Should you learn Simplified or Traditional Chinese? | Reasons for both!
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- Опубликовано: 31 май 2024
- In this video, Savannah explains the history of the development of Chinese characters, and the differences between simplified and traditional Chinese characters, AND which should you study!
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I’m a mainland Chinese, and throughout my life I’ve never seen any mainlander who can’t read traditional characters. It’s very easy to switch between the two writing styles if you start with simplified. I never systematically tried to learn traditional characters. I think I just picked them up subconsciously as I watched Japanese animes with traditional subtitles. Almost everyone in China in my generation grow up watching animes. My point is that they aren’t very different, and you probably only need to read a book or two in traditional characters before you can be fluent in them without needing to translate. With that said, if you want to be able to write traditional, you’ve got to put in the real effort. I can easily read traditional but can’t write it at all.
Well if it's easy to pick up traditional hanzi for you then the reverse will also be true. Since traditional hanzi are easier to memorize it is faster to learn traditional than simplified.
See my other comment on this video.
lies
雞拿畜牲
What?! You're being modest for sure. I'm sure you've been able to passively remember A FEW traditional characters. But yeah, reading is one thing; writing is a whole nother beast, haha. And if you don't have to handwrite traditional ever anyway then what's the point for you.
Reading, yes because you can guess from context. Computer data entry, maybe. On-demand hand-writing formal script no! It is a lot more difficult than you have given credit. There is an old saying: 由繁入简易，有简入繁难. This is only common sense. But mainland Chinese are not known for their common sensibility. For me, it will only take one or two weeks to learn on-demand writing in the simplified system. For you, it will take at least a year to do the same in the traditional system. The nickname for the simplified system is 残体字。
Smart Taiwanese can read simplified. Smart mainlander can read traditional. The only deciding factor is availability, to get the resource to learn.
There are lots of mistakes in this video.
Most of the simplified Chinese Characters were not new. They existed
Actually, one Chinese character may have many different versions in ancient times. 80% of the simplified Chinese Characters were picked from those ancient variants, mostly from cursive script [草书], which is another version of the Traditional Chinese characters.
e.g. “爱” can be traced back to Song Dynasty. We can found “爱” in the artwork of Zhao Mengkui[赵孟奎], a well-known calligrapher of the Song Dynasty.
When you know standard characters, you don't even need to learn simplified forms, just learn standard forms designed by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China.
Simplification of characters is not just a one-to-one relationship. There are certain characters that were merged. So, the characters used to write "face" and "noodles" used to be different. They are now the same character and you have to use context to decipher which is the correct meaning. Similarly, "queen" and "behind" are the same character. "Hair" and "emerge" are the same character. I'm not a big fan of the merging of characters. I think that's kind of gross. Imagine, in English, you wrote the number 2 every time you wanted to communicate "to" and you wrote the number 4 every time you wanted to communicate "for". Imagine writing the letter u each time you wanted to communicate "you." Now, imagine your government telling you that it's easier because you don't have to write so many strokes and that it is going to boost literacy. It's nonsense.
This is really solid overall! There is one fairly major issue that should be discussed here: traditional characters are presented as giving access to much more literature, which is misleading. "Everything written before 1950 was written in traditional characters" is technically true, but it's highly misleading. Before 1920 or so, common practice was to write everything in _a different language altogether_ namely "Literary" or "Classical" Chinese. Mandarin written in simplified characters arguably has a longer tradition now than Mandarin written in traditional characters.
In the end, I think too much is made of this question. As you said yourself, in the end you'll want to know both. But I wish I had known starting out that writing Mandarin in traditional characters really isn't much more traditional than using simplified characters like the vast majority of people using Mandarin today.
I completely disagree, simplified is a misnomer. Traditional characters have a certain logic to them, they are built up out of radical which give hints to their meaning or to their pronunciation. These can be used as crutches to memorize them. But in simplified this logic has been mostly destroyed and the memorization burden becomes larger.
見 is built up out of the eye radical 目 and the legs radical 儿, it's not hard to memorize that it means 'to see'-> an eye on legs.
见 meanwhile is just an arbitrary shape that only makes sense if you know its traditional form. If you don't then it's an entirely new symbol you have to learn.
聽 contains an ear 耳 and a heart 心 -> to use your ear with all your heart -> to listen
There even is an earth radical 土 and a tilted eye 目 merged into one which I personally memorize as in "listening attentively with your ear and your hearth while looking at the ground/earth"
听 meanwhile is an axe 斤 and a mouth 口, now that's quite violent and doesn't make a lot of sense. What does an axe have to do with listening?
The justification for the simplified characters is that they were used in some obscure old book or in cursive writing, but as a foreigner that really does not help you. So why is simplified not simpler to learn?
The answer lies in the question "what was the goal of the simplification?".
Was it to help memorize the characters more easily?
No.
Was it to help foreigners learn hanzi more easily?
No.
Was it to help writing by hand faster?
Yes.
The goal was to (sometimes quite aggresively) reduce the number of strokes. For this a sacrifice was made in the simplicity of memorization -> spend more time in learning but get back that time later during writing.
The question is? Does writing by hand still really matter? Even Chinese people mostly use pinyin (roman alphabet) keyboards to type characters digitally. And due to this, even a lot of Chinese people forget to write certain characters after they leave school. If you're not writing by hand (let's be honest you won't) then you will not get that time back!
Now as for reading ... recognizing really isn't made easier by simplified, in our daily lives we constantly recognize much more complex objects than any traditional charachters, cars, faces, buildings, ... Now most of us wouldn't be able to draw them if asked, but we can recognize them. The speed difference between recognizing 聽 or 听 is completely neglilible, both are faster than recognizing a car.
Chinese children go into the writing classes at an age when they already know thousands of words. But a foreigner learning the writing and speaking from scratch really isn't helped by simplified, it's just going to up the burden of memorization.
You're better of learning traditional and then later you can learn those thousand simplified characters really quickly because you'll be aided by your knowledge of traditional. If you already learned 6000 characters what are 1000 more? 1000 which will be learned more than twice as fast because you know their original forms!
Hell it might even be faster than learning simplified from the get-go. And now you'll be able to read both systems as well.
@@user-bs8vs6zq9n Illiteracy is nothing to do with the character set. It is about the accessibility to the education system or the education resources. In your logic, if you have everyone riding bicycle, you are having a mass transportation system. Try to use your logic to explain why Taiwan or Hong Kong has lower illiteracy than China. Or you want to tell me that Taiwan and Hong Kong can do even better if they do Simplified character?
We are talking about the percentage of populations who can read, not about how fast the educated people can write.
Agree. I believe that learning a language must have followed through a process of listen, speak, read (recognize word/character and link it to what you hear and pronounce), and write. Unfortunately the majority of the Chinese teachers/learners do not seem to follow that sequence. They do recognize a word/character first, then pronounce (and listen), then memorize, then write. They even run this process when learning other languages....That's probably why there is a wrong believe that simplifying the character would be the key for literacy. They just don't and never listen first!
I would like to give my own experience. I was born just before the 2nd world war, and I learned traditional Chinese. Now I prefer simplified Chinese and would happily drop traditional characters out whenever I can. I’m on my way to becoming a nonagenarian , and I think it’s great that Chinese characters have been made simpler to write and to recognise despite what others say about loss of “meaningful bits or radicals” in simplified characters. It’s completely false to think it makes less sense to learn simplified characters - the brain does not work that way.
Hello mad-fleming: I totally agree with your saying: "Traditional characters have a certain logic to them, they are built up out of radical which give hints to their meaning or to their pronunciation".
This is very true. When I taught traditional Chinses in a university here, I used the logic as you said. It was every efficient and the students learned it very fast. The simplified Chinses has no such logic and the students must memorize it without any logic to help them.
I agree with this comment through and through, I'm a Malaysian Chinese growing up learning Simplified Chinese but started learning Traditional Chinese this year and I find Traditional Chinese logically easier to understand as a person who almost forgot how to write Chinese and is trying to relearn the script
繁體字就是美！喜歡傳統之美的人，和cool people就去學繁體中文就對了！尤其愛看早期年代的中文與香港電影的人，你會發現裡面都是繁體字，很少有簡體字的。藝術文化還是繁體字最有共鳴。但如果只是要去中國、新加坡做生意的人，就學簡體字吧！因為快又最普遍。
If you learn traditional Chinese well, you really get the simplified version as a free bonus. The learning curve is flat for a native speaker. I do not like the simplified system but you cannot fight city hall. As far as data entry by computer, you hardly notice the difference. The simplifications that had been made have increased ambiguity in the written language. Example. You easily mistake the character 请 for 清 if you are not careful, especially when you have poor eyesight. In handwriting, it must have been a disaster. In my adaptation process, the transition from traditional to simplified was transparent. For initial encounters, writing takes a little work but reading is automatic. I have never bothered to learn simplified but I can write emails expressing the same with simplified or traditional transparently. If you have courage and are serious about the language, I would recommend traditional to you because you can do everything with traditional but you are limited by the simplified system. There is truth in that you should know both. Anyway you cut it, it is a huge order. BTW, you have a much bigger chance of encountering ambiguities with the simplified system than with the traditional system. In the earlier Mao days, the simplified system was meant as a stop-gap measure. Romanization was the goal. Stalin pushed for it and Mao complied. However, the CCP finally discovered that Romanization is not feasible so they gave up. Thus we ended up with the current half-ass simplified system. FYI, there are more than 80 thousand Chinese characters being created in the course of Chinese history. Only at most 3 thousand are really simplified. Un-simplified ones are either that it is already simple or it is not of daily usage though.
China: "We have a huge problem of illiteracy bc our language script is so Complex! Let's modify a small amount of these characters into moderately difficult characters, and leave the majority rest of the difficult characters.
I don't believe that the simplified Chinese characters helped the illiteracy. It was their reforms in education and the spread of schooling and population moving to urban areas with ACCESS to education, that helped increase literacy
Me as a japanese learner: hmmm interesting
Same hahahahha
👍
Since I want to really delve into this language I decided,I will learn both.
Thank you very much....
This helped me a lot...
for me both but what should be important is the truth and that is the traditional and special hobby is the simplified
Simplified were first proposed by Taiwan's KMT
1:41 I hope you would make a video explaining why the simplification wasn't applied consistently to those characters on the rightmost column too. Eg, 歡 is simplified to 欢 but 灌 remains unsimplified, why?
Because simplify chinese is a bug system. Traditional chinese use Six Categories of constructing the Chinese characters, that make all characters have their reasons to be those form.
You need strike a balance between simplification and not losing too much information. Also, there were artistic considerations.
Even pre-1950 literatures and history books are published in Simplified Chinese in China, just like The Analects and The Records of the Grand Historian, can be easily found their SC ver. Only calligraph is usually written in TC; however, I also know calligraph works written in SC or mixed.
You tell too much about the merits about learning TC, but how about the demerits? Maybe it's not a question about “should I…” but just “must I learn TC?” For who isn't native in Chinese, to learn TC is nothing than a torture.
To see how to write “a depressed Taiwan turtle” in SC and TC.
SC: 一只忧郁的台湾乌龟
TC: 一隻憂鬱的臺灣烏龜
So the only two reasons that you must learn TC is if you wanna learn calligraphy or live in Taiwan.
It is like colour and color, favourite and favorite.
Ninety percent of the people in China use simplified Chinese characters, only people in Taiwan use traditional Chinese characters. In the mainland, we all write simplified characters
Hong Kong and Macau as well
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.
In general, I'm a fan of making things systematically easier. Simplifed did a great job of making the radicals easier and I love them. However, in some cases it's easier to learn traditional because it's more systematic. For ex, 陽 yang rhymes with 場 chang 、湯tang、楊yang etc. however, the simplified version: 阳 doesn't immediately look obvious. Another example is 讲 doesn't look like it's related to 購 、 溝、構。 There are tons more examples like these and I won't go into them. These examples are much more obvious when you start to learn a little of other dialects, such as Cantonese, Hakka or Wu or even Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese. Knowing the traditional allows you to quickly realize how other characters are pronounced.
loved the video super helpful and informativ!
I know this is mostly for foreigners who have not learned Chinese, and that's okay. Do whatever is most convenient, if simplified Chinese resources are more accessible, then go for it.
However, as a ethnic Chinese from Malaysia, I'm greatly dissatisfied with what China did, I honestly don't think that traditional Chinese is the main reason for illiteracy, it was more due to the inaccessible for poor people to go to school in the olden days because education wasn't free back then. China could've made education free and compulsory for everyone and retained traditional Chinese. It's not only in the word 愛 that they took out the most important element, there are many words which they changed to fit their communist ideology, effectively removing the people from the history.
Though I grew up with simplified Chinese myself, I wished I had started with the traditional one. To be honest, the simplified writing isn't any easier especially if you're not living in the environment of the language, if traditional Chinese was really the cause of illiteracy, then Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau would've been illiterate, but they're not. For this reason, I've made a conscious decision to switch to traditional Chinese myself and learned Zhuyin as well, it is in a way easier in some ways despite of the number of strokes.
ooh I think this is a very smart way of thinking of it
I'm ethnically Chinese too, my parents are from Malaysia but I grew up in the states so there's always a language barrier between me and family in Malaysia.
Im taking Chinese in school, and we were taught traditional before they switched to simplified and I have no idea if I should switch too,
1) I would love to be able to read and write traditional for the culture and meaning behind it but
2) Most Chinese is written in simplified Malaysia and Singapore or a mix of both
In your opinion would it be more beneficial to stick with traditional, switch to simplified, or if possible, learn both at the same time?
I'm trying to learn traditional chinese since I'm going to be studying in Taiwan soon, but finding study materials is almost impossible... Any tips you could give me?
@@Gloywi idk if this helps but my highschool uses the “integrated chinese” textbooks to teach us, i think it includes traditional and simplified as well.
my teachers taiwanese and she would base her lessons from the book and whatever she wants really so i’m not too sure how good it is
hope this helps!
@@suisnity6685 oh? Thank you! I'll look into those.
@@Gloywi no problem!! if you find anything better please let me know!
0:56 Simplified 正体字/ Traditional 正體字
what chinese is the original like which one did the ancient chinese use
Interesting
I'm fairly sure Chinese literacy is now around 95%, not 85%
yeah, it used to be like ... 20%. About ... 40 years ago.
10:51 what Philippines?? I think it's more like Hong Kong Macau Taiwan @@
There's a large hokkien population in the Philippines
useful vid
我正在學習繁體字和簡體字。
Please restore traditional chinese characters in mainland china.
Simplified Chinese was derived from a bunch of the illiterate who at least learned a certain of Chinese charaters to help the power to get the done and it passed down from generation to generation. Simplified Chinese have confused Traditional Chinese that every word comes from the origin of the culture. Every Traditional Chinese character is very meaningful with the strokes. For example, 廠 has something inside the factory, but 厂 is nothing. When it comes to the art of word, Simplied Chinese is very ugly. 開VS开. 廣VS 广. 塵VS尘. 習VS习. 務VS务. 為VS为. Many many more ugly words I don't like them.
"愛愛"
kappa face
So... simplified Chinese?
I don't buy the argument about the beauty of traditional characters. Most simplified forms were shortcuts that actual people were taking hundreds of years ago. They represent an evolution of the system just as valid as traditional character evolution
You just keep saying Chinese but you are not saying the name of which Chinese language you talking about that people should learn a simplified or traditional written form so for that I have to give you a thumb down.
Also if you know/are learning Japanese too, Kanji shares more characters with Traditional Chinese than Simplified Chinese so if you're learning both the total amount of character you'll need to learn is lower if you learn Traditional Chinese.
哈哈，不管怎么说，对于无脑认为繁体字有优越性又不打算生活在香港澳门台湾的外国人。我很开心看到你们为难你们自己。反正又不是我学
正字。。。。華夏民族的榮耀的字
正字？是甲骨文、金文还是小篆？
@@brighthorse6981 中華民國政府的字啊
@@user-mp7tm5hy1m wwwacc.ntl.edu.tw/public/Attachment/911513424117.pdf
看看台湾史料，1950年代蒋介石极力推进繁体字简化。
不料被大陆抢了先，先实行简体字了，凡是大陆的必须反对，蒋介石遂放弃简化运动。
另外，一个残酷的现实，只有殖民地或半殖民使用繁体字，独立的政体都是使用简体字。因为文字是随历史文化发展的，殖民者希望断绝当地文化的发展，所以阻断了文字向前发展。
爱compose of 爫冖友。友link to 发，拔，拨，废，泼妇，波浪，know 100 radical is enough ,is like knowing the route
学甲骨文最好。
愛：用“心”爱？不对，用脑子！ 心是管血液的，脑子才是想事思索的。所以“愛”是不科学的！ “爱”才是对的！！！
for me both but what should be important is the truth and that is the traditional and special hobby is the simplified
I don’t understand what is being said or implied here. What has truth got to do with how you write the characters - simplified or traditional ?
What he probably means is that simplified characters or like the orcs in lord of the rings, a twisted form of Chinese characters devised by the communists. Therefore he wants to learn the original modern form of characters not the twisted version. But he can work with the simplified form. Hope that explains it.