When people think about learning Chinese, one of the first decisions they need to make is whether they want to study traditional characters (繁體字) or simplified characters (简体字). This choice is sometimes made for them (universities often teach one or the other, though I’ve heard increasing reports of Chinese programs allowing students to choose the character set they want), but if you’re self-studying it’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself.
The question is, for some reason, one that sparks much debate among the Chinese learning community (not to mention the Chinese community itself). Wikipedia has a decent overview of the debate. In my view, the two sides can be summarized as:
- Pro-Traditional: Simplified characters are ugly, and break with thousands of years of tradition.
- Pro-Simplified: Traditional characters are painful to write, and since the PRC uses Simplified learning them will give you access to the most written material.
I’m not a partisan — you should learn whatever suits you. Below, though, I’m going to describe what now-me would have told then-me when I had just started learning Chinese.
In the end, you’ll learn both
What they don’t tell you when you start is that, if you’re serious about learning Chinese, you’ll learn to at least read both simplified and traditional eventually. Not being able to read anything from either Taiwan and Hong Kong (if you learn Simplified) or the Mainland and Singapore (if you learn Traditional) is going to chap your ass enough that you’ll eventually give in and learn to read the other set, even if you have some strange aversion to them.
Traditional first, then simplified
That being said, I’d learn traditional first, and then go back and learn simplified. There are a couple of reasons for this:
- Traditional are easier to learn to write. Note I didn’t say “easier to write,” but rather “easier to learn to write.” I do think that traditional is easier to learn, however, specifically because of the number of strokes. Characters tend to be composed of other full characters, rather than lots of abbreviated components (see 乐 vs. 樂), which generally makes them easier to remember.
- Taiwan/Hong Kong media is more interesting than Mainland media. Interesting in a salacious way, that is. Of course your opinion may vary, but after six years on the Mainland this is the conclusion to which I’ve come
- Educated Mainlanders can read traditional. There’s enough Taiwanese and Hong Kong media on the mainland that most people can read Traditional at least passably, whereas the same cannot be said about people from Taiwan and Hong Kong reading Simplified.
Learning traditional also gives you a good base from which to learn simplified (most of the characters are either the same or haven’t changed much), as well as Japanese kanji (which have also been simplified, but not as much as simplified Chinese) and Korean hanja (which haven’t been simplified at all?). It also opens up all material published before the 1950s, when everything in the Chinese speaking world was all in traditional (because simplified hadn’t been invented yet).
Those are my two cents. What do y’all think?
Related posts:
- The origins of ràng’s svelte simplification
- AJATT for Chinese
- Giving Heisig a shot
- REQUEST: content recommendations for an intermediate Chinese learner
- More thoughts on Heisig
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
Meh! I don’t think that someone has a choice as to which they learn first; they learn whichever is predominant where they are. I learnt in the mainland so learning simplified was a no brainer, if I started learning here in Oz I’d of course learn complex.
I think that literate people like ourselves often think ‘if I had the choice to do it all over again, would I learn everythign the same way’ but forget that choosing to learn one or the other isn’t practical at all. One has clear advantages over the other, depending on which is more prevalent in your learning environment.
A bit like any language. No matter how useful a certain language is, if no one speaks it around you, it’s not going to be very practical to learn it.
Some people certainly have a choice. I started with traditional in Orlando, FL, and I don’t think you could make an argument for either simplified or traditional there (Vietnamese, perhaps!).
I think it probably doesn’t make all that much difference one way or the other. I started learning with traditional characters, then switched to simplified after the first year, promptly forgot most of my traditional characters, and then picked them up again when I started studying classical Chinese a few years later. I’m fairly agnostic when it comes to the simplified/traditional holy wars: traditional characters are definitely nicer looking, but choosing a writing system based on aesthetic concerns is slightly insane, and while it’s certainly nice to maintain the historical forms of the characters, it strikes me as not all that different from nuttiness like the spellings of “night,” “through,” and “enough.” Also, everyone who thinks traditional characters should be brought back on the mainland should be forced to hand-write 讓 a hundred times.
Unrelated, but I far, far prefer reading 竖版 (i.e., Taiwanese/HK) printing — I find it a lot easier on the eyes, whereas with 横版 I lose my place in a text a lot more easily. Not sure why this is; it may just be that since my traditional character reading doesn’t get nearly as much exercise as simplified character reading, I’m paying more attention to the text and thus am less likely to let my eyes wander across the page.
I think if you were forced to write 讓 that many times, you’d end up with a cursive scribble that looked a lot like 让
Totally agree about 竖版 vs. 横版 — the characters are made for it, and it shows.
Im in the process after 2 years of living her of diving into traditional characters, but somewhat passively at that. This is partly out of interest and partly out of necessity. Most of the texts I’m reading in my grad program, be it in English or Mandarin, use traditional characters. But living in the mainland and coming here without a word of Chinese, I obviously only learned simplified in the beginning.
Otherwise I don’t think it matters too much one way or the other as I agree you’ll learn them both anyway if you really care about the language enough.
Like others, I studied traditional for the first two years, and then switched to simplified and never went back. Well, I still read sources in traditional, but I never try to write up. While I agree that eventually you’ll need to read both, the easiness of writing certain characters I think would make those early years easier with simplified rather than traditional characters. I still remember how much easier my homework became when I could switch to simplified from traditional. However, I learned them pre-Heisig and so with Heisig some of those differences might be moot. Also, if you haven’t considered Heisig before and your years into the Chinese learning process, I still recommend it for some of those hard to remember characters.
Traditional first, then simplified. I second that! The other way around is very, very hard and may be frustrating.
A small mistake in your post: “Mainland and Singapore (if you learn Simplified)” should be “Mainland and Singapore (if you learn Traditional)”.
Thanks for the typo catch, Hans-Peter. It’s fixed now!
This is interesting to me. After coming to Taiwan, I must have heard this debate a million times. While I heard Taiwanese people advance the “simple characters for simple people” and “simplified is ugly” arguments, the one single argument foreigners here have given me again and again is that it’s easier to go from traditional to simplified than visa versa.
And I think that’s true. In my own experience, simplified characters were easy coming from a fántǐ background. So many of the characters that were simplified relied on such simple phonetic components (e.g. 認識 -> 认识) or incompletely versions of the characters (e.g. 號 -> 号) that I can still write nearly all the simplified characters I picked up on that vacation. In fact, now that I’m able to write pretty much everything I can read in Traditional (which is only at about the level of a 4th grader), picking up simplified characters wouldn’t be much of a challenge at all. After all, they were designed for people who were already used to traditional characters.
However, I’m not so sure that it’s better for a student to start with traditional characters. It’s true that you’ll need them eventually, but I’d argue that an advanced student can handle the load of learning a bunch of traditional characters without much pain, but a beginner might be broken by the prospect of memorizing 醫 instead of 医 and 歡 instead of 欢. I’m sure that of my old Shīdà classmates who quit in the first semester, a bunch must have seen all those stroke-filled beasts in the first few chapters of the book and just said, “Fuck it. Speaking is good enough.”
Great article.
Personally I know both traditional and simplified Chinese characters. What I think is that you have to know both characters, but when come to writing, simplified version would be the preferred, since it is easier to learn and write.
I have a website that let people to learn a Chinese character a day. It is mainly in simplified format. However, for each character, I will have a traditional. Even you do not know how to write the traditional character, at least you can “recognize” the it.
One other thing that simplified has going for it is that on a computer and with default font sizes, it’s significantly easier to read. A large number of traditional characters just melt into a black blob whereas simplified generally have a larger proportion of whitespace, making them easier to distinguish.
That being said, when comparing simplified with traditional, simplified seems to come off like text speak does in English (r/are u/you etc), which I can’t stand in English. Looking at the further simplifications that were later retracted, I find them pretty ugly and meaningless. I guess that’s the same feeling most people who go the traditional route have when seeing regular simplified chars.
As for which one to learn first, I think it’s much of a muchness. I learnt Simplified first and had no trouble picking up Traditional. The key is learn whatever is the most appropriate considering your usage and planned future usage.
Traditional Characters + Computer Monitor = Horribly Wrong.
From a design perspective, I can’t understand an argument for more complexity. Design is about communication – not decoration – and characters are for communicating, not decorating. They should be as simple as possible in order to communicate effectively. Traditional characters are outmoded.
I read traditional characters on the monitor every day, as does nearly everyone else here in Taiwan (or in HK). I can assure you there’s nothing horribly wrong about it. It works fine. Computer use actually circumvents the one major disadvantage of traditional characters– the hassle of writing them.
In reading, the important thing is how distinct a character is from another, not how “simple” it is.
Look at these character pairs (traditional/simplified)
義 vs. 叉 / 义 vs. 叉
無 vs. 天 / 无 vs. 天
廣 vs. 廠 / 广 vs. 厂
術 vs. 木 / 术 vs. 木
In each case, the traditional character pair are more readily distinguishable from each other than the simplified pair. Don’t get me wrong. I’d rather write 厂 than 廠. But if I’m on a computer it’s equally easy to write one as the other, and when reading it’s good to have clearly distinct characters.
Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine we wanted to simplify Arabic numerals in such a way that each character consisted of only a single stroke. You could chop off the horizontal section of “7″, for example, “5″ could be reduced to the horizontal bar at the top, and so on. Our new seven would still be distinct from one, due it being at an angle instead of a completely vertical line, and it would be faster to write! Unfortunately, the change would hinder communication rather than help it.
Something similar to what you suggest with your thought experiment has been studied and apparently comprehension does not seem to suffer at all by masking out the bottoms of letters. And, actually, one of the techniques for speed reading is to focus only on the tops of letters. That kind of makes my point. As long as characters are sufficiently unique, simpler is better. I can’t imagine mistaking “U” for “V” or “广” for “厂”. They are sufficiently unique but still quite simple. Also, if “7″ was reduced to “/” and “5″ was reduced to “_”, of course they’d still be sufficiently unique and still distinguishable from “|”. That’s my point.
I’ve done both of those. In any case, there have been a number of formal studies on the disambiguation of simplified vs. traditional characters and the ease with which native speakers become literate readers. Traditional characters regularly come out ahead. The topic isn’t quite so cut and dry as you might guess at first glance.
The only real problem of simplification is that it is not a one-to-one relationship (it is now obvious, but how could they guess ?). A one-to-one conversion between both systems could be easily handled by computers and everyone would be free to choose his own system. I mean, going from 廠 to 厂 is ok for me, but why the need to merge 台/臺/颱/檯 ?
I know it is possible to get help from the context and try an automatic conversion, a la Wikipedia zh, but it is still a lossy compression of information, for a gain which is not evident to me. It also means that if I want to write a word containing 台 in traditional (I am learning simplified), I basically have to relearn it to know which traditional form it is. Great !
I don’t know if there is an objectively right answer, but here are my two biased cents.
Learn the character set that you’re most likely to use first. If you think you’ll be traveling to the mainland, or if you think you’ll be doing research on traditional texts — that should drive your decision. I suspect that most college students are interested in China as part of their career, and will probably eventually end up working with the mainland. In that respect, I think the choice is increasingly obvious.
Taiwanese and Hong Kong media might be more interesting. However, the work opportunities and sheer amount of information coming from China will eventually dwarf the others. It’s not right or wrong, but it’s just the question of learning what is most useful, and how to get up the curve as quickly as possible. It’s important to get wired into a culture or society, whether that is through reading the blogs or the newspapers, etc. Learning both eventually happens, but what you spend your limited time learning first is crucial.
I ended up learning traditional first, and then moving to simplified. I wouldn’t say that retarded my progress on simplified much, but I would say it’s better to learn what you need to know sooner.
Final note: typing (with tools like the google pinyin IME) makes this debate less acute in my opinion. The pain of writing traditional characters is significantly lower — assuming you don’t have a teacher that insists on you handing in homework written by hand. Recognizing / reading is a much lower bar for students, and it allows you to focus on usage and grammar, rather than trying to remember a missing stroke.