5. Pinyin, Traditional and Simplified Chinese

>> History…I hate history but I love listening to the stories. In 1954 (some said 1956), 毛澤東(Mao ZeDong), the former Communist Chinese leader decided to simplify characters in order to promote literacy. It indeed helped, thus, he did it again in 1964 before the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). In total, there were 2235 characters being simplified. Personally, I think it destroyed a part of the Chinese language history since the traditional or so-called standardized Chinese could be dated back to 商朝 Shang dynasty (1766 B.C-1122 B.C.), where pictograms were developed to illustrate objects. Then between 周Zhou and 漢Han Dynasties (1406 BC – 220 AD), the former gave this language a life with their phonetic sounds and the latter, where there was a famous scholar 許慎(Xu Shen) classified characters into 6 important categories. 

The traditional system is still used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and some oversea Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia). Last but not least, for that it’s so different from Roman alphabet, Pinyin system (romanization of Chinese) has been created and developed to assist Westerners in reading Chinese. Nevertheless, some pronunciations of pinyin such as 之zhi – 吃chi – 師shi – 日ri – 早zi – 餐ci – 歲si cannot represent the true sounds of characters because there are just no similar sounds in roman languages. 

Well done!!!!!! You just finished these “nutritious” articles! Impressive!! I hope this doesn’t discourage you from moving on because we are going to start your first lesson soon. Go take a break and come back here shortly!