The Chinese writing characters are fairly complicated and one has to memorize and practise writing them frequently before they become so foreign and easily forgotton. Many times when I tried to write them after long years of switching to English and Malay languages, I tend to forget portion of it, whether missing of a stroke or the combination of them, only had a very faint idea as to how the character should look like, one just simply could not get it written right!
Before China became the super power, most of the Chinese characters were written in its traditional form for many many years and this has been adopted by Taiwan and Hongkong as the de facto standard way of writing the Chinese characters internationally.
Communist Chinese regiment or educationists thought that by simplifying the strokes and the shape, thinking that it would serve to save a lot of time and effort in writing those characters in greater speed and also facilitate easier learning for the younger generations to come. The decision was made with good intention and also from the point of view on efficiency consideration was really a praiseworthy effort. Other than that I am not sure whether mainland Chinese government wanted this to be perceived as something different or just for any political agenda as a superior sovereign state to differentiate themselves from Taiwan and Hongkong. And I had jumped into conclusion mainly because many Japanese and Korean characters were originally in the same form as those of Chinese but were subsequently changed and invented their very own way of writing just to differentiate themselves. I see this as something done driven perhaps by egoistic patriotism because they just wanted their very own writing so as to dissociate themselves from others, without regard to any historical development and ethnic evolution from similar cultural background over time. Though the Chinese, Korean and Japanese pronounce those words differently, a lot of the characters or words actually possess the same original meaning. Imagine, how helpful it is if the Chinese, Korean and Japanese have almost the same writing characters that could commnunicate with each other through writing, emails etc. We used to write in Chinese characters when certain meanings could not be expressed well enough in English to some of our Japanese friends and business associates! How amazing it is that most of the time they could grasp the meaning of what we tried to convey!
As Malaysian we could travel to Indonesia and Brunei without any problem, thanks to our common language and cultural background! Imagine again one day, if we Malaysians wanted something on their own just to differentiate ourselves from Indonesia and Brunei, what would be the situation? Given the current situation where Indonesians claim that our national anthem is a plagiarized version of their "Terang Bulan", some of our patriotic educationists someday might just decide to change our very own version of Bahasa Malaysia language.
Because of the pride of humans that wanted to build the tower of Babel to reach the sky, symbolic of the dwelling place of our Most High God, that God had dispersed them by confusing the humans through different ways of speaking languages so that they could not communicate amongst each other. They could not accomplish the task simply because of without a common language. Come to think of it, what had happened just for the past few decades, we were just doing the reverse, instead of promoting something common, we make ourselves unique, embracing so-called egoistic patriotism and putting ourselves a thick wall and creating obstacle between us to communicate and understand each other. What a pity!
The emperor Qin of ancient China had such farsighted view and wisdom that he standardized all the Chinese writings. And because of his wise decision, the entire China with 1.3 billion population from a vast diverse ethnic origins are now able to communicate and understand each other well through this common language. This is made possible by one wise man despite the fact that they are still having their very own dialects and different ways of pronouncing the same Chinese characters.
You will be surprised to notice when coming to the art of Chinese caligraphy, all Chinese regardless they are from mainland China, Taiwan, Hongkong or any other overseas Chinese destinations, they have to use the same traditional Chinese form of writing! This is probably from aesthetic and cultural consideration that Chinese all over the world had unanimously adopted this practice without any dispute. Without the traditional Chinese characters, one could safely say that Chinese caligraphy done in simplified Chinese characters would have lost its richness in the value of art and culture forever!
With the advent of computers and all the powerful word processing software packages, the writing of Chinese characters has become so simple and easy. When mainland Chinese took on the task of simplifying the form of Chinese characters, they did not expect all the effort and good intention would be going down to drain just within a matter of 5 - 10 years. To the computer, simplified and traditional Chinese makes no difference when the more common "pinyin" input method is adopted for all the printing and typing works!
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