Chinese traditional characters: worth learning?

On November 02 2009 07:33 PanoRaMa wrote:
If you are "fucking serious" then yes. A LOT of the heart and soul of the written Chinese language is lost with Simplified. If anything, it'll be easy to figure out Simplified AFTER learning Traditional characters. And wrt your last paragraph, yes, understanding traditional characters well allows you to infer and understand meanings of otherwise unknown words etc.

There's no way Traditional will ever really disappear. Simplified is going to ruin your life if you end up in Taiwan or something where they use strictly Traditional and likely will never change.

On November 02 2009 07:56 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
You do realize that if you know simplified, you can read traditional, bit not viceversa.

On November 02 2009 07:57 rauk wrote:


other way around dude...

On November 02 2009 07:57 rauk wrote:


other way around dude...

for example how the hell are you supposed to guess than 开 is 開?

On November 02 2009 08:00 McFly wrote:


You do realize you said this to a Chinese person? And your example is just proving our point.

On November 02 2009 08:00 McFly wrote:


You do realize you said this to a Chinese person? And your example is just proving our point.

On November 02 2009 08:03 rauk wrote:


im taiwanese, so yeah.....? it shows that few would think that simplified character 开is the traditional 開, ie, that simplified to traditional is hard, so i fail to see how that proves your point (which was simplified -> traditional = 1a2a3aezpz).

On November 02 2009 08:05 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:


Uh, it makes perfect sense to me, since ou can see the 开 in the traditional.

On November 02 2009 08:03 rauk wrote:


im taiwanese, so yeah.....? it shows that few would think that simplified character 开is the traditional 開, ie, that simplified to traditional is hard, so i fail to see how that proves your point (which was simplified -> traditional = 1a2a3aezpz).

The high ratio achieved by Simplified characters are by force. Red guards ransacked homes, persecuting teachers and took part in other violent activities.[44] One example is the faculties at Nankai University who were beaten and publicly reviled. Some were murdered. Many faculty families were left homeless.[45] In 1966 universities were even shut down to allow students to participate in the Cultural revolution. Traditional literature were also halted.[46] In just one month between November 9 and December 7, 1966 Red guard member Tan Hou-lan (譚厚蘭) burned 2,700 traditional books.[47]

On November 02 2009 08:12 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
Though I'm usually a proponent of Wikipedia, this particular one is awful. Take a look at one of the Pro-Traditional points:



What does that have to do with anything lol?

The high ratio achieved by Simplified characters are by force. Red guards persecuted teachers and took part in other violent activities in opposition to traditional characters.[44] One example is the faculties at Nankai University who were beaten, killed and publicly reviled. In 1966 universities were even shut down to allow students to participate in the Cultural revolution. Traditional literature were also halted.[46] Example: between November 9 and December 7, 1966 Red guard member Tan Hou-lan (譚厚蘭) burned 2,700 traditional books.[47]

This has to be one of the most stupid and pointless article on Wiki. The whole thing is filled with stuff like "he said", "she said", manufactured facts, brain-dead logic, politically motivated statements, while putting little effort into establishing facts. Does "...claim that the PRC government was politically motivated to simplify this character, to devalue..." sound NPOV to anyone, at all?

Then there's the whole section about literacy, while showing zero proof that writing system is even related to literacy rate at all (Niger and France have the same official language, so they should have the same literacy rate, right?) This whole section doesn't deserve to exist, whichever side you might "pro".

Next comes the "dry goods" vs "fuck goods" debacle, cited as evidence that merging multiple characters into one confuses people--so, it would have been OK if someone had translated the traditional "幹" (do, perform) into "fuck" on product packaging? It only shows how bad the translator is at English, but not how simplified characters are misleading. Being one of the working languages of UN, and used by more than a billion people daily, I'd wager simplified Chinese can make a distinction between "dry" and "fuck", thank you.

And there's the gem in section "Symbolism conflict". Under "Pro-simplified", bullet 1: "...traditional characters can often be identified as not belonging to China..."; bullet 2: "...simplified characters is far from belonging to mainland China only"; bullet 3: "It's no longer the case that everything in simplified Chinese is made in mainland China...". I can't tell which side of the debate these bullets are "pro-"ing, hell, they don't even agree with each other.

Similar problem in section "Ratio of current usage or pragmatism of the choice between the two systems" (way to make a section title, BTW), under "Pro-simplified", bullet 1: "traditional Chinese ... used by only some 50 million people"; bullet 2: "...used by just over 30 million people". What's more, the "50" and "30" are nicely italicized in case readers might miss the glaring inconsistency. Right after that, under "Pro-traditional", there's the story of Red Guards beating up or murdering people, burning books, etc. Ok, Red Guards bad, I get it. But does it prove the point "The high ratio achieved by Simplified characters are by force"? I don't see it. Relying on ambiguous terms like "Traditional literature" or "traditional books" doesn't do the trick, sorry.

There's a NPOV notice at the top of the page, but it'd be more fitting if it were a "The non-stupidity of this article is disputed" tag, because throughout the whole article, regardless of which side is being "pro-"ed, arguments are either bogus, or badly presented. It's not a neutrality issue, it's a competency issue. We'd be doing readers a service by deleting this article altogether, because it'd be one fewer way to waste readers' time.

The majority of the contents here are old. You can ask anyone on the street and they can get you way better contents except there is no references. If you can find a less-stupid article out there, let us know.

On November 02 2009 08:18 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
No, what it is is shifting the focus of the article (if it even had one to begin with) into a political debate about communism.

This guy in the discussion puts it very well:



And also

On November 02 2009 08:27 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
Yes, we are. Read the second quote - asking someone on the street, or in our case, a random internet thread - seems to be yielding more coherent statements than this particular article. At least we are providing relevant details as opposed to attacks on a political system/self-contradictory "facts"/just plain retarded shit.

The majority of the contents here are old. You can ask anyone on the street and they can get you way better contents except there is no references. If you can find a less-stupid article out there, let us know.

On November 02 2009 08:37 blue_arrow wrote:


yeah thats the entire point of not asking random ppl on the street, no references = no credibility on an anonymous internet forum, no matter how seemingly excellent a piece of content you provide, content can always always be fabricated dude

edit: this article isn't complete and absolute bullshit that should be eradicated from the face of the earth, it provides facts and references and an education on the topic, perfection notwithstanding; it has so far done a better job of providing knowledge to us than this thread. so why not build upon it? slamming down the entire article and influencing others to not read it is not the way to go.

also i find this whole ordeal regarding wikipedia contributors' comments incredibly, incredibly ironic

On November 02 2009 10:46 Sad[Panda] wrote:


Its hard to reference "facts" when you really dont have any... even the "facts" presented are all opinions to that person as to why they think pro traditional or pro simplified.

Edit: also I think we did a better job debating it here than in there for the facts that by a landslide most people posted traditional first = harder to read simplified, simplified first = easier to read traditional, and that we are generally staying on topic t.t; as apposed to the wiki article where its a he said she said clusterfuck t.t;

Edit2: oh csheep quoted some dude who raped your wiki article and makes this pointless meh w.e xD

On November 02 2009 13:07 writer22816 wrote:
The "simplified is corrupting Chinese heritage" argument is bullshit. Foot binding is a heritage, why don't we reinstate that?

On November 02 2009 11:17 Superiorwolf wrote:
Yes, traditional makes more sense in terms of how the characters are constructed, but simplified is probably the more practical one in most of the areas you'll be going to. If you're learning both, that's fine and good. In my Chinese class right now actually, the teachers teach traditional but we are allowed to use simplified if we want, so I can recognize both fairly easily. The only complaint I have about traditional is that because sometimes they have more strokes, on the computer they are kind of difficult to see and look like blotches of black sometimes. Still, for the cultural understanding of Chinese, learning traditional is fine.

Of course, from my perspective, learning simplified with traditional alongside is extremely easy. I can't always recognize traditional characters that we haven't read yet, but traditional supplementing simplified is pretty easy to do. I recommend you continue simplified and learn the traditional versions for each of the words you study. Also, most of the words are nearly identical with a few less strokes in simplified, and there are many words that are the same in both simplified and traditional, so learning both is not that difficult. Even the word 书, although pretty different in simplified, looks pretty similar to the traditional version.

As well, you'll see a lot of patterns, like the differences in strokes between radicals like in 门， 学， 又， etc - so many of the changes from traditional to simplified are just simplification of radicals (the radical on top of 学 is crazy in traditional o.o).

On November 02 2009 13:18 Retsukage wrote:
On a separate but related note, I am currently doing Chinese/Japanese calligraphy in a course in my university. Does anyone have some cool star craft driven phrase I could write out? I mean does anyone know the character for strategy? that kind of thing?
In case anyone happened to be interested here is one character I wrote, and then imposed on a photo of mine.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/-goodmorning-/4067407890/

On November 02 2009 14:55 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
感谢护盾电池活圆满生活

On November 03 2009 02:36 Matoo- wrote:
By the way does someone have an idea about where to learn chinese seriously? Like universities and stuff. I'm going to China this winter between like Dec. 20 and Jan. 10 and I'm going to use it to scout for proxy hatch locations probably around BJ or SH. I like HK but I don't think it's the best place to learn mandarin.

On November 03 2009 04:22 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
I also want to point out that the conception that Beijing doesn't have its own dialect is false. It is simply the Beijing dialect that was integrated largely into Standard Mandarin. If you grew up learning Chinese in Beijing, there is a 99% chance that another Chinese person can identify you as from Beijing, because we do still have a very distinct way of speaking.

To say that Beijing is bad for learning Chinese because of the foreign presence is very false imo. As long as you're not in Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent Shanghai, anywhere in China is still not as "international" as you'd think. I personally think Beijing would be great, mainly because there's not so much English present that you couldn't learn Chinese, but also it's a big city with a nice juxtaposition of tradition and globalization, something that is lacking, I fell, in HK and Shanghai.

On November 03 2009 13:32 MK wrote:
The Shanghai World Universities Ranking is from where ? Tongji or Fudan ?

On November 02 2009 14:55 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
圆

On November 03 2009 15:18 tarpman wrote:

Is that a person standing in a room?

I studied at Beijing Language and Culture University. I met my wife there

On November 03 2009 17:12 knadolny wrote:
Perhaps I can lend my insight into learning Chinese. I spent my first two years in America learning basic Chinese at Cornell University. Cornell has an amazing program by the way. I found learning a foundation was a must before going to China to learn Chinese.

Also I began studying the traditional characters than moved to simplified. If you want to learn both then do it. It will only help you, but traditional is not a must on the mainland (except for karaoke songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan) The Chinese government is thinking of going back and complicating the characters. If you study traditional now you might be a step a head.

Now to your question: Where to study Chinese in China?

I studied at Beijing Language and Culture University. I met my wife there and would not trade that experience for the world, but there are a few things to keep in mind. When you study in Beijing you need to have personal initiative to get out there and make Chinese friends. Many people just hang out with expats and their fellow "foreigners" in Beijing. Your Chinese will not improve your Chinese if you speak English all the time. That said I studied in Beijing and became immersed in the language and culture while in Beijing. I just hung out with Koreans, Japanese and Chinese who could not speak English.

Famous schools for learning Chinese are worthless. If you tell me you studied Chinese at Peking University that means nothing. Their program is not so great from what I hear. There are many foreign universities that run Chinese learning programs at the famous universities in Beijing. This does not mean you're signing up for this program though. The price tag will tell you whether it's Chinese run or American run.

Whether you study in Shandong, Chengdu, Harbin, Beijing, or Shanghai is all up to you. What do you want out of your time in China? Beijing is definitely a cultural hub with Shanghai being a financial/economic hub. If you want the hustle and bustle go to one of those cities. (all cities are basically bustling in China, but some more than others).

As with anything in life, you will get out of China exactly what you put into it. You can find an alcove of foreigners in almost any city in China. At the same time you can also find a billion Chinese people all over the country.

I loved my experience in Beijing, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for you.

I hope this helps.

Sorry to all the Taiwanese, HKers, and traditional Chinese learners that my book (see link) is in simplified Chinese. I'm considering a traditional Chinese version and will make one if I get enough demand.

Cheers,

Kevin
www.capturingchinese.com

On November 03 2009 23:26 madnessman wrote:
I read simplified but I do recognize the basic traditional characters. If you plan on learning Japanese learn traditional. It's really cool knowing Chinese and living in Japan because there are a bunch of random words which match up really well. Library in chinese is tu shu guan and to sho gan in Japanese.

On November 03 2009 23:35 madnessman wrote:
Japan uses the simplified version xue? I've actually never really specifically noticed that. Oops!

On November 03 2009 23:26 madnessman wrote:
I read simplified but I do recognize the basic traditional characters. If you plan on learning Japanese learn traditional. It's really cool knowing Chinese and living in Japan because there are a bunch of random words which match up really well. Library in chinese is tu shu guan and to sho gan in Japanese.

On November 03 2009 03:41 Orlandu wrote:
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