Was the simplification of Chinese character the worst event in East Asian cultural history?

>廠→厂

Who cares honestly? The aesthetics of a writing system are almost completely meaningless compared to it's primary purpose of conveying information.

Question:

How do Chinese people type

with their fingers

繁体字上电脑看起来不好

They input the Latin characters then choose the right Chinese characters. Chinese mainlanders learn Latin writings first in elementary school. They make fun of Latin script, seeing it's so easy to learn that.

The real reason why ideograms are hard is because it's a primitive script. Imagine if western scripts' development never get pass hieroglyphs.

Not everyone uses pinyin, there's also shape based input (cangjie).
And Bopomofo a non Latin based sound based input.

Does it matter if the Etymological origin is slightly lost when simplified? The traditional characters are still known and recorded, the etymology is still known.

People need to write quicker dude. If anything they could do with another round of 2 of simplification, get every character down to 7 strokes max.

打字像这
They type like this. Each character has a sound ascribed to it in Pinyin which uses the latin alphabet, but doesn't read like English anymore than French or Spanish does, Zh is similiar to j, C is kind of like ts

Anyway, this is how they type, there is another method where you select strokes and it builds up the character you want, and another method where you just draw the character like on a phone, but these are complicated and slow.

Pinyin is best because its quick and locking each character to a set sound pronounced in a specific way slows down the drift in language pronunciation. This is why young people from all over China speak mandarin clearly and without much accent, whereas the older people who didn't grow up with Pinyin speak in wildly different accents in their mandarin. I can't understand them almost at all but young people are very clear.

chinese is only difficult because it was intentionally made convoluted so peasants remained illiterate

terrible language

cursive looks cool tho

>中文很难

Things brainlets say

Chinese Grammar is exceedingly simple. Combined with pinyin input removing the need to learn how to write, I'd say Chinese is one of the easier languages to learn.

>pinyin input removing the need to learn how to write

>Type Jiao
>Get 叫,脚, 交,角

How will you know which one is right without knowing how to write?

>chinese is only difficult because it was intentionally made convoluted so peasants remained illiterate
t. Marxist.

A lot of the Scholar-Bureaucrats came from the peasantry. What made entrance to the elite very hard was primarily the cost of education (there was no public schooling) and the exams.

So what villages used to do (since everyone belonged to the same family anyway in a village) was pool their resources to send their smartest kid to school, hoping that he passes both that and the Imperial Exams and in turn help out his village once he has a comfy government job.

Theres a difference between knowing a character and knowing how to write it.

China should just use pinyin and whenever there are homonyms borrow words from another dialect or from the west. Similar problems happen with Japanese i.e. shitloads of homonyms but they could get by just fine in the early video game era when they couldn't use kanji. How they did that was to combine hiragana and katakana. In fact, during the Japanese colonization of Asia they used katakana in the colony in order to teach and encourage people to learn Japanese, what they called the 'language of Greater East Asia'. This shows that the so-called 'homonym' problem' is solvable.

You primitive script users really have no excuses, especially regarding convenience. Even you admit yourself that pinyin is easymodo. Stop being pretentious and just admit that you keep the ideograms just for cultural reasons, i.e. heritage etc. Look, the French admitted that they keep the retarded spelling because it just looks beautiful. Spanish too, because they said it's to honor their king or something like that. The East so obsessed on proving that their old-ass (actually primitive) script is good because it 'works best'. It's a pretense wrapped inside the appearance of pragmatism, as you are afraid that perhaps, perhaps the westernized alternative is better, and that the 'authentic' (not really) Eastern trait is objectively unfounded. The same old complex towards the enigmatic West.

>China should just use pinyin and whenever there are homonyms borrow words from another dialect or from the west.
They'd have to change the entire language, plus there are literally hundreds of words for almost every sound. Yi has thousands, they'd need to suddenly add thousands of new sounds from other languages. It is not practical.

The Chinese do keep their script for cultural reasons and pride, and why shouldn't they, it's impressive, and since they learn it from childhood it is no hindrance to them, plus it boosts cognitive function to learn such a vast amount of information from so young.

Realistically they should simplify it a few more times, but with their language as it is there's no way it can avoid using ideograms.

>Learning Mandarin
>Can't handwrite anything
>But that's ok because a lot of native speakers can't either.

I hate that such an alien and interesting script exists and Ill never be able to learn it

JVST LOL @ HOW SVPERIOR LATIN SCRIPT IS

Every one ive met can.

It's really easy to start learning, there are so many apps.

I've learned about 800 words in 4 months.

>The simplified forms are easier to write and remember

Easier to write perhaps, but demonstrably wrong on the remember front. If that were so literacy in Hong Kong and Taiwan would certainly be lower by a noticable factor compared to the mainland. Phones have a larger effect on memory rather than any variation than simplified vs traditional.

>The real reason why ideograms are hard is because it's a primitive script.

Ideograms are easy as piss mate if you have an IQ above 0. Humans only understand words through "sound" in scripts when they first read them. In any other instance the reader sees the word as a single block. It's how people misread words.

>Does it matter if the Etymological origin is slightly lost when simplified?
Unlike Western scripts where a writing system is enslaved to the sounds of the base language, Eastern logograms remain independent of the sound of a language. This means that historical texts and writings have a long history of continuity in China which is suddenly and abruptly cut off with the Communist parties simplifications. To simplify the writing is to effectivly rob the people of their ability to read the past.

>They input the Latin characters then choose the right Chinese characters. Chinese mainlanders learn Latin writings first in elementary school. They make fun of Latin script, seeing it's so easy to learn that.

Fuck off Mandarin centrist. For the hundreds of millions of other people who speak dialects of Chinese that isn't Mandarin, typing with a stroke keyboard or physically writing out the word on phones is the best way to go usually.

>borrow words from another dialect

Fucking retard the Chinese language remained a logographic system for some 6,000 years because of the vast number of almost unintelligible dialects in China, with different tonal systems. Unlike the languages of the West which use tone to inflect emotional meaning primarily, tones are fundamental to the meaning of a word, and each dialect has its own number of times. Shanghai speaks 2, Cantonese 9, and Mandarin 4. Pinyin is useless in any capacity outside Mandarin, and if you tried to "borrow" words from another dialect, nearly the whole remainder of China would be incapable of even pronouncing it.

>They'd have to change the entire language, plus there are literally hundreds of words for almost every sound.
Then how do they talk with each other? If they can make do with it in conversation then they can do it better with pinyin.
>inb4 tone
Yeah and pinyin has tonal marks. If you're talking about different tones then it's not homonym but homograph (just same alphabet), and pinyin can do it just fine.
>inb4 that 'shi' poem
The poem is a literature that employs literary techniques, unfamiliar and arhaic words. It doesn't represent the common everyday uses.

One of the reason it becomes even more clusterfuck in modern era (or every successive eras even) is because they assigned loanwords into some retarded arbitrary rules instead of just adopting their sound and spelling. It's their own fault they make it harder for themselves, instead of making it simpler. It's like it's destined as a pretentious script bragged by snobbish people, no matter if they're Qing era Confucian bureaucrats or modern-day Chinese Neoconfucian Nationalists.

Again, the usual Han chauvinism and typical insecurity of the West manifesting within the meaning of 'practicality', 'pragmatism', 'smart', 'high culture', 'unifying script' and so on. Why not admit like, 'yeah it's funny and retarded now but hey at least we're proud of our own history and culture!' and so on without all the pretense.

For me, it feels great to use this 'kindergarten tier' Latin script that old Confucian bureaucrats made fun of.

Oh and don't forget that Hanzi is at the same level of development as Hieroglyphs. Imagine being as ass-backward as Ancient Egyptians.

>發
>為
>歳
>廠
>飛

How the fuck are you even supposed to write this? It looks hideous, it´s overly complicated, has no symmetry, and I can't even tell what it fucking means. Why don't they just write with the English alphabet like normal people?

>Was the simplification of Chinese character the worst event in East Asian cultural history?
What about the Japanese being replaced by English

Tbh a lot of the simplifications are based on different styles of speeded-up writing instead of proper print. Similar to cursive in latin languages, it's what most educated adults end up writing like anyway. It just now given a print form and looking less asthetic because of the missing strokes to fill space.

Pingyin is actually hard as all fuck to read in anything longer than a short sentence because of tones and same-sounding words. I can finish a page of characters before a few sentences in pingyin and be much more clear of its meaning. Your tiny wh*te brain just gota get familiar with the commonly used characters.

This. We literally read English like ideograms. That is why when you encounter a word you've never seen you can't just instantly read it, you have to sound it out. That's why we can't fluently read French or German if you can't speak those languages even if you can read the writing, you can't just speak it because you don't recognise any of the words as the pictures they really become.

>To simplify the writing is to effectivly rob the people of their ability to read the past.
It really isn't though because they're literally taught each ones etymology when they learn them. That's how they are learned, by learning the etymological composition of each character or at least all the base component radicals.

>Then how do they talk with each other? If they can make do with it in conversation then they can do it better with pinyin.
Context of conversation, very different to text. You can point at a chicken and say Ji but if you write Ji on a piece of paper it can mean 100s of things, so instead they use 鸡 its the character for chicken. Its the same reason we use Their There and They're.
>Yeah and pinyin has tonal marks. If you're talking about different tones then it's not homonym but homograph (just same alphabet), and pinyin can do it just fine.
Yes but even within the same tone has 100s of homonym.

If Chinese didn't need ideograms it would have dropped them like every other language did, but it needs them because otherwise its impossible to understand in writing.

For example

Tā qù chū
Tā qù chū

Mean two completely different things, but you'll never know what they mean because there is only pinyin.

I'm not trying to make any cultural points, im just saying Chinese needs ideograms.

To write a character takes about the same length of time as to write an english word.

I don't understand how Koreans can manage also, with all the homophones

I think its mostly nouns in Korean which makes context fix it.

Japanese has over 90% simplification and three separate writing systems...

Japanese Kanji have been simplified 18 times since 1866. “Very minor” my ass.

>literacy rates

Why are you comparing a developing country to first world provinces?

Then how come I can read most things in Taiwan, while everything looks alien in China?

98% of Chinese were illiterate in 1920.

98% can read simplified nowadays while 40% can read traditional.

By every measure far more Chinese can read and write traditional script in 2018 than in 1920.

Because you are illiterate

A fine example of Japanese vs Chinese simplification.

CT關 JP関 CS关

Notice how the Communist removed the 門 radical completely. Absolutely horrific

How the fuck do you even read the traditional ones on your phone? My eyes hurt. So this is why you all have slanted-eyes.

Likewise, “traditional” script has also been sinplified 12 times since 1916 in the Republic of China.

Kill yourself lying jap scum

Your kanji looks nothing like RoC’s.

>while 40% can read traditional.
It's probably higher, the majority look roughly similar, only some are totally raped, and in a sentence you can tell what it is from the context.

It's sort of like lower and upper-case.

>Absolutely horrific
Get a life.

>China
>Developing Nation

Go home Xi. China is far from being a total backwater. The comparison is sound. Further, the point is the rates are about the same. If some discrepancy existed where the traditional readers had lower rates of literacy you could have a point, but there is none.

>By every measure far more Chinese can read and write traditional script in 2018 than in 1920.

Ethics should not be made into a game of statistics. One of the singular purposes of Chinese writing was it's ability to remain independent of sound allowing the language to be read across a multilingual nation, and for the past to be accessible by all those who could read. To change that is to rob the people of something they once had.

>It really isn't though because they're literally taught each ones etymology when they learn them.

The simplification isn't some systemic reduction. It's literally just randomized reductions of words. There are all manor if words which have been reduced almost arbitrarily, where "learning" the entomology does jack shit. You see them in the very first list OP made. Secondly, if they can read the same way, there is no reason simplify them anyway.

>How the fuck are you even supposed to write this?
You break the word down into its component radicals and follow the prescribed order when writing them. Just because you are too mentally retarded to grasp this simple elementary schooler fact doesn't mean the rest of the world can't.

Chinese characters ARE the worst event in Asian cultural history. They SHOULD have developed an actual alphabet - or at the very least a syllabary, like any ACTUALLY literate civilization.

黑鬼
With pinyin input, you type out the pinyin and choose the characters. Some phones have good predictive text so you can type a single letter and it gives you the word, making typing Chinese actually quite easy. Other phones are dogshit like mine and make you manually select each character

Zhuyin is so much better.

I always butcher pronunciation with pinyin

ITT: Dumbasses think Mandarin is the only form of Chinese spoken, and that Mandarin is actually a unified language.

The REAL reason why Chinese have a logographic system is because the nation is multilingual with language varieties that are unintelligible to one another even within the same language family. The simplification was done ONLY with Mandarin in mind, and the Mandarin of Beijing at that. To some 40% of China the simplification is often wildly pointless and stupid. But even that is better than the retards in this thread arguing for a Latin script adoption of Chinese. It will never happen so long as the people in a single city speak a different language from those of another. The Yue language family contains nine tones, while in Shanghai they speak only two. Such fundamental differences in language cannot be rendered using the same Latin script and MAINTAIN linguistic unity. The only reason why these languages share the moniker of Chinese is due in part to their shared writing system.

The Chinese script is more suited to Chinese and Japanese than the Latin script because both have tons of homophones. It's not antiquated at all.
t. Linguistics major

Why don't they simply give up on Chinese or any native dialects, and use English, Esperanto, or Yiddish instead?

The only written language in the world that hasnt changed in the past 1000 is arabic and thats only because a very common, parasitic religion leaches its legitimacy off of the language.

Honestly the chinese made their shity script more practical to write. If anything they shouldve done away with those shitglyphics all together and introduce something more like the koirean new script or just use fucking english.

Vietnam more wealthy than vietnam.
Op.
Tread carefully lest I masturbate to this.

Muh culture.

Weren't they going to go through more rounds of simplification but they stopped because too many complained

I don't really care which direction Chinese characters take so long as Chinks don't adopt Jyutping.

That is literally the worst writing system ever.

Well that's what Canadians did and it worked perfectly.

"Trust nobody, not even yourself."

Some Commies (such as Mao) wanted to go all the way and just adopt a Latin based alphabet. Pinyin is pretty shitty because MUH HOMOPHONES (all five tones of "shi" have like twelve homophones each), so the idea was fucking terrible.

Thankfully, Mao died and with him died any more ideas of changing the writing system because at the time it was a case of debating the number of angels that could dance on a pin head (Keep in mind at this time China had just gotten over an intentional famine that had killed tens of millions).

>native japanese speaker

you literally adopted a new writing format that consists of little squiggly lines. go to your room and never come out again

>I'm not trying to make any cultural points, im just saying Chinese needs ideograms.
I know for a fact this is not the case because audio books are very popular in China.
sixthtone.com/news/1872/this-un-american-life-chinas-struggling-podcast-industry
en.yibada.com/articles/67700/20150926/success-story-audiobooks-china.htm

Well they were right (unfortunately). The homonym and homophone problems are solvable. Otherwise nobody could talk with each others.

Yes. CCP needs to repent and correct this mistake.

>While some simplified characters were adopted from conventional abbreviated forms that have existed for a long time, those advocating the simplified forms often fail to point out that many such characters in fact had multiple vernacular forms out of which just one was chosen, arbitrarily, and then privileged by the designers of the simplified character scheme. Many of the changes have been found to be ideological, such as the removal of the "heart" (心) from the word "love" (愛) into the new character (爱) without heart. To some, the new 'heartless' love character is an attack on Confucianism, which emphasizes the virtues of filial piety and humanity in relationships so as to maintain a harmonious society

Altering chinese radicals is actually capable of altering the connotation of words.

We usually put them in parantheses as context or even replace Hangeul with Chinese characters when the meaning isn't clear.

The lion eating poet begs to differ. Vernacular speech is far different from formalized writing. While Standard Chinese is not nearly as bad old Literary Chinese, using pure pinyin would not be an easy task. Further, it fundamentally fails as a method of communication between dialects. While Standard Chinese can sound strange when read by those who speak different dialects, it is still readable in the native dialect. To switch to pinyin would be to destroy written intelligibility between languages.

Either way its fucking retarded, all of it, the whole writing system, so complicated and impractical, Jesus fucking Christ, just modify any alphabet, Cyrillic or Latin to fit your ugly languages and be done with it.