March 14, 2008
China to start teaching traditional characters again?
Nope, it's just a proposal so far. According to the article, some folks on the arts side of the Political Consultation Congress have written a letter calling for some level of traditional character (繁體字) education in elementary schools in China, arguing that some knowledge of traditional Chinese characters is necessary for people to fully understand the language, culture and history of China.
Judging from our observations of our friends, we would say that if formal education fails, watching Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Korean, and Japanese TV shows, along with a healthy dose of Cantopop at the karaoke joint ought to get you started on traditional characters. Most PRC Chinese can read, if not write, traditional characters, but we suppose that's not the same as being formally educated in the subject. Anyhow, we think that, if it happens, it'd be a step in the right direction. Not as big a step as say democracy and free elections, but we're really into keeping our expectations low.
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Am I misinterpreting you? You seem to be saying that learning traditional character would be a step in the same direction as democracy and free elections?
can you elaborate?
perhaps your tongue is in your cheek, and i'm being dense.
wow... it's excellent.
jenming
yeah it was meant tongue in cheek, except it was poorly written. it's like the view from inside my brain--things don't always make sense there, i didn't edit it enough.
don't believe all of the hot air the braggarts like to blow at you, especially when it comes to anything to do with "their" language. yes, a lot of dalu'ers can basically read traditional, but what they are really doing is looking at the characters which are the same or so common that they do actually know in traditional and guessing the rest from context. Pull a few random common but fairly different from simplified individual characters from a hat and see how sure they are then. THERE IS A A GOOD REASON you see things (e.g. a Japanese grammar book for Chinese sold in Japan) printed in both simplified and traditional versions. If the dalu'ers were as capable as some like to brag, it would be completely unnecessary and in fact silly to print up an extra simplified edition of books.