Learning Traditional Chinese (Part 1)

Foreword

Today, I will try to endeavour into the world of traditional Chinese as part of a (likely) series of blog posts about improving my Chinese abilities. Although I grew up in Beijing, I attended various international schools since entering grade school. Furthermore, after (unexpectedly) spending last two years in the States, I am beginning to lose my Chinese skills, which were, admittedly, lacking to begin with.

Nevertheless, I am a native speaker of Chinese. In most ordinary, day-to-day situations I could communicate equally as well in Chinese as I could in English, if not better. However, this does not carry over to other aspects of the language. I heavily rely on the auto-suggester when I type in Chinese, and I’ve also found that I typically resort to guessing (which is somehow quite accurate) when it comes to reading Chinese characters. Of course, writing is a huge struggle as well.

That’s why I want to endeavour to see how I could “fix” my Chinese. Along with many in my situation, I am in a quite unique position: I find introductory material meant for non native speakers far too easy, yet content for Chinese students of my age to be too difficult. Sure, reading middle school material might be a quick fix, but it’s probably too boring. Whatever I find is completely interest driven with the “side-quest” of improving my Chinese skill in mind. (This includes the Zhuyin Article.) Hopefully, by practicing through researching (on the Chinese internet) and trying out various techniques, I could see some tangible improvements in my own Chinese, and perhaps provide interesting topics to you, the reader.

Why Traditional?

My goal of improving my Chinese immediately begs the question: why learn Traditional? Most of the Chinese-speaking world already uses Simplified Chinese including my own family who could somewhat read traditional but could not write in it. Furthermore, since reading/writing were already my weaker disciplines, wouldn’t adding a different set of characters burden by already lacking character skills?

Those are valid concerns, and in fact, I have no suitable rebuttal against them. Instead, I will provide my own reasons for wanting to learn Traditional Chinese, which will probably have varying degrees of relatability to my readers.

First, I’ve always thought that the advantage of having a basically logographic language is the elimination of ambiguity from homographs (homonyms in written form). Unfortunately, anyone with some degree of familiarity with Chinese would know that it isn’t the case here, especially with Simplified Chinese. The Simplification of Chinese was notorious for creating many homographs by replacing characters with others that sounded similar. This came as a surprise to me as it was completely counterintuitive to the language’s logical nature when it comes to logographic characters. By learning Traditional, I would be forced to realize the plurality in meaning of many familiar characters, which, in my opinion, would be beneficial to my understanding of the language, as characters are the building blocks of Chinese.

Following a similar line of reasoning, the previous point also implies that Traditional Chinese can be more intuitive, as noted by many of my friends who use and prefer Traditional over Simplified. Whenever a “merger” happens, like merging 裏 with 里, a piece of character intuition in the language is lost, as there usually isn’t a reasonable way to relate the new (common) character to the meaning as the old character could, especially if the old character is a logograph (pictograph or ideograph).¹ It might be helpful to review the general ways in which Chinese Characters are formed.²

Another reason is that I’m trying to learn Japanese, which is a blend of Traditional, Simplified, and Japanese-specific Chinese Characters (or Kanji). This is, in fact, a gross oversimplification and misrepresentation of the true histories of these characters. In Japanese, Traditional Chinese characters (kyujitai 旧字体) were simplified independently from Mainland China in the mid twentieth-century into shinjitai (新字体). Since these simplifications generally followed the same principles as China’s simplification process, many characters were simplified in the same way while others were not.³ This results in the aforementioned apparent composition of Japanese characters.

From the perspective of a Simplified Chinese user, it may be hard to find regular patterns in the “idiosyncrasies” of Japanese Kanji. Learning Traditional, however, gives you a bird’s eye view of both simplification processes, providing a better understanding of Japanese Kanji (and consequently less confusion/rote memorization). This is only my theory after some research and browsing through common Japanese Kanjis (the jōyō-kanji list), and I would (hopefully) get to test its validity after learning Traditional Chinese and delving into Japanese.

Lastly, as a Chinese speaker, I want to be able to understand as much Chinese as possible, whether that is on the internet, in books, or in any other written form. While I wouldn’t be able to easily understand ancient Chinese or many unfamiliar Chinese dialects, I am able to understand standard Chinese written in Traditional even though I cannot read it that well, and I don’t want a change in the writing system to prevent me from reading Chinese content that I would otherwise understand. To me, the advantage outweighs the immediate burdens, and that’s why I would like to attempt to tackle this challenge.

The Starting Point

First of all, a common misconception is that the simplification of Chinese characters only started after the second world war and the advent of the People’s Republic of China. Although simplification was mostly carried out after the formation of the PRC and championed by the CCP as a means to promote literacy, its origins span throughout Chinese history as a phenomenon of replacing Chinese characters with variant written forms, which drove the evolution of the written Chinese form. Furthermore, the pre second world war Republic of China has already begun to assemble a list of simplified characters, although many of them are not the same as today’s Simplified Chinese.⁴

In the PRC, the first wave of mass simplification came around the 1950s and 1960s. This is generally referred to as the First round of Simplification. In 1964, the CCP published an official list of Simplified Chinese, containing some 2,235 characters. Then, during the cultural revolution, a second round of simplification was proposed that proposed more radical simplifications to the Chinese script, championed in particular by the left wing. This simplification surfaced after the cultural revolution in 1977, but ultimately failed to become adopted for various reasons. In particular, this process of simplification broke the “rules” of the lifecycle of new Chinese characters that have held up generally over the previous millennium: new characters are first used as variant forms by the people before becoming adopted as the standard. Instead, many characters were proposed that have never been seen before by the Chinese population. Another likely factor contributing to the unsuccessful outcome was the displacement and expulsion of educated writers and contributors to literature. In other words, the second simplification was devised without the help of those whose efforts ensured the success of the first round of simplifications.⁵

In 1986, the second round of simplification was officially repealed by the Chinese government, and an updated list of words from the first simplification was published with minimal changes.⁶ This list is the “Master List” that will aid us in our attempt to learn Traditional Chinese.

The Master List

The “Master List,” which could be found here, is formatted into three sections:⁷

1. Characters that do not appear as components in other characters, resulting in no derivative simplifications. (Contains 350 characters.)
2. Characters and radicals (which are not characters on their own) that appear as components in other characters, resulting in the consequent simplifications of other characters. (Contains 132 characters and 14 radicals.)
3. Characters that are simplified as a consequence of other characters or radicals in the second list. (Containing 1753 characters in total.)

Thankfully the third list is organized by the items that appear in the second list, and a character that is simplified due to more than one of its components appears separately under the list of each of its components with very few exceptions. This makes our analysis significantly easier.

While many might stop at this point, utilizing the Master List as an official reference source, I felt that the format of this list also reveals how we should approach Traditional Chinese when I first came across it, especially after the digging that I have done on the Chinese internet to learn Traditional Chinese have not been particularly fruitful, with most answers resorting to rote memorization and “learn through daily usage.”

The Master List has outlined 350 characters that are “one-off” simplifications with no compounding effects. For those characters, we might want to learn the most common ones and stash the rest for later as learning them is not particularly efficient. It has also outlined a core set of 146 characters and radicals that theoretically unlocks some 85% of simplified characters directly, making its mastery of utmost importance to our grasp on Traditional Chinese. This is probably the most effective learning method that I wouldn’t have come across on a differently formatted list.

Strategy: Learn the core set, then browsing the third list of derivative simplifications. There isn’t any need to memorize everything in the third list, as everything can be recreated from the second list alone. Then going to the first list and learning as many as necessary to complete all Traditional Chinese characters.

Conclusion

This is where we will leave off for this week. My goal is to try to mess around with the data on the Master List, decide the order in which I want to learn the first two lists, and proceed to learn them.

1. I have not been able to find a good example of this yet. For now, just consider this hyperbolic example: Let’s say there is a character for “dog” that looks like a dog (a pictograph), and then there is another abstract character for antidisestablishmentarianism, which is most likely a derivative or phonetic-ideographic character. Now imagine that the dog character had more strokes than the other character, and was consequently replaced during the simplification process. Now, it would be almost impossible to establish a similar level of intuition for the other character, which now also adopts the meaning of “dog,” as compared to the old pictograph. ↩

2. This resource was pretty helpful. ↩

3. Source: Wikipedia. However, it is important to note that in Japanese, unlike Chinese, simplification of a character does not imply simplifications of other characters in which it serves as a component. ↩

4. Source. ↩

5. Source: Wikipedia. ↩

6. Though, they were able to sneak in six new changes. ↩

7. Here is a cleaner PDF version, if the link is not dead. ↩