I’d like to add Japan to that list. While there are simplified kanjis (chin. characters) used (for example the character 国 for country like in mainland China, not 國 like in Taiwan) most of the kanjis are traditional Chinese characters.
The reason why the traditional vs. simplified debate is BS that 95% of students who learned traditional from the beginning say that traditional is better while 95% of students who learned simplified first say that simplified is better. Now, this would be a perfectly logical outcome if students were making an informed decision about which form to study a priori. But that’s not what’s happening. The vast majority of students don’t conciously which form to study when they begin learning Chinese. Most people start studying Chinese in college, where they’re forced to use whichever form the departments uses. Or they first come to Taiwan or the mainland to teach English or do whatever job and start to take Chinese classes on the side. It’s extremely rare for a person with zero Chinese background to think, “Hmm, I want to learn Chinese. I think I’ll go to Taiwan since I hear the type of Chinese they have is the best form” or “I think I’ll go to the mainland since they have the best form.”
When someone who has only studied one form says that that particular form is the best way, I think at least part of their argument is motivated by an attempt to justify to themselves that they didn’t waste their time studying an inferior form of Chinese. Who wants to admit to themselves that they’ve wasted YEARS of their time studying the wrong form? I think this is especially true for the more gut feeling reasons (e.g. “I think simplified characters are ugly.”) Moreover, there is a lot of completely unrelated poltical/cultural baggage underpinning some of these arguments (e.g. China doesn’t respect human rights, so traditional Chinese is better.)
I mean, if you took a group of 100 Taiwanese students with little to no English experience and sent 50 to America to learn English and 50 to England to learn English and then you asked them which accent they preferred, do you really have to wonder how most of the students would respond?
My own experience is that I studied two years of traditional in college, went to the mainland for a year and spent a lot of time relearning my limited vocabulary in simplified, went back home and studied two years of simplified (since the vast majority of the students in our department all went to the mainland for their study abroad, we all switched), after graduation went back to the mainland for a year, then came to Taiwan and got screwed trying to relearn my larger vocabulary in traditional. So I’d like to think that I don’t have some hidden cogitive-dissonance reduction mechanism clouding my judgment, because I’ve wasted equal amounts of time on both forms. In my humble opinion,
1.) From an aesthetic point of view, traditional wins. As irrational as saying that Italian is a beautiful language or German is an ugly language, I agree that simplfied is the uglier form.
2.) From a usage point of view, simplified TROUNCES traditional. There’s no way around it. If I actually had to write one of these forms by hand for, say, an essay, I would choose simplified seven days of the week (in this day and age of computer IMEs and software conversion, this doesn’t matter as much.) And learning…Jesus Christ on a bouncy pogo stick, simplified is SO MUCH easier to learn. Anyone who says that they would rather learn 醫 rather than 医 is absolutely deluding themselves.
3.) For a beginner, it’s much easier to understand how Chinese is a phonetic language through simplfied. For example, the word 達/达. I remember getting into Beijing and seeing a road sign for 八达岭, and it was like light went on in my head. “Hey, that’s 大 in that character. It’s just like my professor taught me. Chinese is a phonetic language.” There are at least 100 other examples where the simplified reduces the phonetic compound of the character to a much more common version and it’s much easier for a beginner/intermediate student to say, “A ha! I don’t know this character, but I already know how to pronounce it.”
4.) I’ve had to “translate” simplified Chinese for Taiwanese people (it was sort of fun being able to go into a book store with a girl, picking up a photography book from China, and saying, “What does this say? You don’t know? Ha.”) but I’ve yet to translate traditional Chinese for a mainland person. My experience with this is obviously statistically insignificant.
Because simplified is easier to learn, for those that are interested in learning both systems, knowing traditional first is easier than learning simplified first. Let’s take your example of 醫 vs 医. The traditional-knowing person will simply need to know that the simplified version is the upper left hand corner. The simplifed-knowing person needs to remember a whole bunch of other new stuff that wraps around 医. So if one lives in Taiwan/HK, of course it makes sense to learn traditional because moving to simplified will be easier.
As for handwriting, no doubt simplified is faster but as far as I can tell, many people that learned only traditional actually write a fair bit of simplified characters in their personal writings. The reason is that characters such as 医(醫), 会(會), 难(難) as well as simplified radicals for 言(讠), 金(钅), and 食 have long been a common shorthand even before simplified characters were introduced. The objection that many have with simplified characters is that not that they are being used, but that these characters have been made “official” rather than leaving it in the realm of shorthand and variants.
Yes, but the traditional character learner expended more effort to learn the stuff wrapped around the 医 in the first place. What’s harder: learning 7 strokes and then learning 11 additional strokes or learning 18 strokes in the first place? I think the difference is inconsequential. Even if ceteris paribus going S->T is slightly harder than going T->S, I’d think other factors would overwhelm that difference. For instance, it’ll be much easier for advanced level students to make the jump than for beginner students, since advanced students can more easily mentally mix around characters by their component parts.
Moreover, it’s certainly better to learn 7 strokes and then 11 more strokes or only 7 characters than to not learn anything at all. I swear that my intro book included 我爸爸是醫生 in the first lesson just to weed out people before the end of add/drop. Indeed, if Russian had fit into my schedule my freshman year, I probably would have never ended up on this stinking island.
Anyhow, for all practical puposes, I think we’re making too much out of this difference. With technology in these wacky modern times, you don’t need to learn everything. It took me a little while to get used to reading traditional, but I never bothered to learn how to write a lot of these new characters since I can recognize them when I type them in whatever IME. Hell, I haven’t even gotten around to learning bo-po-mo-fo.
It makes sense to learn whatever form you see every day.
I must be one of the 5%. I learned simplified first, but prefer traditional.
Yes, but the traditional character learner expended more effort to learn the stuff wrapped around the 医 in the first place. What’s harder: learning 7 strokes and then learning 11 additional strokes or learning 18 strokes in the first place? I think the difference is inconsequential. Even if ceteris paribus going S->T is slightly harder than going T->S, I’d think other factors would overwhelm that difference. For instance, it’ll be much easier for advanced level students to make the jump than for beginner students, since advanced students can more easily mentally mix around characters by their component parts.[/quote]
I guess I’m looking at this issue from the point of reading rather than writing. Deducing simplified forms from the traditional ones is easier than vice versa. Not significantly easier, but easier nonetheless.
I’ve never thought about this from the point of view of writing. But thinking on the fly here, if a beginner starts learning 医, he then goes away and copies out 医 20 times and through using it in sentences, reinforces his memorization of how to write that character. When the same students goes to learn 醫, he’ll have to repeat much of that process again. However, if the student learns 醫 right off the bat, when he goes to learn 医, all he has to remember is that it is a sub-component of 醫. He needn’t go through the same amount of writing exercises again because he knows how to write it already. Of course, this doesn’t work for all the simplifications (i.e. 葉/叶) but a good subset of it at least.
I disagree - the condences characters make a contextually based language that much more based on context. As for 醫 vs 医traditional is more internally consistent so that once you ‘chunk’ the radicals in your memory, it’s not that difficult. Just my opinion
I learned both simultaneously for a while (actually learning them alongside the study of Northern Wei script, which is a curious blend of early kaishu retaining heavy clerical and some seal script elements), and always felt the traditional characters (and the early kaishu, N. Wei to early Tang) to be, overall, aesthetically more pleasing (with a few exceptions). I also find them more interesting from an etymological perspective.
Slightly aside, when locals tell me traditional characters are more… well, traditional, I like to point out some exceptions just for fun. Some of the simplified forms such as 来, the simpler vsn. of 來, go back a very long way (Qin to Han, in this case, in clerical script). And some actually precede their “traditional” form, e.g. 采 preceded 採.
Finally, I agree that more effort is required to learn the traditional forms, but if one is going to learn both and not simultaneously, it is IMO best to learn the traditional first, as the trad --> simpl move is then easy.
I must be one of the 5%. I learned simplified first, but prefer traditional.[/quote]
Ditto . . but I really don’t think we are quite so unique.
Agree with Dragonbones and Elegua, also.
HG
I must be one of the 5%. I learned simplified first, but prefer traditional.[/quote]
Me too.
I guess I’m an exception, too. I learned traditional first, and I sorely wish I’d learned simplified instead. Er… I mean, I’ve learned about as many traditional characters as a Taiwanese 3rd grader, and I desperately wish I knew the same number of STROKES worth of characters in simplified. If I had, I’d be cruising through newspapers, and possibly even be able to understand more in a traditional paper than I can now.
I totally agree with alidarbac that learning 7 strokes at a low level, moving on to the next character and then coming back and learning the other 11 strokes of 醫 after achieving basic literacy in simplified characters is more efficient than struggling with the 18 stroke beast as a beginner and then having a near effortless conversion to simplified later. I remember going through PAVC a couple of years ago, and it sucked. Learning an 18 stroke character isn’t just twice as hard for a beginner as learning a 7 stroke character; it’s more like 5 times as hard. Also, Elegua, what are these radicals that I can “chunk out” of 醫? I can’t find any phonetic information in there. I can’t really find any semantic information in there, either. It’s just not one of those “nice” characters like 鱈.
The way I see it is this: I’m living in Taiwan, so of course I’m going to learn traditional characters. However, since over 98% of the Mandarin speakers on the planet use simplified, I’m going to have to learn it, too, if I ever want to get a job back home with my Chinese skills. If I didn’t have a specific interest in Taiwan, I probably would have just learned whatever they teach in western colleges.
[quote=“Xiaoma”]Also, Elegua, what are these radicals that I can “chunk out” of
醫
? I can’t find any phonetic information in there. I can’t really find any semantic information in there, either.[/quote]
First, be careful not to call just any old part of a character a ‘radical’. Only the ONE part it’s indexed under in the dictionary is its ‘radical’ (in the sense of 部首 bu4shou3, dictionary section header). Please don’t misuse the term ‘radical’ as if it meant just any old component. You’ll only confuse yourself. 
Second, its semantic is 酉 you3 (which is a vessel such as that for alcohol; probably millet beer specifically, despite the frequent mistranslation as ‘wine’; or perhaps here a vessel for traditional medicinal salves or potions); and its phonetic is
殹
yi4, an obscure graph which means moan or groan.
Now, since the graph is so complex, it may help to come up with a mnemonic for this top yi4 component too. I’ll give you one which is etymologically plausible, as a bonus.
医 (which is also the simplified form of
醫
) is ㄈ plus 矢 shi3 ‘arrow’ (or the latter might be a distortion of a man; think 大 or 天). Imagine a sick man or a man struck by an arrow, so he’s lying in bed ㄈ groaning.
BTW, all of these are pronounced yi4: 伇 翳 毅 疫 and 役, so the right side (殳) of 殹 is probably its phonetic in turn, despite the fact that shallow modern books tend to tell you that 殳 “is” pronounced shu1 or shu2 (as in 杸 shu1), generally meaning to strike and showing a 又 hand striking with a hooked rod 几. Those books fail to take into account clear evidence of ancient polyphony and/or a divergence from a single ancient pronunciation into various modern readings.
I hope I haven’t confused you there. Just think 矢 man struck by arrow, in bed ㄈ, with 殳 phonetic (yi4) but possibly also semantic (strike), and then the doctor treats the patient with medicine from a jar 酉.
In talking to those from the mainland, I find that most have some difficulty reading newspapers from Taiwan due to the not only the character set, but also the writing style. One typically requires a greater breadth of character knowledge to read a paper from Taiwan when compared against the mainland.
The operative word here is beginner. When you write “learning”, I’m assuming you mean “learning how to write”. So yes, a beginner who regards all characters as simply a random collection of strokes will have a harder time learning how to write an 18 stroke character than a 7 stroke character. But once one advances and has acquired a critical mass of characters, character partitioning should start to be much easier. YMMV of course since every person learns differently.
Also, learning how to read and learning how to write are two very different things. From my own observations, the number of strokes seem to have no significant bearing on how fast one learns how to read. My four year old son easily learned how to read many high stroke-count characters such as
龜, 學, 覺, 贏, 藥, 關, 嗽, 獸
. However, it took him a bit longer to be able to distinguish between fairly low stroke-count characters such as
人/入, 石/右, 又/叉, 土/士, 鳥/烏, 服/股, 後/俊
.
[quote=“sjcma”]My four year old son easily learned how to read many high stroke-count characters such as
龜, 學, 覺, 贏…[/quote]
You taught your four-year-old son [size=24]贏
? 
:loco:
[quote=“sjcma”][quote=“Xiaoma”]
Also, learning how to read and learning how to write are two very different things. From my own observations, the number of strokes seem to have no significant bearing on how fast one learns how to read. My four year old son easily learned how to read many high stroke-count characters such as
龜, 學, 覺, 贏, 藥, 關, 嗽, 獸
. However, it took him a bit longer to be able to distinguish between fairly low stroke-count characters such as
人/入, 石/右, 又/叉, 土/士, 鳥/烏, 服/股, 後/俊
.[/quote][/quote]
I totally agree. I ‘know’ 100s of high stroke count characters because the brain simply ‘photographs’ the shape. (Beginning readers also do this in English) Writing characters is a differrent set of cognitive skills. In Chinese, as in English, we need to learn to learn to decode (in terms of being able to recognise the components of a character) as well as recognise the shapes.
[quote=“Dragonbones”][quote=“sjcma”]My four year old son easily learned how to read many high stroke-count characters such as
龜, 學, 覺, 贏…
[/quote]
You taught your four-year-old son
贏
? :loco:[/quote]
Hehe…well, to balance it out, I also taught him
輸
. 
Actually, I’ve been reading the book
龜兔賽跑
(The Tortoise and the Hare) with him, so high stroke count characters such as
龜、樹、贏、輸
naturally come up.
Yes, indeed the operative word here is beginner. Wasn’t this thread about whether it would be better/easier for a beginner to learn simplified or traditional Chinese?
Agreed, but as I argued earlier, I believe that you will reach this “critical mass,” where you really start to recognize how parts of characters contribute to their pronounciation and meaning, much earlier if you study simplified. Another example besides the 達/达 is 療/疗. I remember learning 療 first during 2nd year Chinese in the States and while making the connection that the 病字旁 meant that the character had to do with sickness (since I learned 疼 and 痛 at the same time), I had no idea to associate what was underneath in 療 with the sound liao. But when I saw 疗 a year later, I immediately thought, “Oh cool, that’s from 受不了.” (Now you might argue that the traditional bushou is more fitting, since it is visually distinct from the le particle, but my basic point is that you indeed make these associations much earlier.)
My basic point is this: It “costs” more to learn traditional Chinese in terms of time expended. After one year, a student plugging away at a simplified character curriculum will be dramatically more functionally literate than a student plugging away at a traditional character curriculum given the same level of dedication, level of immersion, etc. Yes, this difference is larger for beginner levels than advanced levels. And this is assuming that there is a significant writing-by-hand component to the curriculum. (In a strictly conversational class or within some theoretical, revolutionary curriculum that taught reading and writing by phonetic IME [which I actually think would be really awesome], my guess is there would be little difference.) But from what I’ve heard of Chinese curricula at the major universities in Taiwan, writing-by-hand is by far the most important and most frequently tested aspect. After all, it’s a lot easier and quicker for an instructor to grade whether 20 students got all the strokes in 喜歡 right rather than the tone or the ability to correctly use it in a sentence.
Whether the “benefits” of traditional Chinese are greater so that it’s worth this higher “cost” is a more subjective debate.
No sir, I do not believe it was. Everyone knows simplified is easier for beginners to learn, and the thread would only be 2-3 posts long. 
just a thought:
do you like it when people in online conversations abbreviate every word they can, you know the: “R u his bf?” kind of sentences? Do you think something is lost when abbreviating words for the sake of simplification and speed of writing?
Would it be easier for foreigners learning English, if long words would be abbreviated? No need to learn “Refrigerator” any more, just learn “Fridge”?
I guess it’s the age-old question of preservation (being conservative) or change (being progressive).
There are good reasons for both.
The problem I have with the simplified system in Mainland China is that it is not a natural development as a result of usage patterns in the daily life of the people, but it is the result of a decision made by a central goverment forcing the people to adopt a new way of writing. In other words, the step from traditional to simplified is huge one over a short period of time. This kind of change always results in a huge controversy.
Simplification as such is just natural, and will, over decades and centuries, even occur in the most conservative of countries, just slower, and most often only noticed by the older generations. It is highly unlikely that 100 years from now people in Taiwan will use all of the complicated characters that are used now.
I would question the meaningfulness of this. The level of literacy in simplified or traditional is so low after one year that it doesn’t really matter if the student studying in simplified is a little bit ahead. You can only really start to compare levles of literacy after two or three years of serious study in a Chinese-language speaking environment.
Both student, in my view, would be far better off if they never looked at a character for their first two years. But that’s another debate I suppose.
[quote=“alidarbac”]
My basic point is this: It “costs” more to learn traditional Chinese in terms of time expended. After one year, a student plugging away at a simplified character curriculum will be dramatically more functionally literate than a student plugging away at a traditional character curriculum given the same level of dedication, level of immersion, etc. Yes, this difference is larger for beginner levels than advanced levels. And this is assuming that there is a significant writing-by-hand component to the curriculum. (In a strictly conversational class or within some theoretical, revolutionary curriculum that taught reading and writing by phonetic IME [which I actually think would be really awesome], my guess is there would be little difference.) But from what I’ve heard of Chinese curricula at the major universities in Taiwan, writing-by-hand is by far the most important and most frequently tested aspect. After all, it’s a lot easier and quicker for an instructor to grade whether 20 students got all the strokes in 喜歡 right rather than the tone or the ability to correctly use it in a sentence.
Whether the “benefits” of traditional Chinese are greater so that it’s worth this higher “cost” is a more subjective debate.[/quote]