From: pwu@ai.mit.edu (Peng Wu)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china,soc.culture.taiwan,alt.chinese.text
Subject: Re: Chinese character simplification, is it now necessary?
Date: 20 Nov 92 22:48:16
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
	<1992Nov20.184501.14317@athena.mit.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: blackjack.ai.mit.edu
In-reply-to: joe@athena.mit.edu's message of Fri, 20 Nov 1992 18:45:01 GMT

    From: joe@athena.mit.edu (Joseph C Wang)
    
    In article <PWU.92Nov20024909@blackjack.ai.mit.edu> pwu@ai.mit.edu (Peng Wu) writes:
    >As to the intellectual difference between T/HK and the mainland due to
    >character set, I do not think I am looking at a scientific comparison here.  A
    >controlled experiment is in order.  But I think it is indisputable that
    >learning simplified chars takes less time than learning complex chars.
    
    Actually, I'd like to see some controlled study on this, because it's
    not clear to me that this is the case.  For example, in FanTiZi, the
    radical for speech "yan" looks exactly like the word "yan."  So you
    only need to remember one thing.  With JianTiZi, you need to remember
    two things because the parts are different.
    
Do you have a fax number?  I can fax you a table of complex and simplified
versions of Chinese characters.  If you have "A Chinese-English Dictionary"
you can find the table in it.  You will get an overall feeling in a second.

    >An important factor not mentioned is budget in terms of time and money.  With
    >simplified characters, people can shorten their learning program to reach the
    >same learning level, which translates into big savings for a huge population.
    
    Again, it's not clear that's the case.  As far as I'm aware of, there
    have been no studies comparing the time it takes to learn FanTiZi over
    JianTiZi. 
    
I think there may be some studies but it is not in my field and I do not know
for sure.  However, you probably have friends who speaks Chinese but cannot
write.  You can do a simple experiment with them: teach them to write 1 to 10
in Chinese, using four groups of chars: A: 1, 4, 5, 8, and 9 in simple form
(i.e. - = ...), B: 2, 3, 6, 7, and 0 in simple form, A1: the same as A but in
complicated form (as used for financial transactions), B1: the same as B but in
complicated form.  Give the first person A and B1 and the second person A1 and
B.  Count the time for learning each group.  If you actually do this, let me
know the results.

    >On the other hand, according to some study I have heard, the children using
    >sound-based writing systems start learning composing much early than the
    >children using pictorial writing systems.  
    
    Could you post a reference to that study?  It goes against my personal
    experience.  In high school, I took Latin and German, but it wasn't
    until I entered college that I started to learn to write in Chinese
    (even though I had spoken it at home since age five).  The characters
    didn't make Chinese much harder.
    
I will keep it in mind and will post it when I find it.

    >I don't think
    >the benefit from using pictorial chars is worth the few more years need to
    >learn them.
    
    It's clear from Hong Kong and Taiwan, that pictorial characters are
    not a barrier to a high literacy rate.  Even the Mainland has a much
    higher literacy rate than India which uses phonetic systems (75%
    versus 40%).  If one wants to increase literacy, I think that it's
    better to direct one's efforts at building more schools than in changing
    the character system.

I can run as far as Carl Lewis does but that does not make me a runner
equal to Lewis.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china