Wang 1 Yi Wang Kristen Foster CO150.

400 24 October, 2013 How Should We Treat Chinese Traditional Characters and Simplified Characters? When I came to United States, I changed my cell phone language from Chinese to English. After then I opened my music files, all titles of Chinese music were garbled words. I checked the Internet to find what led to Chinese turning into garbled code in order to fulfill my curiosity, and the answer I found online said that because Chinese characters had two kinds of handwriting the traditional one and the simplified one, there are two different kinds of input codes. Therefore, electronic products always appear messy for their inability to read and translate words correctly. This phenomenon really arouses my awareness of Chinese characters. Chinese have been discussing what on earth kind of characters we should be using for a long time. People discuss this topic on the Internet, in their blogs, on TV showsSometimes the conversations that people have had about characters have changed from debate to quarrel on the Internet. I have been always thinking that since traditional characters include more profound meaning for Chinese culture and they look cooler and better, why do people in mainland chose to simplify them instead of following what ancestors passed down 60 years ago? I thought it was meaningful to explore an acceptable attitude about how we should treat traditional characters or simplified characters.

Wang 2 Before I could pinpoint an acceptable attitude towards whether people should learn traditional Chinese characters or simplified characters, I needed to get historical information about these two kinds of characters. I consulted two articles, one of which was in Chinese and the other one was one chapter called CalligraphyChina in Encyclopedia of Modern Asia to find the history of Chinese traditional characters. From the article, I found that traditional characters could date back to at least the Shang Dynasty (1300 BCE) when people used Oracle characters which were carved on the bones of animals. After that inscriptions appeared on bronze during the Shang Dynasty and the Zhou Dynasty (1300 BCE-1034 BCE), most of inscriptions were pictographs. Before the Qing Dynasty, people used writing brush to write. We call this kind of handwriting calligraphy. In Qin Dynasty, two important kinds of calligraphyZhuan shu(seal script) and Li shu(clerical script) following inscriptions appeared. The latter one was the first unified characters formulated by Qinshihuang who was the first emperor in the history of China. Then Kai shu(regular script), Xing shu(running style of script) and Cao shu(grass style) were prevalent during the Tang Dynasty (618907) to the Qing Dynasty (16441912). Those three characters styles are rudiments of todays Chinese traditional handwriting. All in all, traditional characters have thousands of years of history. The conclusion I found before made me urgently want to get information about the history of simplified characters. I found some search about the origin of the simplified Chinese characters in Wikipedia and the explanation was that western civilization had began to have a even greater effect on East Asia since the early 19th

Wang 3 century when characters were still written by writing bushes, some young cynics tended to learn western ideological, and the first thing they planned to do was to abolish Chinese traditional characters, because in their opinions it was traditional characters that fixed the whole nations thoughts. However, some scholars realized that characters were signals of the nation, so it was unrealistic to abandon them, but simplifying them was feasible. In 1935, the first batch of simplified Chinese characters was published. Compared to traditional characters, the age of simplified characters is really much younger than traditional characters. However, why were some people so eager to abolish the traditional characters? The next question I want to study was that what the advantages of simplified characters were when they were compared to traditional characters. I found a telephone interview presentation which was in Chinese talked about the advantages of simplified characters. First of all, Pei, the interviewee of the telephone interview, said due to the huge population, because simplified characters are much easier to remember and write, for example , which means orchids, its handwriting in traditional characters is , it was really necessary to simplify the characters in order to reduce the rate of illiteracy. The author also emphasized that simplifying characters did follow peoples logic and the natural law. He stated that from Oracle characters to Kai shu (regular script) and the following Xing shu(running style of script) and Cao shu(grass style), it had already had a process of simplifying, and the process included reducing strokes. He also argued that although traditional characters had been reduced strokes, they still followed the rules of Chinese character writing

Wang 4 which were pictographic, phonogramic and associative-compounded characters. What he said did help me discovery the advantage of simplified characters. However, after so many years, why do people arouse the debate of reviving traditional characters? What is it that makes people rediscover the advantage of traditional characters and appeal to reusing traditional characters? I typed What is the advantage of traditional characters into Google scholar and found an article called The Choice of Traditional vs. Simplified Characters in US Classrooms (US-China Education Review), which listed a huge number of advantages of traditional characters. Primarily, traditional characters have a longer history, which contained more cultural background. Secondly, traditional characters conform to the rules of Chinese character writing much more strictly because the handwriting in traditional characters is almost the same as calligraphy while simplified characters have been changed a lot, which loses a lot of their original meaning. Thirdly, traditional characters look better and cooler and are more worth appreciating. Fourthly, people used to think that traditional characters are difficult to remember and write. But with the development of computer science, people can easily type traditional characters on the computers as how people type simplified characters for they have the same spellings and pronunciations. Difficulties to write are no longer troubles. Fifthly, learning traditional characters help we study ancient literature. Finally, using traditional characters can reduce culture differences among mainland, Hong Kong, Marco, and Taiwan. HK, Marco and Taiwan use traditional characters, so captions on TV plays which mainland have imported are all traditional characters, but many people in mainland can not recognize traditional

Wang 5 characters. To sum up, evidence used in this article are sufficient. Facing this kind of comparison between traditional characters and simplified characters, I was really eager to know the attitude Chinese held. I found a blog in Chinese collecting a bunch of comments on traditional characters and simplified characters from different people. A general trend presented by people was that people on the mainland supported simplified Chinese because they thought simplified characters are really helpful to reduce the rate of illiteracy, while people in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan supported traditional characters because they thought simplified characters were informal. It was not difficult to understand the reason that people preferred to choose things which they had already been familiar with. Under this circumstance, I doubted that other countries such as Japan also simplified their characters, why they did not debate on the characters as seriously as what happened in China. I found an article discussing the process of characters simplification in China and in Japan. The author concluded that the process of characters simplification in Japan had experienced a long period and repeated discussions before they finally decided their simplified characters, while the process in China was not specific enough, for example, Japanese simplified characters still maintain their original font, while Chinese simplified characters were changed so much that Chinese who use traditional characters rarely can recognize simplified characters. It is also the reason why those who used to write traditional characters refused to write simplified characters. Now that our simplified characters are not specific enough, does that mean we

Wang 6 should abandon them? I wanted to know what we now can do to reach acceptable attitude for most people from all over the country. To solve this question, I checked it online and found an objective article which said what we needed to do was to learn traditional characters because they were national treasure and it was meaningful for our government to require students in primary school to learn basic calligraphy. He indicated that on the other hand, the government also needed to improve our simplified characters in order to bring convenience to daily life. In his opinion, learning both traditional characters and simplified characters are necessary. Leaning how to recognize traditional characters and writing simplified characters are apparently good idea. Based on my previous research, I am wondering whether people can handle both characters? Because children now in China are being asked to a lot of things such as instruments, drawing, dancing and so on, can they deal with an extra complicated character style? Next period, I want to research how Chinese can learn both characters and to what extent they need to learn both kinds of scripts.

Wang 7 Work Cited Deng, Shizhong."The Choice of Traditional vs. Simplified Characters in US Classrooms." US- China Education Review (2009): 67. Gustavq. blog.und. com. blog.und.com, 13. Apr.2006. Web. 10. Oct.2013. Levinson, David., Karen, Christensen. Encyclopedia of modern Asia. Vol. 5. Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002. Pei,Jue. telephone interview presentation. 9. Mar.2009. Wikipedia contributors. "." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 16 Apr. 2013.Web. 3 Oct. 2013. Wu, Yixuan. . YAYAN ONLINE . Fudan University