繁体字 Fántǐzì — Traditional Characters

What simplification did, and how much a learner needs

Chinese characters have been written for something over three thousand years and have changed continuously, so there has never been a single fixed set. What happened in the twentieth century was an official, systematic simplification: the mainland government published lists in 1956 and 1964 that changed the standard forms of about two thousand characters, with the explicit aim of raising literacy. Singapore adopted the same forms. Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan did not, and use what are called 繁体字 — traditional characters, or 正体字, orthodox characters, as Taiwan prefers to call them, which tells you the argument exists. The methods were mostly conservative. Many simplified forms were cursive shapes already in handwritten use for centuries — 書 to 书, 為 to 为 — so they were standardisations rather than inventions. Others replaced a complicated component with a simple mark: 漢 to 汉, 觀 to 观. A third group merged characters that had sounded alike, which is the change that loses information: 後 behind and 后 empress both became 后, 隻 and 只 both became 只. Around two thousand characters were altered and several thousand common ones were left exactly as they were, which is why the two systems are far closer than the names suggest. The argument about it is real and mostly conducted by people who use one or the other daily. Simplification's defenders point at literacy rates, at the practical speed of writing, and at the cursive precedent. Its critics point at the mergers, at the loss of visible etymology — 愛 contains 心, a heart, and 爱 does not — and at the break with a written record. There is also a political dimension, since the systems now map onto jurisdictions. Both sides have serious people on them and this course has no verdict. For a learner, 阿明's advice is right and worth repeating: 不用写，看得懂就行. Reading traditional characters passively is a small addition once you know simplified, because the majority are identical and the changed ones follow patterns you pick up in a few weeks — 门 becomes 門 throughout, 讠 becomes 言, 钅 becomes 金, 马 becomes 馬. Learning to write them is a separate and much larger job, worth doing only if you will live somewhere that uses them. And there is one concrete reason to bother at all: Hong Kong, Taiwan, a great deal of the diaspora, most pre-1950s printed matter, and almost all calligraphy and classical scholarship are in traditional forms, so a reader who cannot handle them is shut out of a great deal. One practical note on looking things up. The old way was by 部首 and stroke count, which is slow and still worth being able to do. The modern way is to handwrite the character into a phone, which is fast, forgiving, and works far better if your stroke order is roughly right — which is the real reason to learn stroke order rather than a calligraphic scruple.