AR&IO: Simplified vs. Traditional Chinese: Stop Lying About the Differences.
22 February 2019 [link youtube]
Check out my "real" youtube channel, AR&IO: Active Research & Informed opinion, here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP3fLeOekX2yBegj9-XwDhA/videos
What is the difference between "Simplified Chinese" and "Traditional Chinese" REALLY? There's a great deal of misinformation, propaganda and mythology floating around the internet… and some of the worst comes from the youtube channel China Uncensored!
And yeah, you can donate $1 per month via Patreon to support the creation of new content on the channel: https://patreon.com/a_bas_le_ciel/
Youtube Automatic Transcription
this radical here means heart the
Communists did this and left us with a simplified character for love it was truly heartless I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about it without telling you too much about it but even if you just looked at this one example if you had no other examples this already is enough to discredit China uncensored and show you that this guy is a hack this guy is doing a dishonest hatchet job so gg notice he tells you what one of the components in the character represents tells you what one of them represents there are some other components they're visible on screen right and it wasn't for some reason he only tells you that one of the symbols represents the human heart what do you think that is directly below it what do you think that is and why he doesn't mention it in the traditional character that's a foot f o o T that's a human foot and this is one of the Kangxi radicals it's referred to as a go radical walking radical but it some people call it the foot radical it's a pictograph of a foot so I noticed if your theory was that this this amendment to the language is to try to brainwash the Chinese people do you think that before in the earlier period before communism everyone in China was a foot fetishist and there was some kind of powerful association between love and feet and then they got rid of the foot and what did they were place it with well of course that's the character all level one students learn in Chinese as in pungho basically meaning friendship so you could give a completely different interpretation of even the simplification of just this one character and say no no it's not that they're removing a heart and replacing it with friendship they're removing a foot and replacing it with friendship so maybe that's an improvement to the character guys if we're gonna criticize communism let's do it honestly let's do it on the level let's not do it in the audience this way what at my people one of the very few sources you can go to for news politics and history of China analysis of things Chinese is a YouTube channel called China uncensored and they have an Associated podcast they have a whole little Empire here on the Internet and in a sense I encourage it because there is almost nothing else you could possibly watch or listen to but unfortunately I am in the position of being a critic of the content they're producing both politically and in terms of what they have to say about the Chinese language so obviously I am a white Western male I did not grow up speaking Chinese I've now studied Chinese for several years after studying a number of other Asian languages I have both more practical ability in the language than the guy who runs this channel and much more of a technical understanding of the history of the language the writing system it's built on so on and so forth and if you dial back you're gonna see videos discussing that on this channel from five years ago when I first started hacking into written Chinese and scizzin but let's not get too technical here the only other disclaimer I have to offer before we talk about the particular examples is that I am in no way a pro communist person I am in no way a supporter of the communist government of China both of my parents were communist I was raised communist but I rejected communism and in the decades since then I'm an old man with a beard now as you can see I have researched and written essays about the history and politics of communist countries not just China but sure especially China it's been a big part of my life so it's a rare combination there are people who are Pro communists or communist sympathizers but most of the people who are ante communists don't really know a lot about communism and because of my background I guess I have the worst of both worlds in some ways and the best of both worlds in others all right let's take a look at what this guy says about simplified versus traditional Chinese George Orwell's classic 1984 the totalitarian party creates new speak a modified form of English created to control how people think it was double plus good in mainland China the Communist Party dramatically changed the traditional written language that had been used throughout much of Chinese history they replace it with simplified Chinese characters so for instance this is the traditional Chinese character for love this radical here means heart the Communists did this and left us with the simplified character for love it was truly heartless the idea of modifying Chinese characters didn't start with the Chinese Communist Party but mounted on originally wanted to take it to an extreme so technically if you can read traditional characters you can read anything written in the past 2,000 years simplified characters on the other hand first came into use in the 50s the Communist Party had only recently seized control over the mainland and began systematically eradicating traditional Chinese culture replacing it with communist ideology so in a precursor to the Cultural Revolution which saw the destruction of the four olds old customs old culture old habits old ideas they targeted the writing system first you see Chinese characters or what was now being called traditional Chinese characters contained within them the traditional culture and thought of China each character tells a story you guys might imagine I'm like super hype to jump on this topic like I was really enthusiastic to make a video debunking or counteracting this kind of historical misrepresentation of what the difference between simplified Chinese in traditional Chinese is I'm not at all I really hate making this kind of infomercial or an edutainment on the Chinese language it is not rewarding for me in any way it only makes you enemies it never makes you friends but I actually at a conversation with a colleague who has a PhD and is generally pretty intelligent person I was just stunned by you know how the language barrier was really made even worse even more mysterious by her fundamental confusion about what traditional Chinese is what simplified Chinese is and what the relationship between them is so look guys here it is real simply this kind of hysterical ridiculous theory that simplification was created in order to cut off the Chinese people from a meaningful connection with their own history heritage okay how does that how does that work with the example you see on screen now right so the insect okay before there were three little symbols the same radical meaning insect or vermin sometimes snake it's that kind of that kind of character okay and then the simplified version is just one so are you gonna tell me how is this mind control again how is this like George Orwell's 1984 your original hypothesis there on this dude how is this cutting people off marriage no this is simplification in the truest sense the word that's all there is to it here's a koala the second character is simplified the first one stays the same what am I gonna tell you I personally really dislike the simplified character I don't think it really saves you much time in terms your handwriting not once you're good at Chinese penmanship I think it's ugly it's needlessly abstract I mean the first symbol is pretty close to meaningless but the simplified one is even more meaningless so it's not really an improvement it just seems like a really ugly clunky shorthand for the real character but nevertheless it's just a simplification there's nothing more to be said about it than that there's no secret psychological theory you can transpose on it it's not deleting the heart out of love it's not I mean there's no ideological agenda here you have got to be kidding me it's taking a complex character and trying to reduce the number of brush strokes you guys can probably tell I'm trying to give you as few examples as possible in as efficient a manner as possible we could do hundreds we could look at all kinds of examples and focus just on the meaninglessness of simplification what I'm trying to point out to you here is that even when it may seem a meaningful and when it may seem politically motivated normally if you do a little bit more research into the etymology and history of these I know shorthand forms it turns out that it is not political and a no symbolic significance whatsoever so these are two different characters used to mean country and in historical context it sometimes means Kingdom I have heard people try to politicize this simplification in the same way that China uncensored so dishonestly misrepresents the history of the character meaning love as if you know the modification of love is some evil conspiracy to control the minds of the Chinese people really doesn't make sense well some people would tell you that the older character for country here has an image of a weapon like a halberd that you have to defend your country with weapons and that then the civil fight character instead inside has the symbol meaning Jade Jade a type of precious stone and that this is some kind of political conspiracy now actually the symbol that's on the inside of the traditional character for country you will know from hoja meaning now like perhaps can just mean or the English word Oh are can be also bit be more like perhaps in English but here's the terrible truth but contrast here we have three different symbols that all mean a turtle or tortoise if you use your imagination you can actually see that the traditional character really is a picture of a tortoise on the right-hand side there's the shell and there's the tail at the bottom at the top is the head to eisenhorn then on the left hand side you can actually see two claws poking out right so it is actually a pictograph of a tortoise then you look at the simplified carriage do you think what is that where where did they get that from well the answer is the simplified character is very clearly influenced by the Japanese character so the Japanese have their own tradition of simplifying characters and of codifying simplifications of characters in most cases not all but in most cases the Japanese version of a character was just selected from some writing methodology that existed somewhere in China at some period of time sometimes there are their innovations that took place in Japan but guess what when we come back and look at the different symbols for country yeah it seems so political but guess what in Japan they use both symbols and this idea of putting Jade in a box as a simplification has it's been around in Japan since forever so if it has any kind of psychological or symbolic significance you can't blame the Communist Party for it see how that works this is normal Chinese handwriting in as much as anything can ever be called normal in Chinese handwriting if you can read Chinese you'll actually be able to tell the exercise that was engaged in here is relevant to what we're discussing in the video I learned Chinese in conveying China and I've been practicing the transition from using the mainland communist simplified standard to using traditional characters because we're moving to Taiwan so I did actually study traditional characters in the past also when I first first started learning Chinese that's what I was using but the bulk of my Chinese education was in mainland China so this is actually communist propaganda then I was transcribing it from standard Chinese into traditional Chinese if you were to ask what is the best Chinese writing system to learn the answer is both I'm interested in the study of politics history etc so I want to know the standard using Communist China also even if I'm just gonna engage in a criticism of what's going on the Communist China here's the thing this may look intimidating and if you just count the number of brush strokes which is what most of these dictionary programs will do for you you think oh this is gonna take forever the truth is once you get used to Chinese writing conventions there really isn't a perceptible difference in the amount of time it just isn't you get used to it yeah once in a while you can find an extreme example of a character where the simplification really saves you some time but the crushing irony is once you're used to it you're used to it and it just never seems to me for example a really benign example all right to study do I really feel I'm saving a significant amount of time if instead we use the simplified standard no I don't and finally this is what most people will give us a positive example but to me it's a horrible example this is shoot on one so if we're really doing like schoolteachers tones here we exaggerate the tones true sounds ridiculous it's not the way people really speak Chinese blood that's how people say it in front of the blackboard to make it sound clear okay so this is xu xin book and actually the traditional character on the left is meaningful if you understand it radical by radical and brush stroke by brushstroke and you understand the etymology it is a mean full pictograph and it has been reduced to a meaningless shorthand for that pictograph so I think that's really regrettable I think that's a step in the wrong direction so look guys I am totally biased in favor of what China uncensored is doing here I'm biased in their favor but still I'm not gonna lie to you I'm not gonna lie to myself and I am calling you guys out for creating cynical dishonest misleading political propaganda on the Internet that is no better than anything the Communist Party has done it is just as bad and worse than a lot of things you criticize the Communist Party for when the Communist Party comes out with propaganda or a slightly slanted version of events if you're out here saying that you answer to a higher standard that I challenge you you should delete those videos you should retract it and what do you have time no rush when this question of the simplification of Chinese comes up you should tell the goddamn truth because if you don't you're no better in this respect at least then the people you criticize [Music]
Communists did this and left us with a simplified character for love it was truly heartless I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about it without telling you too much about it but even if you just looked at this one example if you had no other examples this already is enough to discredit China uncensored and show you that this guy is a hack this guy is doing a dishonest hatchet job so gg notice he tells you what one of the components in the character represents tells you what one of them represents there are some other components they're visible on screen right and it wasn't for some reason he only tells you that one of the symbols represents the human heart what do you think that is directly below it what do you think that is and why he doesn't mention it in the traditional character that's a foot f o o T that's a human foot and this is one of the Kangxi radicals it's referred to as a go radical walking radical but it some people call it the foot radical it's a pictograph of a foot so I noticed if your theory was that this this amendment to the language is to try to brainwash the Chinese people do you think that before in the earlier period before communism everyone in China was a foot fetishist and there was some kind of powerful association between love and feet and then they got rid of the foot and what did they were place it with well of course that's the character all level one students learn in Chinese as in pungho basically meaning friendship so you could give a completely different interpretation of even the simplification of just this one character and say no no it's not that they're removing a heart and replacing it with friendship they're removing a foot and replacing it with friendship so maybe that's an improvement to the character guys if we're gonna criticize communism let's do it honestly let's do it on the level let's not do it in the audience this way what at my people one of the very few sources you can go to for news politics and history of China analysis of things Chinese is a YouTube channel called China uncensored and they have an Associated podcast they have a whole little Empire here on the Internet and in a sense I encourage it because there is almost nothing else you could possibly watch or listen to but unfortunately I am in the position of being a critic of the content they're producing both politically and in terms of what they have to say about the Chinese language so obviously I am a white Western male I did not grow up speaking Chinese I've now studied Chinese for several years after studying a number of other Asian languages I have both more practical ability in the language than the guy who runs this channel and much more of a technical understanding of the history of the language the writing system it's built on so on and so forth and if you dial back you're gonna see videos discussing that on this channel from five years ago when I first started hacking into written Chinese and scizzin but let's not get too technical here the only other disclaimer I have to offer before we talk about the particular examples is that I am in no way a pro communist person I am in no way a supporter of the communist government of China both of my parents were communist I was raised communist but I rejected communism and in the decades since then I'm an old man with a beard now as you can see I have researched and written essays about the history and politics of communist countries not just China but sure especially China it's been a big part of my life so it's a rare combination there are people who are Pro communists or communist sympathizers but most of the people who are ante communists don't really know a lot about communism and because of my background I guess I have the worst of both worlds in some ways and the best of both worlds in others all right let's take a look at what this guy says about simplified versus traditional Chinese George Orwell's classic 1984 the totalitarian party creates new speak a modified form of English created to control how people think it was double plus good in mainland China the Communist Party dramatically changed the traditional written language that had been used throughout much of Chinese history they replace it with simplified Chinese characters so for instance this is the traditional Chinese character for love this radical here means heart the Communists did this and left us with the simplified character for love it was truly heartless the idea of modifying Chinese characters didn't start with the Chinese Communist Party but mounted on originally wanted to take it to an extreme so technically if you can read traditional characters you can read anything written in the past 2,000 years simplified characters on the other hand first came into use in the 50s the Communist Party had only recently seized control over the mainland and began systematically eradicating traditional Chinese culture replacing it with communist ideology so in a precursor to the Cultural Revolution which saw the destruction of the four olds old customs old culture old habits old ideas they targeted the writing system first you see Chinese characters or what was now being called traditional Chinese characters contained within them the traditional culture and thought of China each character tells a story you guys might imagine I'm like super hype to jump on this topic like I was really enthusiastic to make a video debunking or counteracting this kind of historical misrepresentation of what the difference between simplified Chinese in traditional Chinese is I'm not at all I really hate making this kind of infomercial or an edutainment on the Chinese language it is not rewarding for me in any way it only makes you enemies it never makes you friends but I actually at a conversation with a colleague who has a PhD and is generally pretty intelligent person I was just stunned by you know how the language barrier was really made even worse even more mysterious by her fundamental confusion about what traditional Chinese is what simplified Chinese is and what the relationship between them is so look guys here it is real simply this kind of hysterical ridiculous theory that simplification was created in order to cut off the Chinese people from a meaningful connection with their own history heritage okay how does that how does that work with the example you see on screen now right so the insect okay before there were three little symbols the same radical meaning insect or vermin sometimes snake it's that kind of that kind of character okay and then the simplified version is just one so are you gonna tell me how is this mind control again how is this like George Orwell's 1984 your original hypothesis there on this dude how is this cutting people off marriage no this is simplification in the truest sense the word that's all there is to it here's a koala the second character is simplified the first one stays the same what am I gonna tell you I personally really dislike the simplified character I don't think it really saves you much time in terms your handwriting not once you're good at Chinese penmanship I think it's ugly it's needlessly abstract I mean the first symbol is pretty close to meaningless but the simplified one is even more meaningless so it's not really an improvement it just seems like a really ugly clunky shorthand for the real character but nevertheless it's just a simplification there's nothing more to be said about it than that there's no secret psychological theory you can transpose on it it's not deleting the heart out of love it's not I mean there's no ideological agenda here you have got to be kidding me it's taking a complex character and trying to reduce the number of brush strokes you guys can probably tell I'm trying to give you as few examples as possible in as efficient a manner as possible we could do hundreds we could look at all kinds of examples and focus just on the meaninglessness of simplification what I'm trying to point out to you here is that even when it may seem a meaningful and when it may seem politically motivated normally if you do a little bit more research into the etymology and history of these I know shorthand forms it turns out that it is not political and a no symbolic significance whatsoever so these are two different characters used to mean country and in historical context it sometimes means Kingdom I have heard people try to politicize this simplification in the same way that China uncensored so dishonestly misrepresents the history of the character meaning love as if you know the modification of love is some evil conspiracy to control the minds of the Chinese people really doesn't make sense well some people would tell you that the older character for country here has an image of a weapon like a halberd that you have to defend your country with weapons and that then the civil fight character instead inside has the symbol meaning Jade Jade a type of precious stone and that this is some kind of political conspiracy now actually the symbol that's on the inside of the traditional character for country you will know from hoja meaning now like perhaps can just mean or the English word Oh are can be also bit be more like perhaps in English but here's the terrible truth but contrast here we have three different symbols that all mean a turtle or tortoise if you use your imagination you can actually see that the traditional character really is a picture of a tortoise on the right-hand side there's the shell and there's the tail at the bottom at the top is the head to eisenhorn then on the left hand side you can actually see two claws poking out right so it is actually a pictograph of a tortoise then you look at the simplified carriage do you think what is that where where did they get that from well the answer is the simplified character is very clearly influenced by the Japanese character so the Japanese have their own tradition of simplifying characters and of codifying simplifications of characters in most cases not all but in most cases the Japanese version of a character was just selected from some writing methodology that existed somewhere in China at some period of time sometimes there are their innovations that took place in Japan but guess what when we come back and look at the different symbols for country yeah it seems so political but guess what in Japan they use both symbols and this idea of putting Jade in a box as a simplification has it's been around in Japan since forever so if it has any kind of psychological or symbolic significance you can't blame the Communist Party for it see how that works this is normal Chinese handwriting in as much as anything can ever be called normal in Chinese handwriting if you can read Chinese you'll actually be able to tell the exercise that was engaged in here is relevant to what we're discussing in the video I learned Chinese in conveying China and I've been practicing the transition from using the mainland communist simplified standard to using traditional characters because we're moving to Taiwan so I did actually study traditional characters in the past also when I first first started learning Chinese that's what I was using but the bulk of my Chinese education was in mainland China so this is actually communist propaganda then I was transcribing it from standard Chinese into traditional Chinese if you were to ask what is the best Chinese writing system to learn the answer is both I'm interested in the study of politics history etc so I want to know the standard using Communist China also even if I'm just gonna engage in a criticism of what's going on the Communist China here's the thing this may look intimidating and if you just count the number of brush strokes which is what most of these dictionary programs will do for you you think oh this is gonna take forever the truth is once you get used to Chinese writing conventions there really isn't a perceptible difference in the amount of time it just isn't you get used to it yeah once in a while you can find an extreme example of a character where the simplification really saves you some time but the crushing irony is once you're used to it you're used to it and it just never seems to me for example a really benign example all right to study do I really feel I'm saving a significant amount of time if instead we use the simplified standard no I don't and finally this is what most people will give us a positive example but to me it's a horrible example this is shoot on one so if we're really doing like schoolteachers tones here we exaggerate the tones true sounds ridiculous it's not the way people really speak Chinese blood that's how people say it in front of the blackboard to make it sound clear okay so this is xu xin book and actually the traditional character on the left is meaningful if you understand it radical by radical and brush stroke by brushstroke and you understand the etymology it is a mean full pictograph and it has been reduced to a meaningless shorthand for that pictograph so I think that's really regrettable I think that's a step in the wrong direction so look guys I am totally biased in favor of what China uncensored is doing here I'm biased in their favor but still I'm not gonna lie to you I'm not gonna lie to myself and I am calling you guys out for creating cynical dishonest misleading political propaganda on the Internet that is no better than anything the Communist Party has done it is just as bad and worse than a lot of things you criticize the Communist Party for when the Communist Party comes out with propaganda or a slightly slanted version of events if you're out here saying that you answer to a higher standard that I challenge you you should delete those videos you should retract it and what do you have time no rush when this question of the simplification of Chinese comes up you should tell the goddamn truth because if you don't you're no better in this respect at least then the people you criticize [Music]