Traditional and Simplified Writing Systems

Chinese characters have experienced distinct periods of transformation and development, including its simplification. The simplification process reduced certain complex Chinese characters with many strokes into characters with fewer strokes. For example the Chinese character for "horse" was written with 10 strokes in its traditional form: 馬, which was reduced to 3 strokes in its simplified form: 马. In addition to reducing the number of written strokes , a reduction of words in common usage was also implemented whereby two different characters are now written with the same character. Simplified Chinese Characters and Traditional Chinese Characters are the two standard character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language. The primary goal of simplification was to improve literacy.

Traditional Chinese characters are currently used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and by many overseas Chinese communities, while the Simplified Chinese characters are officially used in the People's Republic of China and Singapore. Simplified Chinese is the primary writing system taught in overseas college and university programs teaching Chinese as a foreign language.

The Chinese writing system is still undergoing change today. The balance between simplification and preservation of culture is a delicate manuever. Many academics have expressed support for the concept of "know traditional, write simplified" to help mitigate the erosion of culture through character simplification.

• Example Character:马 Mǎ | "Horse"
• Category:Linguistics
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