.:: ♫ 追星一族 ♪::.: L203

The Chinese writing system is considered one of the world’s oldest active, continuously used writing systems. The system is unique in the sense that it uses characters instead of alphabets used in most languages. Each individual character, rather than representing a fixed speech sound, has its own spoken syllable and meaning. Such system is known as logographic, or logosyllabic. One good example is the ancient Egyptian script.

Because of this complex writing system, written Chinese can be hard to grasp for non-native learners. In the West, difficult things are casually termed ‘Chinese’. (eg. ‘This is absolutely Chinese to me!’) In languages like English, Korean, German, it is common to know how to pronounce the word but not know its meaning. However in Chinese, if you do not know the meaning of a word, you would probably not know how to pronounce it as well.

Of course there are exceptions...

Chinese characters originated as ideograms, which are small symbols or pictograms representing visual ideas. As the characters evolved through the times, they began to consist of well-defined strokes, stroke orders and sizes. More and more words were created from the original few, often taking the sound of the parent character. According to major dictionaries, the number of characters has increased from 9,353 in 100 AD to about 85,600 in the present.

However, it is approximated that only 2000 characters are required for basic literacy in Chinese, which is sufficient to read Chinese newspapers. A well-educated person might know around 4000 to 5000 characters. Thus it can be inferred that most of the characters are uncommon and rare. Those are usually used in names, often emerge when a person decides to create a character for their children or products for the purpose of uniqueness. The orthographical property of Chinese characters makes it easy to create new ones. (by adding some strokes and radicals here and there)

In the modern times, written Chinese is split into two main forms: traditional and simplified. Hong Kong and Taiwan use the former style while China, Malaysia and Singapore use the latter. There has been much debate regarding the use of both forms and whether the system should be standardized internationally. There are many noteworthy points raised by both sides of the argument. Here are a few:

Pro-traditional members felt that simplification removed key stokes symbolizing the original meaning of the character. The simplified version of 愛 has its ‘heart’ 心 removed into 爱. The word 義 lost its sense of individuality 我 into the meaningless　义. Furthermore, simplification can also be misleading. 买 has actually nothing to do with ‘head’　头 while its traditional form 買 truly shows the concept of money by the shell 贝 radical.

On the other hand, pro-simplified members felt that the radical system is already flawed in the first place, such as 笑 having an inappropriate 竹 radical. Certain traditional characters have too similar appearances, like 書, 畫, 晝, and their simplified forms, 书，画，昼 make it easier to distinguish between them. Some words are made easier to pronounce, such as 忧, made up of the sound 尤 and 竖心 radical, as compared to the unclear 憂.

Pro-ｔraditional members claimed that the merger of two different characters with similar pronunciation into one same word is not justified enough, as their meanings often differ greatly. Examples include: 髮(hair) and 發(set off) both simplified to 发, 後(back) and 后(queen) simplified into 后, 隻(counter for animals) and 只(only) into 只. Such merger could reduce the variety of the language and cause ambiguity.

Pro-ｓimplified members, on the other hand, claimed that having fewer strokes has made Chinese easier to learn, resulting in a higher literacy rate. However it was also argued that the correlation is small and the literacy rate was mainly influenced by other more dominant factors such as modernization.
Details of the debate can be further checked out at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_on_traditional_and_simplified_Chinese_characters

So what is your take on this issue? Should Chinese characters be retained in its traditional form or simplified? Would the Chinese literacy rate be lower if Singapore did not adopt simplified writing in the first place?

We know that the simplest Chinese character with the fewest strokes is none other than 一. But how about the most complex character? In modern dictionaries, the most complex character with the greatest number of strokes is the following:

This word is pronounced as nang4 and has 36 strokes. Can you guess its meaning? Obviously it has something to do with the nose.

Other contenders include: 籲 yu4, with 32 strokes, 鬱 yu4, with 29 strokes, 豔 yan4, with 28 strokes, 釁 xin4, with 25 strokes and 鱻 xian1, with 33 strokes. By reading the previous sentence, you should have noticed one disadvantage of traditional characters – they look jumbled and crammed when there are too many strokes, making it difficult to read.

Some words may have tons of strokes but not that complex. Take this 64-stroke rare character as an example. (pronounced as zhe2) Yes, it is a word, not four.

Similarly, this 84-stroke Japanese kanji, which means ‘appearance of a dragon in flight’, is made up of several single characters. I wonder how long (and how much space) does it take to even write out one of this.

The most complex character still in use is probably the 57-stroke biang2, which came from Biang Biang Noodles, a kind of noodle sold in China. This word is probably of dialect origin since its pronunciation does not even exist in standard Mandarin.