Topic Reading-Vol.2810-12/21/2019

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Topic Reading-Vol.2810-12/21/2019

英語で世界を知ろう！Topic Reading

2019/12/21 Topic Reading-Vol.2810-12/21/2019

Dear MEL Topic Readers,

Keep Chinese simplified, schools told

China has and always has had very diverse cultures with different peoples, traditions, and languages. But one thing that has been uniting them is Chinese characters that originated thousands of years ago. Though there have been continual changes in the forms and pronunciations, today’s traditional Chinese characters have been used for nearly two millenniums not only in mainland China but also in surrounding countries like Korea and Japan in some way or another. After World War II, mainland China and Japan started simplifying traditional Chinese characters separately while Taiwan and Hong Kong kept the tradition. Today, Macao and Singapore use the same simplified Chinese characters as mainland China.

Since simplified Chinese characters decreased the number of strokes and replaced complicated components of characters with simper shapes, some say it misses the aesthetic beauty of traditional Chinese and deteriorate the meaning of Chinese characters and cultural heritage.

The ministry of education says students can learn about traditional Chinese when they study Chinese classic writings and Chinese calligraphy at school.

Thanks to the standardization of diverse characters, Qin Shi Huang managed to unify China in 221 BC. But today, people either type or touch/speak-and-choose characters on their computers or smartphones to write documents or messages. Pinyin, the Romanization of the Chinese characters based on their pronunciation, may someday become more popular than characters as Chinese become more popular around the world.

Enjoy reading the text about what today’s Chinese characters are like.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201912/09/WS5ded880ea310cf3e3557cae4.html

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