Traditional or simplified Chinese writing? Options

[timonlanguage]

Do you like traditional Chinese characters, or simplified?

I'm all for traditional Chinese characters. I mean, it's the TRADITION. The Chinese have been using traditional Chinese characters until the idiotic Mao Zedong f*cked up China in every single possible way with his stupid cultural revolution. Now, the Chinese characters are bastardized with its simplified writing.

Only Hong Kong and Taiwan are still using traditional Chinese characters because they've been unaffected by the d*mn cultural revolution. Whenever I watch mainland Chinese dramas and movies, I want to throw my remote control at the TV because all I see are the bastardized simplified Chinese characters. I feel much more at ease watching HK or Taiwanese dramas and movies because their subtitles are in traditional writing.

cultural revolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

Here's a comparison of traditional and simplified Chinese writing.





This post has been edited by timonlanguage: Dec 26 2010, 02:52 PM

[emotion1030]

I like traditional writing better too because it looks prettier.

[foi2]

Simplified Chinese look like crap.

They seriously need to get rid of it, or at least make it look better. Some simplifications don't even make sense. The Japanese Kanji still looks pretty good despite some simplifications, they should take that as an example.

[YoungGun8]

Humans are lazy and time is one of the most valueable asset, so for convience/speed I definitely choose simpflied Chinese. If I am an artist who is into Chinese calligraphy then I may prefer the traditional.

This post has been edited by YoungGun8: Dec 26 2010, 05:23 PM

[Suijen]

Simplified. People talk about the beauty of traditional, etc etc, but the vast majority of Chinese don't really care about that. You want to write pretty characters, learn calligraphy.

[SeafoodFriedRice]

I like traditional for reading and simplified for writing

[orange peel]

as text editing shift into the exclusive or near exclusive realm of computer editors then simplification of glyphs may become pointless, in that case... do whatever tickles your fancies I guess. Having said that I think mainland will probably keep with simplified, having 1-2 generation of people growing up with simplified, soon all the professors, all technicians, teachers, publishers will be so used to simplified that changing it back will become impossible.

And as Chinese economic clout grows neighboring Sinic societies will probably have no choice but to adopt similar measures just to get included.

And for all the people saying that simplified is ugly, I don't know, is there an objective way to say for certain. I think a lot of it is cuz you guys are so used to traditional that seeing simplified versions is kinda strange - i.e it is strange looking. Frankly sometimes I think some traditional glyphs are too complex and borderline ugly as well.

And in a more general front, a lot of people seem to think that traditional = right, because it's traditional, and we've been doing it this way for billions of years. Well I think this unjustified obsession with preservation of the past is grossly wasteful (not in this case perhaps but in other instances)

And the OP, it seems like he isn't objectively criticizing the first Chairman, I'm assuming he's not a mainlander, it might be difficult to understand from a HK or TW perspective but the cultural revolution is also very much an integral and I would even say one of the most significant part of ML Chinese culture, while it brought a large number of setbacks it also very effectively secularized (not accurately used but I think you'll understand) Chinese society, and may be one contributing factor towards current Chinese dynamism. A China that was suffocating under 4 thousand years of traditions was finally revitalized. The result was a China of modern pragmatism, I think this is one of the biggest contributions the early CCP made to China.

This post has been edited by orange peel: Dec 27 2010, 03:01 AM

[ClassicalMusic]

traditional should be left to the elite professional. there is no other way around the issue.

[odkram]

traditional looks better lol...

but my Chinese teacher told me that simplified Chinese is pretty much the standard now.

so there's no point in learning traditional...

i can only recognize 2 characters in traditional lol ><

ma... horse

and huan part of xi huan lol ><

[ktoast]

Some of the simplified characters - to put it frankly - are very ugly.
However, I do think that very cluttered looking traditional characters (with loads of stroke counts) also look a bit rubbish.

That is just looking at it aesthetically.

For practicality - I don't think it really makes that much of a difference with just a few strokes more. Perhaps Mao wanted his imprint on Chinese history to last forever.

[tianya]

1.Simplified written system appeared before 1949. Chiang's government had already made a simplified written system but the government never promoted it.
2. Mao's final target was latinized chinese written system.But he failed
(btw it was also not the creation of CCP. After 1919's New Culture Movement, a lot of the elites held the opinion "chinese culture r all crap. and we should all westernized".That's why "latinize chinese written system" was very popular once upon a time.)


From calligraphy, tradditional characters look better, but it is too complicated and inefficient...............

[sewoth]

Also, a very important point that most people miss all the time. Simplified Chinese characters existed before CCP, before 1949, even before Qing Dynasty ended. CCP did not just pull simplified Chinese completely out of thin air. Lots of simplified characters was used in dynastic periods, in less formal context though.

You might as well say modern Chinese grammar/sentence construction is ugly as hell, and we should all write in classical Chinese. You similarly make a lot of complaint about how vernacular Chinese kills the terse/conciseness/elegance of the Chinese language.

Saying simplified Chinese look like $hit, is just subjective BS. It's only because of political reason that people say such things. If you present two set of characters to someone who have no experience with the history and ask them which one is prettier, only then can you see if there exist such "inherent beauty" and one set is preferred to the other.



Also, just as a side note, I actually think simplified characters have many good aesthetic qualities. For example, in traditional scripts, you have characters that have such vast variety of number of strokes, in regardless of how specific or non-technical the character represent. So when you look at a traditional piece of writing, you see areas of dense ink and areas of sparse ink. Simplified characters, although not complete, reduce the stroke numbers for many commonly used characters, so you see a more uniform ink distribution.

This post has been edited by sewoth: Dec 28 2010, 05:38 AM

[newties21]

I think traditional characters are too boxy / too complicated with too many strokes.
It is too crowded.

Simplified characters look more minimalist.

In actual fact, even simplified characters are not minimalist enough.

And another thing is that,

It is not systematic since it is memory-based pictorials.

I believe that in the ancient days, this might be one of the reasons that China was overtaken by other civilizations such as the Western civilization, because they used an alphabetic system while the system in China was cumbersome, thus it affected the storage, cultivation, and spread, of knowledge.

Even today, let's say HYPY (HanYu PinYin) is totally used,

I believe children in their elementary and secondary school level would master linguistic skills faster, would be able to write faster, and so on.

Even today people at the senior level such as professors sometimes still dont know how to write certain characters.

(However I am not proposing full HYPY usage)

[zoopiter]

free will.
let those who are used to each system takes that system.

likewise there is no need to force americans to use queen's english.
in fact, i prefer american spelling becos the word looks more like the way it is pronounced.

if we force on each other, that's just being cultural nazis. other people can likewise force on u too, think about it.

This post has been edited by zoopiter: Dec 28 2010, 08:46 AM

[tianya]

^
That's because u haven't mastered the regularity of chinese character.



And tradditional character looks better than simplified, every people would admit that,if u had some experience in writing chinese. That's why in mainland, most tombstone/shop signs still prefer tradditional character.

[yiming2000]

I want traditional characters on my tombstone.

Hey tanya, latinized Chinese written system shi pinyin, shi ma?

[Nowhereman]

Do you like traditional Chinese characters, or simplified?

I'm all for traditional Chinese characters. I mean, it's the TRADITION. The Chinese have been using traditional Chinese characters until the idiotic Mao Zedong f*cked up China in every single possible way with his stupid cultural revolution. Now, the Chinese characters are bastardized with its simplified writing.

Only Hong Kong and Taiwan are still using traditional Chinese characters because they've been unaffected by the d*mn cultural revolution. Whenever I watch mainland Chinese dramas and movies, I want to throw my remote control at the TV because all I see are the bastardized simplified Chinese characters. I feel much more at ease watching HK or Taiwanese dramas and movies because their subtitles are in traditional writing.

cultural revolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

Here's a comparison of traditional and simplified Chinese writing.

In fact the Chinese characters have been simplified for many times since ancient times （or it could have been a continuous process perforemd spontaneouly by the users） and even the so called traditional Chinese characters now used in HK and Taiwan are a kind of "simplified" Chinese characters.

But the simplified characters used in mainland are a total failure under the cultural aspect- the simplification has cut off the relation of the characters to their origin and thus makes many of them meaningless, by which I mean that it makes many of the characters fake hieroglyphs. For example, how can one understand the meaning of "後", considering it as a hieroglyp, if it is simplfied by being replaced with the character "后"， which is a totally different "picture"?

I think it reasonable to simplify the complicated traditional characters so that more people can read and write (considering the illiteracy rate in mainland before the simplification of characters; but I'm not arguing that simplification is the best or necessary measure for the fight against illiteracy), but they should have been simplified in a better way! Unfortunately, in my opinion, the simplification turns out to be a cutural disaster.

As to the aesthetic aspect, I personally prefer traditional characters but I think it hard to formulate a thesis asserting that traditional characters are essentially more beautiful or elegant than the simplified characters. Anyway, it's the task of the professors majoriing in aesthetics.


This post has been edited by Nowhereman: Dec 28 2010, 01:51 PM

[foi2]

LOL, look at all these people trying to defend an ugly character set. Simplified characters are uglier. No question about it.

When I see simplified Chinese packaging on a product, I think "cheap". no matter which way you slice it, there's no need for simplified characters now, because people mostly use computer input nowadays. If the example of 後 and 后 is true, then it's just one more example of why the simplification makes zero sense.

The way I see it, the aesthetic beauty of Asian character sets: traditional > hiragana > simplified > katatana > Thai and other sanskrit character sets > hangul >>>unbridgeable gap >>>>Vietnamese.

[SeafoodFriedRice]

LOL, look at all these people trying to defend an ugly character set. Simplified characters are uglier. No question about it.

When I see simplified Chinese packaging on a product, I think "cheap". no matter which way you slice it, there's no need for simplified characters now, because people mostly use computer input nowadays. If the example of 後 and 后 is true, then it's just one more example of why the simplification makes zero sense.

The way I see it, the aesthetic beauty of Asian character sets: traditional > hiragana > simplified > katatana > Thai and other sanskrit character sets > hangul >>>unbridgeable gap >>>>Vietnamese.

same, I like traditional more too. It looks more elegant. I definitely like to read traditional text more. But I'm lazy so I like to write in simplified characters. When i type on the internet though, I do use traditional

[YamFries]

LOL, look at all these people trying to defend an ugly character set. Simplified characters are uglier. No question about it.

When I see simplified Chinese packaging on a product, I think "cheap". no matter which way you slice it, there's no need for simplified characters now, because people mostly use computer input nowadays. If the example of 後 and 后 is true, then it's just one more example of why the simplification makes zero sense.

The way I see it, the aesthetic beauty of Asian character sets: traditional > hiragana > simplified > katatana > Thai and other sanskrit character sets > hangul >>>unbridgeable gap >>>>Vietnamese.

What's Hangul?? Korean characters?