Just because it was a Mao initiative, doesn’t make it bad. Remember pinyin was also invented by the Red Chinese (with Soviet help.) Imagine learning Chinese without pinyin — it would be a nightmare. Just as a bit of trivia, simplified characters are also used in Singapore as well as taught in the schools. Hanyu pinyin, in my opinion is much better than the Taiwanese version simply because it represents how Mandarin is actually pronounced. Remember pinyin wasn’t designed for English speakers — it was created to help Chinese school children learn to read their own language.

Personally, I wish Mao would have gone further and make pinyin the official Chinese writing system — while characters are beautiful, their usefulness, especially in the digital age is waning. After all, to type Chinese, most people must use pinyin and then the software converts the pinyin to characters.. An inefficient and often imprecise system. China’s growing economic influence also demands that more foreigners learn Chinese — something that isn’t easy. China would be well served in further simplifying the writing system and relegating characters to the poetic and calligraphic arts. Kind of the way cursive writing is all but obsolete in the English world..

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So, I was wondering how is Chinese? Can they all understand each other more or less, like different English speaking countries? Or are the differences more tricky, like how I am learning Brazilian Portuguese but I would have to strain to understand European Portuguese with different spellings and verb tenses and such?

Or does it end up completely different?

How does that work?

Thank you,
Sherise (18 year old exchange student)

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Now I catch up on my Chinese on the web from a mainland China site(http://chinesepod.com)and starting this week from a well produced Taiwan site ( http://worldlearnerchinese.com ). I’ve found that Chinese has become less different between to two sides. This maybe good. Maybe this is a sign of the two sides future relations.

Johnson

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Some of the concepts involved in learning Chinese are really just a matter of acclimation, of getting comfortable with the idea. Also, learning a language goes so much easier if you focus on the joys of sound, the symbols, the ideas that come from discovery through curiosity, instead of “Must-learn-Chinese, I-am-learning-Chinese.”

Just like travel – you gotta get into it to get anything out of it. There’s a difference between falling in love with the idea of speaking Chinese, and falling in love with speaking Chinese.

All things come in time. If you’re on this trip, don’t give up.

Xie xie. (Forgive my lack of tones: my computer has an accent.)

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good luck.

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Of course, Mao and the CCP were directly responsible for the deaths of 10s of millions … so perhaps their motives, principled though they may have been, were less than altruistic.

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As a Westerner, I’d never make a statement that traditional forms are the only way to appreciate the Chinese language. After 4 years of simplified characters, my fifth-year teacher was from Taiwan & made us read unsimplified. It was a good exercise, but nothing reinforced my opinion more that simpler is better.

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However, we need to remember that the Chinese language has evolved over the centuries and has gone through several simplifications. Otherwise we would write hieroglyph-like characters today And although I can read traditional characters,I am relieved that I didn’t have to learn to write them, because they are much more complicated to memorize. This is also the reason why only a few scholars could read in ancient China while many ordinary people where iliterate.

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We in the West need to make more of an effort to understand China – after all, we’re surrounded by stuff that’s made there!

I found the part about classical v. simplified Mandarin very interesting.

What do you see as the political implications of simplifying language?

-Tim

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