Should I learn traditional and simplified Chinese characters?
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- Опубліковано 4 чер 2024
- Should you learn both traditional and simplified Chinese characters? Know your goal for learning and start from there.
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Maybe I'm weird, but....learning the characters is actually my FAVORITE part. So even though I started off learning simplified, I ended up learning traditional, and eventually, both! I believe it can be done, but that's just me.
I agree! I think there's something really beautiful and fascinating about Chinese characters despite how hard people make them out to be.
Perhaps this can lead to learning artistic
calligraphy with brush and ink ?
Me too... Started learning the language cos of the writing.... Can be hard sometimes but once I get familiar with the character, I love it!!!!!
You’re not alone, i think traditional chinese characters are beautiful pieces of art
I agree with this with Japanese, people hate Kanji but I love so much writing them so I want to learn Chinese later too, I think I’ll like both❤
Traditional Chinese keeps the original idea of one character as one painting, simplified Chinese is more phonetic driven, thats why your example "FA" will be the same in Mandarin, though the meaning is totally different, I think there are pros and cons as a learner may get confused and even harder to remember the character system. Characters with complete meaning is funnier to learn and remember. One classic example is in TC "Love ＝愛" there is a heart in the middle, while SC "Love = 爱" the heart is missing. Even in Japanese Kanji, the heart is still there.
Thanks for breaking this down for us!
The heart is simplified to a line
You'll wind up learning both sets eventually so just pick whichever you prefer and drill down eventually you will understand.
This is the reason why I feel more comfortable sticking to Japanese. (I've been learning that for the past 8 years now.)
In Japanese there's only ONE set of Kanji characters. There are a few characters with variations but not as much as Chinese.
Many of the Traditional characters are closer to the Japanese ones than Simplified.
But some of the Simplified ones are closer to the Japanese ones as well.
Japanese's character set is kind of the "best of both worlds" if you will. Also you don't have to learn nearly as many since they're often reused.
doesn't Japanese have different readings for kanji? In chinese it's always the same I think. Besides it's always syllable per character. Characters make way more sense for Chinese than Japanese
@@duckshon True but the many different readings make sense in context.
Agree. My practical take is, pick one set of characters and go with it until you're at a comfortable level of Chinese to read comfortably at will.
At that point, you can then pick the occasional book of the other character script.
When around say 3k-4k character proficiency, the reader can quite well infer a good portion of characters from the other script. It's far less exhausting in my opinion, to then start learning the other set of characters "subconsciously" at this point, which also shouldn't be too effortful. At this level of proficiency, you'd have enough familiarity with the patterns of characters that it's much easier learning these new character variations, than it was learning your first few thousand characters from scratch.
Unless you really enjoy it, it can actually be quite tedious to be learning both for each character from the onset, especially if your hope is to get to reading and enjoying texts sooner.
Learn traditional Chinese characters you can communicate with people in Hong Kong and Taiwan and Macau
I mainly use simplified for writing and reading but I look at the traditional version of characters to remember the meaning (I don't try to write it tho). Also I see traditional everytime I look up lyrics and watch videos so I'm exposed to it a lot too :>
Interesting combination of study and retention techniques. What's your favorite song?
@@ElementaryChinese I don't look at the traditional version of every character I come across tho, only ones I have trouble remembering. I try to "dissect" the traditional character and look at the meaning component. I'm still a noob so idk if every single traditional character has a meaning and sound component but that's what I do. I get help from yt and google too. As for my fave song, I'm obsessed with 永不失联的爱 by 周兴哲!
I don't know if it's natural as a native speaker but it's quite easy for native speakers to understand simplified even if I've only learned traditional growing up. Maybe the same can apply to foreign speakers so you can just learn traditional and if you are good enough, you can understand simplified easily.
3:28 This is quite interesting! Contrary to your experience in the west, Chinese people in Southeast Asia (esp. Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore) are mainly Hokkien & Hakka people. I'm part of that group of people and surprisingly I've never met a Cantonese-speaking person in real life 😅
I had this question in my mind most of the time before learning Chinese😑 Of course I decided to study simplified hahah❣
❤Btw I love your videos❤
I'm obviously also on team simplified. Thanks for being here and watching! What motivated you to start studying Mandarin?
@@ElementaryChinese I'm planning to go there for university :)
Yes there are many throughout
SE Asia who speak Hokkien, Hakka
(but also Jamaica, Surinam, Hawaii. etc.) Teochew,
Hujiu(Fuzhou), Hainan, etc.
I was born in Mexico in an area that has lots of Chinese population which can be equivalent to a Chinatown and most of them I believe are Cantonese but I’ve seen some who speak mandarin as well. I had a friend in elementary who spoke English but also spoke mandarin.
What part of Mexico?
@@ElementaryChinese Mexicali, it has a good Chinese population.
Chinese character for heart 心.
Simplified character for love 爱.
Traditional character for love 愛.
Look very carefully 👀👀on both characters....find me the heart?!!!
Chinese character needs to have meaning to the character, how can you love without a heart??
Well, Simplified is used in mainland China, there is no heart in the love word character, so.......🤣
Simplified has 友 in it. Being friends is a step on the journey to love.
@@skazka3789 unless you're stuck in the friend zone🤣
We have a mostly Mandarin Chinatown in cyrildene south Africa.
Really???
You’re a good vibe
I want to learn all because I’m interest in Chinese language!
Chinatown - it depends on how old that Chinatown is & the inhabitants. Really old Chinatowns will have mostly Cantonese / Toisanese speakers because they were the first Chinese who emigrated. Those dialects are more prevalent among the older generation as well. Since the 1980s, the influx of Taiwanese immigrants and students from Mainland China changed Chinatown to be a mix of Cantonese / Toisanese / Mandarin. In addition, the influx of illegal immigrants from the Fujian province has made the Fujian dialect more prevalent among the laborers (rather than the store owners).
Re traditional vs simplified characters: traditional characters have the radical which helps one to identify or etymology of the character eg, the radical for wood is used for most words for things made out of wood. some simplified characters will still have the radical but not all.
I'm very glad I learned the characters because it absolutely improves your oral comprehension since almost everything in Chinese is subtitled also known as the Chinese themselves have widely varying accents. Without the characters my comprehension drops to 50% with them and especially with the stop button it jumps to 90-100%. The difference is that the parts i'm unsure of orally get clarified with the writing and vice verse. LEARN THE FUCKING CHARACTERS NOOB YOU WILL BE SO GLAD!!!
请问， why don’t you like HSK? I’m actually learning chinese in university. Never did an HSK test or class but my mandarin teacher says university classes are equivalent to
most HSK tests and teachings. Would like to know your feedback!
It's quite easy to recognise the other system without learning it if you only learn simplified or traditional. You can easily guess what a character is from the context even if you've never seen it. It's like if English had missing words in a sentence, but you could still fill in the blank.
There isn't a correct answer, it only depends on where you are going to or where you put your goal at. (Taiwan HK or China)
In my case, I'm studying the Four Books and Five Classics, as well as the history of the Warring States Period, so it makes sense for me to know Traditional characters. Also, I have no way of being able to look up Simplified characters in my dictionary, since they don't follow the radical-and-strokes method. Finally, I think Traditional characters are beautiful and expressive, and Simplified ones are not, in my opinion.
They were simplified so your hands wouldn't break in writing 20 characters in a story-
@@EHMM I'll take my chances, thank you.
What are you talking about? I have an Oxford Chinese dictionary and the radical and strokes method is exactly how you look up characters. The dictionary is only simplified Chinese. As a side note, many simplified characters have hundreds of years of history.
@@skazka3789 Yes, they do, but after the 1960s in the PRC, many new ones were created for no logical reason, based only on the easiest character in a sound category. Vey confusing.
Chinatowns are mainly consist of the mandarin mainlanders Chinese along with the cantonese Hong Kongers or GuangDungers. Usually you'll find that first generations speak mainly cantonese and read traditional characters whereas the second , third, fourth, etc... speak more mandarin or fluent in mandarin and read simplified chinese characters instead.
My only worry at this point is learning the traditional characters again in chinese. For a little bit of context for quite some time ive been learning Japanese and can read quite well at this point. Which bring me to the subject, Japanese uses traditional Kanji. While im familiar with the meaning and reading from japanese study that doesn't necessary carry over to chinese 100% of the time. At times even the meaning complete differs with the same kanji between the two languages. So he lies my question: Is this just a problem at first or will continue to be a problem and i just have to get over it? Should i invest in learning simplified chinese? My aim is to read chinese comics EVENTUALLY.
If anyone can offer any advice it would be much appreciated.
Japanese is not fully traditional characters. While it's closer, Japanese simplification is more of a middle ground.
Great video 👍
I am really interested to know, why you don't like the HSK?
HSK sets out unrealistic targets. You need 5000 not 3000 characters for real literacy. HSK also includes no pedagogical explanation or guides. It's literally just a frequency listing so knowing all 150 hsk 1 characters is quite useless. It's like knowing all the prepositions and articles in English pronouns to they're super frequent! Do you see the problem or should I try to explain it in more detail?
@@QuizmasterLaw Thank you for taking your time to answer me. I see your point
Thanks Elena. I probably should make another video about why don't I like HSK.
I am trying to learn mandarin by going through the HSK lists ( on 1 right now). It's a solid place to start for me instead of learning phrases here and there. Knowing the words helps me understand the phrases more. If HSK also have alot of "useless" words, then I will skip over those prepositions for example. Thanks.
“发展” can be HAIR EXPO for me, while “發展” is DEVELOPMENT.
Stupid argument, you can tell by the context
Past intermediate chinese, traditional characters become really easy, so I study both
IMPORTANT TO KNOW. of the 3500 most commonly used characters ( if you know this much you can read 99.5% of characters in media in china ) only 30% have a simplified written version. So if you say yoo want to learn traditional you learn 100 % traditional . When you say you want to learn simplified what you learn is about 70 % traditional and about 30 % is simplified.
我不相信要认识3000多个字，我个人小学生1000己够了。你认识100个字就认识一千个字，因为都是有关联。
I started learning simplified characters around 3 years ago, but I've come to realize that the majority of media and content that I'd like to consume in Chinese uses traditional characters. In the future I plan to travel to Taiwan as well. On the other hand, all of the people I chat with online use simplified so I don't know what to do. I wish I had more time so I could study both!
Depends what u value more. It is definitely possible to learrn both, but it's better to master one of them at first, then transition to another one. It's generally easier to learn trad then simp if u want to learn both in the end. There's also translation software u can use to translate traditional characters to simplified. Other way around works worse. So mbe master trad first?
Simplified Chinese is king. I understand you plan to travel to Taiwan but even then you barely need to learn Chinese to navigate so many foreigners and English speaking already
Learning Chinese language is like recognise the route. If you know 人，add strokes become 大，天，火，灭，灾。大add stroke become头，买，卖，实
I prefer TC because I learned Japanese first, It's easier recognize where the Kanji came from.
Every Chinese town I been to they speak Cantonese but the new generation and in China mandarin is the rule.
What happen if we want to learn both?
That’s good
I learned simplified Chinese but idk why I can actually read traditional Chinese character naturally 😂without even learning it
Simplified is king
Is simplified Chinese a little easier?
Duh
quaizhou brother depress mean犹豫😔
Cool ! I'll stick with simplified . I'm actually moving to Xiamen too. J wonder what it's like.
What will you do in Xiamen? When are you moving? I enjoyed that city.
@@ElementaryChinese I'll be teaching English. I also want to hangout near the ocean quite a bit. What are some great places to visit in Xiamen?
They are both beautiful traditional （繁體字）and simplified (简体字). It's just some Chinese keeps on politicizing these systems of writing that nothing to do with thei agenda.
I find Chinese too complicated, that’s why I’m learning kanji (JPN)
Complicated!?? As a non-chinese speaker, I didn't know a word in chinese. the start was quite difficult but after some weeks, like 2 or 3, it became amazing and I like chinese more than japanese, Chinese is simple and easy ..
I've been learning Japanese for 5 years, Chinese is a piece of cake compared to Japanese. all the rules and kanjis(characters) are sometimes impossible to guess how to pronounce correctly without checking the dictionary every single time.
ugh duh....kanji means Chinese characters used by Japanese!
You sound delusional
sui diu
Horrible joke time: the Uncle Ben character retired
to China. He is alive and well and living in CHINA!
Simplify Chinese link one to another. Eg 发link to 友 ′ ′ 。友 also link to 拔,废，拨款，so If know one hundred, almost know all。just like recognize route