Simplified versus Traditional

[yialanliu]

I was just thinking that everyone knows that in Chinese there's simplified and traditional chinese. However, the one major annoyance is that they are not always mutually comprehensible to a person who knows one or the other.

I was wondering what are people's thoughts in maybe set a forum best practice to use either simplified or traditional?

I am an advocate of simplified for these reasons:

1) The great majority of students of Chinese study the simplified script. As students, understanding vocabulary is already a challenge and seeing traditional characters might confuse them.

2) In terms of native speakers, the amount of simplified users greatly outnumber the traditional users.

Whil this could be seen as a forum shift, I do believe exceptions could be used when talking about Hong Kong and Taiwan for isntance. However, outside of that, especially in learning chinese, I think we should default to simplified and maybe use traditional only when the OP requested it?

Any ideas?

[imron]

maybe set a forum best practice to use either simplified or traditional?

Forums best practice is to use whatever character set you prefer. There are plenty of members here who prefer Simplified, and plenty of members here who prefer Traditional. Reasons are varied and equally valid for both sides and so for the forums to set one as the preferred standard would only risk alienating the other group.

Regardless of your preference, getting exposure to the other type is good for you anyway (neither are going away soon).

Besides, there's not really that much of a difference between the two, and if you really have trouble reading the other set, there's always Google Translate.

[yialanliu]

That makes sense, but in terms of the grammar, vocabulary, it just seems to make it confusing for novices to see a mixture of both and when are learning one or the other. The rest of the forums makes sense to do both.

[imron]

Novices get to be non-novices by gaining exposure to things outside their current frame of knowledge.

Plus, I don't think it is as big of an issue as you suspect, and any novice who is truly confused by these things can ask, and will almost certainly gain an answer, thereby learning something in the process.

[jbradfor]

You can have my traditional IME when you pry it out of my cold, dead, fingers.....

[roddy]

We did a poll years back, and the majority were using simplified at that point, by quite a large margin. But things may have changed by now. I think I might have said at some point something along the lines of 'if it doesn't make any difference to you, use simplified. If it does make a difference to you, use what you want.' but there's no way I'd try and implement any rules on this. It's hard enough to get people to use meaningful titles (see this topic for an example - we've got three pages of topics with 'simplified' + 'traditional' in the title), trying to get people to install a new IME would be a fool's errand.