Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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That's what most people say, but i've found it's a bit more nuanced than that.
Chinese characters are certainly hard for foreigners to learn, but they work quite well for Chinese or any language based on it. So anyone from any sort of Chinese dialect can look at those written charaters and know exactly what they mean, even if they dont know the pronounciation. Or at least, they could until Mao messed it up with his stupid "simplified Chinese" that randomly removes strokes. They will also instantly know the meaning of most Japanese Kanji too, without any extra effort. The hiragana in Japanese mostly just fills in the grammar words like verb conjugations, so it's easy to separate.
This used to be the case in Korean too, but then they abruptly removed all the Chinese characters. So now there's no clear boundaries between words, verbs have like 1000 particle endings with no direct translation in English, and everything has 10 different homonyms since the characters and tones got lost. You pretty much have to know the entire sentence and context to know what any specific word means. At least you know the pronounciation... sort of... assuming you know all the little details and exceptions they don't teach you at the start.
this is maybe more ranty than i intended. Korean really is a difficult language though.
It was not Mao’s effort, and you should not give him credit for it. Since the beginning of the New Culture Movement, scholars had already been considering the simplification of Chinese characters as a way to improve literacy. Some radicals even wanted to abolish Chinese characters altogether, similar to what Vietnam eventually did. The Nationalists also had their own versions of simplified characters before the Communists (RoC’s Foreign Minister and Ambassador to the US, Hu Shih, is one of the most prominent supporter of reforming the Chinese language), although these efforts met with strong opposition. Japanese too have simplified some Chinese characters (some even borrowed by the communists later). All of these movements eventually culminated in the Simplified Chinese.
Most simplified characters have roots in Caoshu or Xingshu. Because of their cursive nature, these scripts naturally reduce and merge strokes. Scholars who are tasked to simplify Chinese mostly do not make up new characters. There are a few abominations that are created entirely after the Communists took power and makes no sense, but overwhelmingly, simplified characters predate Mao, some of them by centuries, even millennia.
Also only ~20% of Chinese characters have been simplified, and a majority of them (I would guess 60% probably) are only mildly simplified and easily recognizable by traditional Chinese users.
Ah, interesting, thanks for the context! Yeah i've never formally studied that history, so I probably got a lot of details wrong. Probably when I heard that "Mao mangled it" I was thinking of what you said "a few abominations that are created entirely after the Communists took power and makes no sense," but it still works quite well as an international language/alphabet.
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