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I'm not going to get into a debate, but Traditional Chinese characters are only really used in Hong Kong and Taiwan these days.

• Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
  Simplified Chinese characters are just that... simplified versions of the traditional characters. In fact, many don't change at all from the traditional version to the simplified version. It's a change, and one that history purists tend to not like, but definitely not a culture-breaking change or something that breaks links to the past. There are still a lot of ancient pictograms left in the simplified characters, a lot of connections to concepts, ideas and views from past millennia.
• yomly 6y ago
  Plenty of mainlanders can read fanti FYI. Writing is harder as that requires active memory and practice but fanti is perfectly decipherable for a fluent mandarin speaker. And when in doubt using a dictionary is trivial. If the text is digital you can pretty much get a 1-1 mapping 99% of the time. Especially if it is putonghua (as opposed to dialect) Obviously something as big as the introduction of jianti is quite radical and will have downsides but it's really overplayed by armchair spectators. For a fluent speaker it is at most an inconvenience - like reading chaucer or shakespeare, except the grammar is exactly the same only the spelling differs.
  • free_rms 6y ago
    And the ancient characters are different still, they're all wavy and it's a lot of guesswork for people who haven't specifically studied them. But it's clearly a continuous culture. We don't use a bunch of wacky f's in our writing anymore in America, doesn't mean we're not a continuous culture on our timeframe.