Traditional Characters in China?

[7jason7]

Anyone have advice about how to study traditional characters while attending school in China? Are there any programs in China that are known for teaching both styles? I want to go to China for the experience but don't want to compromise my background in old writing.

Thanks for your feedback.

I wanted to post this again to get more feedback.

[Jose]

As far as I know, only simplified characters are taught on the mainland. You would have to go to Taiwan for courses that use traditional characters.

Anyway, why can't you do what I am doing at the moment? Come to the mainland for the best Mandarin-speaking environment, and use simplified characters in the classes. After the classes, when you review the vocabulary on your own, you can always check the traditional forms of characters with your dictionary and practise writing them.

Be aware that no matter what your personal preference is, you definitely have to learn the simplified script.

[7jason7]

Jose, thanks for the reply. Two more questions:

1) I have found it difficult (not impossible) to learn the traditional form on your own. But the practical difficulty is knowing when a simplified form also has a corresponding traditional form. I imagine that the instructor in China, when asked if there is a traditional alternative, may not really know???

2) Why do you say it is a requirement to learn simplified? Do you mean that it will take over around the world?

Thanks again.

[imron]

1) I have found it difficult (not impossible) to learn the traditional form on your own. But the practical difficulty is knowing when a simplified form also has a corresponding traditional form. I imagine that the instructor in China, when asked if there is a traditional alternative, may not really know?

Well, any good dictionary will list the traditional form of a character next to its simplified form, so it is trivial to find out if a simplified character has a traditional form. Also, I've yet to meet an educated mainland Chinese person who couldn't read traditional characters in addition to simplified ones (heh otherwise how else would they sing karaoke ), so I wouldn't worry about a Chinese instructor not being able to help you there. Anyway, once you know what to look for, Traditional and Simplified characters aren't really all that different. If you are learning one style, it is relatively little extra work to teach yourself the other (at least that is once your vocab gets up over a few hundred characters).

2) Why do you say it is a requirement to learn simplified? Do you mean that it will take over around the world?

I think he means more than if you are going to be in China (as you mentioned in your first post), then simplified characters are so prevalent that you need to know them.

[xuechengfeng]

My teacher from the mainland doesn't even know how to write traditional characters

[imron]

My teacher from the mainland doesn't even know how to write traditional characters

Writing is far more difficult than reading, especially if you are just talking about writing stuff off the top of your head. You'll note in my post I only talked about reading traditional characters. I'm sure that if you showed him a traditional character, he'd be able to write it, tell you the stroke order, tell what the simplfied character was, and also tell you what it meant - well at least for any character whose frequency appears in the top few thousand characters.

As for finding out if a character has a traditional form in the first place, well that's where the dictionary comes in handy

[xuechengfeng]

Well, the teacher told me that she could not grade my writing because she only knows how to read/write simplified characters because that is all she's ever been taught. She had to have someone who was learned/trained in traditional form.

[imron]

Wow, I'm truly surprised I've never learnt Traditional characters, but can usually still figure a large number of them out when I try to read them. I mean not only is there are large overlap in the character sets, but many simplifications were made in a consistent manner (言 radical becoming 讠 etc).

I'd be interested in hearing what mainland Chinese have to say on the matter. If anyones reading, how difficult do you find it to read Traditional characters?

[7jason7]

Thanks, everyone.

I've taken 2 years of college Chinese and I recall the professor knowing both forms, but the TAs from China being terrible at both reading (recognizing) and reading traditional characters. Also, anecdotal evidence from mainlanders makes me think they have a hard time reading traditional characters. Only in certain circumstances does reading traditional require merely swapping a complex radical for a simplified one.

I could find a good dictionary and hope it lists the traditional form but a few drawbacks still: 1) I would have to look up every simplified character -- this would take a lot of work 2) sometimes it is nice to see the professor write the strokes of the character.

So, does anyone have any ideas about formal training in both simplified and complex in mainland China?

Thanks for everyone's input.

[roddy]

Bring textbooks using traditional characters with you, and use these in parallel to the simplified ones - that should ensure you come across most if not all of the traditional versions of the simplifed characters you are using.

As for the 'formal' training - you'll need to look for a private tutor, but to be honest, I'm not sure it would be worth it for this alone.

Roddy

[imron]

I could find a good dictionary and hope it lists the traditional form but a few drawbacks still: 1) I would have to look up every simplified character -- this would take a lot of work

The Chinese-Chinese Xiandai Hanyu Cidian allows for lookup of traditional and simplified characters in the same radical index. Traditional characters that are different from the simplified forms are simply specified inside of brackets eg (學). Looking up one form isn't any more difficult than the other.

The Oxford Chinese-English Dictionary has the same kind of setup, and it wouldn't surprise me if you could find dictionaries that did the reverse of this (i.e. listed the simplified version in brackets).

Granted that's only half the problem solved, but at least it's a start :-)

As for studying Traditional Characters in China, probably your best bet is to go somewhere that allows you to take classes in classical chinese, or character etymology.

[Claw]

The Oxford Chinese-English Dictionary has the same kind of setup, and it wouldn't surprise me if you could find dictionaries that did the reverse of this (i.e. listed the simplified version in brackets).

http://www.zhongwen.com/ and its corresponding book Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary by Rick Harbaugh is a traditional character Chinese-English dictionary listing the simplified version in brackets.