Similarities between China and Taiwan

The_Zergling said:

Okay. Intentions stated clearly, all is clear.

I was mostly focusing on the superficial stuff like how similiar the statues look, stuff like that. It's true that you can compare the 'Mao cult' to a 'Stalin cult' but the similarities in expressive (artistic) style aren't as glaringly similiar as Mao vs Chiang.

On a side note, I'd arguably say that Mao made China better... somewhat. Chiang on the other hand... made Taiwan better by stealing a whole shitload of Chinese artifacts while he was running. His only redeeming point is that he managed to preserve some nice parts of Chinese culture, especially the Traditional Chinese writing. (At least in my opinion. But hey, I learned it as opposed to Simplified. Of course I'm biased. But seriously, who here thinks Traditional is uglier than Simplified?)

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There are no arguement here my friend, I also like the traditonal writhing more . Actually I might be bias also , since I learned to write traditonal chinese writing in HK. I did tried to learn simplified writing, but I could only read now. It would be a great difficult for me to write simplified writing.

I knew the person who made this site, he is very active in some ML forum. Can't say I agree many things he said, but he is actually quick knowledgable.

PiSigma said:

lol.. this site is awesome. dictators don't change.

traditional characters looks better hands down. but there are too many strokes to learn. but on the plus side, if you ever studies caligraphy, you can see where each stroke comes from through the evolution of the character, but with simplified you can't.

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yes traditional+caligraphy+ best chinese writing but then the paper and ink requirement is quite high ( cost too much $$$ to get the whole set of tools )

another thing about chinese writing is that is not easy if your left handed or at the very lest the caligraohy dosent look as good

Actually, I am left-handed. I don't find writing difficult at all, people always ask me, "Doesn't it feel... backward?" which I find odd since I've been writing with my left my entire life so it's hard to believe it would feel weird.

But I write calligraphy with my right hand because my teacher had no idea how to teach me otherwise.

Hey i'm left handed too!!! :nana: Actually i find all right handed stuff extremely backwards...except when it comes to playing drums...

Mrs S was taught traditional Chinese and she complains bitterly about simplified. She says that she finds reading it slow as she has to guess the meanings all the time.

I suppose it must be like trying to read English without any vowels.

But serious question. Do you guys think China should now seek to move away from pictograms and formally adopt a phoenetic written system?

For my obinion they should...but then again what i'm to say anyhting over this matter as i have no idea how the pictograms work and how well they fit for chinese language. Could someone enlighten us ignorent westerns??

Gollevainen said:

For my obinion they should...but then again what i'm to say anyhting over this matter as i have no idea how the pictograms work and how well they fit for chinese language. Could someone enlighten us ignorent westerns??

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The pictograms are a bit like that way you can spell a word by drawing a
picture of several things and using the 'sounds' of each picture.

eg if you wanted to say 'Happy' you could draw a picture of a harp and a pea.

I'm curious though sampan i can read urdu and arabic but written arabic and urdu as opposed to typed always gives me a headache because you have to
really concentrate do you have the same problem with typed and written chinese?

Hi Freeasia

My Chinese is appalling. Its Mrs Sampan who is Chinese. She easily reads hand written caligraphy and general traditional text. It is the Simplified Text; which I believe is largely derived for the benefit of computers, which she finds hard as a lot of the structure of character is removed which makes the meaning far less precise.

Its the Computer angle I am thinking of when I ask about the viability of developing Pinyin as a proper written language. Simplified Chinese was produced as computers would often struggle to display all the detail of traditional characters (many of which are really complex, I mean over a dozen strokes of a pen and only one small stroke in another direction to say either, come in the house via the front or back door)(actually I just made that up for illustrative purposes).

The extra memory required to display all these charcter components is I think this is one of the reasons why Chinese Websites are so slow to load compared to Western Ones.

SampanViking said:

Mrs S was taught traditional Chinese and she complains bitterly about simplified. She says that she finds reading it slow as she has to guess the meanings all the time.

I suppose it must be like trying to read English without any vowels.

But serious question. Do you guys think China should now seek to move away from pictograms and formally adopt a phoenetic written system?

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The answer will be no. The CCP had tried to do in sixty and seventy, but they failed. So in eighty they abandon the effort. The biggest obstacle will be there are many different dialects in China, so for every single dialects there will be a different writing system for Chinese. Imagine the problem that will create. Only picograms had the ability to be use for all different dialects under single writer system. And chinese is not that difficult to learn, for an average ten years old. They will have no problem to read many complicate books.:china:

SampanViking said:

Mrs S was taught traditional Chinese and she complains bitterly about simplified. She says that she finds reading it slow as she has to guess the meanings all the time.

I suppose it must be like trying to read English without any vowels.

But serious question. Do you guys think China should now seek to move away from pictograms and formally adopt a phoenetic written system?

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well technically simplified are faster to write. i agree some words look a bit weird, but then again, words changes from perfectly fine to weird after i stare at them for a long while all the time. i'd hate to write a 5000 essay in traditional chinese.

and it's more than just english without vowels, it still have the basic structure (well most of them), they just got rid of all the short lines/dots inside or around. it's more like the transition from traditional english to modern english (e.g. we don't use "thee" any more), except more dramatic.

as for the left-handed problem, it's all about tradition. chinese people believe right-handed is the traditional way, so parent always teach their children to write with their right hand, thus when they grow up, they're right-handed because they're used to it.

If anything, it frustrates me because if Taiwan and China unify I have the sinking feeling that we'd be forced to switch to Pinyin and Simplified, something that duly pisses me off. It's one of my pet peeves.

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i doubt that would happen, since hongkong still use traditional characters. i don't know if they're forced to learn simplified or not, but i know they still have traditional chinese classes.