It's no secret that Chinese is one of the most complex languages of all that exist today. In particular, the Russian man seems wild variety of hieroglyphs that the inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom daily use when writing. As you know, Western languages are more or less similar to each other: they have similar alphabets and millions of borrowings. The situation with the Chinese is different. For a long time, the current PRC was almost completely isolated from the rest of the world. But even now, the Chinese do not succumb to foreign culture. No borrowing. Other traditions. Other letters. For a person who has decided to learn Chinese, that sounds scary. The so-called Chinese simplified language was invented to help him. But this term in no way refers to dialects. When one speaks of simplified and traditional Chinese, they mean only types of writing.
Origin history
In the period from 1956 to 1986 in the People's Republic of China, the largest written reform was carried out. Many believed that it was precisely its complexity that was the reason for the country's economic backwardness. The inconvenience, the difficulty of communication and training - all this led to the fact that the Chinese government released an official book called "Summary table of simplification of hieroglyphs", containing as many as two thousand characters. This was the first stage of the reform. A year later, the list was supplemented by another 2,500 new Chinese characters. As a result, two types of writing appeared in the state: simplified and traditional.
The prevalence of Simplified Chinese
Of course, in the People's Republic of China, especially in such developed cities and economic centers as Beijing and Shanghai, where the reform was originally carried out, the simplified Chinese is well understood. In fact, Singapore, which is ahead of development in all other countries of the world, also does not use such a difficult to understand and unnecessary type of writing as traditional. The same can be said of Malaysia. But in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, as well as on the island of Taiwan, the reform did not make such a strong impression on people. Traditional hieroglyphs are still used there, although not on a large scale. For example, for many Chinese, it’s quite normal to switch to an unofficial language in correspondence with a friend. On the street of the same Hong Kong, you can see ads written in traditional Chinese, and no one is surprised. However, at the state level, everyone has long been using a simplified version of writing. By the way, most of the instructions are also written in Chinese simplified.
View from the outside
What does Chinese simplified language look like?
In fact, when the unenlightened think about the word "hieroglyphs," they present a simplified version of them. It is he who is most often offered to teach in various manuals. Traditional Chinese is too complicated to fully understand, and even more so to reproduce in writing.
So, simplified Chinese usually consists of about ten straight lines (sometimes they can be rounded, but not much). These lines are crossed and intersected, creating a unique symbol. This character means one specific word.
But what really is the essential difference between Chinese traditional and simplified?
Features of Traditional Chinese
Being one of the oldest languages in the world, Chinese has a very rich history. Over four thousand years, he has undergone significant changes. Often, various styles were highlighted based on factors such as the place of use (for example, white papers or informal communication), as well as the difficulty of writing. However, the foundations of writing, laid down by the semi-mythical thinker Tsang Jie, remained. A variety of characters, the difficulty of writing and many dashes characterize traditional Chinese writing today.
The difference between traditional and simplified Chinese
It’s not so difficult to guess that simplified characters look less ornate than traditional ones. While a depressing number of different strokes were used before, they were ruthlessly reduced in modified Chinese writing.
The second difference is to reduce the number of hieroglyphs themselves. If the old symbols had similar meanings, they no longer needed two different designations - just one, and also a simplified one, was enough.
In many ways, the reform of writing has affected phonetics. Sounds that are too complicated for pronunciation were eliminated or changed to simpler ones.
The creators of simplified Chinese also ruthlessly took away from the hieroglyphs those components that they considered superfluous. For example, if a symbol cannot be confused with others even without all these dashes, then they were either removed or replaced with others.
Some new hieroglyphs do not resemble their traditional equivalents. It is possible that the original signs simply could not be simplified.
However, do not assume that the ancient Chinese linguists sought to complicate everything that they could. Many of the traditional characters were fairly simple to write. Because of this, some of them continue to be used in modern simplified Chinese.
Summing up and drawing conclusions
Before learning a particular writing style, people should decide on the ultimate goal. Work in Hong Kong? Relocate to Beijing? Read books by oriental thinkers? China is diverse, and for each of these goals, you need to devote yourself to the study of a particular writing style and pronunciation method.