STFU, Jackie Chan

That’s the official stated reason. I’ve heard it argued that the party also did it in order to cut people off from the older texts, thus giving the party greater control over the people’s minds.

Huh… and Hong Kong, in its unique political region, still uses the traditional Chinese.

But that was because Hong Kong was still under the British when they switched over to the newer writing system. They could force the changeover now but it won’t be a popular move, and I don’t see why China would want to incur even more public wrath over something like this.

I don’t see the big deal in this either way. I learned Chinese in Malaysia using the new writing system, but many Chinese newspapers here still use the old style, so I can read either one. It’s not that hard once you can read Chinese at all.

The main objective was to streamline writing, not reading. The simplification didn’t substantially reduce the overall number of characters – only about 7 percent of the top 10,000 were eliminated, and 4 percent of those were variants that had already been largely eliminated through attrition. I haven’t seen any comprehensive figures for how many components are actually used in simplified vs. traditional – probably because there’s no consensus on how many components there are in the first place – but I suspect the number isn’t much lower (it may well be higher, since some simplified components retain their traditional forms in certain characters).

So an advantage in reading only comes if simplified forms are easier to recognize, which isn’t necessarily a given, since simplified characters tend to resemble each other more than the traditional ones and thus the risk of confusion (especially for low-level readers) may be higher. It would be interesting to see if any studies on reading speed have been conducted.

If this was really the goal, there were much better ways to achieve it, like switching to a different script or completely redoing the character-based script. Instead they took the path of least resistance and legitimized some informal simplifications that the literati were already familiar with (most of the simplified characters were based on handwritten or variant forms that had been around for years). Anyway deccan is right – it’s usually possible for someone reasonably educated in one script to read the other by relying on the remaining similarities and contextual clues. Actually writing a text in the other script is a different matter.

About 1 percent of the top 10,000 characters are pictographs – a truly pictographic script would be either too limited or too cumbersome to actually function. The vast majority of characters are phonetic-semantic compounds that may use the pictographs as their basic building blocks, but are no more pictographic of their actual meaning than your typical English word (I defy anyone to tell me how this is a picture of “irresolute”). Learning every Chinese character as an integral drawing will drive you nuts and runs counter to the way they were actually designed.

This is actually a large part of my parent’s and grandparent’s complaint with simplified form (which I learned, such that I can read at all). They say that the different radicals give you the pronunciation and meaning, so that you can determine interpret new words you don’t even know based on the components. They claim that because simplified form removed the connection between the radical form and word form, it becomes impossible to figure out new words (or even to recognize obscure ones you know).

I personally would be fine with traditional characters being retained only for calligraphy and whatnot, and using simplified form for everyday use, but as I mentioned, I’ve only learned simplified characters, so I’m biased.

The character on the left represents heart. On the right, at the top, the character means “stand”. At the bottom right, the character stands for “village”. Yeah, I don’t get it either.

I wonder if he’d still feel that way if he was dirt poor, working in a coal mine with no safety equipement and almost no rights? Living in Taiwan would look pretty darn nice then.

I wonder if he’d still feel that way if he were a successful businessman from Hainan.

Actually, Jackie Chan is from Hong Kong. A lot of male HK movie stars from his generation grew up poor and poorly-schooled - Chau Yon Fat, Jackie Chan, Jet Li. H.K. had no social safety net - one of my parents left school at age 12 to work full time as the family’s breadwinner.

“I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not,” Chan said. “I’m really confused now. If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic.”

The older Chinese people I’ve talked to (non-Americanized) would actually agree with some of his statements. They would say pro-democracy demonstrators (Democracy was shoehorned at the last minute by the Brits as they packed up to leave) are idle, rich students with no need to make a living.

Taiwanese parliament (recent as well, founded only after disbanding of the military junta) is notorious for its hand to hand brawls and outright gangsters.

The H.K. and Taiwanese news have been filled with horror stories of China poisonous food the last decade - predating toxic toothpaste, lead in toys, and the milk powder. The hospitals themselves probably helped spread a lot of diseases (AIDS, Hepatitis) with their profit-seeking “blood transfusions.” (They would pay people to donate blood, then reinject plasma from a common pool, untested for any diseases.) Corruption of local officials by entrepreneurs is rampant, with the few safety laws they have unenforced. These common, powerless people probably would support a strong emperor / right-wing caudillos, cause the alternative ain’t much better!

China sounds wonderful!

Why are there so many threads about China on this forum?

(Mostly joking.)

Oooo, how about a “What’s happened around China lately (that’s interesting)?” thread.

(Mostly serious.)

It means “Heart of a child”, and therefore irresolute. (Ageism, I say!)

The left side is heart, right side is child.

This is the proper meaning in Mandarin, not dialects.

The character is also used in Japanese(duh! Japanese origins from Chinese), and it literally means heart of a child, naive or innocent.

In Cantonese, the word has similar meaning as it does in Mandarin, but it can be used both as verb or adjective. And of course, it has a different pronunciation.

Regarding this thread’s topic, all I can say keep an open mind. Things are not always black and white. I would not consider him as a simple actor, unlike his Hollywood counterparts.

Aside from the fact that what you described is an ideograph, not a pictograph, that smacks pretty heavily of folk etymology. The phonetic relationship between 童 and 憧 is obvious – not so much in Mandarin, where the pronunciations are now different (but recognizably similar), but the Cantonese, Korean and Japanese on readings (which have undergone less change over the centuries) are identical (tung4/tung4, dong/dong and / respectively, although there are alternative readings in Cantonese and Japanese). The Xinhua and Kangxi dictionaries both put it in the phonetic-semantic category.

Aside from the fact that what you described is an ideograph, not a pictograph, that smacks pretty heavily of folk etymology. The phonetic relationship between 童 and 憧 is obvious – not so much in Mandarin, where the pronunciations are now different, but the reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciations are *thoŋ and *thoŋ (which were interchangeable in some dialects) and they have identical readings in Cantonese, Korean and Japanese (tung4/tung4, dong/dong and / respectively, although there are alternative readings in Cantonese and Japanese). All the dictionaries I checked (going back to Kangxi) place it in the phonetic-semantic category.

What you describe is an ideograph, not a pictograph, and that smacks pretty heavily of folk etymology anyway. The phonetic relationship between 童 and 憧 is obvious – not so much in Standard Mandarin, where the pronunciations have diverged, but the reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciations are *dhōŋ and *thoŋ (which were virtually interchangeable) and they have identical readings in Cantonese (tung4), Teochew (tong5), Korean (dong) and Japanese (), although there are alternative readings in Cantonese and Japanese. I looked at a few dictionaries (back to Kangxi) and they all put 憧 in the phonetic-semantic category.

Funny you should say that: a WaPo OP-ED which theorizes that Jackie was basically speaking about controlling poor Chinese to protect the burgeoning Chinese elites - including himself and the members of his audience, which is why they reacted enthusiastically.

What is the difference between pictograph and ideograph? I thought they are the same thing.

An ideograph is a character in writing that represents a concept rather than a phoneme. A pictograph is pretty much just a drawing of the thing it represents. Most ideographs are theorized to descend from pictographs, but over time they become more stylized.

Holy fuck people, this is Politics, not language teaching! Start arguing about something and calling each other names!

You sure you weren’t looking for this thread? It seems more your speed.