I am Chinese. In fact, people in mainland China also prefer traditional characters. Every time I write Spring Festival couplets, I will use traditional characters because traditional characters are more meaningful and beautiful. I usually use simplified characters just for convenience and to improve efficiency.
That's true, I also prefer traditional characters because they are more beautiful and logical. A lot of simplified characters were simplified roughly and I really hate the characters derived from the mergers of two even more characters that have totally different meanings. For example, “面” which means face or surface and “麵” which means noodle are merged into the a character “面”. The left part of the character for noodle “麥” means wheat and we have a simplified character “麦” for it. I don't know why did we use a silly way to simplify the character that we put the noodle meaning into the character for face😩 , we could have simplified like “麺”. Although I don't like simplified characters very much, there are still several simplified characters more logical than traditional characters. For example, 从 contains two people “人” so it means to follow, and 众 contains three people, so it means many people, but in traditional characters, they are 從 and 眾or 衆:-)
As a native speaker i totally agree. Traditional chinese is art, and it bears 4000 years of history, starting from oracle bone prophecies. simplified version was only invented not even a hundred years ago. But if there wasn't simplified version, i can totally see how many people would remain non-literate if they didn't have time, money or energy to learn each character and keep them correct. it would be so frustrating for foreigners to learn too.
Dude, I agree with you. I'm a Chinese, I appreciate the way the traditional hanzi are written, visually entertaining. People have been arguing about the orthodoxy about the form of hanzi on Chinese internet all these years. I have no mood in tangling with those discussion, I just find them noisy.
But Taiwanese education infrastructure and human resources was much better then mainland China in the 50s when both trying to climb that literacy rate though. These two don't have the same starting point.
@@HakuYuki001this is a hindsight argument, back in the day all the revolutionaries that wanted to modernise China thought the writing system was what is holding the country back. Of cos I agree that it wasn’t such a factor as most thought in the end but hey it is what it is. Also maybe a side effect of specific case of where I come from (Singapore) where the Chinese standards are honestly pretty abysmal, simplified probably helps a lot for people who learn it as a ‘secondary’ language.
@@HakuYuki001simplifying the characters at least expedited the speed at which the language is being learned on a larger scale, it's just easier for people to remember.
My dad is black and my mom is white. People say I'm too black for this and too white for that. That's crap. I agree that we should judge people by the knowledge/wisdom they show and their actions rather than how they were born. I'm going to Japan soon and I want to learn Japanese. I'll be watching more for your videos.
People like to assume that because certain people are of other races, they don't know anything because they're not of the race the language originated from, (which is racist), and it causes many problems because misunderstandings occur and they always paint someone that's just expressing something they believe in as a bad person. I don't use tiktok so I don't know what happened over on tiktok, but I'm glad I watched this. It's gotten so much worse that people are brainwashed to think you can't be racist to white people, (which I got banned over in a server on discord, because everyone was calling white people stupid and racist because if they dare touch one of Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, they're "romanticising" it and/or "want to be Asian". I'm glad you made this video, thank you for this.
Yes. The one I absolutely hate is, if you like Asian faces or prefer black hair you “fetishize” Asians. Somehow you can’t have a “type” anymore. And there is a growing amount of people that are purely just racist against skin color if it’s white. And they fail to see the irony that’s what we’ve all been fighting against since and before the Civil Rights movement.
@@japanesefromzero Such people don't care about Civil Rights, nor do they care about equality. They simply want to exercise power over the group they have an assumed grievance against and it shows in the horrible things they write and say online. They are hypocrites and have no moral authority to criticize anyone.
If I ever learned Chinese I would study it using traditional characters because they're similar to Japanese kanji which I'm already familiar with. While the simplified ones are completely foreign to me.
I find simplified Hanzi pretty hard to learn for the reasons you mentioned. They often look so different from the Kanji I'm used to. What you said wasn't racist or bigoted at all- but I guess since it's a Chinese website, people there are more sensitive to what they think is anti-Chinese sentiment.
Just saying an opinion is enough for people to come after a person because their opinion doesn’t match theirs. Sorry to hear you went through this, George. People on the internet just can’t handle or respect people’s opinions.
Sorry to hear this happen to you. Though your comments remind me of what some of my Singapore friends think about simplified vs traditional Chinese - radicals and meaning get lost. I'm still looking forward to Chinese from Zero! I love how your Japanese from Zero is set up, it makes language learning much easier for my brain.
If you look back to the lind of communication tech used in 1950s, like telegram (actual one, not the app) or teletypewriter, it seemed that abandoning Chinese character was the way to go, and simplified was a stop gap. Then personal computers and internet made that thing completely obsolete, and I can even argue that vernacular Chinese, especially the invented and very restrictive grammar used in mainland China, are hindrances.
I'm learning Japanese, after already learned Chinese, and when I realized that Japanese has so many pronunciations for the same character, I just facepalmed and pondered "why"?... LOL... It's like the Japanese think their language is too easy, so they want to make it harder as a challenge... :D
It could because the spoken Japanese developed without having its own writing system, and because of that there are many words that express the same meaning with different sound. That would be the reason why when they got a writing system, a single character with an specific meaning got several sounds.
100% agree with you mate, just ignore those guys. this new trend of disregarding opinions or facts just because you are white is absolutely uncivilised. keep going mate i hope you find more success
GEORGE, hot topic with me. Whenever Narcissists say "you are...", it really means "I am...", and they are always the blame "expert" of the accusation because ironically they themselves are the biggest experienced offender of it.
I agree, I've been learning japanese through your books for the past year (currently on J4) and took a chinese course this semester. The simplified hanzi characters in my opinion really do lack the aesthetics and logographic meaning that even most "simplified" kanji have (post 1946) reforms. Looking at many characters and seeing that radicals were done away with or just became even more abstract lines makes it harder for me to remember then than if they were more traditional forms. There are some hanzi that also just look a tad ridiculous compared to their "kanji counterpart", such as the name for the han 漢=汉 or see 見 = 见 due to the level of reduction they underwent.
I've just been learning Chinese for one year and a half after five years of experience with Japanese. And even my classmates who knew only their mother tongue and English seem to be pretty happy that Chinese readings stick from day 1. Maybe it's the method of the teacher that's cool, or maybe it's something else, the mood of the class or something. But I'm just mesmerized at how effective my Chinese teacher method is. We even get to understand her grammar explanations while she only uses Chinese full of technical terms. It just seems that the sounds do convey meaning, more than they actually do in Japanese
Well said. This over-sensitivity and claiming appropriation all the time is getting old. Crushing conversations by accusing racism just widens the misunderstanding of people and traditions. Some day we'll all intermix and be one unified race.
@@japanesefromzero I think you may be being target by Wumao. There are many similarities between the two writing systems because they share a linguistic origin. There are so many similarities; like how both "Shan" & "Yama" even have the same meaning, despite a slight variation. I'm glad you handled this with dignity and restraint.
I appreciated traditional characters more than the simplified. But I guess many are complaining about the difficulty in these writings. Hence, to sort of boost the literacy rate and to draw more people to learn Chinese, the simplified version was introduced. If you are a new learner in Chinese Language, which one intimidates you more? Simplified Chinese 1 to 10 一，二，三，四，五，六，七，八，九，十 Traditional Chinese 1 to 10 壹、贰、叁、肆、伍、陆、柒、捌、玖、拾
the internet always attacks the person and not their point. they also can't fathom that sometimes things are just opinions. it's crazy to me that most people are allowed to vote lol.
It's called the "ad hominem" fallacy - where one attacks or criticizes an opponent's character, motive, background, or other personal attributes instead of the content of their argument.
I mean, we were very close to completely abandon Chinese characters and use romanized pinyin in China. Simplified characters did increase the literacy rate, but they are esthetically unpleasing sort of speak, they mostly came from a font called "xingshu" 行書, which existed hundreds of years ago in China, is to be used to simply the strokes so people can write faster, but will not be used in formal documents.
First, the mere suggestion that characters ought to be replaced is no where near being very close to actually removing them. Second, Taiwan has a higher literacy rate than China and they use complex characters. So there is no real connection between adopting simplified and increasing literacy. It was the development of the modern education system which did that.
I think it's unfortunate how most of today’s interactions tend to implode into religion, politics and race. It’s like we’ve been conditioned to fear change, remain ignorant and not learn anything. In the last three years I've had to cut ties with most of my family and friends, because I don't want to engage in emotionally based discussions.
@@japanesefromzero there's a large segment of online Chinese that are guilty of having 玻璃心. I wouldn't take their opinions seriously and I'd wager many of the accounts are troll/bot accounts. Keep fighting the good fight and making Japanese accessible to people of various backgrounds.
I study both Chinese and Japanese, I don’t think that Japanese ruined the Chinese character the way you’ve said, because we recognise the character and the meaning first while pronunciations is a different matter. I did ran into issues like asking a Japanese for something in the way I thought the kanji was pronounced, she was totally confused since the word is pronounced in kunyomi which has no connection to the individual characters
One small remark though: the "traditional" isn't really the "original" either (1:28). It evolved from simplified drawings and abstractifications into what it is today. I personally also prefer the traditional Hanzi (or, well, Kanji), but I do have to admit that simplified Hanzi is more efficient/simple to use and learn (even though their logographic interpretation tends to be even less visible). Then again, if efficiency alone were to be the goal, any script that's purely sound-based/phonetic would have an edge on logographic scripts. So, simplified Hanzi feels a bit like a compromise between the "traditional" and efficiency. Good video. I think you brought up some interesting and good arguments.
Many 'simplified characters' in Chinese writing were in fact used in history as alternatives to what you now know as 'traditional characters'. You 'don't like' the 'look' of 'simplified characters' - wow, what an original thought - because of geopolitical and cultural prejudices. You know that's true. Take the inverted commas away, because your perspective is a white man's, not a 'white' man's, perspective.
Some of Simplify characters was write by Wang XiZhi, who is the most famous artist in China. Simplify characters use about 2000 years, that most people do not believe it. Even they can see Simplify characters in 2000 years old books.
This issue is 100% political, that's why you were getting these comments. People in mainland communist China use simplified Chinese characters and they use traditional characters in Taiwan. If you pick a side with the characters people interpret it as you're taking the corresponding political side at the same time.
I dont think thats it because I seriously doubt anyone thats complaining are actually Chinese. I'd bet money theyre all white. Its white americans that can only see things from an american perspective and see asians as a minority because theyre a minority in america and are desperate to find a white savior narrative everywhere they look.
The moon and the flesh characters are different. But the differences are so minute that 99% of the population don't know it. The moon character is written with the two strokes directly across. The flesh character is written with the two strokes opposing each other representing the ribs in a piece of meat. I spent years studying ancient vs. modern Chinese characters , that is how I know.
Hmmm. Are you saying the stroke order is different? I know the parts themselves present differently when broken up, but when in a fully built kanji they look identical. I'm curious if the stroke order is different but I'm almost 100% sure it's not. You have any insight on this?
Surprised there wasn't an attempt to create a much more simplified Chinese phonetic script which is essentially how Hiragana (and later Katakana) came about but in a less structured fashion. Imagine reading Japanese where instead of hiragana it was all the original variants (部 for へ, 乃 for の, 仁 for に, 遠 for を, etc.). So Chinese could then use traditional hanzi for vocabulary and simplified for often repeated characters that are used for their grammar or pronunciation instead of the hanzi's meanings. If you haven't guessed, I'm in the camp that HATES the overuse of katakana loan words cause it makes Japanese more difficult reading wise. Of course you can't control language like that, and the reason loan words make it into the language is like: English word or phrase introduced that doesn't have a commonly used Japanese equivalent word or phrase, the meaning is explained in Japanese, students use the katakana version of the English word they now know the meaning of INSTEAD of just using the Japanese phrase/explanation that got the meaning across, yada, yada, yada, Japanese people are surprised that "bucket" is an English word.
Mao originally wanted to get rid of Chinese characters entirely and use the romanji equivalent for Chinese which is called "pinyin" but apparently it was a bridge too far for the locals. It's pretty fascinating history, IMO.
Unfortunately, ad hominin attacks are an easy way out for many. In this case, it can make them feel better by painting the other party as an outsider of sorts. One would go crazy if they tried to stick to the origin of the characters in their learning. From my limited experience with the simplified Japanese characters, there are lots of empty components, corruption and radicals used just for the sound. So I say, screw authenticity, just pick a system that helps you remember be it a moon or flesh and stick with it. My least favorite pronunciations of 人are the ones that appear in words like 玄人 (くろうと) and 狩人 (かりゅうど), but I can understand why there are a gazillion of readings for kanji in Japanese. Many of these words existed before and had kanji retrofitted to them, which created this mess. And the people who simplified the characters after WWII limited their efforts to the Joyo list. It is not fun trying to learn some of the non-simplified characters.
The pronunciations are mostly off but to me that's fine, 頑張れ!! I don't have time to watch the stream but, I think it is difficult to have a dialogue on this subject, without cleanly splitting between the Spoken and the Written, and what you are talking about. And from what I know, Tiktok (the internet really) isn't really a platform where people actually listen to educational discourse and generally would choose to accept what they think "intuitively" is right. From the interpretations of the Chinese written language from the simplification perspective, then yes, what the word originally represented -which you called Fidelity; is painfully lost! Whether or not it ruined Kanji from a Japanese perspective is not something I can talk about, but you are really talking about two points really, the fidelity of the Chinese characters and the Japanese language. The Japanese did ruin the Han Zi in some ways by making it theirs. But the points you brought up were the pronunciation, which I feel is independent of, though related to, the written language. The Japanese corrupting Han Zi via pronunciation. With regards to the spoken language, as you have pointed out, there's just too many pronunciation for attributed to the same word. I believe: 1. The Japanese already had their own spoken language before the introduction of Han Zi which sparked the development of Manyogana and Hiragana. 2. Historically speaking, there is no authority in Japan besides the Chinese to teach the Japanese how to pronounce the logograms. Besides, why should I pronounce 上 properly as 'Shang' when the word literally means 'Ue' and everyone around me would not know what 'Shang' is but would know what 'Ue' is? 3: Historical spoken Japanese does not really accommodate the pronunciation of foreign words. Changes were made to both spoken language and written language (primarily the kana) during in Meji era to accommodate the pronunciation of western words. This would have morphed word pronunciation especially when you peg the pronunciation of a logogram with Hiragana. 4. Historical Japanese is not modern standardized Tokyo pronunciation that is taught to foreigners and most locals today. And even in today's Japanese, dialect isn't split away like how Mandarin is split away like Cantonese, and are all recognized as part of Japanese language, which makes all alternative pronunciation fine. The Japanese corrupting Han Zi via writing. Now because the Japanese had a spoken language 5. Reading the two logograms by itself, 上馬 means getting up a horse, but we already have a word for mounting, and that is "Noboru", so let's just refer to that as Noboru instead of Ue. 6. Some spoken words are later attached to Kanji despite the spoken has nothing to do with the original Han Zi meaning. For example, a Chinese who grew up in Chinese education and was not taught Japanese culture and Language, would not understand why is 下さい written with 下. 7. Japanese also "invented" some Kanji words by mashing logograms together despite the Fidelity of the logogram and the spoken language bears no relation. For example 忍者 which is a contraction of 忍びの者. Focusing on the Han Zi 忍 -which in Chinese means "preserve" (i.e. no matter how painful it is to the extend that it feels like a sword is stabbing your heart, you bear with it); so therefore using 忍 to describe the Verb しのび doesn't make sense unless you first convert しのび into a Noun (i.e. the same way English word "Hammer" is both a Verb and Noun) and attribute those people you call しのび because they performed stealthy acts (しのび) to possess huge amount of perseverance. From the Han Zi perspective, while 忍者 is completely readable, it does not tell you that it means people involved in stealth activities (i.e. A Chinese familiar with the Chinese language would be able to guess that the word not of Chinese origin) With regards to people calling you "white skinned", I don't know if they are speaking it from a racist point of view, I feel that some academic schools subtly reinforces the idea that the people - specifically the white; don't know what they are talking about (Which is important generalization to consider when studying things produced by the outsider of a culture from a hindsight point of view, but not beneficial to be applied universally to everyone). But then again, China Chinese internet users are weird from a westernized perspective.
Shinjitai is the name for Simplified Kanji. Do you think it will eventually replace Traditional Kanji in the same way that Simplified Hanzi is used and taught worldwide more than the Traditional version?
The racism thing is nothing. They're only angry because they disagree. If you said exactly what they believe about said countries, suddenly judging foreign countries is fine.
湖 is composed of 胡 for the sound “hu” and the radical water, so quite consistent. I think it is probable that 胡 is “old” 古 and “flesh” 肉 because it means beard and old flesh has beards. The sound is not really close, but close enough to not be too weird. Maybe the sound changed over time.
Yeeh don't worry about it too much, George. It sounds like some people just called you names for their own fun. Anyone who truly appreciates the arts and knowledge will listen and argue with you properly om the details. Sure, some may be proud that "oh look, the Japanese and Koreans have used Chinese in their languages" but arrogance is just distasteful when taken to that length. I don't even think what you've said is that uncommon within Chinese people. I have myself heard people say the traditional chars are more meaningful. I'd say maybe the use of "ruin" is an exaggeration, that's my only complaint.
It shouldn’t since I avoided saying “I went to Taiwan”. At the end I said I no longer wanted to visit China though. It’s said because I wanted to go back more than anything. Then all the political stuff made me never want to go back to “China”. But Taipei? Yeah I like there.
@@japanesefromzero I mean probably no issue with people from China, probably issue with people from Taiwan when you said you went to China twice, once in Taipei and once in Beijing....
Wonder why the Japanese couldn't write entirely with Katakana and Hiragana, are they phonetic. The Koreans were able to do this with Hangul, and I think it's phonetic.
That vid made me laugh so hard. I liked it so much People on the internet don't know what they're talking about. These days calling people racist is kinda like a trend. It's very sad to see people who cannot view and understand others' opinions, and to add salt to an injury they call these people "racist". that's just ridiculous. I love your channel and you should keep doing what you do best. screw em all lol
Personally I think "ruin" is a strong word for this. Do I know how to read traditional? Not a lot. Do I find them aesthetically and artistically beautiful? Absolutely I do! In everyday writing, especially with modern language, it's going to be faster writing simplified chars or then cursive. With calligraphy it's practically a given that you're going to write the traditional chars whenever you can.
I’ve never really been interested it Arabic primarily because I don’t like religion and I feel like the Arabic speaking countries are steeped in religion so going to them doesn’t appeal to me. Until I realized how politics were so toxic I also really wanted to keep studying Chinese. Although really even Japan and Korea have bad political issues as does America. Eventually I’ll just have to ignore it all.
@@japanesefromzero As an Iranian, there are a lot of problems because of religious government. So I understand your opinion. Also I am learning Japanese and I wanted to thank you for the support.
I think Arabic Script is the prettiest of all. More so than Western, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese or Chinese or Hindu script. Just from my own personal aesthetic opinion.
Well I am white. I’m not allowed to talk about anything outside of my own culture. Imagine if this standard was allowed to actually be applied to everything.
It didn't used to bother me. I was just like... yeah I guess it's "white" people's turn. But then I thought about how normally when racism occurs, we battle it by trying to say everyone is equal and we make rules to treat everyone the same. So now that I'm more and more being judged by the color of my skin, and even saying I can't possibly know something or analyze something because I'm not the right race it really flusters me since I myself have never said or thought things about other people. I think the people being racist to someone who is white feel justified due to the sheer amount of racism they have faced and still are facing. But two wrongs don't make a right and I would hope we could all treat each other fairly. I will no longer engage with racist people, they don't deserve my time if they can't see how dumb it is to use an uncontrollable trait to judge someone.
Yo… didn’t you literally start with calling me an asshole expressing an opinion because I’m hidden behind a screen? You threw the first shot. And you have no idea who I am. I’m the same asshole in person. You are sitting in the audience yelling at my performance when you’ve never been on the same stage. Who is the asshole?
@@japanesefromzero No, I didn't direct anything at you. Just pointed out that the internet is full of assholes. Please reread my comment without jumping to the conclusion that it was personal.
A white dude is making a controversial opinion about 2 cultures he is not apart of, causing unneeded infighting and separation. But since he learned that language and wrote a book it’s okay.
You should self reflect on your racism. Are you saying I would have to be half Japanese and half Chinese to hold an opinion on a writing system invented thousands of years ago? What part of the arguments that I laid out do you believe were designed to cause infighting? Even though you aren’t a white male named George who made a video about a writing system I give you permission to give an opinion so please lay out the exact things I said that were designed to cause infighting.
@@japanesefromzero 你懂什么中国文化 你懂什么日本文化？一个白人在这里胡扯，你们白人文化殖民世界这么多年 没人想听你嘴里说出来的话 你看几本书就觉得自己什么都明白 一个白人在这里挑起中日文化之间的矛盾 赶快闭嘴吧who cares if you’ve been to all of these countries. You do not and will not understand the deep cultural differences and the cultural values each language holds. 就跟一个三岁小屁孩在这里放空屁 白人们有病要治啊
Hey George, I disagree with you.I like the many readings of jaPanese, makes the characters more unique. If i say "the hito character"you know that is 人. Try to think about the character "shi" in chinese. There are so many it's not even funny. This helPs me to acquire more words faster. But I will learn chinese also. One day. The Traditional variant.
There are many other reasons why Japanese is better to learn than Chinese. I was just giving one particular thing I liked about Chinese. Trying to show balance. Overall though I would recommend learning Japanese more than Chinese for so many more reasons.
Simplified Chinese characters are horrible. They just are. As you said the fidelity is gone. Chinese people will get upset about any little criticism sometimes, simply because they think criticism means you are saying "China Bad". Such fragile egos in so many Chinese people it's really pathetic.
It could have been done better. However, the ones who dictated over this were what we in Chinese described as "黃俄," so the expected outcome is outright butchering of the culture with an insult as icing on the cake.
Simplification was bound to happen at some point. One day, both Japanese and Chinese will abandon their absurdly complicated writing systems because they will not be able to indefinitely coexist with other, simpler writing systems. And I'm not saying they will use the Latin alphabet. Maybe their writing system will go through several simplification iterations, or maybe they'll use a new writing system of their own, like hiragana for Japanese. And don't get me started about the whole "Japanese can only be written with kanji because of homonyms", that's an argument that holds no water. There could be different spelling for each word, like in most languages in the world, and it would still be simpler than kanji. Any language can be written with any writing system. English could be written with kanji and hiragana and Japanese could be written with Arabic abjad. We frequently see entire countries switching from one to another. IIRC most recent was Kazakhstan in 2017, going from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet. It's not just culture, it's politics... and practicality. If you're learning kanji or hanzi though, have no fear -- they will not go away any time soon. I'm talking in decades/centuries here.
It seems discussion about Chinese things leads to a lot of angry comments for sure. It’s sad because every Chinese person I know personally is great. Must just be people who don’t interact with foreigners or people in general. It’s a mystery.
@@japanesefromzero Probably, that and weird Chinese nationalists, which isn't surprising since the CCP literally control TikTok. I'm happy the people you've met are great though! :)
Let's not act like only chinese people get offended. Everyone gets offended. It's always been this way. Don't look for a reason for unreasonable anti-chinese sentiments.
@@Purpletrident they never said anything of the sort (unless it was different before the edit). But from here it just looks like you're being aggressive for no reason
Congratulations, George, for having the courage to speak your mind. I applaud you for apologising for a bad choice of words but also for not apologing for someone else who took the meaning of your words the wrong way. It is refreshing to see someone who does not hide behind politically "acceptable" norms of obsequious conformity and not afraid to say "Screw you" when it is perfectly warranted. You have my respect.🙂
In Australia, sometimes price tags are stapled to clothing. Yeh I know, it's horrific. 🤭 George, when are you gonna visit Australia ? 🙃 If you do, you can say you've visited your 3rd Chinese city - Melbourne 😉
I chuckled at the "hopefully that doesn't trigger anymore" when bro previously put air quotes around "China" and then mentioned Taipei. I saw what you did there, George. 😂 You're definitely touching that 3rd rail. I have a feeling that anyone criticizing you about expressing your opinions on the differences in written Han-Chinese characters are probably the terminally online cultural appropriation goofs. They're to be ignored. I also find simplified Chinese off-putting. I learned Japanese first so using more traditional-looking characters when I first arrived in the mainland was mildly helpful but in the 3rd tier city I lived it the locals didn't really know how to read traditional characters. Even something silly like being able to read only 3 out of the 4 cardinal directions because the simplified character for East in mainland China made zero sense to me was incredibly frustrating. Over time I started to see the method to the madness as the saying goes when it comes to the style choices that were made during simplification in the mainland but my biggest gripe was always with the character 爱。愛 in Japanese/traditional Chinese uses the character for "heart" but the simplified version literally ripped the "heart" out of love. I knew some mainlanders that appreciate traditional characters but many others just saw the characters as a means to an end so the fact that the cultural significance was stripped out of many of the characters didn't bother them. Others even got a little nationalistic about the simplified characters. Opinions varied and that's fine with me. I purposefully call simplified Chinese characters stupid Chinese because of my disdain for it. I know that will probably piss some people off (my relatives included) but frankly I don't care. I know I'm being an asshole when I express my opinion this way but I accept the pushback. Furthermore, I also find Japanese stroke order to be inconsistent and stupid when compared to Chinese stroke order for certain characters (必ず for example) so I welcome haters on all fronts. It's just an opinion. It's nothing to lose sleep over in the grand scheme of things. At the end of the day, I think your average Chinese or Japanese person will likely be appreciative if you've taken an interest in the culture to be able to learn about the characters and as long as you're not a dick about it they'll humor your outsider's perspective. As a native English speaker I always find the opinions of other non-native speakers fascinating even if they're shitting all over the English language.
What are you talking about?!?!? What video did you watch where I said, "Japanese stole Chinese characters". You got to be really lacking in education to not know that China SHARED their characters with Japan. Japan didn't even have a written language when the Chinese emissaries visited Japan. All Japan had was WAGO language. It was an amazing thing for Japan to gain writing so that they could grow. Please tell me how a country steals a language. Also how DARE you speak English? I bet you stole it from English people. Doesn't that sound weird??? Culture and language is something you share.
Ah. How lovely. Racism from this other side of the world too. Like they just directly used an ad hominem on you and didn't even address your opinion lol smh
Unfortunately people seem to think its not racist to have a problem with white people… Which is totally racist, literally, by definition. On can Japanese read Chinese, i completed all of the Japanese from zero Books and i do not know Chinese. The other day i saw some Chinese Pokémon names and i could read them for literal meaning. One of them was called 三首悪龍 so in my head im like “San Kubi Waru Ryu” lol . I know that’s not how the Chinese would read that Pokémon name but I know that it is literally three neck bad Dragon . So with this, I would say that a Japanese person could also do the same. P.S i’m white and it has nothing to do with my knowledge either
@@japanesefromzero yes of course, that’s why I wouldn’t say that I could read Chinese and I’m sure most Japanese people that haven’t got a particular interest in mastering Chinese would say that they also can’t read Chinese. But knowing kanji is only ever a benefit, at the end of the day there is some overlap, but they are entirely different languages
You know I’ve never actually thought what I identify as beyond the “I’m 7% gay” thing I say from time to time. My identity is tied to the things I’ve created and not the circumstances I was born in. That isn’t meant to be a political statement, but just how I processed the thought of “What is my identity?” and the answer has nothing to do with skin color or sexuality. Is that weird?
I think it's fine to not like how symbols looks. I'm still incredibly beginner level at kanji, but I can confidently say kanji is awful and annoying. Not liking a written language doesn't mean you hate the people lol. That said, how you skirt around China and Taiwan, and some of your replies here does absolutely come off as xenophobic.
Me? Hmmmm. I’m definitely not xenophobic but I’m not a fan of assholes. As for the skirting around the Taiwan / China issue I do that because of prior experiences just saying Taiwan. “I want to go to China or Taiwan” created so much hate. It was shocking. I wish you understood I love Chinese people but don’t like the politics.
@@japanesefromzero I'm not saying you are absolutely xenophobic, I was just saying that's how it sounds like. Though you should understand it's not like every chinese person would berate you for just saying Taiwan. It's always the terminally online folks that bark the loudest, even the Chinese ones. That's what decades of nationalist propaganda does. Americans, for example, act the same in many circumstances (like saying their healthcare is awful). Obviously it sucks to be harassed at all, and I'm sorry that happens, but understand that's not indicative of every chinese person.
Yes. I’ve known this for longer than I can remember. 20 years or more. Considering they also stopped using tons of Chinese characters for hiragana it was a purge and simplification. 🙂
I remember when I was in Korea, I had some coworkers that learned Hanja as children, and I showed one of the Kanji I knew, 学校, and she got annoyed and said that was not how you wrote it. She wrote out 學校, and that was the first time I could ever remember seeing that symbol.
Those people were just boosting their social credit scores. Don’t sweat it. Alright spicy joke aside, If they got annoyed with genuine constructive criticism, and their ego is getting in the way, that’s on them.
So blessed to have a 26 letter Latin alphabet. I wonder how in the heck Chinese people memorize, write, and speak Mandarin and Cantonese without knowing how to pronounce them.
Yeah sorry honestly the ONLY time I've ever gotten hate for language related things are Americans and Chinese people. Maybe I'm not trying hard enough but even when I said I hated the German accent Germans were having fun with it.
The Japanese simplification of Kanji also ruined them IMHO. 艱難 as an example (Matt did a great video on this ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9K95xsKPur0.html ) the first half of both characters is the same component but only one got simplified 🥲. Also if you want something funny for readings in Japanese 生 is my favorite!
You have a point. It is simpler to write simplified but the meaning got lost and also its beauty. But this like getting rid of all the vowels in English to make words easier to write. Anyway. Keep it up and thank you for everything you've done to my education.
I think the thing you don't get is that traditional Chinese, were a simplify version of even older Chinese writing systems. Calling traditional the original is also not exactly correct, both are part of normal Chinese language updates. As for aesthetic, that depends on people, it really doesn't mean anything.
I don't know if that would change my opinion about Simplified. But I agree that I had not seen the writing before "traditional". Also I understand all the reasons why Hanzi was simplified. It was a good idea I think (as I said in my video). I just don't like it in terms of aesthetics. I think most people getting tattoos with Hanzi would agree. I still prefer to use simplified since it's easier for me to write.
