Introduction to Simplified Chinese Characters

The following is an excerpt from an article I wrote for the Chinese Language Institutes blog, to see the full article click here.

Most Chinese characters look complicated to the outside observer, but not all characters are created equal. There are two main Chinese writing systems, traditional and simplified.

Traditional characters are based on historical Chinese writing systems with roots tracing back millennia, whereas simplified characters are those same traditional characters, but with many simplified so that they are easier to read and write.

Despite being invented in mainland China, simplified characters are also used elsewhere. Children studying in mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore all learn simplified Chinese characters. It wouldn’t be shocking to see simplified characters being used in Hong Kong or Taiwan either, and even some Japanese Kanji resemble simplified Chinese. While traditional characters were once the only choice for books and texts, nowadays the majority of the contemporary Chinese text is simplified.

Find the full article on the CLI website here. (In the unlikely event that link is dead, you can view the full article by extracting the zip here).