Simplified and Traditional Chinese
dylanprout
August 11, 2008, 02:37 PM posted in General DiscussionNi3 hao3
I as you may guess am a newbie and wherever im lokking for chineese resources online i find im asked about Simplified or Traditional characters. What's the difference and which are more common etc.
goulnik
August 11, 2008, 05:30 PMJust ran a quick test against the People's daily and BBC news in Chinese : out of 720 characters used, I looked at the first 240, and 80 had a different simplified/traditional. Of those 80, 36 had an obvious, systematic correspondance (e.g. 讠radical for 言 in 谈 /談), and 44 had a really complex change.
I'm not sure I agree with the statement that common characters are quite simple though, not sure there really is a correlation. Even daily speech can rely on words with complex characters (e.g. 听 / 聽 to listen).
mattwhyndham
August 11, 2008, 03:53 PMSimplified characters are used mainly in the PRC, but lots of learners in other countries use them. They are not used so much, if at all, in HK, Taiwan and in established Chinese communties overseas.
They were introduced systematically by the PRC in the 50's or thereabouts. You can see that a lot of them resemble the traditional character but with fewer strokes. Out of the corpus of 2000 common characters, about 20% (it seems to be) of them seem to have been simplified, the other 80% being identical in both systems. Really common characters are generally quite simple and aren't different. Rare ones are complex in both systems. The middle-frequency characters are the most different.