My father was a child of two worlds, he was born in China and moved to Taiwan when he was 8 years old. He left relatives behind in mainland China, yet still had much of his family in Taiwan. With good reason, he kept a foot in both worlds, and made it his goal to make it back to mainland China. He was able to do so in 1980 by creating a study-abroad program at Hofstra University where he taught for most of his life.
While my dad approved of many of the advances that China has made in the last half century, there was one that always bothered him, and that was the use of simplified characters. While he understood its necessity, he also thought it was travesty to the art form that Chinese call the written word.
James Fallows, a writer for The Atlantic, published a piece this week on Chinese characters and the recommendation this year at the CPPCC to change the simplified written form back to the traditional form. There are a few reasons outlined in the article for this move back, but the one I found most interesting was that technology was making it easier to use traditional characters. Simplified characters were introduced to make learning and writing Chinese easy, but advances in computers and cell phones have made writing complex characters effortless. The argument is that with these new tools, China should be able to easily go back to traditional characters.
My dad would have applauded this recommendation. He loved the history behind Chinese characters, and when he taught Chinese and Chinese Literature, he always explained the history behind the character. He would draw each character on the chalkboard and make them look like the pictograph they represented, much like the scroll pictured above. The moon would appear as a moon, and he’d explain how it transformed over time to be the character we have today. He’d talk about how characters would be added to together to form new pictures; new meanings; and new words. He’d just get that spark in his eye and you’d know this meant a lot to him. I just wish he had lived long enough to hear that China was considering going back to his beloved Chinese characters.
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10 Comments to “The Chinese Language: Technology As Friend Of Tradition”
John wrote:
I agree completely with Fallows. I’ve always thought that, although well intended, Simplified Chinese was a travesty to the Chinese written language. Thankfully, Taiwan has always maintained Traditional Chinese and those who want to learn the “real” written Chinese go to Taiwan to study.
I do wonder how difficult it would be to transition back from Simplified to Traditional in China, since Simplified has been taught in China for so long now.
Thanks for blogging about this!
Posted on 13-Mar-09 at 12:43 pm | Permalink
Smith wrote:
“Taiwan” oh please most people in taiwan don’t even consider themselves chinese.
Posted on 13-Mar-09 at 3:24 pm | Permalink
jozjozjoz wrote:
I love the headline you put on this piece.
I, too, learned the traditional characters and I can’t stand looking at simplified characters… they actually make me angry! Whenever people send me notes with simplified characters, I get totally ticked off!
My Dad, too, loved teaching me about the history of traditional Chinese characters. I also have many memories of my Dad showing me the pictograms as they evolved over time to look like the characters they are now. They are definitely happy memories and I wish my Dad was around to show me more.
Posted on 13-Mar-09 at 6:01 pm | Permalink
jozjozjoz wrote:
@Smith
There is a difference between “Chinese” as in “from the modern political state of the People’s Republic of China”and “Chinese” as in “the Sinitic language.”
John is correct in his statements that “Taiwan has always maintained Traditional Chinese [written language].”
He certainly does not mean to imply that Taiwan = China.
Posted on 13-Mar-09 at 6:06 pm | Permalink
John wrote:
@Smith
You have no idea what you are talking about. As a % of the population, there are more Han Chinese in Taiwan than there are on mainland China.
Posted on 13-Mar-09 at 10:17 pm | Permalink
Daniel (different) wrote:
I also quite admire the traditional characters and hope it could make a comeback on the Mainland. It’s not just Taiwan but many overseas Chinese communities still use traditional characters for many reasons. I remember learning how a lot of characters sort of had a story behind it or some type of very descriptive reasoning.
Posted on 13-Mar-09 at 11:10 pm | Permalink
Erik wrote:
I’m sort of from a different background, and I’ve just started to learn to read and write this year, and though I was introduced first to simplified, and despite it being like 10x harder for an ABC like me, I do wish that Traditional were the standard again.
Posted on 14-Mar-09 at 12:24 am | Permalink
Kim wrote:
ABSOLUTELY NOT! China should never return to Traditional. Its substantially more difficult to learn, and In any case, because all Chinese must be learned by rote— (unlike phonetic romance languages)—its a huge time, and study commitment for any student.
Simplified offers most of the same images, and brush-stroke stories that Traditional does, but its….. simplified. Brush strokes take time and work, and as characters are reduced in size, they are harder to read–particularly for the elderly. Fewer brush stroke = clearer, and faster communication. And in any case, The Chinese written language is under assault by English, across China, as the international language,and one that is easier to learn.
I appreciate the stories presented here, but my Father (in-law)—die hard Communist that he is, and former, very broad minded college president —-who, btw, is fluent in more than 4000 Traditional characters—believes to this day, that the literacy Simplified gave to the people of China under Mao, was one of the great, and lasting gifts of Communism.
Posted on 14-Mar-09 at 9:10 pm | Permalink
Tim wrote:
@Kim: It isn’t that traditional is harder to learn to read, it’s that traditional is harder to learn to write. In fact it was argued at the CPPCC meeting that in fact it’s easier to learn to read traditional, because you have context behind what the character means if you don’t know what word the character represents. That’s because complex Chinese characters typically are made up of other Chinese characters (for example the character for forest, is the character for wood used three times in one character), and when you simplify them, you lose the original context of how the character itself was created (for example, the character for country contains the character for people, land, etc and the simplification takes all that away). If you have the context and you don’t know the word you can guess at the meaning. On the other hand, writing characters with 20 or more brush strokes is extremely difficult and time-consuming to learn, and with technology, it’s not as big of a deal to write them.
There are of course opinions all over the spectrum on the topic of moving back to traditional, and the debate is sure not to end anytime soon. You can find a run down on a lot of this at the danwei.org site, including a link to an interestingly titled opinion piece called We shouldn’t have simplfied back then, and we shouldn’t return to traditional now.
Posted on 15-Mar-09 at 7:24 am | Permalink
Mark wrote:
I too am not happy with simplified chinese aswell even though I am not Chinese and am just starting to learn characters. I really think traditional charcters are more beautiful than simplified characters and they have a whole history behind them, why ruin them by simplifying? A the same time they are easier to learn as they do not lose meaning as the simplified charaters do. Also, I think it’s harder for people to learn both simplified and traditional characters rather than 1 system, especially for foreigners so I don’t see how this increases literacy, but that’s my opinion.
Posted on 27-May-09 at 1:45 am | Permalink
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