Chinese is already a difficult foreign language to learn, as Level IV compares with Level I Spanish and French. We make it even more complicated by talking about simplified or traditional characters.
Traditional characters are the original Chinese characters standardized since the 5th century in China, and they’re currently used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Simplified characters were introduced in the 1950s in mainland China and are used in China, Singapore and by the United Nations. People who come from or have lived or visited in either region seem to have strong feelings for which characters to use. They have endless good reasons why students should learn one version or the other. Traditional characters advocates say traditional characters represent Chinese culture, Chinese calligraphy can only look good with traditional characters, and if you learn the traditional version first, it will be easier to learn the simplified version later. Advocates of simplified characters say you should learn the version that most Chinese use. If you go to China, you see only simplified characters, and they’re much easier to learn. So who is right and whom we shall listen to? In my opinion, they both are right, but you still have to decide which version to learn. It really doesn’t matter which comes first or whether you learn only one. That’s because if you have a good foundation of either, you can learn both – even if you don’t master both. Why?
Do you know there are only “350 singly simplified characters, whose simplifications cannot be generalized to other characters” and only “132 simplified characters and 14 simplified radicals, which can all be generalized to other characters?” To learn more about this, please click here This means fewer than 500 Chinese characters actually have different forms among 5,000 characters that we use on a daily basis. And if you read Chinese daily and see both versions here and there, you can automatically read either of them. I am from mainland China and have learned only simplified characters, but I can read traditional characters without any problem, even though I cannot write them. Likewise, my suppliers in Taiwan and Hong Kong learned only traditional characters, but they have no problem reading my hand-written simplified characters. You may have heard some Chinese say that they cannot read simplified or traditional characters. I have to say, it is not that they can’t, it is that they don’t want to. If they want, they can!
I have also heard some teachers saying that we don’t need to teach Chinese characters, that Pinyin is enough for students to understand and speak Chinese. They say if students really need to know the characters, they can type Pinyin on the computer and pick the right ones. I am not sure I agree. Writing can help you memorize the characters, and if you only type Pinyin a few times and choose characters from the screen, how will you remember them? If you cannot recognize Chinese characters, you can’t even read street signs in China or in Chinatown. So choose whichever version you think best for your Chinese learning/teaching endeavor. In the end, you’ll know both characters and can read endless street signs in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Singapore!
To learn more about Chinese characters, visit Wikipedia’s Chinese character site, a great page with everything you want to know about the Chinese characters.
Chinese Characters – Simplified or Traditional
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