Chinese Simplified and Traditional language in wrinting

[apiSubmarine]

What is the difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese character in writing. China is using Simplified style. Hong Kong and Taiwan are using Traditional character writing style. Does it involve political system issue. even oversea chinese are using traditional writing for newspaper, magazine, etc.

 

[ahtan_china]

What is the difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese character in writing. China is using Simplified style. Hong Kong and Taiwan are using Traditional character writing style. Does it involve political system issue. even oversea chinese are using traditional writing for newspaper, magazine, etc.

The CCP got the regime from KMT in 1949. A lot of people is illiteracy. So CCP created the Simplified Chinese to learn it easily . Normally many Chinese know both of the character in mainland. But over sea Ethnic Chinese only know Traditional Chinese character including HK/TW/MACAO............

 

[TaiShang]

What is the difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese character in writing. China is using Simplified style. Hong Kong and Taiwan are using Traditional character writing style. Does it involve political system issue. even oversea chinese are using traditional writing for newspaper, magazine, etc.

Nothing political, really. As @ahtan_china said above, the main purpose to adopt the simplified form was to encourage literacy.

Please notice, Mainland adopted the system as the official form, not created it from scratch.

In fact, a simplified way of writing characters has existed for hundreds of years. Simplified characters were used in informal documents and in some forms of calligraphy hundreds of years before adopted by Mainland China as the official form.

So, although today some people might like to interpret it politically, you may encounter simplified characters in use in Taiwan (China) and traditional characters in use in mainland China. I myself know lots of people in Taiwan who use simplified form.

@Chinese-Dragon

 

[Chinese-Dragon]

I like the look of traditional characters (like the one in my avatar picture), but I think simplified characters are more efficient.

And efficiency is more important at the end of the day, especially with such a large number of people that need to be educated to become literate. Traditional characters will always have a place in the disciplines of calligraphy and history.

And yes in HK we use traditional characters for basically everything, but if I want to write something fast I will often switch to simplified characters since they can be written 5-10 times faster.

 

[Maarkhoor]

 

[Chinese-Dragon]

For the first one it does have a point, since the traditional character contains "心" in the middle, which makes a lot of sense.

But the simplified version can be written so much faster, which is such a huge bonus.

 

[bbccdd1470]

The CCP got the regime from KMT in 1949. A lot of people is illiteracy. So CCP created the Simplified Chinese to learn it easily . Normally many Chinese know both of the character in mainland. But over sea Ethnic Chinese only know Traditional Chinese character including HK/TW/MACAO............

Many people from HK can read Simplified Chinese well, however, some HK people despite the Simplified Chinese due to their anti-China mindset. For me, I think Traditional Chinese looks prettier, but Simplified Chinese save more time to write.

 

[powastick]

Malaysia used change to simplified chinese after 1981, my dad learned traditional characters. But definitely can read both.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

It's just a different font in essence. Nothing different than Times New Roman vs. Arial.

The big difference is between classical Chinese (文言文) and modern Chinese (白话文).

The difference is like Latin vs. English. The difference is that all Chinese can somewhat understand 文言文 but few English speakers understand Latin at all.

 

[nang2]

KMT wanted to simplify Chinese as well. They never got the power and time to do it.

 

[Wolfwind]

Traditional is used in RoC (Taiwan), Hong Kong, Macau.

Simplified is used in PRC (China), and the Chinese communities in Singapore and Malaysia.

Usually someone who is familiar with traditional can read texts in simplified and vice versa. That's because of context (and oftentimes the general "shape" is still there). Many, if not most characters are identical in both the simplified and traditional forms.

Some of the simplified strokes like the 讠radical are based on cursive Chinese

On printed text and computers, the difference is quite apparent, but with handwriting nobody writes each stroke individually like that of typefaces, it's like expecting people to write English in helvetica or times new roman.

I think for handwriting / cursive, simplified looks better because it mimics Chinese calligraphy, but for printed typefaces, traditional (usually) looks better.

That said, it's a bit of an eyesore when you get characters with like 20 strokes and it usually ends up looking like a block of scratched ink, especially if the font is like < 9 pt, you can barely read it and it looks cluttery. There's less occurrence of that with simplified.