Simplified Chinese characters. Misconceptions!
Actor Anthony Wong (黃秋生) would not have expected such fierce attacks by mainland bloggers shortly after he commented on the introduction and irreversible popularization of simplified Chinese characters (簡體字) in the mainland and its destructive impact on our culture. A clear evidence of the success of brain washing education in the Chinese mainland, the majority of the Chinese population nowadays, from primary students to university professors, faithfully believe that the use of simplified Chinese characters has been helping the nation. So far, I have heard a fairly unified set of viewpoints supporting the discontinued use of full-form or proper Chinese characters (正體字). The argument basically puts the blame of the high illiteracy rate (文盲率) of the nation on our 'hard-to-learn' Chinese characters. Simplification of our language thus came to the rescue, and it proved to be effective, as literacy rate (識字率) improved dramatically in the past 30 years! Clearly, such misunderstanding was a glaring ignorance of our history: in fact, until the recent centuries, China actually had the highest literacy rate in the world and over half of the world's literature was written in Chinese (see zhongwen.com).
Misconception 1: Use of simplified characters improved literacy rate
The question is whether literacy rate has anything to do with our full-form Chinese characters. What is the root cause of low literacy rate? For China, the poor literacy rate from the turn of the last Century to the early communist era was to a large extent a result of inadequate education system and prolonged period of resource scarcity. Putting the blame on knowledge being too hard to acquire, culture too rich to preserve, language too difficult to learn, etc. does not seem to be convincing, but yet the most aggressive medication was prescribed, namely, simplification of Chinese characters to facilitate learning. History will eventually bear witness to this worst disaster for China: destruction of the nation's own most precious culture. But while the logical flaw of the argument against the continual use of proper Chinese is obvious, similar and even more flawed lines of logic continue to stand firm in the mainland.
In addition to the flawed logic that supports the use of simplified characters for improving literacy rate, the popular use of simplified characters has degenerated the sophistication of our culture that our ancestors had developed over 5000 years. The Chinese language contains sophisticated semantic separation of subtle concepts as well as implicitly defines them, thus facilitating the users of the language to think logically and construct complex ideas. However, simplified characters have destroyed this sophistication by imposing raw mappings of multiple words and concepts to a single simplified character. Worse still, the simplified characters are shamefully unaesthetic and poorly designed.
Misconception 2: Simplified characters are easier to learn
From a scientific point of view, efficiency of image recognition of our brain actually improves when an image has more distinct features. Furthermore, simplification via multiple mappings (see diagram on left) without due consideration of the logic of the ideographic compositions does not help systematic learning and memorisation. Thus, simplified characters do not necessarily help ease reading (character recognition), and most likely the converse is true. Writing could be easier with simplified characters, but there is no reason to assume that the human brain cannot handle the writing of the full-form characters adequately given that the entire character set was also created by human. It would be an insult to our own brain to assume that we cannot learn to write the full-form characters, the gist being in our pedagogic methodology and in the way we learn to use our language. So far, in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau, there is no evidence suggesting that the use of full-form Chinese characters is a cause of learning problems to children. In fact, literacy rate in these regions improved from the 1970s as a result of the provision of compulsory education to children. The cause of learning problems in children are far more diverse and complicated than what the mere replacement of simpler characters could possibly and adequately address.
Simplifying for Greater Impact
Simplifying our own language is too domestic a contribution. A prospective superpower, China should make greater contributions to humanity! Perhaps our Ministry of Education should start formulating new policy to help popularize science education, for example, by simplifying Newtons' laws via eliminating gravity, or simplifying the periodic table by permanently destroying elements of high atomic numbers.
August 2013