Basic Written Chinese. Cornelius C. Kubler

      RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE CHINESE WRITING SYSTEM

      In the PRC today, all mass media publications such as newspapers and magazines are printed exclusively in simplified characters. So are school textbooks from kindergarten through high school. Scholarly works and university textbooks, especially those dealing with ancient literature and history, are sometimes still printed in traditional characters. Street signs and handwritten materials, such as notes and letters, typically contain a mixture of some simplified and some traditional characters, depending on the age, educational level, and personal preference of the writer. In addition to the official simplified characters, there are also several hundred unofficial simplified characters commonly used in handwritten notes or on signs.

      Interestingly, in recent years—even though the government discourages this—it has become fashionable in some parts of China to use traditional characters on the signs of hotels, restaurants, and shops. Professional people often have some traditional characters on their name cards. The reasons for this partial return of traditional characters include that they are considered more formal, more aesthetically pleasing, and more chic, since they are associated with the affluent Chinese societies of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Traditional characters are probably also considered more eye-catching, precisely since they differ from what is normally written. While educated mainland Chinese readers can read most texts printed in traditional characters, they often cannot write traditional characters.

      In Taiwan the situation is more or less reversed. With few exceptions, only the traditional characters appear in print. However, as in pre-1949 China, many simplified characters are used in informal handwriting such as in notes, personal letters, and signs. In recent years, with the increased contact between Taiwan and mainland China through the exchange of letters, e-mails, television programming, and personal visits, many people in Taiwan have become familiar with the relatively few simplified characters that are post-1949 innovations. However, while educated Taiwanese typically can recognize most simplified characters, they may not be able to write them.

      As for the other Chinese language-using societies, traditional characters are official and widely used in Hong Kong and Macao, but one increasingly sees simplified characters there also, in part due to the influence of the large numbers of visitors from the mainland. In Singapore, simplified characters are official, though it’s not uncommon to see traditional characters on store signs. In Malaysian Chinese communities, both simplified and traditional characters are in common use, as is the case in overseas Chinese communities in the rest of the world.

      What we have, then, is a single language with multiple written standards—a rather common situation among the major languages of the world, and in essence not so very different from the different spellings and usages prevalent in the various English-speaking countries. The bottom line for you, as a learner of Chinese, is that if you wish to become proficient in reading all kinds of Chinese written today (even just Chinese written in mainland China), you’ll eventually need to be able to read both simplified and traditional characters. With time and practice, this is all very doable, and the materials you have in your hands right now are designed to help you do that as efficiently and easily as possible, since every lesson is presented first in simplified characters and then again in traditional characters (of course, you can also choose to study only one type of characters). Now, as regards writing, since most educated Chinese can recognize both forms of characters and since computer conversion of simplified to traditional or vice versa is easily accomplished, there is really no need for most learners to learn how to write both forms of characters. You’ll probably wish to learn how to write the type of characters used in the region where you plan to live or travel most frequently.

      Finally, there is the question of the format of the characters. Traditionally, Chinese characters were written from top to bottom, right to left. Since the 1950s, it has become increasingly common to write Chinese according to the Western format, that is, horizontally, from left to right. This is now the standard format in the PRC, though in recent years the vertical style seems to have been making a limited comeback for writings on literary or cultural topics. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, the traditional vertical format is still common, though scientific and technical writings, informal handwritten notes and letters, and the subtitles of movies and television programs are now usually in horizontal style. The option of horizontal or vertical formats—and a third, rarer format with characters written horizontally but from right to left—adds a stylistic variety and versatility to Chinese that is absent from English and most other languages. Since both horizontal and vertical formats are commonly encountered everywhere that Chinese is used, this textbook includes texts in both formats.

      What does the future hold in store for the Chinese writing system? That is not so easy to predict. There is no question that, if written as it is spoken, Chinese could be written in Pinyin. It’s possible that, someday, Pinyin might replace the characters, something that a number of Chinese intellectuals and political leaders have in the past advocated. The widespread use of computers for processing Chinese characters, for which most people input Pinyin and select the characters they want from their monitor screen, has already had a noticeable effect on the ability of native Chinese to handwrite characters from memory, as have newer communications technologies like e-mail and text messaging. Not only people’s ability to write characters has been affected, but also the content of the Chinese they write, which includes many neologisms, simplifications, and abbreviations, and reflects frequent mixing of characters with Pinyin and Roman letters.

      On the other hand, Chinese society is, like our own, very conservative and the characters have been an intrinsic part of Chinese culture for thousands of years. Though characters have the disadvantages of being hard to learn and at times cumbersome to work with, they do have certain advantages, including flexibility of format (think of book titles), efficient use of space (one page of English in United Nations documents typically translates to about 3/5 of a page of Chinese), and the fact that one can skim or scan for a specific word or phrase faster in Chinese than in alphabetic languages (since characters tend to stand out more). It must also be acknowledged that the Chinese writing system has stood the test of time and proven to be eminently successful, since it is used today by more people than any other written language in history. The reality is that Chinese characters will be around for the forseeable future, so the only realistic approach for the non-native who wishes to learn Chinese reading and writing is to buckle down and learn them. Indeed, due to simplifications and standardization in the language, better reference tools, and improvements in technology, textbooks, and teaching methods, written Chinese is today easier to learn than ever before. In the next section, we’ll take up some practical suggestions for ways to help you learn it better.