When in Rome...
It is with some sadness, but with relief too, that I report that I am making the switch from traditional characters to simplified ones (sorry, Dorothy!). For those of you who don't know (and I assume it's most of you), different Chinese characters have, for the past 50 or so years, been used in China and Singapore than in Hong Kong and Taiwan. These new characters were introduced in 1956 and 1964 in order to make characters simpler to write and remember by reducing the number of strokes in each character and altering them to have a more logical structure. People have very mixed opinions of this transition -- many laud it as a much-needed change which reflected the actual use of many simplified forms among the common people (this is, in fact, the official position of the Chinese government), while others bemoan it as a corruption of a richly complext ancient writing system whose structure and meaning have been clouded by inconsistent simplification and whose beauty has been cheapened by the new character forms.
I tend to think that the traditional characters are nicer and more interesting to learn (although obviously harder to remember and write!), since they often tend to preserve more meaning from the ancient pictographs. A small part of me is, I think, attracted to the challenge -- to be able to read not only simplified characters like everyone else in China, but also the writing system so difficult it was abolished by the government. To be sure, there is truth to the argument that the complexity of Chinese characters, not unlike the complexity and inconsistency of English spelling rules, was used throughout Chinese history as a way for the wealthy, educated classes to distinguish themselves from and exclude the uneducated masses too "simple" to write such complicated characters. This element of class warfare must certainly have hit a chord with the Communist government, and was perhaps one of the precipitating factors in the nation-wide transition from fantizi (traditional characters) to jiantizi (simplified characters).
At any rate, at Harvard (but not at Yale, UChicago, or Brown, from what I gather from other students here) the first year is done entirely using fantizi, jiantizi are only introduced in the second year of Chinese. But at HBA, the simplified characters are not so much "introduced" in a nice, comprehensible way, but are rather the only way everything everything is written now, both in class, in our textbook, and (of course) out on the street. It's pretty bewildering for a simple second-year well-versed in the beautiful, complex fantizi to suddenly need to learn 50 new characters every night in the strange new form as well as the simplified forms for nearly all of the characters we've learned (about 600) during the past year. Thankfully there is (usually) a good deal of similarity between the traditional and simplified characters, so a little guess-work goes a long way, but reading is difficult and slow, and every teacher I've worked with in individual session has told me the same things: (1) I have nice handwriting, (2) I'm not bad at having conversation, answering questions, or doing on-the-spot translations of paragraphs from English into Chinese, but (3) I really, really need to work on reading out loud.
I can tell this too: I know I sound horribly unnatural when I read, because I'm working so hard to (a) identify the character or try to figure out what it correlates to in the traditional system if I don't recognize it, (b) figure out what it means, (c) remember the syllable's sound, (d) remember what the tone is (there are 5 different tones), and finally (e) figure out how to stress or emphasize the syllable in the flow of the sentence's meaning. Obviously, I'm not at the stage where (e) is even a viable option, except for sentences (zhen de ma? zhe me hui shi ya! etc.) that are only a few characters long. I have a lot of work to do before I can read out loud with anything that could be called success. I resisted the simplified characters for a week, doing all my homework and essays in fantizi, reading from the traditional pages in the book, looking up all the new vocab online to find the tradtional forms, and learning each word twice: once in jiantizi, once in fantizi. And you know what I learned? It's just not possible. We simply do not have enough time to learn both sets of characters. The teachers certainly don't expect us to (all tests, homework questions, written announcements, etc. are in jiantizi), and most of them can't write the traditional characters either (I've asked them a few times, and no one has been able to do it yet). So I will, as we say in Chinese, "ru xiang sui su" -- when in Rome, do as the Romans do.
posted by Kelly @ 2:00 下午
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