Simplified or Traditional Chinese?

Which do you like more? Which do you prefer more?
What's your reasons to it?

I personally prefer traditional 99% of the time. Simplified gives me the ease of writing faster, but that's the end of it. Aside from all the political negativity that associates simplified with CCP, it's the heart and blood of traditional which speaks for Chinese culture, civilization, history, morals, cultures, etc..

Of course I do hope to see China readopt the traditional Chinese writing in the future.
 

bluewater2012

Junior Member
Traditional of course! It's a must if you want to study ancient Chinese history texts. I'm kind of an history buff but with an bad memory :). I recalled a few years ago when this issue was brought up and the Chinese official said something along the line, while they liked the simplified writing system for the ease of adopting, they never shunned the traditional writing system and encourage others to learn it too.
 

no_name

Colonel
Simplied looks kind of hard and un-normal, like cyrillic script compared to latin script, but that may just be because I was brought on the traditional characters.

Plus if you learn traditional, you can learn to read simplified without much effort. It will feel a bit unnatural at first, but with practice I can pretty much pick up simplified books and read them with no problem. I can visit mainland forum and read the posts with no problem, not sure about the reverse though.

And if you are studying chinese history, you will have to learn traditional, as that is how most of the relevant texts are recorded.

Also, Japanese hiragana characters are borrowed from elements in Chinese cursive script.
 
Simplied looks kind of hard and un-normal, like cyrillic script compared to latin script, but that may just be because I was brought on the traditional characters.

Plus if you learn traditional, you can learn to read simplified without much effort. It will feel a bit unnatural at first, but with practice I can pretty much pick up simplified books and read them with no problem. I can visit mainland forum and read the posts with no problem, not sure about the reverse though.

And if you are studying chinese history, you will have to learn traditional, as that is how most of the relevant texts are recorded.

Also, Japanese hiragana characters are borrowed from elements in Chinese cursive script.

agreed. well for me I still feel unnatural reading simplified, but sort of like learning to do things with left hand when ur a righty
 

Lintuperhonen

New Member
I prefer the Kangxi dictionary forms of the Traditional Chinese characters. As an amateur linguist I have found out that the Simplified characters only suit the Standard Mandarin, though I accept the usage of them. BTW, when it comes to the National language of China, I would prefer a dialect Koine instead of the Standard Mandarin which is IMO a striped down version of the Beijing dialect.
 
I prefer the Kangxi dictionary forms of the Traditional Chinese characters. As an amateur linguist I have found out that the Simplified characters only suit the Standard Mandarin, though I accept the usage of them. BTW, when it comes to the National language of China, I would prefer a dialect Koine instead of the Standard Mandarin which is IMO a striped down version of the Beijing dialect.

What is the Koine dialect?
 

delft

Brigadier
When you are in a hurry to teach hundreds of millions of adults to read and write going for a simplified script seems a very good thing to do. But that was nearly sixty years ago. Making it easier to read old books and documents should now be more important.
In Dutch we have a similar problem, only worse. The law in The Netherlands, in Flanders and in Suriname now says that the spelling of Dutch words should be reconsidered and perhaps changed every fifteen years or so. It wasn't done last time but I have already seen several spelling era and have decided to ignore the changes. But for young people to learn one spelling system but to have to cope with half a dozen of them even when they do not want to be historians is bizarre.
The German spelling was changed in 2005 a hundred years after the previous change.
 

solarz

Brigadier
Simplified all the way.

I spent grade one and two learning simplified characters in Shanghai before moving to Canada. Back in the 90's, the only Chinese books available were those donated by HK and TW immigrants, and are thus in traditional characters. I spent my youth reading those books without much difficulty. From personal experience at least, going from simplified to traditional required very little effort.

Now writing is a whole other matter. I have trouble enough writing in simplified, I can't imagine trying to write in traditional.

Chinese writing is an exercise that needs to be maintained with regularity, or you simply forget how to write the words. With the proliferation of electronic input devices, from laptops to tablets and smartphones, people will have less and less need for handwriting.

If anything, people are moving toward even more simplified scripts. Look at all those Japanese characters used in Taiwan.
 

MwRYum

Major
Amongst the Chinese community this argument is mostly on political grounds, and thanks to the successful propaganda by Taiwan, simplified Chinese often been branded as "crippled style" or "bandit style", whereas the traditional Chinese are labelled as "correct style"; the most prominent example is now at Hong Kong, where local right-wing extremists and politicians suddenly shown keen to defend the "pureness" of Chinese by using those punchlines.

Personally, being one educated in Hong Kong and Singapore, I don't have such attachment to either type, rather I see language and letters are merely tools should and when it fits the situations...the logic is simple, Chinese characters can trace the linage all the way to ancient Chinese characters, and today's characters are gradual simplifications of the old words, like how most European languages evolved from Latin.
 
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