I read news in Yahoo! Hong Kong website almost every week. I understand almost 80 percent of traditional Chinese characters but cannot write even one of them. The reason that Chinese people are using two different forms of written text was that the Chinese government believed that simplifying the writing method would encourage more people to become literate and the government decided to use Simplified Chinese in the 1950s. People in mainland China adopted it but the other Chinese speaking areas kept the traditional one till now. Basically, writing Simplified Chinese is much easier than writing traditional Chinese. Following is a comparison of the word “frighten” in both Simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese.
Traditional Chinese: 驚嚇
Simplified Chinese: 惊吓
Comments