• well5H1T3@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    10 hours ago

    Hanzi characters are great for condensing information.

    True, I will ask this: Why does it have 2 variants? Traditional? Modern?

    • An Original Thought@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      10 hours ago

      Fucked if I know 😂 I’m studying it on my own from textbooks and online resources, not in a classroom setting taught by scholars much much smarter than me. I assume the reduced complexity of simplified characters makes it more accessible though, which is why I understand the PRC makes Pinyin required on road signs as well.

      • Infrapink@thebrainbin.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        8 hours ago

        The ultimate goal was to transition Mandarin to Roman letters (which had happened naturally in Vietnam, so there was precedent).ao’s party realised that going straight from Chinese characters to Roman letters would be too abrupt, so took a first step of swapping out complex characters for characters that look simpler but are easier to write. This was surprisingly well-received, and became standard in mainland China (but Taiwan did not adopt the new system on the entirely reasonable grounds of fuck the CCP). The CCP intended to do a second round of simplification, but the people balked at this on the grounds that it made the written language to difficult to read, and so they stopped at the current set.