Traditional Versus Simplified Chinese Characters

For my lessons, I prepared one character flash cards of all new vocabulary. This way, not only can I check to make sure I recognize all the new characters separate from their contextual phrase, but I can also improve my character recognition speed. Since character recognition is the goal here, I had written separate cards for characters with separate Traditional and Simplified forms; this way I can ensure I recognize the character in any publication from the Mainland or Taiwan. However, as we went thru the cards during the lesson, an interesting discussion occurred:


"What's that character?" my tutor asked, holding up the character "據" (pronounced "ju with the 4th tone").

"It's ju, as in genju (根據)" I said, "the same character as '据' in simplified Chinese."

"Why do you bother having flashcards with traditional characters as well?"

"Because I feel it's important for me to learn both."

"But they're so complicated! I don't understand why you Taiwanese don't just switch to 'modern' Chinese."

"That's how the Chinese language is supposed to be. It you guys in the mainland who messed with the language."

"From my point of view, it's you Taiwanese who are weird and have a 'messed up language.' How can something so simple be so complicated? Why bother at all? Besides, some things just make no sense.... like "态" (tai, pronounced with the 4th tone) in traditional Chinese is written "態". The first time I saw it, I probably would have pronounced it "neng" instead of 'tai' (this is because the top portion of the traditional character '態' is the same as the character '能', which is pronounced 'neng', while the top portion of the simplified character '态' is the same character as '太', which is phonetically equivalent to 态/態)."

"I can't tell you why '態' is pronounced 'tai', but look, Traditional characters were here first. We didn't mess up the language at all. It's you guys who have messed with them! Besides, in some cases, the simplification results in a loss of meaning. Take the traditional character '慮' (pronounced lǜ with the 4th tone) for example. It means to consider or contemplate, as in 思慮 (silǜ). Note that '慮' has a '思' component in its middle, and '思' also means to consider or think, which helps one infer a similar meaning for '慮'. However, when you simplify that character, it becomes '虑', and it loses its meaningful connection to '思'."

"Right..."

"There are also cases where there's way oversimplification - for example, take the character '广' (pronounced 'guang' with the 3rd tone), as in '广场' (factory). It used to be this: 廣. That simplification is just ridiculous!"

"Well I would have read that as 'huang', because the middle looks like '黃' (pronounced 'huang' with the 2nd tone, means 'yellow')!"

"I have to say simplification does make some things easier to read phonetically, but in general, it results in loss of meaning. However, some things seem almost wrong... for example, the word
'愛' (pronounced 'ai' with the 4th tone, means 'love') has a heart character (心) in the middle of it, which makes sense, since a heart is at the heart of love. Yet in the simplified version, '愛' is written as '爱', which drops the heart, replacing it only with the friend character ('友') at the bottom. While friendship is great, it shouldn't replace the heart character in the word love!"


We continued on with the flashcards, and my tutor was now eagerly taking up the chance to learn some traditional characters...