Most Mainland Chinese people still know how to use traditional characters for historical or aesthetic/artistic purposes. There’s a bit of a complex from some Taiwanese and HK elitists who think China is trying to impose simplified on everybody or that people who use simplified are dumb, but there really is no “right” script. Traditional characters definitely look more aesthetically pleasing than their simplified counterparts, but also making it easier for people to gain and maintain literacy is much more important than some notion of tradition.
Traditional characters definitely look more aesthetically pleasing than their simplified counterparts
not always in my opinion. sure, 區 looks better than 区 whick looks like an “image not found” 車 and 龜 do look like a wagon and a turtle while 车/龟 look like… runes? 頭 has a bean in it which is cute， but i do like the minimal aesthetic of many simplified characters like 广, 门, 县, 个, 书 etc where 廣, 門, 縣, 個, 書 look unneccessarily complicated and cluttered
Its possible that since my exposure to traditional characters has mostly been in contexts where they must be aesthetically pleasing that they become associated with that in general. You do have some good examples of unnecessary clutter though funny you bring up 廣, since I always felt the removal of the phonetic element made it lose its charm when simplifying, similarly, the simplification of the metal (釒) radical to 钅 sure saved me a lot of effort in school but I did like symmetry of “gold”.
i didn’t start learning chinese seriously until moving to china as an adult and was exposed to simplified characters long before traditional. i worked in a 广场 and though “广 makes sense, it looks wide and spacious”. later in HK/TW i often misread it as 黄 until i got used to it
I’ve been trying to learn Chinese so I can watch 那年那兔那些事without subtitles. I was wondering, outside of the obvious deep immersion of being in China, any particular resources you’d recommend for someone just trying to learn?
Most Mainland Chinese people still know how to use traditional characters for historical or aesthetic/artistic purposes. There’s a bit of a complex from some Taiwanese and HK elitists who think China is trying to impose simplified on everybody or that people who use simplified are dumb, but there really is no “right” script. Traditional characters definitely look more aesthetically pleasing than their simplified counterparts, but also making it easier for people to gain and maintain literacy is much more important than some notion of tradition.
not always in my opinion. sure, 區 looks better than 区 whick looks like an “image not found” 車 and 龜 do look like a wagon and a turtle while 车/龟 look like… runes? 頭 has a bean in it which is cute， but i do like the minimal aesthetic of many simplified characters like 广, 门, 县, 个, 书 etc where 廣, 門, 縣, 個, 書 look unneccessarily complicated and cluttered
Its possible that since my exposure to traditional characters has mostly been in contexts where they must be aesthetically pleasing that they become associated with that in general. You do have some good examples of unnecessary clutter though funny you bring up 廣, since I always felt the removal of the phonetic element made it lose its charm when simplifying, similarly, the simplification of the metal (釒) radical to 钅 sure saved me a lot of effort in school but I did like symmetry of “gold”.
i didn’t start learning chinese seriously until moving to china as an adult and was exposed to simplified characters long before traditional. i worked in a 广场 and though “广 makes sense, it looks wide and spacious”. later in HK/TW i often misread it as 黄 until i got used to it
I’ve been trying to learn Chinese so I can watch 那年那兔那些事without subtitles. I was wondering, outside of the obvious deep immersion of being in China, any particular resources you’d recommend for someone just trying to learn?