Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese?

Which is better and easier to learn and remember?

ahaha..def simplified, but im like tawainese so i gues i should say trad.

just go read up on previous threads. this topic has been beaten to death...god knows how many times.

Probably traditional... eventhough it's harder to learn, all the history, meaning, culture is in these words. Simplified destroys a lot of it...

besides i'm a native Canto speaker

simplified.

Please forgive my ignorance. I do not know this may cause great pain to you.

Simplified ruins everything.

Thats rather absurd. Most of simplified Chinese characters are drived from 行书，which is one style of Chinese calligraphy. Characters such as 门，楼，东 and 书 are all come from 行书。

not really, it just makes the writing quicker.

stop UN's decision to abolish traditional chinese [petition]
http://www.gopetition.com/online/8314.html

Traditional Chinese is beautiful so keep it around.

Simplified.

I rock because I can read both.

most 你的頭啦, 行書寫得再怎麼難看也不會搞得像現在的簡體字

even today, when kids learn chinese caligraphy in mainland china, they still only use traditional chinese.

I can't even read alot of simplified text. And it looks ugly. Traditional is much better.

i like both... i use traditional when painting and simplified when writing. bott!!

that's the way to GO!!!

doesn't matter that much... just make sure you learn to read both.

most ppl will promote the script they grew up learning, and often comes down to personal preference. But they will have all these reasons to rationalize why you should go with one and not the other. It's not that important as to which script you learn to write with, since with the computer age(assuming you don't use wubi input), it won't make much of a difference as you can always switching between simplified and traditional when you type.

If you really wanted to choose one and not the other, I'd say simplified, simply because Mainland has such strong influence. Of the Chinese schools in my area, I've seen zhuyin/traditional classes dwindle in size as more students are switching over to pinyin/simplified, plenty of them from TW too. Even Singapore's Chinese curriculums have followed the ML standard(hopefully not for political reasons)

hasnt this been said a billion times. its's simplified, obviously, but more ppl including me like traditional better. how come the government wants to destroy our culture?

China wants more Chinese to be literate in Chinese.

That's why simplified Chinese is invented.

if we want more litterate Chinese people, then we should improve our way of education, not lower our standards.

Well...I am learning mandarin now, and my teacher is from the mainland (she's so adorable =D) so we are learning simplified. BUT I want to learn both someday.

I agree...turning our traditional characters into strange looking symbols isn't the way to go. Throughout history, so many people have endured the incredibly demanding task of writing so many strokes for a word (sarcasm). Why can't people today do it too? It's not like our brains are smaller or can't handle much.
Seriously, I really don't agree with having a Simplified system at all.

it's simply a matter of language evolving. I have nothing against simplified chinese (that's probably because I can't understand traditional at all ), but no one goes around writing old english these days right? which is a bit of shame since grammar isn't even taught properly in school nowadays!

Old English isn't the same as Traditional Chinese characters versus Simplified though.
I personally don't think that by chopping parts off Traditional characters, it's evolving our writing. It's simply...chopping off parts of our written characters. I mean, we can still understand the traditional characters perfectly - whereas no one writes Old English today anyway because they don't really make sense today.

You can easily match the traditional characters with the ones you've learnt - and memorise them

中華人民共和國建立後的簡化漢字工作 1950年﹐中央人民政府教育部社會教育司編制《常用簡體字登記表》。當時依據的原則是﹕整理已經通行的簡體字﹐必要時根據已有簡體字的簡化規律加以適當補充﹐所選定補充的簡體字﹐以楷體為主﹐間或採用行書和草書﹐但注意容易書寫和便於印刷﹔簡體字的選定和補充﹐以最常用的漢字為限﹐不是每一個繁難的漢字都簡化。後經過徵求意見﹐決定根據“述而不作”的原則﹐於1951年擬出《第一批簡體字表》﹐收字555個。

time to learn something new buddy... Ignorance is not a bliss you know


you will pick up Tradtional Chinese characters very fast once you have mastered the Simplified Chinese. Actually, many simplified chinese characters are derived from tradional characters.

many of the simplified characters we see today were already present before the ccp's adoption of the simplified system. 555 out of some 3-4000 commonly used characters cannot be considered "most"

i think simplified chinese is analogous to slangs used in english. improper, bastardized chinese.

there were also political motivations behind the adoption of simplified chinese. whatever the roc used, the prc wanted to use something else, and vice versa.

one cannot fully comprehend and appreciate chinese culture, art, and history without first learning traditional chinese. lastly, simplified chinese is just plain ugly. as someone else mentioned earlier, to increase literacy, we should improve our mentods of learning and instead not lower our standards.

it is easier for fobs/abcs living abroad to learn both systems due to their extra exposure to traditional characters used within chinese communities. however, for most, it would definitely be easier if you learn traditional first and then use common sense to recognize simplified. not that hard.

we should say, modern Chinese gramma (both PRC and ROC) ruins everything. It kills the spirit of chinese language. Just read those old poems, it is so much powerful than modern chinese, damn !

I personally prefer traditional characters. They are more beautiful to look at and this shows in old chinese calligraphy. But the world has to evolve, using simplified characters may not be such a bad thing as it can save us time and effort.