Traditional v. Simplified... at the end of the day, it's political

I spent a lot of time being confused by the Traditional v. Simplified debate during our first year in Mandarin Immersion. Having been raised on Traditional, I had no idea what "simplified" meant, except that it was supposed to be a simpler version of the characters to make them easier to learn. Sounds awesome, right? For those of us who had to slave over learning characters as kids, writing and writing, over and over again... Characters that had fewer strokes meant less slaving, right?

When we started MI at K, mommies like me, we'd joke about how we couldn't figure out if, while looking at Chinese text, we were having a memory problem or if we were looking at Simplified. Moms of young children have a memory problem, anyway. Too much going on just to keep your child safe, let alone having to backtrack to your own long-gone childhood.

Now that we are nearly done with 4 years of being in a MI program, and I've learned more Simplified characters while returning to glance at their Traditional versions, and having suffered through numerous strongly iterated opinions about which one is better, I can soundly say that it doesn't matter.

You are stuck with the one that defines your program or is the one that your teacher is most comfortable with. That's it. Then stick with it. After a few years, your kid or you, whoever is the one learning Chinese in your picture, will figure out the difference. There is one caveat: that is if the person who is learning Chinese has learned enough. At some point, it's true - there aren't that many Simplified characters relative to the Traditional ones. Some characters were never "simplified" anyway.

What is more critical is to acquire vocabulary in context. Having enough experience with enough context and content, then your eye will adjust to guessing.

What underlies people's strong opinions is history and politics. Maybe you can throw class in there. But with all things Chinese, class is a part of politics. After all, what is a "communist revolution" if not one about class as an essential part of politics? I will save the political economy lesson for another day.

Suffice to say, people have their issues with being "from" somewhere along the Chinese spectrum. Hong Kong Chinese prefer Traditional, as do Taiwanese Chinese. Singapore is far more pragmatic, as they are for many things, so they go with the Mainland.

I have met HK'ers and Taiwanese Chinese who are emphatically against Simplified, some even going so far as to claim it's all a Communist plot against what is "real." I have met Mainland Chinese who opine for the long lost days of the past and point to the adoption of Simplified as having created a literacy crisis, that even the educated person is now cut-off from texts of a certain period. I have met Mainland Chinese who refuse to raise their children with Traditional because they believe it will cut them off from the Future.

These are all really "political" views that are based on people's individual historical experiences.

I have met teachers and folks who are a bit more moderate in their views, usually people who have spent longer periods of time outside of China/HK/Taiwan who have said what is the bigger truth - that it's all the same once you learn enough. I have read the views of linguists who point out that many Simplified characters are based on the cursive versions of the characters or even just have a very long history of usage in and of themselves.

People might say learning Simplified is easier to then learn Traditional, or the converse, that learning Traditional makes it easier to read Simplified after the fact. But it's a rather useless discussion in the face of how much and how hard you have to work to learn anything at all for what it means to learn the Chinese language in the first place.

So pick one. Stick with it. And if you stick with it long enough, then you'll see. But without getting going and always thinking there is a better way, then not much will happen at all. With either path, the critical piece is having learned enough, crossing a threshold of sorts. To cross that threshold - well, that's what this blog is about. Like I said in an earlier post, the "flashcard" mentality will get you nowhere. Acquiring vocabulary is really important. But merely memorizing it is not the way to go. Vocabulary in Context. That context means other characters and content. But that's for another post...