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Traditional or Simplified in my situation?


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Posted

I have been studying Mandarin/Traditional Characters in a conversational class for a couple months now. I am getting ready to quit the class and start private lessons. I have the chance at this point to switch to learning Simplified characters.

My main reason for considering switching at this point is that Simplified characters should be simpler, right? Am I wrong on that?

My reason for learning Mandarin is a genuine passion and interest. I can use Mandarin at my job but it's not the main reason that I am learning. Most of my practical use will be verbal not reading characters. With my job I can travel to Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu and Hong Kong. I am very excited about traveling to Hong Kong over the other cities. I'm thinking that maybe I should stick with Traditional characters so that I could possibility communicate in HK with Cantonese speakers. Also if I do an immersion class I think it would be easier for me to travel to Taiwan as I am American.

Any insight or thoughts are appreciated. I don't have clear cut goals so I am not sure whether to go Traditional or Simplified. thanks, =*

Posted

Travelling to China is not hard at all for an American. Yes you need a visa, which you don't need for Taiwan, but that's really not a big hassle.

You seem interested in both, and you might be able to use both in the future. Perhaps you can consider continuing with traditional characters, but also ask someone to explain simplified to you, and learn those passively, so to speak: when you learn a new character, learn the traditional version but also take a look at the simplified version to get an idea. Simplified characters have less strokes, but they're not necessarily easier to learn. Going from traditional to simplified is easy, in my experience. I had started with two years of learning traditional, and after arriving in Beijing it took me only a week or two to get used to simplified, without even trying all that hard.

Posted

If Taiwan and Hong Kong are high one your wish list, by all means continue learning Traditional. If you wind up on the mainland, you can easily adapt.

Posted

Just to clarify, you can't tell whether or not a person uses simplified or traditional basing on whether or not s/he is a Cantonese speaker. And most well-educated Chinese people are able to read both scripts (regardless of their preferences). But in HK of course we use the traditional script.

I have heard that the simplified is simplier is a myth. I myself use traditional so I don't know how true that is.

Posted

I think simplified is simpler if you can already speak Chinese, and certainly if you're only planning to learn 800 characters.

For a foreigner learning characters at the same time as learning how to speak, I think simplified characters actually make life more difficult because they remove some of the pronunciation clues, e.g. 國 sounds like 或, 国 doesn't sound like 玉 .... 导 is weird but 導 sounds like 道 etc etc.

If you've no likelihood of needing to read textbooks and other material, webchat etc from mainland China, I'd probably choose Traditional.

Posted

For what I seen all is depending on you. If you have interesting on learning something new. I prefer you start to learn traditional chinese then following by the simplified . Yes. Now all whole china mainland is using simplified but it just a tool for them to communicate with each other. The essence of the chinese still remain in traditional characters.This is my view of point. :lol:

Posted

Thank you so much. It seems that for one reason or another that all of you lean toward traditional. Which is awesome because I have already invested in my traditional text and work books and already a few months down that path. Thanks again.

Posted

My advice is to choose one and stick to it for a few years, especially if you want to learn how to write Chinese as well. Learning both scripts at the same time is a lot of extra work for a beginning student, and at times you may end up confusing yourself. Knowing both scripts will only come in handy once you move into the intermediate and advanced stages of your learning. And converting one script to another is easy nowadays with the aid of Google Translate, Tong Wen Tang, etc.

Edit: For the record, I'm all for learning both scripts, but only during later stages of learning. During my first decade of learning Chinese, I learnt simplified. Afterwards, I started learning traditional, and I was surprised by how little of a deal it was.

Posted

I learn Simplified cause my countries' ties are with PRC and not with Taiwan, so I have not much of a choice. But it's often... "surprising" what they did, to put it politely.

What they did, in general, was move from pictograph - a breeze to remember once you are aware of the components - to meaningless random scribble:

頭 - 头 (head)

買 - 买 (buy)

And what is worst, they all look the same. 车 "vehicle" looks like 东 "east" looks like 乐 "happy" now.

Apparently someone made the assumption that something with less strokes must be easier for the brain to remember, and easier for the hand to reproduce. I have a feeling like that someone was maybe from the same "scientific" school that thought getting rid of the sparrows would increase harvest.

Actually, I'm lazy and I'm all for making things easy. So I like the abbreviations - like 语 for 語 - that make writing faster.

And my Character book from Beijing University Press has a few examples of where the Simplified character is actually the ancient character; it had just gotten more complicated over time. This might be the reason why Japanese has got several (seemingly) "Simplified" characters - they might be just ancient Chinese (I am guessing on this, I am not a historian of Japanese or Chinese).

What I do is, with every new character, I learn Simplified actively, Traditional passively. I prefer dictionaries, reading exercises (like the Readings in Chinese Culture Series by Cheng & Tsui Company, Boston) and grammars (the Routledge Modern Mandarin for example) where they present both equally.

Posted
My main reason for considering switching at this point is that Simplified characters should be simpler, right? Am I wrong on that?

They are easier to write by hand, which is how Chinese characters have traditionally been taught (and still are, in China).

Whether they are easier to remember or to read, this is subject of fierce debate. There are countless examples where one of them is easier or more logical than the other.

Like tooironic says, learn one of them, and learn it well. If you do that, the other one will come with very little effort.

Posted
This might be the reason why Japanese has got several (seemingly) "Simplified" characters - they might be just ancient Chinese (I am guessing on this, I am not a historian of Japanese or Chinese).

The Japanese have their own simplifications. Often illogical as well, e.g. 廣 -> 広.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai

And the reason many simplified Chinese characters are similar to the modern Japanese standard is because they came from the same 俗字. Even in old days, not many people actually wrote full orthodox 正体字 by hand. That's why 康熙字典 is so huge, most of it are the various 俗字/异体字 people used to save time.

  • Like 1
Posted

I agree you have to stick to one system, otherwise you will confuse yourself unnceccessarily.

The ones I really learn are simplified. I want to be able to read Traditional passively though, and write the most common ones, cause my Chinese friends where I live are from Taiwan.

So this is how I prepared my Anki cards. I use exclusively simplified, with one exception, the card for writing. There I added a field for Traditional, in a slightly different colour, so it is more like an add-on and easy for me to ignore when I don't want to deal with it.

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post-51349-0-13307200-1375205391_thumb.jpg

Posted
I learn Simplified cause my countries' ties are with PRC and not with Taiwan, so I have not much of a choice.

Why is that? Do you work for the government, or otherwise forced to learn the system of the country your government has ties with? And what do you mean by "ties?" I mean, the US may have diplomatic ties with China, but you couldn't say we don't have ties with Taiwan.

Posted
Why is that?

I'm guessing he means that the vast majority of all Chinese people in Germany are relatively recent immigrants from the mainland. So he's far more likely to interact with, or befriend people who are more versed in Mandarin and simplified characters.

Of course you run into HKers and Taiwanese people regularly too, but less often.

Posted
Do you work for the government, or otherwise forced to learn the system of the country your government has ties with?

No, just: my Uni only offers Simplified. All official and semi-official language courses in my town are with Simplified text books. There is a HSK test center in my town. And I feel the fact that my government doesn't recognise Taiwan shows in many little details. I have the impression the US are much better there, some US-based publishing houses even have text books and grammars both in Simplified and Traditional (Tsui + Cheng from Boston, for example, or the Routledge Grammar).

I guess my wording was bad. Sorry if it came across as offensive or weird, I certainly didn't mean to.

Actually I know more Taiwanese than mainlanders, which is one of the reasons why I am trying to go ... well not bilingual. bi-Hanzi :wink:

Posted
Sorry if it came across as offensive or weird, I certainly didn't mean to.

Not at all. I was just curious what you meant. Thanks for clarifying. :D

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