Mandarin, Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional and Cantonese

In most parts of Mainland China, people use the simplified scripts of Chinese characters, whereas in some other regions like Hong Kong and Taiwan, the traditional script of Chinese characters remains in the mainstream.

Mandarin is the official language in mainland China, and is based on the northern accent. Due to many political shifts throughout history, the accents in China vary dramatically so that some people barely understand each other although they are neighbors geographically. Therefore, it becomes necessary to choose a language as a common tool for communication. The area where Chinese Mandarin is spoken most is in mainland China and Taiwan. In recent years, since more people have flooded into Hong Kong and Macau, more local people have become familiar with Mandarin for more convenient communication with the visitors coming from mainland China. For these reasons, most new learners of Chinese adopt Mandarin as their primary learning target. Another advantage of this language is that it has more native speakers (nearly 1.5 billion) than any other language.

Simplified and traditional Chinese are two types of writing systems of characters. Traditional Chinese characters are mainly used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and to a limited use in South Korea. Simplified Chinese was promoted by the People’s Republic of China government during 1950s to 1960s to increase literacy. Simplified Chinese characters are officially used by People’s Republic of China, Singapore and Malaysia. Chinese government decided to simplify the writing system officially based on two emphases: a) simplify the structure by eliminating some characters and b) decrease the number of strokes in characters that remain in use. Compared to traditional characters, simplified characters have approximately 22.5% fewer strokes. Several different simplification approaches were used, including phonetic borrowing (極–极, [jí], extreme), cursive writing (樂–乐, [lè], happy), elements removing (麵–面, [miàn], flour) and replacing a complex character with a simple one (龜–龟, [guī], turtle).

The difference between the traditional and simplified forms of a word is often small. Table 1 contains some common transformations and example traditional and simplified characters for those transformations.

Table 1: Common transformations between traditional and simplified characters.

Despite many common transformations, there are still some words for which the traditional and simplified characters are vastly different. A few of these are listed in Table 2.

Table 2: Examples of characters with no consistent transformation between traditional and simplified characters.

Traditional characters also tend to have evolved from pictorial representations of physical objects, and this imagery is lost in the simplified forms of some of these characters. For example, 龍, meaning dragon, could be seen to resemble a dragon with its feet and tail it the bottom right. However, the simplified form, 龙, has lost this resemblance.

However, there has been continuing debate ever since 1956 about the “superiority” of the simplified version argues simplified characters may be visually more difficult to differentiate from one another because they lack the balance between the legibility and distinctiveness of the stroke patterns. One of the major drawbacks of simplified characters is the omission of semantic components within a character. Taking the above simplification as an example, the semantic component麥([mài], wheat) is removed from the traditional character 麵([miàn], flour) and the simplified version turns out to be 面([miàn], flour), a phonetic part indicating the pronunciation of it.

Cantonese is primarily spoken in Hong Kong and it is the dialect used in mainland China near Hong Kong as well. Cantonese used to be the popular language that represented Chinese language around the world, because there were more Cantonese speakers who immigrated to the United States, Europe and other East Asian countries early on. Because of that, in many Chinatowns around the word, the owners of restaurants and stores are Cantonese speakers. It is an interesting language to learn but because of the limitation of numbers of speakers and regions where it is spoken, the number of new learners of Cantonese decreases every year.