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I think I understand your confusion. I also spent time as an ex-pat in China. This is a bad sentence from the article: "Before Pinyin was developed, 85% of Chi

by qwrusz 10y ago

I think I understand your confusion. I also spent time as an ex-pat in China. This is a bad sentence from the article: "Before Pinyin was developed, 85% of Chinese people could not read, now almost all can." In reads like the development of Pinyin is what led to this big change in the % of Chinese people who can now read. That is not correct and very misleading. Pinyin was not the catalyst nor the major reason for changes in literacy levels. Rather it was new education policy and development of the new Simplified Chinese Characters (Newer Chinese characters with fewer line strokes in them - makes reading and writing much much more simple - it is still used today and is the official character language in China). Pinyin was and is a huge deal. For foreigners learning Chinese and more importantly later on when it was chosen to be utilized as the input method when technology developed that required putting the Chinese language into computers and mobile phones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters

mcguire 10y ago
I'm a little skeptical of both the claimed literacy rate and of simplified characters' part in the increase of literacy. The replacement of characters on a phonological basis is good, but you still have to memorize thousands of characters, simplified or not. Further, I've never seen how "literacy" is defined for those statistics. IIUC, pinyin was originally proposed as a replacement for characters, and there was some interest when the communist government took over, but the choice was finally made in favor of simplification.
- FabHK 10y ago
  Agree. Simplification just saves some strokes when writing by hand (and when hand writing "cursive style", you skip/elide/join strokes anyway). Initially, it might even make things more confusing: In traditional, you immediately see that 言 is part of 語, but the same radical in simplified 语 looks different. Similarly, 金 in 錢, but different in 钱.
- qwrusz 10y ago
  Be skeptical. I am too. Especially when it comes to statistics coming out of China things where details can be very unclear and the skeptics have been right a lot lately. We can debate what the actual literacy rates are or how to define it. But it's pretty clear literacy in China has gone up in recent decades however you define it. More so, we can debate how big a part simplified characters were to the change in literacy, but my comment above was trying to clarify any confusion pinyin played that big a part in literacy improvement. Pinyin is taught in schools very recently but it did not play this big part in improving the % of the population who can read and understand Chinese like the article suggested. You do not need to know one letter of pinyin or even have heard of pinyin to read Chinese fluently. In fact, the push to teaching younger students pinyin and the roman alphabet in recent years may actually slow down a bit learning to read Chinese (pinyin is needed to use computers and mobile phones and helps when eventually learning English and is worth teaching early even with such a tradeoff). Also, memorizing of thousands of characters is not the major problem. Firstly, you don't need to memorize thousands of characters. Words are multiple characters. You can read and understand +90% the Chinese you encounter on a daily basis, involving thousands and thousands of Chinese words with less than a thousand characters. Yes, it is harder to memorize a few hundred characters compared an alphabet with a couple dozen roman letters, but characters are not all that difficult once you understand the system behind it (radicals, components etc). I know a few hundred million people who seemed to have done it just fine. Lastly, government policy alone could have improved literacy even without simplified Chinese characters. It wasn't a necessary step. And many Chinese can read and understand the gists of texts written in traditional Chinese characters even though they were never taught them. (similarly if you know English but were never taught Latin, go spend an hour reading about Latin and etymology you can probably start understanding a lot more Latin than you realize. errare humanum est)
kobeya 10y ago
> Rather it was new education policy and development of the new Simplified Chinese Characters (Newer Chinese characters with fewer line strokes in them - makes reading and writing much much more simple - it is still used today and is the official character language in China). Then why do Hong Kong and Taiwan have higher literacy rates? EDIT: Why the down votes? The parent is making an unsubstantiated claim for which there is conflicting evidence: 1) Reading simplified is not objectively easier in the inside view as some characters with distinct meanings are ambiguously combined, and semantic information stripped from many other characters so if you aren't quite remembering that character you aren't given any hints. 2) Writing simplified is not objectively easier in the inside view as many of the components are changed in form from the characters they derive from, and again some semantic clues are stripped from the character. So there may be slightly fewer characters composed of slightly fewer strokes on average, but those aren't the metrics one should use for measuring difficulty -- a character with more strokes can be easier to write on demand because the strokes are part of components that carry semantic meaning. You don't have to remember each little detail, just the broad gist of a plot for the character and then systematic rules fill in the rest. 3) Finally in the outside view, non-mainland communities like Hong Kong and Taiwan have always used and continue to use the traditional characters. And these communities have higher literacy rates across the board compared with mainland China. People who have already learned simplified-only find simplified characters easier to read. That shouldn't be surprising, but it is not objective truth. And the PRC likes to toot its own horn and say that simplified characters are cleaner, neater, simpler, more modern, led to higher literacy rates, cure cancer, etc. But that doesn't make it true without further substantiation either.
- qwrusz 10y ago
  Hey, I didn't down vote you but based on your question and your edit of an "unsubstantiated claim for which there is conflicting evidence" I think you may have mis-interpreted my comment. Apologies for any confusion. I was not making a claim nor comparing between characters used by PRC vs. Taiwan vs. Hong Kong, in particular I wasn't ranking them as better or worse or easier or harder. I understand there are ongoing differences, posturings and debates between PRC and Taiwan and Hong Kong, including about language, and the whole thing is serious and complicated. Bro, I have no dog in that fight. Good luck y'all. Maybe see my other comment as it goes into more detail. But just on a basic level I think you have mis-interpreted the words "simple" and "easy". A pretty common mistake I have made in the past too. The characters are called "Simplified Chinese Characters" not "Objectively Easier Chinese Characters". The definitions of simple and easy are different. Context matters too. For example: Contributing useful comments to a discussion on Hacker News is very simple. Clearly it is not easy.

by qwrusz 10y ago

mcguire 10y ago

I'm a little skeptical of both the claimed literacy rate and of simplified characters' part in the increase of literacy. The replacement of characters on a phonological basis is good, but you still have to memorize thousands of characters, simplified or not. Further, I've never seen how "literacy" is defined for those statistics. IIUC, pinyin was originally proposed as a replacement for characters, and there was some interest when the communist government took over, but the choice was finally made in favor of simplification.

FabHK 10y ago
Agree. Simplification just saves some strokes when writing by hand (and when hand writing "cursive style", you skip/elide/join strokes anyway). Initially, it might even make things more confusing: In traditional, you immediately see that 言 is part of 語, but the same radical in simplified 语 looks different. Similarly, 金 in 錢, but different in 钱.
qwrusz 10y ago
Be skeptical. I am too. Especially when it comes to statistics coming out of China things where details can be very unclear and the skeptics have been right a lot lately. We can debate what the actual literacy rates are or how to define it. But it's pretty clear literacy in China has gone up in recent decades however you define it. More so, we can debate how big a part simplified characters were to the change in literacy, but my comment above was trying to clarify any confusion pinyin played that big a part in literacy improvement. Pinyin is taught in schools very recently but it did not play this big part in improving the % of the population who can read and understand Chinese like the article suggested. You do not need to know one letter of pinyin or even have heard of pinyin to read Chinese fluently. In fact, the push to teaching younger students pinyin and the roman alphabet in recent years may actually slow down a bit learning to read Chinese (pinyin is needed to use computers and mobile phones and helps when eventually learning English and is worth teaching early even with such a tradeoff). Also, memorizing of thousands of characters is not the major problem. Firstly, you don't need to memorize thousands of characters. Words are multiple characters. You can read and understand +90% the Chinese you encounter on a daily basis, involving thousands and thousands of Chinese words with less than a thousand characters. Yes, it is harder to memorize a few hundred characters compared an alphabet with a couple dozen roman letters, but characters are not all that difficult once you understand the system behind it (radicals, components etc). I know a few hundred million people who seemed to have done it just fine. Lastly, government policy alone could have improved literacy even without simplified Chinese characters. It wasn't a necessary step. And many Chinese can read and understand the gists of texts written in traditional Chinese characters even though they were never taught them. (similarly if you know English but were never taught Latin, go spend an hour reading about Latin and etymology you can probably start understanding a lot more Latin than you realize. errare humanum est)

kobeya 10y ago

> Rather it was new education policy and development of the new Simplified Chinese Characters (Newer Chinese characters with fewer line strokes in them - makes reading and writing much much more simple - it is still used today and is the official character language in China). Then why do Hong Kong and Taiwan have higher literacy rates? EDIT: Why the down votes? The parent is making an unsubstantiated claim for which there is conflicting evidence: 1) Reading simplified is not objectively easier in the inside view as some characters with distinct meanings are ambiguously combined, and semantic information stripped from many other characters so if you aren't quite remembering that character you aren't given any hints. 2) Writing simplified is not objectively easier in the inside view as many of the components are changed in form from the characters they derive from, and again some semantic clues are stripped from the character. So there may be slightly fewer characters composed of slightly fewer strokes on average, but those aren't the metrics one should use for measuring difficulty -- a character with more strokes can be easier to write on demand because the strokes are part of components that carry semantic meaning. You don't have to remember each little detail, just the broad gist of a plot for the character and then systematic rules fill in the rest. 3) Finally in the outside view, non-mainland communities like Hong Kong and Taiwan have always used and continue to use the traditional characters. And these communities have higher literacy rates across the board compared with mainland China. People who have already learned simplified-only find simplified characters easier to read. That shouldn't be surprising, but it is not objective truth. And the PRC likes to toot its own horn and say that simplified characters are cleaner, neater, simpler, more modern, led to higher literacy rates, cure cancer, etc. But that doesn't make it true without further substantiation either.

qwrusz 10y ago
Hey, I didn't down vote you but based on your question and your edit of an "unsubstantiated claim for which there is conflicting evidence" I think you may have mis-interpreted my comment. Apologies for any confusion. I was not making a claim nor comparing between characters used by PRC vs. Taiwan vs. Hong Kong, in particular I wasn't ranking them as better or worse or easier or harder. I understand there are ongoing differences, posturings and debates between PRC and Taiwan and Hong Kong, including about language, and the whole thing is serious and complicated. Bro, I have no dog in that fight. Good luck y'all. Maybe see my other comment as it goes into more detail. But just on a basic level I think you have mis-interpreted the words "simple" and "easy". A pretty common mistake I have made in the past too. The characters are called "Simplified Chinese Characters" not "Objectively Easier Chinese Characters". The definitions of simple and easy are different. Context matters too. For example: Contributing useful comments to a discussion on Hacker News is very simple. Clearly it is not easy.