The Chinese language has been around for centuries and is often credited as the oldest language still in use today. As time progressed, the language slowly evolved into various dialects spoken throughout the vast regions of China. Since then, Chinese has modernized and adapted to fit our daily lives, with new vocabulary and loanwords from other languages being added constantly. For those who want to learn Chinese, the choice is usually obvious: they want to speak Mandarin Chinese, the most widely spoken language in the world with more than 955 million speakers. But what many of these aspiring learners are not quite sure of is which type of written Chinese they should commit to: Simplified or Traditional? Chinese characters are arguably the oldest form of writing still in use today. They have been so influential in other parts of Asia that they were adapted to be used historically in languages such as Korean and Vietnamese, and are still used in Japanese script today. During the 1950s, the ruling Chinese Communist Party simplified over 2,000 Chinese characters for the sake of “modernization” and to increase the literacy rate throughout the nation. However, in doing so, many of the characters’ original meanings that were the result of thousands of years of history have been undermined by their new simplified forms. My teaching session will be focusing on discussing Chinese characters, their simplification, and their use in Chinese communities and in the International Community. The Big Question for this session is “How can we love without a heart?”
Assignment–Please read the following article:
BBC – China and Taiwan ‘first joint dictionary’
The following video and article are OPTIONAL, however, they do provide more context for the teaching session:
Why use Traditional Characters?
Epoch Times – Simplified Beyond Sense: The Travesty of Modern Chinese Writing
