No matter what affected Taiwan’s education system (Japanese did have important influence on Taiwan’s education system, in both good and bad sides though), literacy rate in Taiwan has improved a lot more after Japanese left, and the improvement has been much faster and more extensive than when Japan still colonized Taiwan, and that had nothing to do with simplified characters. And to remind you, the highest literacy rate Taiwan ever has in her history is now instead of during the Japanese colonial period. You mis-interpret the history. (Juba’s statisitcs data happens to serve as an example, if his data is correct
Just because Taiwan and China have the same origin of culture and basically same language, it doesn’t mean they should reunite their characters, especially in the way favorable to China. Just because China is politically and will be economically powerful, Taiwan has to forsake its own written language and transform it into the form that China uses? For whose sake we say this? :?: If I do business with the British, should I try to understand their British accent, or should I ask them to speak American English like the powerful Americans do? Of course we can argue that Taiwan should enhance English as an efficient second language, for business sake, but Taiwan’s English ability has nothing to do with traditional or simplified characters.
I can’t say SC or TC is better, though I prefer traditional characters because I’m used to it. But when it comes to preservation or transformation of a nation’s language, there are a lot more to take into consideration than just business. (Hm, I hope I’m right about this)
Do you have figures to back up that statement or would you just like it to be that way? Also, you may notice two keys of your keyboard with the word “shift” printed on them. Try holding one of the shift keys down, type some letters and see the astonishing effect it has! [/quote]
*courtesy of cia world factbook
china - exports : $232 billion
china - imports : $190 billion
taking a rather conservative view that even with so much control of market capital, if ethnic chinese in those countries are only responsible for 1/3rd of internation trade involving those countries, yes, ethnic chinese in taiwan and s.e. asia contribute a greater % to world trade than china proper.
Note: When the literacy rate in China was 20%, it was poor, ruled by the KMT and used traditional characters. When it was 84.1%, it was less poor, ruled by the Communist Party and used simplified characters. You can draw your own conclusions as to cause and effect.
I don’t mis-interpret it at all, silly boy. I just didn’t list every possible factor.
(1) Taiwan’s population in 1945 was only about 6 million.
(2) Of the 2 million mainlanders who arrived, a very large number were educated. (Sun Li-jen’s 100,000 troops were all high school graduates)
(3) Massive infusion of US aid.
So. You had a fairly well educated elite ruling one of the most literate countries (with a small population) in Asia which was at the same time receiving massive amounts of foreign aid and trade benefits.
Wow. Think Taiwan had a few advantages, do ya? [/quote]
and the point is? that mainlanders could not have achieved current rates of literacy had they not abadoned traditional characters? now that they’re all much better off economically and much more literate, maybe it’s time for them to dump “chinese for dummies” and switch back to tc. or are they still too easily confused even in their current state to be able to handle all those hard characters?
Hard to say, but simplified characters probably helped some.
Now it’s time to factor in myopia. Does any place in the world have as many short-sighted people as Taiwan? You know, if any Taiwanese person doesn’t wear glasses it’s because he wears contacts. Could it have something to do with all the time Taiwanese kids spend hunched over their desks writing all those extra strokes? (Simplified character
I think I have been missunderstood: I do not want to change the Traditional Characters to SC for business sake but instead I want them to learn reading English so we can save time and cost for mostly unnecessary translations of e.g. technical documents.
In fact I like the traditional characters, too, and find it more interesting to learn though I must admit it’s not easy for me …
Languages evolve with time, and it is reasonable to evolve toward an easier way. But to dramatically simplify its own language like China communists did, well, I don’t know. China leaders in early and mid 20th century did not give a damn about cultural heritage. Their reasoning behind their policies was rather “genius” and simple. For example, they thought low literacy rate had resulted from the language (which I don’t think so), so they created a new simplified form, which in many senses has deviated from its original characters and radical principles, let alone the language’s natural patterns of history. And the language is not the only cultural heritage they dismantled during the early time of their regime. They wanted to sever the then-present from the past, which is all right, but by destroying culture, architecture, language, and religions? Well, well, well
And if simplified characters only contributed to literacy rate, say, by 5%, but it destroyed the language heritage, say, by 50%, then it is certainly not worthwhile to change it to a simplified form in the first place.
Yes, I am familiar with the accomplishments of Mr. Webster. Once again, your point?? Please read (and try to understand) other people’s comments before replying, thank you very much.
To Pro SC ppl:
Let me provide some general information on this issue. Okay, first of all, I understand that some of you may like simplified characters because you believe it is easier or whatever. On the surface it does seem so, because you, being someone who does not know Chinese (at first), has to learn fewer strokes than TC. Now think about the logic here. Just because it has fewer strokes does not mean it is better or that people should use it. You cannot be so simple-minded. You have to understand that traditional characters are the REAL Chinese characters, has been for thousands of years, never posed any problems for the Chinese people as far as literacy rates or whatever. It is an integral part of Chinese heritage and culture, hence the term “traditional”. A lot of westerners cannot understand this, because in the west, people generally don’t care about handwriting as much, or what kind of script you can master, or writing in a brush, etc. Then the commies took over. Simplified characters were instituted, along with other idiotic things like melting your pots/pans to create metal, destroying temples and schools, having kids hate their parents and send them to jail, etc…the list goes on. You have to understand that SC is just one of the stupid ideas that the commies came up with, it’s as simple as that. The purpose was supposedly to increase literacy, but in reality it was just part of their plan during the Cultural Revolution to change everything. In addition, they did not want their people to be able to read what’s been printed in Taiwan, because they want to control the information that’s available to the people. They are STILL doing the same thing by controlling the media and censoring the internet.
Now, you might say that maybe SC turns out to be a pretty good idea because it did increase literacy. Wrong. In statistics there’s this term called “correlation”. The increase in literacy rate in China is simply not correlated to TC or SC. To say that China’s literacy rate was low before 1949 because of the KMT and TC is ridiculous. It was low because it has been low, that was the way things were back then. Back in the days not everybody had access to education, but China prospered for thousands of years with a low literacy rate. Being able to read just wasn’t as important as it is today, and many were farmers. That’s just the way it was, nothing to do with the KMT or TC. Most the countries (probably all) had low literacy rates until recently. Now you say that literacy rate increased with the institution of SC. Wrong again. It increased simply because the educational system got a little better and people in general were a little better off (still far behind Taiwan, which uses TC). Now how do you know that if China stayed with TC, that the literacy rate would not increase? I think that if they stuck with TC, the literacy rate would’ve increased at a faster rate, because they wouldn’t have to make everyone learn a new writing system. A more competent gov’t and better educational system is what china should’ve aimed for, instead of butchering the Chinese language.
Let me rephrase that: China had a low literacy rate for thousands of years but it definitely didn’t have anything to do with using traditional characters - I KNOW! - and what the hell anyway because the peasants managed to eke out a prosperous existence even though they couldn’t read.
what webster did has no relevance to the discussion in this thread. maybe if webster had made himself supreme ruler of the united states and forced everyone in the country to use his spellings you’d have a point. we’re not talking about academics thinking up neat new ways to use their language. we’re talking about the communists who ditched thousands of years of culture because they thought chinese people were too dumb to learn traditional characters.
webster’s contributions were that he unified the different ways of writing english to make it more consistent. he didn’t invent new words or spellings, he took words that were already used and tried to standardize on those. more akin to the spread of putonghua as the official language of china, though even there people were forced to adopt it. webster’s ideas were adopted willingly.
Cool down 8) . As a matter of fact, the differences between simplified and traditional characters are relatively small. If you have learned traditional characters well, adapting to simplified is relatively easy. The other way might take a bit work.
the Chinese character system has been changed around a few times, as a matter of fact the writing system was unified the first time under Qin Shihuangdi (221-209 BC). Before that - during the warring states period - each of the different states had at least some characters, which were unique to that state. Since then, more or less every dynasty made their own official list of “recognized” characters. Add in a bit of “natural” development and you arrive at what Taiwan has today. The changes on the mainland do not affect the grammar, most of the characters or the effort it takes to learn them.
I would call it a relatively moderate makeover.
That said, I believe that the writing system itself is a few thousand years past its shelf life.
so on the one hand we have the likes of webster who came up with ideas that were deemed good enough that they were adopted voluntarily and willingly. and on the other hand we’re talking about a couple of elites who thought their idea was so great that they forced it on the people in the name of patriotism. can you see the slight difference here?
fyi, most of the great ideas advanced(and forced on the people) by chinese patriots after the communists came to power(cultural revolution, anyone?) were proven to be absolute bullshit and caused incredible harm to chinese society, chinese culture, the chinese economy, and the chinese people themselves.
to use your ballpoint pen example:
webster - wow, ballpoint pens are fantastic! i’m going to spread the word about how cool they are and try to convert other people to my point of view. maybe one day we can get lots of people to use them.
the commies - hmm…these ballpoint pens are a useful invention. we will now ban all pencils from this country. from this day forth all citizens of china must use ball point pens and anyone found in possession of a pencil will be arrested. i’m sure they would want us to do this as it’s in their best interests.
[quote] Iris:
But it is a fact that literacy in Mainland China improved greatly during the 20th century (long ago, I wrote about some of this stuff in my thesis). I wouldn’t necessarily attribute this to Simplified or Traditional characters but mainly to the political efforts of, yes, the Communists. I don’t support the government in Mainland China, I don’t want to discuss advantage and disadvantage of Traditional and Simplified characters (I consider Simplified as easier because that’s what I learned and studied, but I’m pretty sure Traditional characters are just as easy - or hard- to study as Simplified, it’s a bit like the discussion on Hanyu Pinyin and Zhuyin Fuhao). I just think that it’s not fair to disregard the infrastructural factor when discussing literacy.
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Yes literacy is a MULTI-factorial thing. China has Judges who can sentence you to life imprisonment (Yunnan province) for stealing, but who can’t read and write properly! It is estimated that some of these judges have an average formal schooling of only 3-6 years. ie primary school. This is from mainland newspapers. I don’t think such short schooling has anything to do with
Of course we can argue that Taiwan should enhance English as an efficient second language, for business sake, but Taiwan’s English ability has nothing to do with traditional or simplified characters.
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