What Makes Simplified Chinese So Simple

You often see subtitle options for both simplified chinese and traditional chinese when looking at language options, but what makes simplified chinese so simple? find out in this linguistics video!
#chinese #language #languages

[@LingoLizard]

Corrections: 1:19 the simplified form of 怎麼 is 怎么, with the second character simplified. 3:27 I do mention the republic of china, (taiwan) as using traditional, but I just plain forgot to include the flag, my bad… There are a couple of instances in which converting from simplified to traditional is ambiguous because simplified sometimes combines two traditional characters together, but as far as I can tell this isn’t exceedingly common, the vast majority of characters convert from one to the other just fine.

[@xandk4009]

Yeah, for the merging of multiple characters, there aren’t many but there is the infamous 干幹乾 where all became 干 which causes confusion during translations sometimes giving results like “fυck” instead of “dried”

[@trien30]

It's better to use 甚麽 (Traditional Chinese, 麽 is the original, 麼 is the variant, look closely at the bottom part of the character inside the 广 radical, 么 was taking the bottom part of the original character and used it as the Simplified Chinese character 么, and not 幺, which was part of the variant character 麼) vs 什么? (Simplified Chinese) as an example rather than 怎麽 vs 怎么, especially when you want to show the difference between Simplified Chinese & Traditional Chinese characters.

[@ysts3452]

its common enough to be annoying in many chinese subtitles your face 面 became noodles 麵 due to conversion from simplified character it is better to be using traditional chinese at first and then convert to simplified characters if you need to use both traditional and simplified one for your job

[@trien30]

@@xandk4009 "What's happening to your hair?" 你头发发生什么啦? 皇后后面有人在吃面. The person behind the queen are having noodles.

[@oishibaking]

@@trien30 it’s lyrics though…

[@sremagamers]

It's probably worth mentioning "standard written Chinese" (白話文）is essentially a euphemism for written Mandarin. People often leave this fact out to make it seem like different Chinese varieties are magically mutually intelligible, rather than the simpler answer that they all just learn Mandarin writing.

[@li_tsz_fung]

It's almost propaganda. It just means "Plain speech script", started as a movement of abandoning classical Chinese, which is basically the latin of east Asian. Promoted with the idea of "the script that matches how you speak". And then somehow "plain speech" just represents Mandarin right now

[@oworandom]

@@li_tsz_fung Well, more like the 'plain speech' IS written mandarin, for example, this sentence here mkae sense ans is grammartically correct in the Cantonese Writing system(yes u can type out everything about Cantonese). 呢一排升左職，叫做加左少少人工，飲唔飲茶呀?我請

[@li_tsz_fung]

@@oworandom Yes, I didn't think about that when I learnt 白話文 我手寫我口 in primary school. But then one day I realise 白話 = 直白+說話. And people in Canton call Cantonese 白話. And Mandarin was called 官話 many years ago. Then I realise 白話文 is such a misused concept

[@oworandom]

@@li_tsz_fung well Cantonese ≠ 白話，白話/白話文 is kinda poorly defined, but yours work, the 直白 and 説話， the real Cantonese should just be called 粵語/廣東話, and I would day that Madarin is the modified version of the 官話， since many cultral changes and stuff happens during the creation of 'Madarin' as one single language.

[@dmicah3960]

Maybe that’s more of a regional thing. I’m from Taiwan and I never say 白話文 to mean “written Mandarin” or know anyone who does. It’s always meant to me written language that is close to how we actually speak, as opposed to 文言文. And I have no preconceived notion that this has to be limited to Mandarin. True, Mandarin is the only Chinese dialect with a well developed and widespread 白話文 writing system but others like Cantonese have one too. And the possibility is always open for other dialects. If I meet someone who writes in a dialect I don’t seem to know. I would just say, 你可以用中文/國語寫嗎？ (I know, these terms have their own propaganda ish problems but that’s how we use them), instead of 你可以用白話文寫嗎？

[@mujakinazainin]

Can we talk about how among all literary works in the Chinese language you chose to use the 小苹果's lyrics as sample text to show the difference between traditional and simplified characters 💀

[@LingoLizard]

I’M SORRY

[@xandk4009]

Lol yea made me laugh when I saw he used that songs lyrics as the example

[@dankmemewannabe7692]

BUT IT MADE ME HAPPY

[@gianb3952]

Context for non-chinese speakers?

[@CryptoIgnition]

Old meme in China

[@Kotsuyosama]

Actually most Chinese can recognize the traditional Chinese characters (TCC) even though we only learned simplified Chinese characters (SCC) in school. My opinion is, no matter what you learned (SCC or TCC), just use it. There's no need forcing each other to change.

[@slslbbn4096]

The simplified Chinese movement came from the late Qing Dynasty, an intellectual movement aimed at strengthening the Chinese people and technologies and removing their dependencies on the west - something which now, the PRC is doing way better than the ROC in Taiwan which has effectively become a de facto American puppet State

[@astralblob]

As someone who learnt Traditional, I can confirm that I can mostly make out what Simplified text says.

[@peterpancake506]

true

[@keeptaiwanfree]

it’s time to accept that simplified chinese is an ugly writing system that the communists made by slaughtering beautiful chinese characters! take down the ccp!

[@trien30]

If Chinese people can't recognize or learn Chinese (first), who were the ones who could (in the first place)?! The thought of such things as Traditional Chinese/繁體(中文)字 vs. Simplified Chinese/简体(中文)字 before 1949 didn't even exist. Everyone in China and abroad either wrote in "regular style script"/楷書, Kaishu or "running cursive script"/行草, Xingcao, a style between , "running script"/行書, Hsingshu/Xingshu (a cursive version of the regular script) and cursive script/草書, Tsaoshu/Caoshu. Most simplified "Chinese" characters were regularized due to Japanese Kanji mostly written in soshō/cursive script which was a free style being forced into a square space and conforming to Kaishu regular script producing such anomalies as 应, Simplified vs Traditional was a political agenda to rid mainland China of its history and cultural heritage. That part didn't go so well when the Chinese language became a hot mess after it was Cyrillicized and Latinized, due to the Chinese population being used to writing Chinese characters Mao and his comrades had no choice but was forced to simplify the Chinese characters due to overpopulation where people don't have enough to eat, not enough clothes to wear, had to live in communes/public buildings where a bunch of families lived together, had no money to buy food because everything was rationed for a long long time, had to learn the Chinese way of communism, political atheism, and other types of nonsensical ideologies.

[@eltontan4340]

About the spoken language,there’s actually some minor differences between China and Taiwan’s mandarin,there’s some words that had either a different tone or just completely different sound,but these are only a number of words so it’s very very minor that both side can understand anyway,like for example 蝸is pronounced wō at China but guā at Taiwan. And fun fact,Singapore briefly adopted their own version of simplified Chinese before switching to te same as PRC,some older generation of Singaporean might know how to write it but it had become very obscure today,otherwise this video was very well made and researched.🙏

[@PierreMiniggio]

OMG, thanks for this comment. I entered the word 蝸牛 in my Anki deck a few days ago, and I coudn't figure out why the Google Translate voice was giving me a different sound for traditional and simplified. I assumed it was probably some kind of Google Translate error as there are many more in other languages, but looks like it was not !

[@eltontan4340]

@@PierreMiniggio I used to thought it was simply because of accent until I found out both were indeed had different pronunciation lol

[@isabelagonzalezlopez8296]

This is true! If anyone goes through the manuals of things you buy, mostly electronics, one can see when comparing the Simplified and the Traditional texts. Not only are they sometimes not one to one, but Simplified and Traditional will have different words for the same terms, I’m assuming that’s just a difference between Mainland Putonghua and Taiwan’s Guoyu vocabularies? I’m not sure but it’s fascinating either way

[@milanoxiel7853]

taiwanese mandarin is southern mandarin with heavy min and hakka influence

[@eltontan4340]

@@milanoxiel7853 yeah their mandarin sound more closer to southern province and Malaysian/Singapore Chinese education,a northerner usually sounded more rough compared to someone from fujian haha

[@batlily]

I am from Singapore. In the early days, the Ministry of Education did came up with a local list of simplified Chinese characters, some unique to Singapore. When China settled down on the official list of simplified Chinese characters, Singapore soon followed the China version!

[@percyjohnson5664]

maybe you wanna learn proper English first.... did COME up with

[@user-bl7ef2bu6b]

@@percyjohnson5664 who types seriously on the internet bruh

[@JungleLibrary]

@@percyjohnson5664 wow, you are so rude. Their English is excellent, and they probably know more languages than you.

[@percyjohnson5664]

@@JungleLibrary you should probably re learn english grammar yourself

[@seanwang3840]

Didn't know this before! Very interesting. Do they still use a bit of the old Singapore-only ones?

[@yeozdemir75]

Why isn't this channel popular? It's a very good linguistics channel!

[@mdahsenmirza2536]

Because it was created just month ago?

[@LingoLizard]

@@mdahsenmirza2536 a little under 3 months :p

[@mdahsenmirza2536]

@@LingoLizard ooo, i wish you luck my dude, nice channel you've got there

[@haroldberserker]

Asides from not having many videos, these seem to be a very specific niche

[@Connie_TinuityError]

@@mdahsenmirza2536 Right, well glad to know I discovered this channel before it became big.

[@user-mx1rb2vz3v]

As you said japanese is a weird case, there are kanji that are simplified like 国、当、図 and others but there are also a lot of not simplified ones like the 言 radical in kanji like 詩 and sometimes there are kanji that are original from japanese like 躾, there are also maaany complex characters like 欄 but when a character is too complex or aren't in common, people sometimes just use kana like in 醍醐味 or 喧嘩

[@Igor_Chausov]

I like Japanese simplification of characters, Japanese were not so radical in this deal like Chinese. I can understand why such characters like 麼，聽，會，國 and so on were simplified, but I can't understand why were simplified such characters as 給，說，語，飯 and so on.

[@michaelmartin9022]

Japanese simplified was not the "deliberate simplifying" that was done in China, it's just around 1947 or so they decided the "vulgar variants" used in handwriting (most of the time) should just be the official ones. So while 學 might have appeared in print on on signs outside schools, everybody hand-wrote 学, without the unwieldy castle on top, so now that's the official form. You know what else happened when people decided a vulgar variant of a language was now official? Most languages in Europe!

[@why_are_you_gae6729]

@@michaelmartin9022 what’s weird to me is why does Japanese calligraphy also write in simplified characters? In China calligraphy is always done in traditional characters.

[@BasedApricot]

⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠@@why_are_you_gae6729Some of the simplified Chinese characters derived from even older archaic Chinese writing systems. Mainly from sinic cursive writing 草書 which is also what Japanese based on when unifying the writing system. Look up evolution of Chinese writing system should you wish to indulge yourself in this topic.

[@bedrock6443]

Kanji is just very different from modern Chinese. Many characters have only one syllable. But in kanji often times the kanji is two syllables and sometimes same one can be one syllable if at end of word. This is probobly why Japanese family names in someways feel like western family names having about 4-5 syllables. Think about any Japanese person you know. Tokugawa Iaeyasu. Akira toriyama. Shinzo Abe.

[@ordinary_name]

In korean, words are still used which came from chinese character (not chinese). But we write them with hangul, korean alphabet. however, we still can use chinese character (in korean, it said "hanja")to write them and if do so, we use traditional one. 국한문혼용체 is the hangul which write the sound of 國漢文混用體 and it mean "write style of using both hangul and hanja". before 1990s, it was not that weird to use both, but at this time, that's not ordinary. here's example of using both and only using hangul. "나는 침대에서 일어나 양치를 하고 학교에 등교할 준비를 마쳤다." "나는 寢臺에서 일어나 養齒를 하고 學校에 登校할 準備를 마쳤다." if you look for some before 1990s' korean news, you can see many chinese character.

[@momoware]

So basically Korean was like Japanese...

[@andreluiz6023]

No cuz korean even then didn't really like writing hanja for native words, unlike Japanese and it's wide use of kundoku

[@mydogisbailey]

I love mixed Korean script so much. It’s such a shame that it was abandoned

[@larry7898]

Ability to read/write Chinese also helps with Japanese understanding (given proliferation of kanji characters). When I visited Japan, I could understand at least broad context of newspaper articles and even communicate with an elderly lady on the train by writing! Even though the spoken language is not even in the same linguistic family. Would've been cool if Korea kept hanja and Vietnam kept chu-nom!

[@freemanol]

My family speaks hakka, which is a conservative dialect that preserves many Middle Chinese pronunciation. Most of the japanese pronunciations for Kanji is derived from Middle Chinese, so it sounds very familiar. Like xinwen (news) in hakka is shinbun / shinmun, exactly like japanese

[@thanhdohuu9473]

As a Vietnamese, I'm actually glad we replaced the classical Chinese script with Latin alphabet. It makes Vietnamese so much easier to learn. It also makes learning English a lot easier.

[@kawaiimym3lo]

@@freemanol same

[@larry7898]

@@thanhdohuu9473 Does the homonyms get difficult to decipher? I sometimes read Pinyin - which is in Latin alphabet with tonal marks, and for me I literally have to read them out loud to know what I'm hearing.

[@thanhdohuu9473]

@@larry7898 Vietnamese homonyms? They feel the same as English ones.

[@Syuvinya]

5:56 This works in most cases, but there are cases where a simplified character is written the same way as the traditional version when it is used in one way, but written differently when it is used another way. Such as the character "后"，which is used for the word "queen" in both traditional and simplified Chinese, but is also used as "behind" in simplified Chinese. In traditional Chinese, "behind" is written as "後" instead.

[@elmakaori530]

yea and stuff like 郁 (trad = 郁、鬱）and 干 （trad = 幹、乾）

[@luckyblockyoshi]

it’s because of the combining of some characters with the same pronunciation, which imo was not a good decision, creates a lot of unnecessary ambiguities.

[@dohuuhailong8352]

Same for the wood noodle and surface. In Trad noodle is 麵 and surface is 面. But in Simplified, they use 面 for both

[@PeterLiuIsBeast]

IIRC 后 was originally used as a variant of the character 後. But as the language evolved, 後 became behind and 后 became queen/empress (consort).

[@user-sb9cg9st4e]

I think it is because it is simplified

[@Numba1zhongguo]

1:17 DUDE I GREW UP ON THIS SONG MAN. For anyone who is confused, these are the chorus lyrics to "Little Apple" by Chopstick Brothers. It's this C-Pop song that was released probably a decade ago by now and it SLAPPS. The language lizard or whatever your name is, massive respect for putting that little easter egg in there

[@050_WeiXian]

Bro I remember listening to this when I was P5/11 years old 🥲

[@memebaltan]

@@050_WeiXian Now the new version 大香蕉

[@lunganimyeni7633]

This is so cool to watch! I'm starting to learn Japanese and content like this is right up my alley.

[@thealtrik3051]

Really interesting video! I love your style! Have you though about making a video about constructing languages? I think you would make a really interesting video about them.

[@waterunderthebridge7950]

There’s an error in 1:13 The 怎麼 of traditional is actually 怎么 in simplified

[@kuri7154]

Finally an educational video on this topic without shaming the use of simplified or any overemphasis on the politics. Thank you so much for making this.

[@zippersocks]

I already knew all this (kinda) but clicked it and wanted to see your presentation. Well done.

[@Sp3ctralI]

It’s really cool to hear stories about these things too. That’s what I love about learning all sorts of countries

[@emonizaz]

You make it simplified for me 😅 Great video 💜💜 Can you make a video on Bengali? I saw it on the top list but most people don't even know about this language.

[@YohohoXX]

The simplification of Chinese characters has been absurdly politicized by people. People think the simplified Chinese characters are invented by the CCP and come out of the blue, ignoring the fact that Chinese characters are constantly evolving and that the simplified characters can be traced back to a long time ago. Personally, I can read and write both interchangeably even though I was taught the simplified version only.

[@Banom7a]

In Malaysia, we used traditional mostly for news headline and simplified for other stuff.

[@liangseng7474]

The only exception is China Times (中国报) where everything (headlines and content) is in traditional Chinese

[@xXxSkyViperxXx]

the chinese newspapers in the philippines are also mostly written in traditional but more and more chinese filipino schools teach simplified, but there are still some that use traditional or they teach both

[@mikeifyouplease]

Loved the ending!! So cute and clever!!

[@lynliee]

To think you only started ur channel 2 months is amazing! Hope to see diff languages in other countries!

[@MCBosmans]

Also worth mentioning that the characters of the Japanese phonetic writing system Hiragana are based on Chinese characters, having evolved out of the cursive versions of some of these characters

[@trien30]

And Katakana was also based on Chinese regular square script called Kaishu.

[@haomingli6175]

@@trien30 hiragana are based on whole characters written in cursive. katakanas are based on radicals written in Kaishu.

[@cicidamagnificent4230]

Oh and the conversion between simplified and traditional Chinese is very simple. And speaking from the point of a Chinese native speaker, most of us should be able to read both versions of the language even if we only learned one of them, there is a logic behind the characters that make sense to us but are very hard to explain.

[@le_beks]

great video! as a language nerd, youve got a new catalan subscriber ^^ with this type of quality content im sure youll grow very fast! greetings from barcelona

[@Fluster]

Very underrated, this video was quite well made!

[@dingus42]

Great video but I have to make a correction as a Mandarin and Hokkien speaker. The written languages are NOT the same at all; for example the same phrase "I want to eat frog legs, but I can't find one" (sorry i just randomly came up with this lol) would be roughly "我要吃田鸡腿，但我找不到" in Mandarin and "我爱食蛤婆跤，tapi我𣍐揣" in Hokkien. Note how literally every character except the one for "I" is different. It's just that most people in the Sinophone regions learn Mandarin writing and reading in school and are thus less literate in the other Chinese languages.

[@prasanth2601]

Upon translating Hokkein one, 爱-Fond of/Like 食-Meal/Food for animals 蛤-Clam 婆- Old Woman (?) 跤-Observe(?) Despite the sentence turned out to be inaccurate atleast the context is being understood

[@OkThisllbeMyName]

we need more linguistics channels

[@poppliotheplushmaker5751]

I just came here to say it's great to see you get such a good audience so fast!

[@spiralfairy]

love your vids keep it up!

[@LingoLizard]

Thank you!

[@zzasdfwas]

Different varieties of Chinese don't use the same writing, just similar. But almost all the written Chinese out there is written in Mandarin, and there is a one to one correspondence between characters and Mandarin syllables (ignoring er contractions). Usually the same character means the same thing in different varieties, just pronounced differently. But different varieties don't have the same structure as Mandarin, so it's not possible to do a word for word translation from written Mandarin to syllables in the language. Plenty of words and parts of speech don't have matches in Mandarin, and maybe don't even match something from Classical Chinese. The writing system for a lot of varieties isn't fully standardized or maybe don't exist at all because there aren't many people who use it. I don't think you can measure mutual intelligibility of the written language because anyone who is literate in Chinese is literate in Mandarin Chinese.

[@ABChinese]

Nice video! I'm studying this topic at the moment so I was happy to have stumbled on your video:D

[@SamLuv07]

Quality content 💜 You deserve millions of subscribers

[@a_maxed_out_handle_of_30_chars]

i had always wondered about this but never tried to look it up, i'm glad the algorithm recommended this video to me

[@user-yp5ko8us9j]

1:14 Holy shit that just gave me a truckload of nostalgia. Haven't heard of little apple in at least 7 years lmfao

[@johnchessant3012]

It's mindbendingly cool to me that dialects can be mutually unintelligible but share the exact same writing system

[@PlatinumAltaria]

Most languages in Europe share the same writing system, we're just hampered by the fact that our writing is pronunciation-based and the Chinese writing system isn't.

[@carultch]

@@PlatinumAltaria That's why English's spelling is total chaos. It maintains the etymological origins of the words so we can figure out the meaning of the word by looking at letter patterns in it and relating them to other words, rather than having spelling follow pronunciation. If you hear words like knight that are loaded with inconsistent letters by modern standards, the way they would've been said 500 years ago, the spelling would make a lot more sense. Trying to keep a written language consistent with pronunciation is impossible, because pronunciation is a moving target. Languages evolve shortcuts to pronunciation all the time, that eventually diverge from the dialects of other regions, and eventually every language will have some phonetic inconsistency.

[@artugert]

They're not completely mutually intelligible, only partially.

[@thecrab3128]

@@artugert Uh...I'd say they're pretty much completely mutually intelligible, like 85% or so, only differenciated by local slangs

[@icebaby6714]

It was China's First Emperor who unified the writing system across China 2000 years ago, there used to be a dozen of small kingdoms fighting one another for decades each of them used a different writing system.

[@vladislavkaras491]

Thanks for the explanation! Always wanted to know the difference.

[@canisalpha_music]

Impressive video! Has to say, this video is completely capable to introduce our facinating language to the world in a fairly objective side of view!

[@Purple431]

Japanese also has a alsort of simplified character system called Shinjitai. (龍 -> 竜)

[@TeslabladePlaysMC]

As someone who's familiar with kanji from learning Japanese, it still baffles me and gives me a good laugh knowing that changes like the Traditional Chinese/Japanese character 機 (machine, opportunity) getting simplified to 机, "desk", were passed. Just imagine... Japan: brb, just gonna go use my 複写機 (photocopier)! China: Oh cool, what're you gonna use your 复印机 (photocopier) for? Japan: my... 複写机 (copying desk)? what? *Taiwan enters the chat* Taiwan: No, your 複印機 (photocopier)! Japan: Oh... why didn't you say so? China: It's a text chat, how could I..?

[@livedandletdie]

I personally view simplified Chinese as an abomination. I mean 爱(simp.) vs 愛(trad.) it's ridiculous, removing 心 from it. And I say this is the only necessary reason for why we should all just murder every CCP member outright. I don't care about the human rights violations at all, but removing the heart from love, is truly vile.

[@oworandom]

I am having a strock understanding this as I have no prior knowledge of thw word 複印機 itself lol. Maybe I am too young and juat say 'Printer' lol

[@jimmywu1011]

As a Taiwanese, we actually call a photocopy machine 影印機，nobody calls it 複印機

[@TeslabladePlaysMC]

@@jimmywu1011 Ah, sorry! I only know a few odds and ins with Chinese, mainly in the writing system, and it was only meant to be a bit of a skit-like joke about 機 and 机 being very different in Japanese.

[@graphemelucid8407]

I'd say ppl in Japan just say コピー機 instead of specifying the word as 複写機. (The Kanji 機, I've seen Japanese ppl write it as 木キ, same with 魔 simplifying it as 广+マ.) There're lots of words in Japanese, especially of foreign origins, although come with Kanji translation & interpretation, nowadays ppl only say the phonetically similar Katakana (most of them are used with Japanese alteration). Maybe you can do example words like 登録（登录）, Japanese = Register / Subscribe, Simplified Chinese = Login. Pretty confusing for Chinese Japanese learners when playing an online game. 録 & 录, I don't know why they just cut the left radical. Another example I just thought of, 制止 製紙（制止 制纸）, 制 & 製 is the same 制 in Simplified Chinese, 製 is more emphasizing "to produce something", but honestly Japanese ppl using both 制作 & 製作 and mixing each other. I think ordinary ppl won't care that much.

[@Zestieee]

I'm liking this channel. Probably gonna be one of my favourites if you keep going like this

[@ShanXiTV]

concise and informative, also very accurate. well done.

[@wrsasq1514]

I think traditional Chinese is better. As some words which simplified would mix with some other words, like (蕭→肖) and(肖) ；(雲→云) and (云), those are different surname. But in simplified Chinese, they become same.

[@soultr549]

With some context people can difficiate it

[@HAITAIIO]

Theres a tiny mistake at 1:20 Simplified:么(not麼)

[@Randopatchi]

As the video was ending I was getting read to comment about kanji, hanja, and chữ nôm but you beat me to it, great work! I’ll just add before Vietnamese got rid of using characters they invented a whole slew of fascinating symbols that look so different from Chinese while being descended from the same script

[@diasigimbayev6865]

Awesome videoooo 👏 subbed^^

[@loulou3676]

Taiwan (which uses traditional characters) actually has a higher literacy rate than the PRC. I think the key is just being able to provide all citizens with several years of education. Anyone can learn to write in traditional Chinese but you'd need at least an elementary or ideally middle school level education. Simplifying made sense for the PRC back in the 1950s and 60s when they had an enormous population of mostly peasants who'd be lucky to get a few years of grade school.

[@KinLee919]

Taiwan is a small island, mainland china is a huge country.

[@LazarusBell]

@@KinLee919 Huge country also means more manpower. There's no excuse.

[@vokzaal]

The rise in literacy rates across mainland China from the 1950s onwards has very little to do with the character simplification scheme, but rather the increased accessibility of education from initiatives brought along by the communist party. Contrary to what people might say, simplified and traditional characters have a very similar degree of learning difficulty if one wants to be functionally literate. The reason for this is that the structural and logical principles behind Chinese characters as a writing system did not change in the simplification, rather the only simplification that did occur was graphical. To illustrate this point, literacy rates in Taiwan and Hong Kong where traditional characters comprise the official script have consistently been higher than that of the mainland and likely always will be higher. The only true benefit to having simplified characters at the time of their promulgation was ease of writing, which would have saved time and ink. But in today's digital era, these benefits are no longer applicable to any substantial extent.

[@risannd]

Even Taiwan writes they own country name simplified lol.

[@oworandom]

@@risannd thats more like a American English and British English kind of things at this point, like realise and realize

[@user-ed9qu5im2y]

​@@risannd Well Simplified Chinese has a much more complex history. As this video explained, a lot of simplified characters have existed for centuries - some 2000 years in some case. The CCP did a systematic simplification of the whole written acript, and Taiwan simply didn't. So Taiwan still uses (sometimes) any simplifications that were created prior to CCP's simplifications. So there's nothing weird about Taiwan sometimes writing their name as 台灣 vs 臺灣.

[@lihwak9181]

'Will always be higher as in mainland' well maybe if you didn't compare an extremely overpopulated city with a country the size of a continent it could work

[@vokzaal]

@@lihwak9181 even if Hong Kong and Taiwan accepted simplified characters (they never will, by the way) their literacy rates would not noticeably increase.

[@danielbojkovski723]

I just discovered this channel and its weird to be watching such a new creator with such interesting content that has yet to blow up. Like if you have 100k subs in a few months i wouldnt be suprised and just be happy that i was part of the first wave

[@shambles9]

Great video! Thanks for this. One suggestion I want to make is that your use of the greater than symbol made it look like you were implying one writing system was better than the other which wasn't the point you were making in the video. Maybe you a dash with the greater-than-or-equal sign like this? -> or the unicode character for arrow like this? →

[@GMDThread8]

In fact, the Communist Party of China tried to further simplify their 简体字 into 二简字, which literally means the second level of simplified Chinese. Due to the confusion between characters, the second-level simplified Chinese actually made comprehension more difficult. Hence, 二简字 destined to failure.

[@cooikemint]

my parents who went to primary school on the mainland at the time described to me that for the double-simplified characters “only a few characters were taught in schools and we couldnt read them”. my brother who was born way later had seen some signs that were still written in double-simplified characters, and he told me that “i couldnt read them at all”. (im a canadian born chinese)

[@ts3544]

Some of the simplifications make sense, however in some, it takes away from the meaning. For example, the word for "listen" (ting) in the traditional form looks like this: 聽 and you can see its components include the characters for ear and heart, eye and principle. The simplified version is 听 which only has a mouth and (if I remember correctly) hammer.

[@CannibaLouiST]

听 in Chinese has an entirely different meaning and pronunciation completely unrelated to 聽. Such relation did not happen until the Middle Ages when 𠯸 appeared. 厂 is another one. Well recorded since the second empire, and completely unrelated to 廠 until the communists came and ruined it.

[@seanwang3840]

The simplification definitely helps people to understand and learn the language, but makes it ever so hard to directly understand the meanings of the characters just by looking at them. The simplification standard even contradicts itself sometimes. You'd often have to refer to the ancient versions of the characters to know more about them.

[@CannibaLouiST]

​@@seanwang3840 No it doesn't. With this mess, nowadays China can't even print a traditional Chinese book correctly. The one book I'm reading has less than 500 pages, and I can find out more than 20 simplified words already (including one in the pretext), and I ain't even half way through the book.

[@seanwang3840]

​@@CannibaLouiST That's a shame. If you want to read proper, authentic Traditional Chinese, you'd have to purchase books from places that actually use it on a daily basis. Publishing houses in, for example, Beijing, would be a bad choice. Guangdong might be better?

[@CannibaLouiST]

@@seanwang3840 Even worse, the book was printed by Zhonghua Book Company, quite well known for good quality classical Chinese books in traditional fonts. Although I did find out one simplified word in the Book of Chen, it's genereally rare in these older editions. New books are nowhere as good in terms of proofreading, but this 鬼谷子集校集注 2nd edition is probably the worst I've ever seen.

[@goldfish-chan]

I love the little apple reference it was my favorite song when I was in elementary school lmao

[@Neyobe]

this is an amazing video!!

[@saintelohim]

4:30 Min, or specifically Min Nan (which means Southern Min) is spoken in Taiwan as Taiwanese.

[@nehcooahnait7827]

An insult to indigenous people

[@xXxSkyViperxXx]

Taiwanese in Taiwan is just Taiwanese Hokkien. there is also Taiwanese Hakka and Taiwanese Mandarin. Taiwanese people love to say that Taiwanese Hokkien is a different language when it's still functionally within the bounds of Hokkien and its many dialects of its own.

[@youtubedeletedmyaccountlma2263]

@@nehcooahnait7827 Same goes for "chinese" you don't speak chinese. Is like saying I learn Romance language.

[@elepot5168]

There are some differences between traditional chinese and simplified chinese other than just character replacements. Some words are more commenly used in one language than the other. For example, "video" in traditional chinese is more commonly phrased as 「影片」 while the simplified one is 「视频」

[@luckyblockyoshi]

this is less “traditional chinese” vs “simplified chinese” and more like regional vocabulary difference, like “chips” vs “fries” in English. The region that uses “影片” also uses traditional more so you will see it more written in traditional.

[@altralinguamusica]

And with that very last line, I laughed and subscribed!

[@lisac2985]

SUCH a cool channel

[@meltup3668]

China's rise in literacy rates wasn't due to simplified Chinese. The literacy rates rose simply because more schools opened up in post-war China (after the CCP won against the KMT in 1949) as part of a mass literacy campaign. Traditional Chinese is complicated, but consider that Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau have literacy rates that are just as high as Mainland China.

[@angelkilier]

However the effort required to achieve the same literacy rate is vastly different. It might not be that important right now to any of the Chinese speaking countries/regions, but back then? In the 50s mainland China, when the goal of education is just to have elementary school graduates be able to read and write about 3000 characters, the amount of time teachers and students needed to spend on teaching and leaning them is greatly shortened thanks to the simplification. It's also more likely to deter people from dropping out of school entirely.

[@heatherlht_]

This is actually a really nice explanation about simplied and traditional Chinese. I am studying aboard now and many people ask if I do simplified or traditional Chinese and they always ask what’s the difference and I always find it hard to explain for them why are there two writing systems. However as a person who writes traditional Chinese, I must say traditional just looks much more aesthetically pleasingly and it’s more easier to guess their meaning/ pronunciation when you don’t know the word Also a little fun fact, there is different variations of simplified Chinese based on where you live, but they’re all similar

[@null0034]

That ending is amazing

[@dankmemewannabe7692]

I love how quickly i recognized the lyrics as being from Little Apple

[@Head0.25s]

3:31 A notable user of traditional Chinese characters is Taiwan

[@ianhuangncubed]

He called it Republic of China and didn’t show the flag. Definitely some underlying bias there…

[@Head0.25s]

@@ianhuangncubed it is officially called RoC, so he is not wrong…

[@ianhuangncubed]

@@Head0.25s ​ Ik, but he’s obviously avoiding using the more commonly used name

[@U20E0]

@@ianhuangncubed he is using the “correct” name. Taiwan is the name of the island. But as is seen with “Great Britain”, using the name of the island is also acceptable ( but technically not correct )

[@xiaoyuvax]

A notable group of users of traditional Chinese characters are calligraphers.

[@yqisq6966]

The real benefit of simplified Chinese is with writing. Since the Chinese read their characters like scanning QR codes, reading does not rely on knowing individual strokes and it's fairly easy to learn how to read Chinese written in traditional characters even if simplified character is what you would normally use. The same is not true for writing since that requires knowing exactly where individual strokes are.

[@seanwang3840]

The lesser the strokes, the faster you write. Some characters actually evolved through history and became more and more simple - people simply came up with their own simplifications, and gradually the entire race forgot how to write the complicated version.

[@ranjanbiswas3233]

It even looks like different languages if no one told me one is simplified and another is traditional.

[@VoidloniXaarii]

This was great, thanks a lot

[@henz9571]

I learned both traditional and simplified at same time, and simplified Chinese is whole lot easier than traditional. Nowadays whenever I read traditional Chinese word i need a few second to think.

[@chinarise]

You think like a normal foreign learner. Simplified Chinese is complicated enough for foreign learners, let alone traditional Chinese.

[@jebremocampo9194]

Dude could not mention Taiwan cuz of fear of being demonetized

[@angelkilier]

wdym? Duded mentioned both RoC and Taiwan.

[@jieunmin9354]

Very fun and informative video :D

[@mehornyasfk]

Ironically, traditional characters look much more recognisable to me.

[@Claro1993]

One quirk about traditional Chinese is that some characters in its simplified form is acceptable when writing in the traditional form, a prominent example is the Chinese character ‘tai’, when written in traditional form looks like this 「臺」, but could be also written like this 「台」and that is still acceptable in a traditional context.

[@auseziegieteursucraineiwst3680]

How about you talk about literal chinese（文言文）? Also, the dialects of china like cantonese and hokkien have similar relationship like French and spanish. they and Mandrin have a common ancestor , which is usually Tang and Song dynastys' chinese mixed with other local languages, Just like French And spanish both have things to do with Latin.

[@shinybreloom4027]

1. you're kind of right on the last one that they're similar to French and Spanish in terms of distance except they're even further apart than that. Also, this translation of 方語 as dialect is deeply misleading, it actually means location (方) - language (語). No serious linguist would agree with your definition. However, it is correct that Cantonese has consumed a substratum of Thai. 2. The RoC government actually considers them completely separate, really only the PRC does the absolute one.

[@xXxSkyViperxXx]

@@shinybreloom4027 there is a mysterious secret substratum of austronesian language in Min languages too but it is left unexplored. as someone who has dealt with austronesian languages and min languages like hokkien for some years. there's been a fair amount of identified similarities. sadly no official study yet to connect the dots.

[@youtubedeletedmyaccountlma2263]

@@xXxSkyViperxXx Go read the study by American linguist Norman on austronesian/austroasiatic substrate in Min languages. Sadly he passed away, but he made a great contribution on this part of research

[@Marshalllow]

Wow! Your voice is so beautiful!

[@ianhuangncubed]

Thank you, Little Apple is now stuck in my head again

[@Spursfan8147]

The 几 looks more similar to Л

[@andrepoiy1199]

Hmmm, why did you omit the flag of the ROC? Sketchy

[@U20E0]

KZbin does not like controversial or “controversial” topics. He tried to not get demonetized.

[@kietack1203]

informative, high-quality videos touching on interesting topic. Hope you release more videos about Cantonese, Simplified / Traditional Chinese, Korean (relation, similarities, difference, history, etc.). Best of luck

[@Joooo89]

Alot of Korean and Japanese words are closer to Cantonese than Mandarin, coz Cantonese is older But the closest will be Hokkien, especially Quanzhou dialect, coz it's way older than Cantonese (they can keep it very well for 2000 years because of /or with the help of their Nanyin Music), the language is very similar with old Chinese, while Cantonese language started somewhere around middle Chinese period

[@shrimpfry880]

chinese pharmacists have to be gods to be able to read the doctors handwriting

[@kirilvelinov7774]

Mandarin:simplified Taiwanese:traditional Japanese:both

[@kirilvelinov7774]

Most Japanese kanji uses the traditional form

[@as2s3hf7gff]

@@kirilvelinov7774 nah, Japanese have their own simplified version

[@as2s3hf7gff]

Simplified Chinese 樱 Simplified Japanese 桜 Simplified Chinese 圆 Simplified Japanese 円

[@Cherodar]

@@as2s3hf7gff But most of them are traditional. The Japanese simplifications are far milder than the Chinese ones. There are a few cases like the ones you picked, but they're very few (compare, for instance, anything with the 門 radical, anything with the 言 radical, and so on).

[@xXxSkyViperxXx]

japanese has its own set of shinjitai (new characters) and kyujitai (old characters)

[@nitrogenthrone1778]

Man you should be way more popular!, You've got your 1k sub my guy

[@scheimong]

Also worth noting is that there are plenty of items and concepts that have different vocabularies in traditional vs. simplified Chinese, much like how a British would say pavement/bonnet/pub and an American would say sidewalk/trunk/bar. Although admittedly this has more to do with the political and social segregation between various Chinese-speaking political entities than anything else. Some examples include: 檔案/文件 (file), 機車/摩托车 (motorbike), 鐳射/激光 (laser), 範例/例子 (example), 馬鈴薯/土豆 (potato), 滑鼠/鼠标 (computer mouse). As you'd expect, most of these concepts with different names originated and/or were popularised during the post-WW2, pre-internet era. Note that many people know and understand both (and in some cases, more than two) variants; they just have a preference for one of them that strongly correlates to where they're from. And there are more subtle differences in the way we structure our sentences too. So if you put some reasonably lengthy text into a machine translator, many native speakers would still be able to tell the difference.

[@kevinpan4969]

It is not so easy translate text between the Traditional and Simplified Chinese. The fact is since the Simplified one has done it several times to combine multiple characters into one, it is hard to translate it back to Traditional Chinese. Similarly, there are some cases that the simplified character only take a part of the meaning, so the Traditional one should be used to indicate the other parts. A translator should go through it by "vocabularies" other than "characters". Nevertheless, there will always be some edge cases; for example, that vocabularies sometimes may be separated wrong, that vocabularies didn't get recorded in the reference table (thanks to the flexibility of Chinese, it's easy to create new ones), or the character itself is also the vocabulary. Therefore, it may be required to use AI in order to get more info from the context.

[@nehcooahnait7827]

That is an over exaggeration

[@ims3312]

你说的就是一简对多繁的情况嘛，这个问题多写几行代码很简单 把所有一个简体字对应多个繁体字做字典，转换的时候 如果某句某字出现一对多的情况，把句子送给拆词库例如jieba拆词，把这个词拆出来比如干燥 干涉 去匹配繁词表，一简对多繁字表也就几十个字吧， 文言文有专门的分词库比如甲言，可以拆字做库。 这个机器做起来比人快，但段落什么的是人写的，同音形近或直接用错的情况太多了，机器可以解决人的问题，只不过人类的问题比较多……

[@fancy841014]

In the mathematical perspective, the mapping of traditional Chinese to simplified Chinese is not invertible because it's not an one to one and onto mapping. It often involved issues in some specific contexts like 干女兒 (simplified Chinese of daughter in law) to 乾女兒 (the traditional Chinese of dauther in law). While 干 is often converted into 幹 which could mean the f word in Chinese, this kind of invert is not a reasonable one. It is also worth mentioning that the majority who use traditional Chinese may have a very different word of choices compared to the people who use simplified Chinese, so directly invert one system of the character to another is not a good idea.

[@hoangduong6683]

Of course, all simplification or compression functions lose information. It doesn't matter if it's worth it. Imagine you have hundreds of photos of 10MB RAW files and want to share it with your friends. And it's terrible that they don't have any compression algorithm that converts those files to 800kB JPEG each for sharing. Yes it does lose information, but your eyes can't even see that.

[@topvidea2815]

Well done, keep it up. Looks like you have some previous experience with KZbin. I would highly recommend you to add some music into your videos. Have a nice day.

[@deutschthomas2751]

Well in some cases traditional characters are still being used in Mainland, mainly in context of ancient cultures, e.g. academic books about ancient Chinese langauge and history are published in traditional characters in Mainland Nowadays there are still a lot of characters(mainly for the name of people or small locations) that are not included in common computer charsets like Unicode, and some volunteers and companies(include Tencent) are collecting and submitting them to the Unicode Consortium(the org who manages Unicode) for a inclusion in the future version of Unicode(but this process will take very long time because they need to argue first why this character need to be included to the Unicode and it also take time for font providers to update the fonts and new fonts being installed to the devices)

[@CannibaLouiST]

almost all "traditional chinese books" printed in china from the 50s onward are corrupted by simplified chinese here and there.

[@tedc9682]

It is false that all the different Chinese languages are the same in written form. They are not. They use different grammar, different words, etc. What is true is that many people who speak some other (Cantonese, Yu etc.) can ALSO read Mandarin. They are not reading (for example) Shangainese. They are reading Putonghua (Mandarin), the official language of China, since 1955.

[@feliksovarondenisovich7706]

麽 becomes 么 in simplified. Doesn’t stay the same.

[@dmicah3960]

The example in the thumbnail is basically like how some people type sight as site in English. It’s simplified indeed, but also confusing. It’s not just simplifying the character, it’s replacing it with another existing character.

[@miguel04685]

Great video! 😀

[@elnini0]

I like how you actively avoided saying anything about Taiwan lol

[@angelkilier]

He said Republic of China. Taiwan is just a province of it.

[@calvinhue]

Lmao that’s the exact example of avoiding saying the work Taiwan

[@angelkilier]

@@calvinhue Well he mentioned Taiwan a couple of times. You might want to watch again.

[@leezhieng]

@@calvinhue the current ROC still controls parts of Fujian province (mah tzu county and lian chiang county), not just Taiwan province.

[@Bouzhe]

Studied both in Uni, started writing traditional, tried some simplified but quickly went back to traditional. Simplified didn't make much sense to me, i found traditional more aesthetically pleasing and easier to balance in a square, you could sometimes guess the pronunciation if you didn't know the character, having to write lines of character to learn them made the ones with more strokes easier to memorize (unpopular opinion amongst my peers at the time). Later on, when i wanted to learn more effective ways to write, i found out that a lot of simplified characters and radicals were similar to the cursive script in calligraphy.

[@leelawhisenant]

The relationship between Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters is indeed complex. In modern China, high illiteracy rates and poor communication led to many variations in how a single character was written. This variation was so widespread that it even appeared in official government documents and poetry written by emperors. The environment that gave rise to Simplified Chinese was quite radical, and the simplification of some characters, particularly surnames, met with considerable opposition. Some Simplified characters are actually older and more original than their Traditional counterparts. For instance, the Simplified character "万" (wàn, meaning ten thousand) is more ancient than its Traditional version "萬", which is a variant form. Conversely, Traditional Chinese includes complex characters like "燼" (jìn, meaning ashes), which redundantly includes the radical for fire, even though the right side of the character already signifies fire. This redundancy reflects the evolution and layering of meaning and form over centuries, contributing to the rich historical tapestry of the Chinese language. translated by ChatGPT

[@leelawhisenant]

Additionally,"近代" typically refers to the recent past, not the immediate present. A more precise translation for "近代中国" would be "Modern China," often referring to the period from the late Qing Dynasty to the early Republic of China, rather than "Contemporary China," which is usually referred to as "现代中国" and represents the current era. The term "modern" in English can sometimes cover both recent and current periods depending on the context.

[@leelawhisenant]

For people in Mainland China, history is often divided in this way: the period from 1840 to 1978 (or sometimes considered until 1949) is referred to as "近代" (Modern), and the period from 1978 to the present is referred to as "现代" (Contemporary). The year 1840 marks the beginning of the Opium Wars and significant foreign intervention, while 1978 marks the start of China's economic reforms and opening-up under Deng Xiaoping. This periodization reflects significant shifts in Chinese society, politics, and economy.

[@zhiyuanliu9533]

1:16 Good work. Just some small mistakes that I want to point out, which are understandable because most Chinese would not even recognise them. Mistake，SC（mainland），TC （），呀，呀 （），苹，蘋 麽，么，麼 （），亮，亮 the 几 in the bottom should not be disconnected （），春，春 the long 'dot' does not do up to the second horizontal line （），会，會 the second last stroke is (slash+hook) not (slash then hook) （），天，天 first horizontal stroke should be shorter than the second

[@jacobfitzgerald6110]

I love how you used xiaopingguo by the Chopstick Bros as a reference LOL

[@Graphite2983]

1:13 The sentence “怎么爱你都不嫌多” seems to have missed the ”么”, which has been placed as traditional. Also, for me, the only thing I really hate about Chinese in general is the space I require to write complex characters. I already find it difficult to try and write something like 整 into a single box.

[@freemanol]

I'm not proficient in chinese, but i've seen my (chinese) family and once chinese ex wrote characters that's hard for me to read. It's a bit like cursive writing? Looks nothing like the printed version, but they can understand these scribbles somehow. I think these cursive version makes it faster to write characters like you mentioned

[@shengranyan6427]

you need more practice😂

[@seanwang3840]

​@@freemanol It's kinda like how you can't read your doctor's handwriting, but all other doctors can.

[@seanwang3840]

It is indeed very hard for foreign people. The simplification already makes it soooo much easier, but still not enough...

[@oni8337]

Apparently they first simplified it from 麼 then to 麽 and then to 么 for reasons unknown to me

[@niggogado]

well, simplifying the character doesnt meant it will increase the literacy rate, but education opportunity is the biggest reason that literacy rate. aside that, they made a system called han yu pin yin easier for people to know how to pronounce the particular word correctly. and yeah, taiwan uses zhuyin and still their literacy rate is still high.

[@lucassantossj]

Yet to be fair Taiwan and Hong Kong are still much smaller in territory and population than Mainland, and mostly urban, so the effort in Mainland will be bigger.

[@niggogado]

@@lucassantossj yep, this is why education plays important role to increase literacy rate. those affected might be mentally challenged or disease that affect speech/reading cognition or they dont have opportunity/facilities to go to education centers

[@niggogado]

@@lucassantossj but tbh yes, it is making chinese easier to be taught, i learned pinyin since kindergarten but i choose to use zhuyin because of precision instead of faster typing. i can set the tone of the word i want.

[@niggogado]

@@lucassantossj for me its easier to read traditional chinese because of my way of understanding chinese characters is preferably word within clearer context. simplified is easy to write but it is challenging for me to understand because some simplified words hard for me to understand as they simplified until make no sense. even taiwanese chinese simplified some of the words. that is for my own, but i believe others would prefer simplified chinese.

[@oldcowbb]

you can translate from traditional to simplified reliably but not the other way around, because multiple traditional characters map to the same simplified character

[@drshyuen1393]

I wish to point out that the second line of the lyrics displayed at frame 1.14 sec, intended to show the differences between "simplified" and "traditional" Chinese characters, had a minor mistake, i.e. 怎么's 么 should be the correct simplified character to be used instead of 麽

[@lijenhsin421]

Some simplification are just lack of logic and need to be revised .... 麵 （noodle）-- 面 (face) 乾&幹 （dry & trunk）-- 干 (also a traditional Chinese character)

[@HenOOXX]

"我嘴巴很乾" 用機器簡轉繁都會變成 "我嘴巴很幹" lol ，另外還有 "干爆鴨子" 的英文機翻ww