I am really sad that due to the rising power of China, more and more people are conforming to China's pinyin and 'eventually' simplified chinese without thinking of the flaws of these systems.

Countries such as Singapore, Malaysia adopted China's simplified characters because they wanted to follow big brother's footsteps. Luckily, Hong kong and Taiwan didn't follow suit.

I have nothing against simplifying chinese characters if it is done in a consistent and elegant manner.

eg. There are some good simplification such as 双 which depicts two hands to replace two birds 雙.

I am going to list out some of the flaws of simplified chinese.

1. 后 to subsitute 後

The original meaning of 后 which means queen now means 'behind' ?

2. 面 to substitute 麵

'Face' now becomes noodle ? The radical is gone.

3. 卤 substitute 滷

Carelessness/natural salt has become thick gravy.


4. 风 and 凤 are now very similar.
Arbitrary and horrible characters are used to substitute character instead of finding a more appropriate ideogram.


5. 凤 is not consistent with the simplification of the bird character. This shows inconsistencies.


6. 边 what has 'strength' got to do with 'side' ? This adds to more confusion.

These are some of the butchering of the original meaning of the word and inconsistencies I found. I can't make an exhaustive list here but you get the idea.

And how are people going to read the characters of ancient books and ancient buildings if they are so different (eg. wind and phoenix characters) ?

7. Some characters are simplified based on mandarin sounds instead of the original ideogram. eg. 檳 is now simplified as 槟 which is spelled as 'Bin' in mandarin but 'Ban' in cantonese whereas the phonetics in cantonese for 兵 is 'bing'. And what has the 'soldier' got to do with the meaning of this character ?

8. 认 is pronounced as 'Ren' but pronounced as 'Yan' in cantonese. 認 is pronounced as 'Ying' in cantonese.

This shows that the simplification was done in a careless manner.

i shall not deny that the problems do exist and yes, it is not elegant. But traditional chinese is not perfect neither. and we still got taiwan and Hk using traditional chinese, so relax xng. and if u could write traditional chinese among those who can only write simplified, u are distinctive. you are cool.

I can't read either, so I don't know about the merits of each, but I think traditional characters look better. Also, I don't like how simplified characters take the "heart" out of "love": 愛 is changed to 爱. I can't see how that simplified the character all that much.

And 無 changed to 无. I'm curious how they came up with that one because it doesn't look anything alike to me. But then, I don't know the rules/conventions for creating characters, so what do I know?

无 is an ancient variant of 無 when the characters depicted a pictogram of a dance, the original meaning of the character.

I must preface this reply by saying that I, too, think traditional characters are more elegant and do not support simplification...



I think the choice of 后 reflects the fact that 后 is seldom used now... besides, the 'original' meaning was a 'prince' before it became to mean 'empress'

Meanings for characters have always changed throughout history



This type of borrowing seems to happen alot before too. Kind of hard to mistake the meaning of 牛肉面 or 面包... although it's true the radical is gone.



卤 <--- but why does natural salt also mean carelessness? Doesn't seem to bear any relationship to the character either... borrowed for sound, maybe?




Lots of characters in traditional are similar... 要耍 are quite similar as well.



The bird radical is sometimes simplified as 又 such as in the example you posted above 双. would you rather have a character that is composed of 鸟鸟 for 双? Kind of defeats the purpose of simplification.



But then, query what does 自 + 旁 [the right side of 邊] have to do with side?



I agree... but I guess most people could care less. I'm guessing people could still 'guess' but hey, look at the Vietnamese and Koreans... they wouldn't have a clue what's written on their ancient buildings...



Characters have to be simplified based on the Mandarin pronunciation because that's the official language. You cannot accommodate all dialects during a simplification so you choose the one that most people use.

Traditional character is generally better than simplified characters, in terms of culture preservation. It also looks better in calligraphy. However, it's too complicated to write it. That's why China has the simplified version.

I personally prefer the traditional character in terms of aesthetic beauty. But simplified writing is alot easier to write.

I completely agree. That is why while studying Chinese I try to familiarize with both systems...I can generally only write the simplified characters, but I can also understand most of the traditional ones, so the original meaning and beauty is not lost, and I have a clue of what I'm reading if I find myself in front of an ancient book or writing.
I know this is a compromise, but it made my life so much easier when I started to study mandarin (and it still does now!).

One last thing is: I don;t think they have done it in a completely careless and random way, they have simply tried their best to compromise between beauty/style and readability. That is a reasonable compromise, in my opinion.

I think people here are confused about what I was trying to point out.

Simplification can be done in one THOUSAND ways, there are much better method of simplification that will preserve the essentials of the oracle bone script/ancient writings while maintaining consistency.

Consistency promotes learning speed while preserving the basic form of the oracle bone script promotes integration of both traditional and simplified form. (In short, for those who are educated in simplified chinese will be able to recognise the traditional form with little effort)

As for previous replies,

1. 又 is a simplification for hand and not bird (as far as I know). As in Shuang, 又又 ie. representing two hands.

2. Radicals are the fundamentals of chinese characters. Removing the radical from 'noodle' remove the meaning of the chinese character. The 'face' character has no radical. There are MANY other radicals combined with 'face' that will give different meanings. These are the tenets of chinese language which was destroyed by utter carelessness by PRC.

I am not going to go into more details as it is pointless to argue if one's mind is set that whatever PRC invented is unquestionably 'excellent'.

yes, simplified chinese ,is not as beautiful and expressive as tradinational chinese, and traditional chinese is one of few living ancient language in the world. But why so many ancient language disappear, besides unstable political situation, they have to adapted themself for modernisation
what's more important is the culture carried by the language, so instead of saying simplified chinese is flawed, i think what's worse is losing traditional chinese culture, but in order to moderniseing, definitely some of our culture ,which is less competitive will disappear, but as long as the core of chinese culture is not lossing, i think we can still proudly call us chinese, which culture is confucius and taoism and buddism
dissappearing of traditional culture is faced by most of country in the world, because attraction of modernisation is too huge, so we have to move on, not be protective, accept the chanllenge, and tackle it.
At the republic time, the government is facing the choice, die or change, so they decide to change, first change the language, but fortunately they did a good job, so still in china we can recognise the traditional chinese, but i can guarrantee you if we did not change,still read classical book, we will die. Chinese culture do not foster science, which is crucial today, like i used to be an engineering student, but after i learn taoism buddhism and confucius, i feel engineering is boring, i believe most traditional culture fans, are same with me, because traditional culture really cannot coexist with science.Or the nature of traditional culture can't coexist with science.
I think one target for china to stop using traditional chinese, is to isolate us from classical chinese book, without occupied by the culture in our mind, we are more likely and willing to accept western science and technology.

This is a given. There are numerous ways to do numerous things. Nobody is claiming the simplification is perfect, but it is a far cry from being 'done in a careless manner.'



I think you will find that most people educated in simplified chinese are readily able to recognize traditional characters, based on context.



Did you not say that "凤 is not consistent with the simplification of the bird character. This shows inconsistencies."
又 is the character for 'hand' and not bird' but 双 (又又) was chosen as a simplification for 雙 [two birds] so in a sense, 又 can be seen as replacing the birds in 雙. Placing the 又 inside 凤 in a sense shows a consistency, although that is a bit stretching it.

In any case, 凤 is a special case, because if you think about it, inside the 鳳 is not a 鳥 [niao] (bird). So rather than changing what's inside by replacing it with 鳥 (bird) , they chose to simplify it to 又 instead.



Radicals are important but they were by no means 'destroyed by utter carelessness by PRC.' Since the beginning of Chinese history, countless characters have radicals that do not comport with their meaning. Traditional characters are replete with examples of characters that have radicals that have nothing to do with what they now mean and were many times borrowed for sound。in what is known as Jiajie (假借) or Tongjia (通假). If you examine some of the most common characters that you use daily, you will see that they either contain radicals that have no relation to the meaning of the character or the character's original pictograph is completely unrelated to what the character is being used for now. Some examples I lifted from wikipedia:

Orig meaning Borrowed meaning New-character
四 sì "nostrils" sì "four" 泗 (mucous; sniffle)
枼 yè "leaf" yè "flat, thin" 葉 (leaf)
北 bèi "back (of the body)" běi "north" 背
要 yāo "waist" yào "to want" 腰
少 shā "sand" shǎo "few" 沙 and 砂
永 yǒng "swim" yǒng "forever" 泳

In this very way... the character that you mentioned, 面 could be used to replace 麵 (noodles) and then the original meaning of 面 (noodles) could be represented with a new word 月+面 or one character 面 could have two meanings... no big deal! Is this cumbersome? YES IT IS. But that's how it's been done in China for countless generations. Is it carelessness on the part of the PRC? MAYBE, BUT it seems more like they were liberally simplifying characters within the confines of tradition.



Could you point out whose mind is set on what? It seems more that you are unwilling to accept the fact that your opinion about simplification is not the only valid opinion out there, because you fail to address any of the points I brought up and point to it being pointless to argue. My mind is not set on anything and I have time and again been against simplification. However, you've repeatedly criticized 'simplification' and 'hanyu pinyin' and PRC's language policies numerous times - I just want you to show me your criticisms rather than just throwing out the same tired rhetoric that:
1) simplification is less aesthetically pleasing than traditional characters (almost everybody agrees)
2) simplifications not making sense because they bear no relation to the traditional character (many traditional characters bear no relation to their original meaning either)
3) simplifications destroying the meaning of the character (again, one cannot figure out the meaning of many traditional characters just by looking at the radical)
4) simplifications being inconsistent (please point out some more examples of 'inconsistencies')

If traditional charc. is generally better than simplified, then it could be said the same of 楷，豪，古金，ETC ETC.
I am not disagreeing you with the idea of culture preservation, but much like the Greeks don't use Greek [I assume modern Greek is different from ancient Greek of the glorious Greece] the idea of knowledge monopolization through difficult words [that is, it takes much longer to be a educated man when your characters involve 30,0000 strokes, which directly lead to the nobility's strict control over knowledge as poor man must first feed and whatever time left is not enough to memorize that 30,000 strokes for one character.] steadily decrease and I must say horray for the CCP for doing that. In fact, Chinese characters were constantly decreased in their complicity for that sole reason [fine, I lied.]

Enlighten me of one way that can be both simplified AND perserve the essentials of oracle bone script [which really... isn't a script but more of an observation of naturally occurring pictures - although that is what Chinese is.]


I think most people who are educated in simplified Chinese do recognize the traditional form with no effort. That doesn't mean they can write it, but they certainly would recognize most if not all.


No. The PRC knew exactly what they were doing and what they are destroying. What they are doing is make a language that by far has been inclusive of ONE group, the GENTRY, and excludes EVERYONE else available to everyone. What they are destroying is a culture that has been fallen behind and bonded by tradition that any desire to reform or change is shout down or drown in voices of dissent for the sake of tradition.


I personally don't think its excellent, but don't you think its pointless to argue if your mind is set on whatever PRC invented is unquestionably WRONG to began with?

I have a Chinese dictionary software, and I am agree with what they write about "Why Chinese characters have simple forms (简体字) and full forms (繁體字)". They also use "full forms" instead of "traditional forms" for the meaning of 繁體字. Because some of the simple forms actually older than their full forms. Let me quote some:
And some simple forms invented by some calligrapher (in "traditional" time)! It is 草书 cǎoshū "grass writing" style. Let me quote some:
And I think some other simple forms were invented by creative thinking. I also think also the full forms were also creative.
I hope i can share these..