Dear MEL Topic Readers,
Keep Chinese simplified, schools told
China has and always has had very diverse cultures
with different peoples, traditions, and languages. But one thing that has been
uniting them is Chinese characters that originated thousands of years ago. Though
there have been continual changes in the forms and pronunciations, today’s traditional
Chinese characters have been used for nearly two millenniums not only in
mainland China but also in surrounding countries like Korea and Japan in some
way or another. After World War II, mainland China and Japan started simplifying
traditional Chinese characters separately while Taiwan and Hong Kong kept the
tradition. Today, Macao and Singapore use the same simplified Chinese characters
as mainland China.
Since simplified Chinese characters decreased
the number of strokes and replaced complicated components of characters with
simper shapes, some say it misses the aesthetic beauty of traditional Chinese
and deteriorate the meaning of Chinese characters and cultural heritage.
The ministry of education says students can
learn about traditional Chinese when they study Chinese classic writings and
Chinese calligraphy at school.
Thanks to the standardization of diverse
characters, Qin Shi Huang managed to unify China in 221 BC. But today, people
either type or touch/speak-and-choose characters on their computers or smartphones
to write documents or messages. Pinyin, the Romanization of the Chinese
characters based on their pronunciation, may someday become more popular than
characters as Chinese become more popular around the world.
Enjoy reading the text about what today’s
Chinese characters are like.
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