What are the differences between simplified and traditional Chinese characters?
Chinese characters have been evolving throughout their usage. In the 1950’s, the Chinese Communist government sped this process up by starting a program of massive character simplification with the goal of improving literacy rates. This involved replacing characters with new forms that required fewer strokes to write or combining several characters into just one form. Sources for the new simplified characters included common handwritten short forms, archaic character variants, and other characters with the same pronunciation. Simplified characters are currently used in mainland China and Singapore, while traditional characters are still in use in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and older overseas Chinese communities. In Taiwan the traditional characters are also refered to as “orthodox characters” by some. Given the mainland’s sheer size, simplified characters have a much larger population using them, but a knowledge of traditional characters is still important for reading classical Chinese literat
