Traditional or simplified Chinese?

What is a Chinese character?

Simplified Chinese is one of two standard sets of Chinese characters of printed contemporary Chinese written language, simplified from traditional Chinese by the People's Republic of China in an attempt to promote literacy. It is used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia.

Traditional characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and many overseas Chinese communities, but simplified characters are gradually gaining popularity among overseas Chinese as more mainland Chinese emigrate from their homeland.

Simplified character forms are created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizeable proportion of traditional Chinese characters. Some characters were simplified by applying regular rules; for example, by replacing all occurrences of a certain component with a simpler variant. Some characters were simplified irregularly, however, and some simplified characters are very dissimilar to and unpredictable from traditional characters. Finally, many characters were left untouched by simplification, and are thus identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies.

That's why we have now two different versions of many Chinese characters: the traditional and the simplified one. Same meaning, same pronunciation, same usage, two different characters.

In a few cases, more traditional characters have been simplified in just one, so their meanings match only partially.

Do you want to see an example of a character's old version and its new face after the lifting? Pronunciation and meaning have remained the same:

• Traditional:
• Simplified:
• Pronunciation: jian3
• Meaning: simple

Chinese as a foreign language