News on 06 May 2008 10:47:28

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Written Chinese Characters Have Many Strokes and Each Character may be Expressed in the Traditional Manner or Simplified

In our April issue we had several articles dedicated to China, which turned out to be a very popular subject. Readers expressed keen interest in learning more about Chinese language and culture. In response we are pleased to offer the following article.

Reading Chinese and speaking Chinese are two entirely different skills. Unlike English, Chinese is more a symbolic than a phonetic language. You can’t look at Chinese characters and know for certain how to pronounce them.

Since the written language is not fixed to the spoken language, Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong can read a newspaper aloud in Cantonese, while Mandarin speakers in Beijing can read the same newspaper aloud in Mandarin. Cantonese and Mandarin speakers may meet and yet not be able to speak to each other, but if they write what they wish to communicate in Chinese characters they can understand each other. This universality is one advantage of having a written language that is not phonetic.

You will hear the terms simplified and traditional in reference to the form of Chinese written characters. Which means a single Chinese written character may have up to 25 strokes, hence over the years abbreviated forms of these characters arose.

With the development of public education in the 20^th century, a movement began to systematically simplify character forms and facilitate literacy. Not every Traditional Chinese character has been simplified; the simpler characters were left unchanged.

Who uses which form? The simplified character set was first adopted in Mainland China. The city-state of Singapore later adopted the simplified characters. Hong Kong, which became part of Mainland China in 1997, uses both forms. As a result of Hong Kong merging with Mainland China, more and more Cantonese speakers are now learning the Mandarin Chinese dialect.

The island of Taiwan uses Mandarin as the national language and Traditional character forms. Anything written in Chinese prior to 1949 was written in Traditional Chinese, so most educated Chinese understand Traditional Chinese.

As a rule, students are first introduced to Simplified characters and later to Traditional forms. The example below shows the difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Note that the first character, which is only four strokes, has no simplified form. The table provides a basic outline of character forms and dialects by geographic region.

Example:
中国话* (Simplified form)
中國話* (Traditional form)