cases. Stricter word order is an artifact of loses cases, since you can no longer identify the “context” of each word from the word alone. There were english reforms however, which made spelling consistent, separate reforms in England and the US. Before then, spelling was mostly phonetic.
@@anguswu2685 some centuries more and we probably have reached Tibetan spelling ... somehow there's a point where you should update the spelling when it's no longer the same language or you end up writing Dutch with German spelling rules or worse
My mother tongue is Hakka, and I have been learning Mandarin and Hanji on-off almost my whole lifetime. I will be sad if one day, China considered adopting a writing system similar to Korean, because Hanji is identical to Chinese cultures, the way of thinking, the way of life, art, and calligraphy. Thousand of years of inheritance, while Korean didn't have a writing language in the first place, so (also Japanese) they have to borrow this Hanji.
Actually, "simplified" Chinese, historically called "variants", were already in existence for thousands of years. Ancient texts with "simplified" Chinese can be found everywhere from Japan to Vietnam. So no one killed the Chinese characters. They just replaced common ones with less common ones.
Could you do a video on components and radicals ? I recently got my HSK 6 but I still don't understand the difference... Some are phonetic, some are semantic, but in a lot of characters the phonetic component does not match the pronunciation, and the semantic component does not match the meaning. They also seem to be in random places in the character, sometimes left, sometimes right or centre or centre-left. I recently learned that there are multiple component and radical systems...Some people claim it can be used to learn Chinese, but I really don't know how. Could you debunk? Thanks
The pronunciation of modern Chinese (Mandarin) have changed a lot compared to ancient Chinese. The pronunciation of many characters(hanzi) are almost the same or similar to their phonetic components(shengpang) in anciant, but not in modern. But many hanzi not similar to their shengpang in Mandarin may similar in Cantonese and Japanese onyomi😂
Your content is great. So is your sense of humour, though personally I wish you didn't feel the need to skate over detail and jazz everything up for the short-attention-span generation. But I guess that's the reality of life on RUclips. I look forward to the further videos you promised at the end.
Judging by his video I can tell this guy did a lot of research and actually did a lot of study on Chinese characters than some Cold War mentality cultist. Overall I also like how this video is both balanced and funny.
Stop exaggerating it, they didn’t kill the Chinese language. just like America didn’t kill English just because they changed a couple words. Just because you disagree with a policy that a government made, is not a valid reason to misinform others.
If replacing Chinese characters with Latin characters entirely isn't killing the language, I don't know what to tell you. Or maybe you didn't watch the entire video to understand what he's talking about.
@@shamringo7438 Do you know what youre even talking about? I am chinese. I should know the Chinese language, Im telling you, the Communist government barely changed a portion of the Chinese language.
@@professionaljailbreaker6965 Yeah, you clearly didn’t pay attention at the video. Literally mentioned at 8:00, the end goal was not just pinyin, nor the simplification of characters. But to REPLACE all chinese characters with Latin ones but was stopped before it ever happens. Hence the title “NEARLY killed”
not true. at that time 80% of the population were illiterate, and most of them were adults who could only study part time. an easier reading/writing system do help.
@@jimmychen576 Oh and the illiteracy rate in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan is much higher than in the mainland right? Simplified characters has simply lost all of it's value in the modern day with typing being more common than pen and paper
@@Vykkkk let’s not forget that mainland has 42 ethnic groups. Part of the reason there’s a literacy lag if it’s so, is because millions are not proficient in the National tongue. This isn’t the case in HK and Taiwan.
@@lyhthegreat also simplified easier to recognize and read on phone screen compared to traditional one, the victor guy are talking out of his ass saying simplified lost its value
when i first went to study chinese i thought; "i'm gonna stick with traditional characters, so i can *really* learn the language for real" then i started actually studying. And pretty soon i came to the conclusion that the whole thing needs at least another round of simplification, but really you should scrap the whole business and steal the korean system or something like that.
there's a fun wrinkle in this saga that you came close to talking about: while all this drama was going on in the mainland, the ministry of education in singapore, for unknown reasons (maybe just impatience idk), went ahead and created their own simplified characters. these were in use in the 60s and 70s (and you can still see them on documents from that time). however after a few years singapore kind of just fell back to whatever the prc guys were using, and that's where we are today
can you point me to any resources to see what those characters were like?? 👀 I don’t know any Chinese so idk how far I can get using just English keywords/resources lol
@@dankmemewannabe wikipedia has a page called "Singapore Chinese Characters" which lists them all :)
unfortunately it seems that the default wikipedia font struggles to display some of the weirder ones, so you may see a box symbol instead
Thanks for sharing! I briefly saw something about Singapore's simplifications in my research but didn't get around to diving deeper
Used to write 宀 with 加 underneath it for 家 and 又 with 女 underneath as 要。
Yea, Japan was doing the same, and they ended up with with own version of Kanji...
Each Chinese character generally has many different variants throughout history. China also standardized which character to use and to consider as the preferred choice several times. Even during Qing Dynasty, China made another round of standardization, see 1875年清朝"大清钦定正体字" (roughly translates to Character Standardization Guideline, Qing Dynasty, 1875) which actually changed some of the simpler characters into the more complex ones. So it's not correct to say it remain unchanged until the present day.
For someone who's not Chinese, let me make a further explanation that the video didn't say☺.
1. Traditional Chinese characters (TCC) are NOT like a new language for those who use simplified Chinese characters (SCC); actually, it's quite easy for Chinese speakers to read and recognise another writing system (both TCC→SCC and SCC→TCC). Then how do we feel when reading?
WELL, IT'S LIKE THIS, NOT THAT USUAL TO SEE, BUT YOU STILL CAN READ😉.
2. Many SCC are much OLDER than you think. Why? Because TCC are too tiring to write, and ancient Chinese also understood this, which is why we implement SCC today. You can say that TCC contains more beauty of the Chinese characters. I completely agree with this point as I also write traditional Chinese characters when I practice Chinese characters calligraphy. However, there is no dispute that SCC are more labour-saving in daily life writing🤔.
3. TCC are actually very close to the users of SCC.
SCC: 繁体字实际上离简体字的使用者非常近。有多近？只需切换输入法到繁体输入就好了。
TCC: 繁體字實際上離簡體字的使用者非常近。有多近？只需切換輸入法到繁體輸入就好了。
How close? Just switch the input method to TCC mode, that's it😉.
My opinion is, there is no need to force someone to change to your writing system; whatever you use (SCC or TCC), just continue using it😄.
Heresy!!! 😛😜
As a native Chinese. I totally agree! I write TCC for calligraphy and scc for daily needs
Well said!
People think that China completely abandoned TCC, but in reality in china most school/industry that teach traditional culture/movie/art/history etc still using both TCC and SCC.
I even think it's wrong to translate 繁体中文 as "traditional chinese", more accurate to translate it as "complicated chinese". There are some characters in 繁体中文 which wasn't really "traditional" as Qing emperor picked the more complicated characters to replace the originally less complicated ones.
IMPORTANT TO KNOW. of the 3500 most commonly used characters ( if you know this much you can read 99.5% of characters in media in china ) only 30% have a simplified written version. So if you say yoo want to learn traditional you learn 100 % traditional . When you say you want to learn simplified what you learn is about 70 % traditional and about 30 % is simplified.
Vietnamese is a tonal language and some could argue their tones are a bit more complicated than Mandarin tones. However they reformed to a latin alphabet quite successfully. Of course they have some unique markings for tones and vowel sounds but it very much simplified their writing system from traditional Characters to a nice looking and practical system.
The literacy rate jumped from 10% to 100%. But the meanings of the words lost 90%. That's why, as a Vietnamese, I have to study Chinese.
Mandarin (4 tones) and Cantonese tones (6 tones) are easier than Vietnamese (6 tones). In comparison to Viet they're more "flat". Besides that, Viet has more than 50% Chinese vocab (closer to Cantonese). This is coming from a Vietnamese who's learning Cantonese and Mandarin
But also destroying their writing culture. Korea is much better because they invent new character
Japanese kanji is the middle way. Japanese invented their own alphabets (hiragana and katagana) and at the same time keep chinese characters (kanji) for specific words, in this way they can keep the root and simplify the way to write.
@@quach8quach907The literacy rate increased because of the standardised education system, not the writing system. Taiwan still uses the same characters and has a higher literacy rate than Viet-Nam or Mainland China. Viet-Nam didn't have to abolish traditional Chinese characters to be successful, it was simply done because the educated class at the time viewed it as associated with Confucianism.
Awesome video. I don't really know any Chinese, but as someone who loves to read Japanese I would have hated to lose the Chinese characters from it. They make Japanese so much easier to read and can express nice nuances in meaning that a latin alphabet couldn't. But I would guess they work even better in the language they were designed for as opposed to in Japan just stapling China's writing system onto their own spoken language. I really gotta learn Mandarin at some point, I love the way it sounds and it would be fun to visit China some day and be able to meet and talk to people.
I think that mandarin is beautiful and the language is a staple of world history, but I think language should first and foremost be a tool for communication. Me, as long as many other chinese friends and a majority of people who do not keep up with their chinese studies, FORGET HOW TO READ AND WRITE CHINESE!! How can you speak a language and forget how to write it? Its totally inefficient no matter how beautiful and rich it is.
If i stopped reading and writing english for 10 years I gaurantee you that if not instantly, it would not take me more than a few days to learn how to read it again.
As a country they seem to be doing fine with high literacy rates but damn it makes it hard to keep up with chinese without constant practice.
Also I'm not sure if this is true, but I hear many japanese people dont know meanings of Kanji aswell unless its very commonly used, wouldnt it be easier for the japanese language if you just added spaces and punctuation? (This is a question not an assumption) Thanks
@@WebsiteLover If language is for communication. Why bother to learn Chinese? Just learn English
I believe a system like the Chinese characters can be used with any language and it's superior to a regular alphabet
@@WebsiteLover no, I don't think it's because of spacing that Kanji make Japanese easier to read, for example in Chinese all characters are just one after another, and after 8 months of studying Chinese, as long as I know the characters in a certain text or article I can read it pretty quickly. It's the simple fact that once your brain sees a certain combination of characters you automatically read it that what, the same is true for English and any other language. You just don't read letter by letter, your brain creates a picture. English is my 3rd lang, and it's happened to me to find new words and not know how to pronounce them for sure
Well, English writing is also basically the Latin alphabet stapled onto a language it wasn't designed for, which was then made even worse by the failure to reform after the Great Vowel Shift. If you want to see Latin characters in use for a Latin-like language, read Spanish. That is basically how it is meant to work. ;)
Japan also went through rounds of discussion regarding simplification of the kanji (Chinese characters) that had been in use in Japan for centuries. This apparently included simplifying the way the kanji were written, but it looks like some current Japanese kanji look like traditional Chinese characters. The government has a list called jōyō kanji ("regular-use Chinese characters"). These are the kanji that are permitted in government documents as well as a baseline for literacy. There was a period right after WWII where there was a serious discussion about moving Japanese over to Latin characters, but that got thoroughly squashed.
@GLODELANIA It has already Latinized, called Roma-ji, Roman Writing.
well japanese feel better to keep some kanji for daily usage over korean, only lawyer understand kanji. pure sound based language doesnt work that well for east asian language
I noticed many Kanji have been simplified, for example 中国共産党, 医学, 天気, 台湾 these are similar to the simplified Chinese characters 中国共产党, 医学, 天气, 台湾 used in mainland China but different from traditional Chinese characters 中國共產黨, 醫學, 天氣, 臺灣 used in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
@@icebaby6714And you know what's interesting? I believe we get our Chinese translation of 共产党 from Japanese Kanji🤣。这就是语言奇妙的地方，东亚文化圈真的很有意思。
@@darkraisnorlax1853 Yes, you are right, but do you know 40% of modern Chinese words were adopted from Japanese Kanji? During Japan’s Meiji Reform in 1860s, Japanese wanted to learn from the west and Japanese scholars had translated huge volumes of western books range from philosophy, medicine, politics, technology, military and music & arts from England, America, Germany, France, Italy and Russia, and they invented tens of thousands of new Kanji words based on the original meaning of the words in European languages that are not available in ancient Chinese vocabulary. And many Chinese students who studied in Japan in late 19th century and early 20th century brought these new set of Kanji back to China and adopted them as part of modern Chinese vocabularies. In the beginning some conservative Chinese scholars were against the idea and invented own set of new Chinese words, however these words were awkwardly created and hard to be accepted by the general public, in the end they gave up.
Below are examples of these new Kanji most Chinese don’t even realize these are loan words from Japanese. If we remove all these Kanji in modern Chinese you can hardly construct a sentence as they are already part of Chinese language.
逻辑
哲学
民主
民主主义
人民
共和
阶级
独裁
物理学
电话
退化/进化/演化
民族
社会
经济
同情
资本
造反/革命
科学
形而上学
进步
文明
宪法/法典
自由
圆
暴力
人气
写真
料理
That is why when Chinese visit Japan they can understand Kanji in public signboards to some extent even if they never learned Japanese.
While Japan adopted Chinese writing and made it as part of its own script Japanese scholars have contributed a great deal to the formation of modern Chinese vocabularies that are not available in ancient Chinese writings.
Here are more examples of modern Chinese words adopted from Japanese Kanji.
规定、经验、审美、形成、个人、工业、政治、幸福、政策、参加、时期、重要、速度、地球、代表、制作、发展、物质、理想、温度、体操体育、记录、代表、优势劣势、入口出口、大型小型、市场、组合、绝对相对、直接间接、左翼右翼、主体客体、主观客观、时间空间、理性感性、预算决算、动脉静脉、商业工业、理想理念、重工业轻工业、石油、出版、支配、民主民族、政党、原子电子、电波、保险、国际、协定、社会、企业投资、广告、景气、历史科学、农民总理、漫画、世纪、注射、资本家、百货店、传染病、图书馆、所得税、所有权、自然科学、土木工学
I'm so glad China and Japan managed to preserve one of the last non-alphabetic writing systems remaining despite all the attempts to end it. I hope this beautiful and interesting part of East Asian culture stay alive for many generations to come.
especially for taiwan, who preserved traditional Chinese 👍
It was more of a necessity. What's good of a Latin based system when you got a bunch of characters that have the same pronunciation but different meanings. It's even worse in Japanese, because they don't have tones for their borrowed Chinese words, so even more confusion if there's no Kanji for reference.
@@ディエゴ-v9v Not anymore. Taiwan is now being politicized and influenced too much by political propaganda that many Taiwanese youths despise and deny themself as Chinese. To stay separated and disconnected from China, the Taiwan govt DPP has been slowly erasing and removing Chinese literature and Chinese history from Taiwan textbooks. Not sure how long they will keep traditional Chinese.
@Hamood Grünstein, we have that problem in English (and other PIE languages) too:
My right to have unique pronunciation to every block of text goes right out the window because it sits at a right angle to reality...the right side of my brain says you are 100% right but the left knows it's wrong.
Simplification won't help. We could burn every dictionary that doesn't change the spelling to "rite" (or Singaporean English may try to go with "rait") but we'd also be expanding the problem by merging in with even more phonograms, such as "write" and "rite" (as they look in current or "traditional" English spelling). It's a tradeoff, but the writing system isn't the root cause OR the magic answer. We'd have to change the language itself, or better yet, supplant English to an engineered language that doesn't have any problems (I'll hold my breath)
😑 😤 😒
We INVENT new glyphs all the time in logos, symbols, and icons.
Cultural vs. Utilitarian? There's room for both. History is an incredible gateway into culture across time, and it can be studied, appreciated, and even celebrated through writing, art, and music. Stories retold, instruments played, paintings made. And yet, we can still have this simplified, albeit more utilitarian, method of conveyance such that society moves forward as a whole.
It's all very fascinating. Keep these videos going!
It would have been disastrous to move to a latin alphabet because people wouldn’t be able to read the classics (like how us Westerners can’t read Latin, Greek, etc, and so don’t know where we come from). Simplified is a smart compromise.
Meanwhile Vietnam ditched their Chinese based script altogether in favor of the Latin based alphabet. Vietnamese could do this though, because the modern Vietnamese alphabet was developed earlier in the 19th century and promoted during the French colonial era. The language itself also has less problem with homophones as in Chinese or Japanese, so writing with the phonetic alphabet doesn't really impede the reading comprehension of the common people. One big downside of this is nowadays the knowledge of more complex Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary of young Vietnamese is much more limited, which is a shame because Sino-Vietnamese makes up between 30-70% of all words in texts and daily speech, depending on the context and formality.
FYI, Homophones in Japanese are the major reason why Japanese is still written like that to this day. That's just how that language works by the way.
@@ankokunokayoubi Yeah I already mentioned that in my comment. Vietnamese could switch to a phonetic script because it has a very rich phonology allowing to it to distinguish between slightly differently pronounced characters. Even with the still somewhat large number of homophones that Vietnamese has, normally the Sino-Vietnamese words are used as compound words, and most of the time only one character among the homophones is more frequently used than most, so homophones are not much of a problem in Vietnamese.
I guess it has to do with the fact that in Vietnam the spoken language is basically Vietnamese only, while in China there are many spoken languages like Hokkien, Cantonese etc. Then you would have to romanize each one of these languages separately.
Isn't actually the reason why ancient China started using characters in the first place that it's the written not spoken form that was understood by all the "Chinese" (including even Koreans and Vietnamese as the members of Sino-civilization)?
@@ankokunokayoubi Granted, many homophones in Japanese are not true homophones; when speaking they are frequently distinguished by tone contour. e.g. 機能 vs 昨日, which are both 「きのう」phonetically, but have very distinct tones.
@@rob6927 Qin dynasty united the land and standardized writing system and many other tool equipment currency measurement etc. it was a disaster before that.
You should cover "The Simplification of Modern Chinese Sounds" next!~
For example, you could address how some of the languages/sub-languages/dialects started dropping the 入声 "tone" (A.K.A. final consonants); whereas others kept it.
your content is insanely good, i hope your channel growns
Awesome video! AWESOME! As someone interested in learning both Mandarin and Cantonese, as well as Japanese, this was Totally Awesome. Thanks a lot!!!
Note:
Alongside Taiwan, Hong Kong also uses Traditional Chinese as the official written language. As a Hongkonger, I have never been taught to read Simplified Chinese. We do know Pinyin tho through 9 years of mandatory Mandarin education. There's also the Cantonese Pinyin dedicated to Cantonese, but those aren't taught/used outside of dictionaries, similar to English Phonetics :)
does Cantonese have pinyin?? :0 I thought they only had the Yale-something system (I forget the actual name)
You don't need to learn the amputated characters since you learned the true Chinese characters already.
@@dankmemewannabe
Cantonese to standard Chinese is like Portugese to French. They have different tones (8 instead of 4?) and preserve the pin-and-zhe in the pronunciation. I think they have different phonetic symbols for Cantonese.
@@ChaohsiangChen amputated characters? The Chinese government needs to take into consideration of the other 55 ethnic groups who are not Han Chinese. This is a compromise made to encourage them to learn the Chinese language.
@@newstar346
Some are like Manchurians, which most speak Chinese today as they forgot their own language long time ago. The other half of those are like ethnic Hmongs, Koreans or Russians, who already adapted and learned Chinese. And there are Uighurs and Tibetans, which the current Chinese policy is imperialistic and despotic on their ancestral lands.
And 92% of Chinese population are Han Chinese. But changing Han cultural icon to cope with ethnic minority..... LOL.
Chinese characters simplification started at least 2200 years ago basically since we have characters guys, characters back then were even more complicated, it's a fundamental law that things go from complicated to simple, language is a tool for people to communicate, if you want it complicated you use it then, as a Chinese, we use simplified Chinese daily and use traditional chinse as an art from primary school to high school, we learn old poems and articles, those are all in traditional Chinese characters, understand?
You don't understand. Language is sacred. Language has its roots in religion. To understand Latin based words, you have to go back to the Latin roots.
"Holiday" is synonymous with vacation day. Rest stay. Off day. The original word is "Holy Day". See the difference?
To understand words, you have to go back to its roots.
@@quach8quach907 no you don't understand, do you even speak Chinese, do you know how we use it, Chinese is different, it has its own system, and also people who created it are even more sacred, in China its the people who decide the future and development of the language, not the language itself, and I can say without doubt that most of our people stand with the simplification as it always. Don't judge anything if you don't know about the culture and language and the history and its people.
It’s not a fundamental law that things go from complicated to simplified. If so, we would continue eating from boiled meat instead of advancing to cuisines. There’s an difference between a wholesale, government sponsored simplification program, and a decentralised, societal change of characters that takes place over time. Some characters changed over hundreds of years, one government program changed thousands of words overnight - there’s a difference. Deciding to use traditional for only artistic purposes defeats purpose of learning it. It’s like buying a jacket and putting it in a closet, never to use it
@@ksm-7184 food is sort of pleasure, language is a tool, how can you give this example, plus I can give you 1000 examples of simplification of tools, and also that's not what government forced people, it's Chinese people that wanted to simplify it, government represented people like always, it's people's choice based on our culture and language and history trend. Some people talk Bullshit about it just because those clowns anti China and it's party, they simply hate everything that China's government is doing or has done. As simple as that, admit it!
Phags-pa script anyone?
As chinese who grown up in mainland china, I prefer traditional chinese because it's more beautiful to me and more importantly I can read most characters from ancient stone tablet. But the simplified characters are easier to read with modern smaller font. Some traditional characters are not that friendly for people without a good eye vision.
Me too, but if I had to write anything longer than a few sentences by hand, SC all the way.
In this computerized world tho, I feel like TC can and should make a comeback.
As an ethnic Chinese, I can definitely see why reform of the writing system was done in the past with great difficulty. Learning some traditional characters (TC) definitely made me realize why there’s a system based on simplified characters (SC). While traditional characters have more depth and soul (especially with regard to meaning of things), simplified characters have more pragmatism and logical explanation.
While we’re at it, I am definitely curious as to why Hong Kong and Macau used TC as a main writing system prior to the handover. Perhaps it’s out of fear? Spite? Consistency?
from what my friend told me the reason the places you mentioned used TC was to distinguish themselves from the politics of China (I haven’t done my own research tho)
@@dankmemewannabe makes sense. Chiang Kai Shek was pushing forward the TC movement at first but abandoned it when he fled to Taiwan, so that he can distinguish ROC from PRC, and make ROC to look more legitimate (the real China, so to speak).
Because it was no longer practical to switch. You see in the 1950s, the mainland Chinese population was barely educated. Literacy wasn't widespread at less than 20%, including semi-literacy. Since most of the population didn't know how to read or write before that, it was easy to switch by just introducing the new SC instead of having people to relearn how to read and write.
Fast forward to the 90s. Most people in Hong Kong were literate in traditional Chinese. That was because Hong Kongers were much more educated, and educated in traditional Chinese. Hong Kong already have a compulsory education of 6 years by the 60s, which was extended to 9 years in 1972. So having an educated, literate population to switch would have been difficult and counterproductive.
In conclusion, it is easier to draw something new on a new paper, than to rub off everything and redraw on an old paper.
IMO it is just because there is no push for a switch.
People get to use whatever characters they please.
As an ethnic Chinese who is native to standard Chinese and fluent in modern as well as literary Chinese, I say that "simplified Chinese" is a practical joke is not practical at all.
In Taiwan or HK, people know and use Chinese akin to older forms, and use a lot of references from literary Chinese. The official documents in Taiwan is still written in literary forms. So people write less characters as compared to mainland way, which is actually a vulger interpretation of vernacular Chinese designed to separate Chinese population from classical literature, religious text and oral tradition.
It is a big joke since humanity studies in mainland Chia train students to recognize traditional Chinese.
And nobody writes nowadays anyway.
Anyone saying Simplified Chinese is easier and more practical, well, "后路", do I mean (a) the road to become queen or (b) plan B?
In Traditional Chinese, (a) is 后路 and (b) is 後路, no confusion which makes communications much more efficient and accurate.
Plan B. 后路 in modern day Mandarin almost never intended as (a)
@@testxxxx123 I beg to differ, ex: 凯特王妃的后路充满了困难与挑战, so... which one do I mean?
@@testxxxx123 Due to that there aren't as many monarchies as there were 110 years ago.
nobody say queen's road like “後路”。 “王后之路” means "being a queen", "成后之路“means” becoming a queen", which one?
@@geofferychang8713 even you replace "后“with ” 後“， still you don't express yourself clearly： ”being a queen" or "becoming a queen"?
I've always wondered what would happen if China stuck with its Latin alphabet plan. Maybe Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan would be pressured to join? Maybe overseas Chinese communities will also adopt Mandarin written in Latin and today public signage would look more like Vietnamese. It's weird, but it was something that almost happened.
It did happen. It is called Vietnamese. Vietnamese is only a vestige of Chinese. Only 10% of Chinese, like MP3 is only 10% of CD which is only 10% of LP.
China tried several ways to romanize Chinese, but it turned out quite bad, since there are too many characters that have same pronunciation.
Im Indonesian, as an Asian, i agree with you basically Chinese is easy especially when it comes to the pronounciation. Thai is more hard for me. But when it comes to the characters Chinese need more effort to remembering 😂. When it comes to the grammar, Chinese also more easy than my native language (Bahasa Indonesia) because its very simple 😂. But again the hardest thing is only the characters 😂
Easy?
I am a Spanish speaker, the pronunciation is a nightmare to me. Not just the tones. The r, sh, zh, z, x, j, LOL! And the pinyin is not so easy, it has its weird logic. Bahasa Indonesia seems easier, but I never tried to learnt it, not yet. 😊
@@MohammedAhmed-py4rk if you compare Chinese with another tonal language like Thai, you would recognize that Chinese is more simple than Thai
@@myriampro4973 it’s true what he’s saying Thai pronunciation is way harder. But also as a native Spanish speaker those sounds are quite hard. Grammar is not that hard at the beginning but later on, it gets really confusing as it is a totally diferent language, not to mention all the particles for counting.
For me (Brazilian) Chinese grammar is easy, but pronunciation is hard lol
Latin system would have been a nightmare in a tonal language full of homophones. Glad they stuck with the simplified system, kind of a middle ground of allowing people to learn quicker while preserving historical connections.
Well, it worked for Vietnamese, which is practically the same regarding tones and homophones. So I don't see how it wouldn't work with Chinese too other than cultural reasons.
@@legendarypussydestroyer6943 Vietnamese is pretty ugly to look at, and many words make sense when only when put into context. Similar issues with romanization of Chinese exist in Vietnamese. A word that’s spelt the same way means vastly different things but you can only differentiate it when it’s put into context but not on its own. Its just a problem that the Vietnamese have learned to accept but it doesn’t mean the Chinese will want to accept that as well.
@@legendarypussydestroyer6943 actually Vietnamese has more complex phonology and thus less homophones compared to Mandarin.
@@MarkMiller304 Spelled in the same way? Don't they use diacritics to signify different tones, thus different meanings?
The issue with China doing romanization would rather be that there is no such language as "Chinese", but rather a few different spoken languages like Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin etc. that are bound together only by the characters, so their written form.
Vietnam on the other hand only has one spoken form of its language.
@@rob6927 Vietnam has 6 tones, there are way more words that sound the same than 6 tones can differentiate. In China the official language is mandarin, any romanization would be done with the official language. All schools regardless of region teach in mandarin, regardless of dialect most Chinese are fluent in mandarin. Mandarin only has 4 tones the word Shi has 20 different characters all representing different meanings but all spelt Shi in Romanization. How do you represent 20 different words with 4 tones?
The 1977 simplifications were hilarious....as in "what the f is that?" "home" became a roof with a person (instead of a pig), etc. It...was...nuts. The previous forms pretty much made sense.
Another massive success for the CPC - improving literacy rates from 20% in 1949 to 97% today, while at the same time preserving a cherished part of Chinese culture.
pretty sure other places that use radiational chinese like taiwan/hong kong have equally if not higher literacy rates.
@@lyhthegreat Neither Taiwan nor Hong Kong had a vast population of illiterate peasants in 1949.
@@ta0304 No it isn't. You are simply wrong.
.... and computers came to rescue to save chinese characters once and for all
lol no
Are there any pictures of the other writing sistems/reforms?
Because I've read many times about these other writing reforms that the Chinese government would've used, but I've never seen a picture of them to know how they looked. 🤷♀️
By the way, nice video!
It's really interesting to know more about the Chinese history and how it evolved.
Thanks! Here's the set of simplifications from 1935: www.toutiao.com/article/6437442550848274690/?channel=&source=search_tab
But the other systems and reforms were really hard to find, I'm sure most were lost, especially if they didn't get much traction. I did see some systems from the Movement for a Phonetic alphabet, but lost the website...:(
@@ABChinese thank you so much!
@@胡利奥 Maybe you are looking for 二简字 (second round of Chinese character simplification)?
As a Vietnamese learning Chinese, tbh, it is more easy to learn how to pronounce Chinese words. Since Vietnam was undergone a Northern colonial period for more than 1000 yrs, that's why many of Chinese words and Vietnamese words are similar in pronunciation (we just don't realize that but we still use it in everyday talk). Yet, Chinese characters is still somewhat difficult to remember.
It wasn't colonialism. The truth hurt and you might not want to accept it. But Ancient Northern Vietnam was a part of Ancient China.
Back then, people in Northern Vietnam and people in all parts of China were considered the same people in the same nation. Like Han people, Tang people...Because they all had the same culture, wore the same style of clothes and used the same Han Chinese written language (which even today still can be seen in ancient Vietnamese buildings).
Native ancient Vietnamese and ancient Han Chinese had lived together and mixed together for 1000 years. So even when later Northern Vietnam broke away from China, many Vietnamese Kings had ancient Han Chinese heritage in them and even considered/declared themself ancient Han Chinese descendants...
It's just like how Southern Vietnam back then was the ancient Champa Kingdom, but after becoming part of Vietnam for hundreds of years, everyone in South Vietnam considered themself Vietnamese not "Champa people" anymore...
@@The_Art_of_AI_888 Thankyou for your information.
Actually, not many Vietnamese know this ugly truth but consider a thousand-year war that grows their hatred against China.
It is true that native ancient Vietnamese was the Baiyue located in southern of China (part of today Guangdong).
Unfortunately, a large number of Vietnamese people do not care much where we were from or what cross-cultural value is.
This is just my subjective opinion. At school, we did not study much about culture, maybe couple few pages and then turned to Vietnamese history against China, France, American and how our father bravely protect the country. I just do not get it why we have learn those events again but not something new. And those events appeared over and over again during 12-year-education. That's why Vietnamese people tend to be more aggressive with China.
My major is linguistics and education. I have to say that our education system have problems. However, it still remains the same for decades. Even though there was a reform several years ago, the result did not show any better. Perhaps, education system is the main factor that can change people' view. Of course, there are tons of information with reliable source but they choose to stick to the course book.
And one more interesting thing I would like share. My ancient is Southern Vietnamese people and once my grandmother told me it was very easy to distinguish Northern Vietnamese and Southern Vietnamese just by their looks. Of course that Northern Vietnamese somewhat similar to our neighbor Chinese. I know this might raise disagreement but Southern people took it for granted.
简体和繁体和发音有什么关系啊？我不理解
@@scoopimmortal1297 为什么我不理解？ 我学习语言和文化，都是我的专业。你会说越南语吗？怎么可能说它们没有关系？虽然英语和中文的发音有关系。
Chinese characters is the beautiful part of the Chinese language. It should never be removed or changed to a latin version.
The Same thing Vietnam did!
@@Ilsun1231is that true vietnam used chinese symbols?
@@hirotofy7653 They were using Hanji(Chinese Characters) but later they adopted Latin version.
@@Ilsun1231damn french
Yes it should
This was a good overview, and I appreciate the humor.
As difficult as hanzi are, I think they are appropriate since Mandarin has so many homophones. It's probably the reason ancient Chinese developed and adopted characters instead of an alphabet in the first place. I imagine romanization would be feasible for Sinitic languages that have significantly more phonological diversity, which is the reason Korean and Vietnamese were able to successfully make the shift.
Chinese people understand each other just fine in speech, despite there being no characters in speech.
Of course it's possible to write Mandarin in a phonetic system and have it remain understandable - it would, however, require a decently long period of getting used to, where people would have a harder time reading, similar to if an English person had to learn to read English written in the Greek alphabet.
If you manage to include all phonemic elements in the alphabet, it should be basically equivalent to spoken language. And if you can understand each other in spoken language, it should be possible in written as well.
@@wasmic5z Speech allows for nonverbal contextual cues that are typically unavailable in the writing medium.
@@sayven Spoken language allows for nonverbal contextual cues that are typically unavailable in the writing medium.
Ancient Chinese people use Yue (Cantonese) instead of Mandarin. Cantonese has 9 tones (instead of Mandarin's 4 tones) so homophones aren't a big issue. The majority of the Chinese population actually speaks Cantonese before Mandarin was declared the national language. Nowadays, only Hong Kong still recognizes Cantonese as the official language :(
Nice one at 9:16, as someone from Malaysia I would know what this is, also you forgot to mention that simplified form is also officially adopted in Malaysia
I love your history videos, you have such a fun video style and I learn many things 😁
Love the background decorations and colored lighting ❤️✨
Yeah, after watching this video learning this both funny and sad history of Chinese writing, this made me think of a couple of funny things. For one, I find it funny that the ancient Qing rulers blamed their own writing system for not advancing fast enough. As a Japanese, I actually remember learning this interesting piece of history that there were a couple of times in which they tried to get rid of Chinese writing (or kanji as its called in Japanese) out of Japanese because, similarly to the Qing rulers, some thought that studying this writing system at school would hold Japan's education back. There was also a time during the Meiji Restoration in which an American Naval officer tried to make Japan switch their writing system to use entirely Latin writing and tried to prove that Chinese writing is terrible by testing a bunch of people in a writing test, but the guy ended up failing because the people who took his test were highly literate. Japanese kanji may have gone through their own simplification process, but the fact that places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau are places that speak Chinese and still use Traditional Chinese just proves this belief so wrong.
I am glad they did not do away with the essence of the writing system. It is vert powerful and although takes more time to learn, it is a living system. It feels much bettee to read what feel like direct concepts instead of letters one has to convert into concepts. It feels less linear and less left brained.
Your production values are insane. I thought this was a channel with already a large audience, since the quality was so good!
I really liked the writing and the way you presented it. On top of that the recording and the editing was really clean.
I was kinda shocked to see just above 1k views! Your content punches way above it's weight-class. Now only youtube needs to realize that too ;)
Wish you the best!
I hope so too😭😭😭 This video took sooo long to make
I am a Chinese character user. Chinese characters seem to have one more dimension than pinyin characters. They are drawn based on what you see and then optimized into symbols, such as "人" = human being, "大" = "big" Opening his hands tells his companions that he has just seen something huge. Of course, it is not just a simple meaning, there are also many words where half of the text is used to indicate the pronunciation. "半", "伴" and "绊" all have the same pronunciation, similar to "bank" without the "k". 伴 = half, companion = person + half, meaning partner, 绊 = silk thread + fall in mid-air = trip, 拌 = hand + half water, half flour = stirring, another difficulty is that Chinese has tones, similar to English "come on", different intonations have many meanings。When "人" is used as part of the character, it will be written as "亻", which means that the character is likely to be related to human beings, such as: 从 = follow, 众 = a group of people, 你 = you, 他 = him, 囚 = a person. In prison, yes, Chinese characters are so logical
I appreciate the notes and references, thank you so much!
So is informative. 👏🏾 This has made me interested in the history of Chinese language. This is better than a soap opera.
Thank you, very interesting. I read somewhere that there was concern with the simplification of certain characters in that the original meaningful units of the character were being lost or erased.
Love your videos! I have learned so freaking much. You’re a great teacher with how Interesting you make your videos!
People always look at superficial easy to see thing to blame for problems. I'm glad China did not fall for that. I'm glad China decided to fix the broken parts and not throw the whole thing away and replace it with someone else's broken parts.
Interested to hear where you came to the conclusion that reading vertically is naturally slower than reading horizontally. This is definitely true in languages where vertical reading is essentially not a thing, but chinese has traditionally been written in every combination of cardinal directions, sometimes three or four combinations in a single composition or on a sign (including bottom-to-top, left-to-right); feel like if it mattered, the most efficient one would be naturally preferred.
Great video! I hope to see more videos like this in the future!
OMG! I want that font that you showed at the begining of the video! It's the one with the Chinese characters and below them their pinyin and then their meanings in English. Where can I get it??? I love it!!! 😍
Interesting thing is, all Mainland-published chinese dictionaries do have Zhuyin Fuhao annotations, as well as a conversion chart. Not that... people really use them lol
Edit: also ngl even though I usually use Simplified Characters, it's a shame they replaced vertical writing order. I honestly like it better.
Nothing's stopping you from writing vertically; though very few websites enable it, it is supported well by web browsers today, and has been an option this whole time with pen and paper. Chinese has been written in every direction conceivable (bottom to top, right to left, disjointed diagonal lines, spirals of upright characters, etc) and is still written in many directions in Taiwan and elsewhere.
@@microcolonel oh don't get me wrong I do all the time, I will happily write in whatever direction I feel like
So the Roman script has been used in it's current form since at least the first century AD, there have been a few characters added for some languages but 23 of the characters are the exact same shape and are generally similar to their modern pronunciation n the languages that use them. And its predecessor Greek and prior Phoenician and proto Canaanite go back to around the same time as Chinese bone script. So the Chinese characters while old are definitely newer in their current form. Someone from the first century AD that spoke Latin while not able to speak the language would be able to make a reasonable approximation of the pronunciation. I don not believe this is possible with Chinese, though I am not as versed in it's development.
I love Chinese characters. They are like art to me. I'm glad they never got replaced. I do enjoy reading Taiwanese more
im pretty sure taiwanese is not a language tho
*_unless_* youre talking about traditional hanzi used in taiwan or referring to the languages of taiwan (like mandarin, hokkien, hakka, wuqiu, matsu, etc.)
@@vannillaAJofficial204people in taiwan call language they speak chinese
@@hirotofy7653 i know that but still, its not a language
@@vannillaAJofficial204 yes taiwanese doesn't exist as language only chinese exist traditional or simplified.
@@hirotofy7653 no no, i meant that chinese isnt a language as well, and i dont understand how people(including the chinese themselves) think otherwise
3:32 boy, it was Stalin who told Mao to not change their script,
Now that I think about it using zhuyin would’ve made more sense in that regards cause it’s phonetic based and it also adds the tone too. Why China didn’t adopt that is anyones guess at this point
Conservatives in the Chinese (ROC) government, who opposed any writing system reform, condemned zhuyin to be a pronunciation annotation only, and never to be used to replace Characters
I enjoyed the style of this video, it was great! 👌👍
Actually the 70s version never took off because essentially, the methods of simplification used blotched the whole system. But it did make it so that some people who's surnames were simplified, permanently kept the new character when the last round of simplification was reverted.
Can you elaborate?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chinese_characters@@Anonymous-df8it
@@Anonymous-df8it e.g.「蕭」寫作「肖」
Interesting video. Thank you.
meanwhile Japan:
It is a bad idea to abandon Chinese scripts.
I'm so glad they didn't get rid of characters, I love them!!
I enjoyed this video- it's a good synopsis of how 拼音was created.
I am proficient with 拼音and so so with 注音 and Wade Giles. I've studied and used all these systems, but I've never looked into the history and politics of how these systems were created. I write 简体字 and 繁体字, but seeing simplified characters on buildings and shop signs just hurts my teeth!
I can finally understand it now.
This was a very informative video, thank you based ABC
when the community protests against the developers for ruining the game with an update
This isn't a bad thing as this is simply an evolution of the Chinese language. In fact there are Chinese dialects that don't even use Chinese characters such as Dungan which uses Cyrillic and Arabic Abjad:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao%27erjing
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language
The advantage of a phonetic system is that it can pass down an element of spoken language to future generations and the advantage of the symbol idea system was that people could communicate across different languages like Mandarin and Cantonese. For a multi-ethnic country like China with a number of languages the symbol version has a greater advantage. That being said complex ideas/concepts/object are constructed of simple ones by teaching just a few simple characters and the rules for combining them you can simplify the teaching of a system while allowing a degree of freedom of expression.
I’m glad you mentioned note 12 in your description. I think history like the 大跃进 and 百花活动 is essential to know for anyone that wants to know about Chinese history, let along world history. Nonetheless this is a fantastic video! I wrote a paper exactly about this during my sophomore year of college. 感谢你了这非常有用的视频！我对你的视频有感兴趣了！
Nice! What do you study?
@@ABChinese I’m getting my bachelors in business administration, but also 2 minors in Chinese and international business.
@@jackogrady6544 Good luck man! Sounds like you want to go into international business in Asia
@@ABChinese definitely! But thanks to people like you, I can be more informed and in the loop of history, culture and the language. 你真牛逼啊！
This video was so funny. I love your videos man. They teach me so much and are always fun to watch
Thank you for always putting a lot of effort into your videos! :)
Excellent video I have waiting for a long time.
Thank you, I don't know your name yet.
谢谢 ！謝謝 ！
Actually it is easier to read vertically, in particular the newspaper justified-spacing column format. It was actually shown that the eye needs to make more effort for wide horizontal movement. Surprisingly the hands are like this as well but it's an unrelated topic, in a nutshell horizontal extension is bad and puts additional avoidable strain especially during the digital era where users read write and interact with devices during the most time of their lives, aka the mouse keyboard and touch devices, alas, when reading, it has indeed a dramatic effect.
So, actually for me, I'd prefer the Chinese, Japanese, etc (CJK language group), to actually keep its traditional form and format. A compromise is the newspaper column format. It works also very effectively for memorization. I urge the reader to try it out as a method! :)
Do you have the source for this? I’d love to read it
@@ABChinese I'll try to find them. It was a very long time ago that I read about it, and/but additional research was conducted for sure.
(To be clear though, the comparison to the arm extension which was also shown, was mine in the comment. The causes are probably different, however the result really seems the same though, that's why I thought it was interesting to share too.)
10:43 there is an editing error. it should be "2nd" not "3rd"
Sadly, the disputes between simplified and traditional characters are now more about political issues, and users in Taiwan and Hong Kong often see traditional characters as a tool to divide Chinese culture.
And the PRC too.
@@ksm-7184 In reality, this is a political issue. This is also why Chiang Kai-shek, who was once a supporter of simplified characters, finally opposed simplified characters.
@@胡育昆 毕竟常凯申
They should have made an alphabet.. They could still keep the characters, have the letters look diff if it's part of a word or if the letters are desperate.
I like how North and South Korea are pretty successful with hanja reduction act even though they started the attempt way later than Chinese and Japanese. The North Korean communist party had officially abolished the hanja system by 1948, while the South Korean government also tried to remove the hanja away as well. Still, the government had to face strong opposition. However, the action was quite successful, so the usage of hangul increased over the years. A good example would be newspapers. The press used a lot of hanja in their text by the 1980s-ish, but after that, the number of used hanja decreased drastically. Nowadays, South Koreans use hanja if word distinction is needed. There was no official attempt to simplify the writing, though. There are some conflicts between people who support either 국한문혼용체(國漢文混用體) and 한글 전용(hangul 全用) so still.
As always, thank you for creating great content! 大感谢了！
I often hear Chinese and Japanese say: Koreans like to apply other countries' cultures to the World Heritage List. I don't know if it's true. But I recently noticed that the costumes of ancient Korean dramas and the costumes of Dae Jang Geum dramas are very different. I wonder why Korea is revising its own history.
@@junweipan2494 That's maybe because there are some controversies or conflicts over which country made 'that' first. I didn't watch the drama at all, so I cannot answer directly about that. However, I can tell that there are things that are genuinely Korean that other countries argue they created first, and there are things that were actually from different countries that Koreans think their ancestors made them.
I would say it is one of the East Asian things. So, if you want to know about the true origin of something, please try to use credible and reliable sources to find something unbiased.
Japanese can't use Kana only as writing system since Japanese have more Sino-Japanese homophones than Korean's. Just try to play JRPGs from 8 bit Era in Japanese.
Chinese in other hand can't go to pinyin or zhuyin only because monosyllabic nature of Chinese language, while native Japanese and Korean words are polysillabic. Just look how complicated is Vietnamese alphabet, full of diacritics and confusing speeling, I bet many English speakers don't know that Vietnamese surname Nguyen should be pronunced close to English personal name Gwen.
@@faustinuskaryadi6610 Yes, you are right! That's why I found it interesting. Even though hangul wasn't used for official documents during the Joseon dynasty, hangul was usually used by relatively lower class people (id est except for scholars), as King Sejong the Great intended. During the Japanese rule (1910-1945), hangul researchers contributed to modernizing and unifying the hangul writing system. Also, the nationalistic movements and social agreements after WWII and the Korean War contributed to eliminating hanja in Korean writing. I think these are the why Koreans had more advantages than other countries in 漢字文化圈.
@@faustinuskaryadi6610 the vietnamese used to use their chinese writing system called"hán tự" and they created Nôm Characters based from chinese character.Now they use latin alphabet
I’m new to all of this but am very interested in Chinese history and Mandarin. Thanks!!!
Thank you for another insightful and entertaining video! 🙏
Thanks for always coming around and watching!❤️
@@ABChinese The earliest writing in China is actually pottery. The Chinese inscribed on ceramics unearthed in Shaanxi Province has a history of more than 6,000 years. Oracle bone inscriptions took 2,800 years to form systematic writing on the basis of ceramic writing. Chinese affairs will never give up Chinese characters. Chinese characters have influenced the whole of East Asia.
Very interesting history - thank you!
Hong Kong as well as Macau also use traditional Chinese characters. I also find that Chinese traditional characters look better.
can you read the simplified version ?
@@sakurakou2009 not really. I learnt traditional Chinese characters. I learnt very little simplified characters. If I'm watching a TV show with simplified characters I can get by. Put a newspaper in front of me with simplified characters I won't get that far into the paper
@@lanvu5740 intersting , I thought simplified characters mean it will help you read the traditional ones more easily but this way those who only know simplified wouldnt be able to read traditional , chinese languge really hard 🥲
There are certain some simplified characters that have 3 different traditional Chinese characters.
Ex: 只= 隻 or is it 只是
干=幹(able)，乾 (dry)，干 (rod).
both look great, both has its strong and weakness, i am chinese, i love both, funny some people try to divide the chinese
great video, very interesting, thank you. quality content for such a young lad!
It was simplified to improve working class literacy
Which helped since China has a massive population.
@@gamechanger8908 Yes! At the funding of the PRC, 80% of the population were illiterate, and within 60 years that number dropped to 4%!
@@lnaru which makes me baffle when people say simplifcation had no practicality.
@@gamechanger8908 It's an excuse they give that holds no ground when you compare the illiteracy rate in the mainland to the one in Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong. And specially nowadays that typing is more of a form of communication than pen and paper, yes, simplification has lost it's purpose alltogether
@@Vykkkk Believe what you believe, but facts and statistics show otherwise when 80% were illiterate back before simplification. When Deng Xiaoping made his reforms, simplification helped because it made it more simpler to learn hundreds of characters with less strokes. And it was either simplification or the Chinese switching to latin alphabet like Vietnam. I bet if the Republic of China won instead of the Commies, they would of done the same.
Great information thanks
It's perfectly normal that an imperial government tries to keep the culture away from the common people, so making the writing system absurdly difficult makes sense from this point of view.
Great informative video!
注音 is still really cool.
Thank you for historically contextualizing this, esp talking about the May 4th movement. Many people don't understand that charscter simplification and hybridity with Latin were ideas that predated the PRC.
Having lived in the US for half my life, it was always impossible to explain how the crushing of Sinocentrism by foreign powers left so many Chinese utterly ashamed with their culture and language. In the current Western dominated world, it is still a common mentality that people express either by being openly ashamed in their culture or being rabidly nationalist to compensate.
Also, thanks for explaining the logic behind simplification. I'm personally not a fan of simplified, at least not with how it was done. But it is important to understand why it happened instead of just blaming communism.
Too many Americans have lectured me about how the PRC destroyed "real Chinese culture" as if all the radicalism of the Mao era occured in a historical vacuum.
Great video, thanks. As a Cantonese speaker with family roots in HK, I find that some simplified characters lack logic and consistency. I'm no scholar, but 憶 has been simplified to 忆, but 乙 is not a simplified form of 意. Simplified characters have increased literacy but, good grief, some are downright ugly and look unbalanced. Two that spring to mind are 厂 (廠) and 广 (廣); just awful! The Japanese version of 廣 (広 ) looks better.
I agree that the Japanese simplified characters often look better. There is actually logic behind 忆, however. 憶 is a phonosemantic compound where the right part tells you how it's pronounced. In simplifying it, they basically recreated the phonosemantic compound using a simpler character with the same sound. This is especially beneficial (at least for Mandarin speakers) when the pronunciations of the original semantic component and the compound character have diverged: for example, when 鐘 (zhōng) was simplified to 钟, the rebus was changed from 童 (which now sounds like tóng) to 中.
Super cool video! Thought it already had thousands of hundreds of views...
A fascinating topic. I like the beauty and harmony of traditional characters. Actually, I don't think simplification made the learning of the characters easier. What made the characters learning easier was the Latin-based pinyin. In that sense Zhou Youguang was a real revolutionary. He's my hero. Thank you for the video!
For me, simplified Chinese is much easier to write and easier to recognize. TC characters can be ridiculously complicated, it doesn't make sense. Whole Latin based system would would easy for English speakers to learn, it doesn't necessarily make it easy for Chinese. There IS a Latin version of the Chinsze language and its called Pinyin. Trust me, it was NOT easy to learn for me, even tho I already knew 3000 characters by then. Especially because there are way too many characters that produce the same pronunciation while having completely unrelated meanings, it makes no sense to rely purely on Latin alphabets. I think for Sinitic languages in general, 汉字 is here to stay. Japan and Korea partially kept the Chinese characters for the same reason.
Imagine if mainland China got rid of Chinese characters, the Japanese would be laughing so hard
Why Japanese would laughing?
there is nothing wrong with a language reform after thousands of years but it should have been earlier ... it's like people would write in Old Norse or Proto-Germanic but speak in modern language and of course modern English got rid of gender and cases and lot of sounds those language had, developed a couple of new ones and imposed a stricter word order.
The grammatical changes from Old English to Modern English are all natural. It is widely accepted that english lost gender and cases due to extended contact with the Latin and Norse, both of which had different noun genders and word cases, which led to confusion and inconsistency, naturally driving towards losing the gender and cases. Stricter word order is an artifact of loses cases, since you can no longer identify the “context” of each word from the word alone. There were english reforms however, which made spelling consistent, separate reforms in England and the US. Before then, spelling was mostly phonetic.
@@anguswu2685 some centuries more and we probably have reached Tibetan spelling ... somehow there's a point where you should update the spelling when it's no longer the same language or you end up writing Dutch with German spelling rules or worse
Actually, it's more akin to an Italian writing in both Roman and Medieval Latin.
@@anguswu2685 Before then, spelling was mostly phonetic.
Or as I like to call it (correctly) Ebonics.
The title in my Japanese environment says 彼らが中国人をほぼ殺したとき, which means "when they nearly killed Chinese people"...
My mother tongue is Hakka, and I have been learning Mandarin and Hanji on-off almost my whole lifetime. I will be sad if one day, China considered adopting a writing system similar to Korean, because Hanji is identical to Chinese cultures, the way of thinking, the way of life, art, and calligraphy. Thousand of years of inheritance, while Korean didn't have a writing language in the first place, so (also Japanese) they have to borrow this Hanji.
Hakka is also entirely Chinese people and Chinese language among many others 😂 even tai and vietnamese kinh are, so are hmong, akha etc as well.
@@zhuqiusong6698 Thank you, my ancestor was from Meixian (arrive in Borneo around 1770)😄
Is there any proposals of what this system based on Chinese characters would look like? Or what the other symbol based systems look like
Actually, "simplified" Chinese, historically called "variants", were already in existence for thousands of years. Ancient texts with "simplified" Chinese can be found everywhere from Japan to Vietnam. So no one killed the Chinese characters. They just replaced common ones with less common ones.
variants do not equal to simplified. It's "different", not "less".
Could you do a video on components and radicals ? I recently got my HSK 6 but I still don't understand the difference... Some are phonetic, some are semantic, but in a lot of characters the phonetic component does not match the pronunciation, and the semantic component does not match the meaning. They also seem to be in random places in the character, sometimes left, sometimes right or centre or centre-left. I recently learned that there are multiple component and radical systems...Some people claim it can be used to learn Chinese, but I really don't know how. Could you debunk? Thanks
The pronunciation of modern Chinese (Mandarin) have changed a lot compared to ancient Chinese. The pronunciation of many characters(hanzi) are almost the same or similar to their phonetic components(shengpang) in anciant, but not in modern. But many hanzi not similar to their shengpang in Mandarin may similar in Cantonese and Japanese onyomi😂
the components help you memorize the characters, but there is no simple rules to summarize it.
This is a good topic, will consider
Give an example.
Your content is great. So is your sense of humour, though personally I wish you didn't feel the need to skate over detail and jazz everything up for the short-attention-span generation. But I guess that's the reality of life on RUclips. I look forward to the further videos you promised at the end.
TL;DR didn't read anything past 'great'
Thank you for that interesting video. I didnt know about Zhuyin yet. It would have been a great idea to try to make that work.
Judging by his video I can tell this guy did a lot of research and actually did a lot of study on Chinese characters than some Cold War mentality cultist. Overall I also like how this video is both balanced and funny.
So are you from Mott St. or Flushing, where they still use the old system?
Stop exaggerating it, they didn’t kill the Chinese language. just like America didn’t kill English just because they changed a couple words. Just because you disagree with a policy that a government made, is not a valid reason to misinform others.
If replacing Chinese characters with Latin characters entirely isn't killing the language, I don't know what to tell you.
Or maybe you didn't watch the entire video to understand what he's talking about.
@@shamringo7438 Do you know what youre even talking about? I am chinese. I should know the Chinese language, Im telling you, the Communist government barely changed a portion of the Chinese language.
@@shamringo7438 Chinese pronounciation has a latin system too, have you not heard of pinyin?
@@professionaljailbreaker6965 Yeah, you clearly didn’t pay attention at the video.
Literally mentioned at 8:00, the end goal was not just pinyin, nor the simplification of characters. But to REPLACE all chinese characters with Latin ones but was stopped before it ever happens. Hence the title “NEARLY killed”
@@shamringo7438 I don't need to watch the end of bullshit.
5:43 Taken from Fresh Off the Boat.
The official given reason for it was to increase literacy. But now we know that the key to literacy is education, not simplification.
not true. at that time 80% of the population were illiterate, and most of them were adults who could only study part time. an easier reading/writing system do help.
@@jimmychen576 Oh and the illiteracy rate in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan is much higher than in the mainland right? Simplified characters has simply lost all of it's value in the modern day with typing being more common than pen and paper
tbh simplified chinese is really way easier to write/remember and makes the learning process way easier...saying otherwise is dumb..
@@Vykkkk let’s not forget that mainland has 42 ethnic groups. Part of the reason there’s a literacy lag if it’s so, is because millions are not proficient in the National tongue. This isn’t the case in HK and Taiwan.
@@lyhthegreat also simplified easier to recognize and read on phone screen compared to traditional one, the victor guy are talking out of his ass saying simplified lost its value
Also, the way the memes are plugged in this video is incredible 😆 😆
when i first went to study chinese i thought; "i'm gonna stick with traditional characters, so i can *really* learn the language for real" then i started actually studying. And pretty soon i came to the conclusion that the whole thing needs at least another round of simplification, but really you should scrap the whole business and steal the korean system or something like that.
Hangul is soulless. And it was never meant to be used as a stand-alone writing system in the first place.
@@billkar6479 I mean it clearly works. And I don't have any idea what you mean by "soulless" but for me it's the content that counts.
Japanese Shinjitai Kanji is the good balance between simplified and traditional, still look traditional, but actually simplified.
@@sayven it doesn’t totally work. As there are so many ambiguities, law documents use a lot of Chinese characters
Interesting, so how long has Zhuyin been around for?
Since 1913
“简体字”从隋唐就开始出现，但你通篇都讲述共产党如何如何，不得不怀疑UP主夹带私货，刻意迎合观众的“猎奇”情绪，硪葚致槐遗亻尔氏亻固樾楠人
The old chinese charcter used in japan are the most beautiful