Double standards: 06 (The Chinese written script)

 

Chinese is a language that is known for being difficult to learn, let alone master.

    The written element is the most difficult for students, in my experience of teaching over the decades.  It bears no resemblance to other languages, except for written Japanese which uses Chinese characters to a certain extent, but even then, not all Japanese kanji [Chinese characters] are written the same way.  Native speakers of lots of European languages have the alphabet already taken care of when they learn another European language.  (There are also lots of similarities in the vocabulary.)

    To make it even harder for the learner of Chinese, post-1949 China reformed the written script, from traditional to simplified, so now there are two versions.

    As the label suggests, the simplification of the written character is supposed to help reduce the illiteracy problem, but it also means that a lot of mainland Chinese people cannot read material published in Hong Kong and Taiwan.  At most, they can only guess at the gist — an equivalent I can think of is perhaps a Portuguese person reading a Spanish text or an Italian text, but a lower percentage of comprehension for a mainland Chinese person when it comes to traditional script.

    I was brought up on the traditional script at primary and secondary school in Singapore.  (Singapore officially adopted the simplified script in 1976.)  Personally, I prefer the traditional script:  it is more graphic, with a lot of the characters immediately giving a visual clue to what it represents.

    Some examples:

• 龍 lóng for “dragon” looks like the animal as it is represented in paintings, but the simplified version 龙 is a poor cousin really, in my opinion.
• Ditto 車 chē for “vehicle”.  The original meaning of 車 is a horse cart:  the two horizontal lines are the wheels (as seen from above / the air); the vertical line is the axle connecting the two wheels; the square box in the middle is the body of the cart; the line in the middle of the square box is the man sitting on the body of the cart.  The simplified version 车 just doesn’t do the trick, somehow.

    Having said the above, however, I must confess to applying double standards when it comes to my personally having to handwrite the Chinese script.  It takes ages to compose a page, even if one were to go for the cursive version (called 草書 / 草书 / cǎo shū / the “grass script” in Chinese, 草 cǎo meaning “grass” but also “rough draft”, sort of a running style).

    Luckily these days, one has technology to do all the hard work — but only if one has all the right tools (the computer / mobile phone, the software, etc.).