It's no secret that Chinese is one of the most difficult languages in existence today. Especially for a Russian person, the variety of hieroglyphs that the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire use daily when writing seems wild. As you know, Western languages are more or less similar to each other: they have similar alphabets and millions of borrowings. With Chinese it 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, this sounds intimidating. To help him, the so-called Simplified Chinese language was invented. But this term in no way refers to dialects. When people talk about Simplified and Traditional Chinese, they only mean the scripts.
Origin story
From 1956 to 1986, the People's Republic of China heldmajor reform of writing. Many believed that it was its complexity that was the reason for the country's economic backwardness. The inconvenience, the difficulty of communication and learning - all this led the Chinese government to release an official book called "Hieroglyph Simplification Summary Table", containing as many as two thousand characters. This was the first stage of the reform. A year later, another 2,500 new Chinese characters were added to the list. As a result, two types of writing appeared in the state: simplified and traditional.
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, everyone understands Simplified Chinese. In fact, Singapore, which has outstripped all other countries in the world in terms of development, also does not use such a hard to understand and unnecessary type of writing as traditional. The same can be said about 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 characters are still used there, although not on a large scale. For example, it is quite normal for many Chinese people to switch to an informal language when corresponding with a friend. On the streets of the same Hong Kong, you can see ads written in traditional Chinese, and no one is surprised by this. However, at the state level, everyone has long used a simplified version of writing. By the way,most instructions are also written in Simplified Chinese.
View from the outside
What does Simplified Chinese look like?
In fact, when the unenlightened think of the word "hieroglyphs", they imagine a simplified version of them. It is he who is most often offered to be taught in various manuals. Traditional Chinese is too complex to fully understand, let alone reproduce in writing.
So Simplified Chinese usually consists of about ten straight lines (sometimes they can be rounded, but not much). These lines cross and intersect each other, creating a unique symbol. This hieroglyph stands for one specific word.
But what is the real difference between Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese?
Features of Traditional Chinese
As one of the oldest languages in the world, Chinese has a very rich history. For four thousand years it has undergone significant changes. It often distinguished between different styles based on factors such as the place of use (such as formal documents or informal communication) and the difficulty of writing. However, the foundations of writing, laid down by the semi-mythical thinker Cang Jie, remained. The variety of characters, the complexity of writing and the many dashes characterize traditional Chinese writing today.
Difference between Traditional and Simplified Chinese
It's not too hard to guess that simplified characters look less ornate than traditional ones. While there used to be a depressing number of different strokes, they have been ruthlessly reduced in the modified Chinese script.
The second difference is the reduction in the number of hieroglyphs themselves. If the old symbols had a similar meaning, they no longer required two different designations - one was enough, and also simplified.
In many ways, the writing reform also affected phonetics. Sounds too difficult to pronounce have been eliminated or changed to simpler ones.
The creators of Simplified Chinese also ruthlessly stripped hieroglyphs of those components that they considered superfluous. For example, if a character cannot be confused with others even without all these dashes, then they were either removed or replaced with others.
Some of the new characters bear no resemblance to their traditional equivalents. It is possible that the original signs simply could not be simplified in any way.
However, one should not assume that the ancient Chinese linguists sought to complicate everything they could. Many of the traditional characters were fairly easy 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 style of writing, people should decide on the ultimate goal. Work in Hong Kong? Move to live in Beijing? Read books by Eastern thinkers? China is diverse, and for eachof these goals, it is required to devote oneself to the study of a certain style of writing and a way of pronunciation.
