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Traditional and Simplified Chinese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6301 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 17 of 80 09 September 2009 at 5:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Fair point. Some pretty funky stuff can pop up.
Your examples are good ones. Unfortunately it looks like the simplified characters are here to stay. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6901 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 80 09 September 2009 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
Nor would it happen to those who stick to simplified only. It feels like rather a moot point to use in support of one system over the other.
As a foreign learner I would have thought "a bit unjustified, illogical, and arbitrary" is a pretty good description of the Chinese system of characters as a whole, regardless whether it's traditional or simplified. IMHO that's part of the beauty of it. All in all, from my learner's perspective, the advantages of simplified seem to far outweigh any of the possible disadvantages. In fact there are some characters that I can't understand why they didn't simplify further, such as 赢, a criss-cross jumble of eighteen strokes (if I counted right) for such a simple and everyday word as "to win". Having said that, I do plan to learn to read traditional too, though not necessarily to write them. It's just that it will be a long time before I get around to it, as there are many other learning objectives that have higher priority for me. Edited by Hencke on 09 September 2009 at 5:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Z.J.J Senior Member China Joined 5615 days ago 243 posts - 305 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 19 of 80 10 September 2009 at 11:33am | IP Logged | |||||
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Sorry for my late reply, Mr Hencke, well, it’s a truly complex and systematic topic to bring up, when it comes to ongoing debate between Traditional and Simplified characters, many westerners, as well as some Chinese, seem to regard characters as pointless and disgusting symbols, unlike Latin or Cyrillic alphabet, believe it or not, actually characters were born to match Chinese needs, rather than represent phonetic feature only. Objectively, just the opposite to western theory, I don't agree that character system is a primitive and backward remains, quite the contrary, pictogram (象形文字) has a few big advantages over various alphabets. 「六書／六书」（classification of characters） is admittedly recognized as ground rule of character formation, but Mainland Characters Reform Commission broke the rules arbitrarily, they pushed Traditional characters into hell, chose irregular vulgar ones and variants of non-standard characters, and what's more, there was nothing worse than creating illiterate symbols and pressurising people to use them as a must, though some of them were abolished later for lack of rationale, a lot of Simplified can’t be converted accurately into Traditional by analogy with logical standards. Normally, it’s understandable that people always long for simpler things, but it should base on the premise that the whole logical system wouldn’t be seriously destroyed. No doubt most Traditional characters weren’t simply created at illiterates’ pleasure, while a lot of Simplified were made sloppily or irresponsibly, before and during “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, that was really the dark ages in Chinese history, that's not to say, I don’t like Simplified only because I’m not interested in politics (especially sick and tired of communism), the main reason why I wouldn’t recommend Simplified is, to a large extent, due to its chaotic system theory, such as merging several characters into 1 form, without considering whether they have different meanings, pronunciation, or tones which may cause problems when you learn the refined and noble Chinese that seems well-educated. Somehow, I found it hard to explain why Simplified characters can’t be Latinised forever, and why Traditional characters work more reasonably than Simplified ones, maybe because I’m not good at English expression, or probably because the Chinese (East Asian) way of thinking is slightly different from western style.
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| Z.J.J Senior Member China Joined 5615 days ago 243 posts - 305 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 20 of 80 10 September 2009 at 2:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Traditional---Simplified, (with the same universal parts, for example, 「又」,「乂」, & etc., it just seems like unknown elements X or Y in mathematics, this is just a drop in the ocean for pointing out its disadvantages.)
「又」 雞---鸡 觀---观 漢---汉 鳳---凤 「乂」 趙---赵 風---风 義---义 劉---刘 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Linguistics Diglot Groupie Finland Joined 5635 days ago 59 posts - 62 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, English Studies: German, Finnish | Message 21 of 80 10 September 2009 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's never simple or easy to "win" considering how many competitors will be around in the country. 赢 (17 strokes) may appear complicated by the first glance, but if you analyze it with etymology, then... In order to "win", we will need: 亡: "death" (A sense of crisis); 口: "mouth" (Communication); 月: "month" (Time; people--> personnel); 贝: "shell" (One ancient money form--> Money); 凡: "ordinary" (Routine--> Plans/Rules). Which part one can "win" without? I'm sure there are plenty other explanations about this character from different angles, but this just shows an idea of how some words remain "complex-looking" till today. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6901 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 80 11 September 2009 at 5:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks for your detailed reply ZJJ. I can see how this can be a very emotional issue as well. I take it from your above comments that you wouldn't necessarily be against a certain amount of simplification, you just disagree very strongly about the clumsy and arbitrary ways in which it was carried out, because it broke the existing logical relations. This was a slightly surprising aspect to me and I find it very interesting. As a learner of the language, and a fairly beginning one at that, I can't of course have an opinion on those inner structures and logical relationships because most of them are way above my head. As I said the opinions I am expressing are based on my limited experience from a learner's perspective, and mostly from a practical point of view. Still, it's only about thirty per cent of them that were simplified, so I guess the majority of the logic must still be there even if you use simplified.
Hello Linguistics. Nice to see you back ! Hope you had a great trip ! Yes, winning can indeed be very difficult, but there's no reason why talking, or writing about it should be difficult. Thanks for the etymological breakdown. It does provide a certain measure of consolation to think about it like that. The only thing that bugs me a little about the structure is having the symbol for "death" on top. If we talk about winning then surely death should be stamped down into the ground and maybe appear at the bottom of the character, perhaps with the symbol for life above it ;o) !? Ha ha, well I have no delusions about reinventing the system as such but it's a nice thought experiment. Edited by Hencke on 11 September 2009 at 5:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| maaku Senior Member United States Joined 5581 days ago 359 posts - 562 votes Speaks: English* | Message 23 of 80 11 September 2009 at 8:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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| Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6901 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 80 11 September 2009 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's a valid point to bring up, and I would have thought so too, if I hadn't known better. But funnily enough this is actually not the case. I know this quite well because I first started learning characters by a brute-force rote-memorisation approach, based on a frequency list, specifically the one found on this page. If you have a look there you can see it covers the 3000 commonest characters in order of frequency with the most frequent characters first. Beside each character there is a special mention of what the traditional form is (marked with an F), if it has one. I just counted through the first 100 characters on the list and found that only 25 of them, ie. 25 per cent of the 100 commonest characters are simplified - I did it quickly and might be off by one or two, but the conclusion is the same. Leafing on further down the list the percentage appears very similar all the way through. So, sorry but no. Any randomly selected page is in fact likely to have that same thirty per cent simplified. It might even be slightly under thirty. Edited by Hencke on 11 September 2009 at 10:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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