It’s interesting to look back at what I cared about before and how those views continue to change. It’s also interesting to see how much people differ in what they value within the same general group of ideas.

In Shanghai the other day I saw another one of the previously ubiquitous billboards found in subways and airport terminals making note of how the simplified character 爱(愛) lost its 心, and how can you have love without heart, et cetera et cetera.

In the last year in Taiwan I’ve come to have a much more 随便 attitude toward character sets, and to characters in general. From the very start I’ve liked the moment of discovering a variant I’d never seen before, and I still like seeing different interpretations. A recent favourite is the half-traditional, half-simplified hand-written characters in YR Chao’s “A Grammar of Spoken Chinese”, or the variation used therein for 国. These have all been replaced with a Ming-Song typeface in more recent publications, but you can still find hardcover copies of the book with the hand-written glyphs.

Scroll down to the 4th scanned page on this post to see examples of both the hand-written forms and the variation on 国. My own copy being newer, I don’t have the enjoyment of enjoying Chao’s own writing habits.

There’s the argument that traditional characters preserve the culture and simplified are just one more instance of governments being bothersome. There’s the argument that simplified help in literacy and tradition has other outlets anyway. There are dozens of arguments in between.

I think part of my own view is tempered by having had to operate in both environments that use simplified (anywhere in the PRC, some textbooks in Taiwan) as well as those that use traditional (Taiwan, China, grad school wherever). So from that I say: If you’re serious about the language, just learn both; It’s really not that bad.

But I think the other part of my view is really coming from all this time working on Phonemica and the countless times we’ve spoken to journalists as well as volunteers. “Are you guys trying to protect (保护) the dialects?”, the question goes. “No,” we say, “not 保护. We’re not trying to stop the flow of Mandarinisation. We’re preserving (保存) them and the stories of their speakers”. Because even if we wanted to stop Mandarin (we don’t. we rely on it as lingua franca for our daily lives just like everyone else), we can’t. You can prevent languages from changing, from dying out, from splitting into other languages, from blurring borders between neighbours.

So yeah, I think if you’re serious about Chinese, you should learn both character sets. But then in addition to that, I think people would do well to understand that language change is a natural part of societies and that variant characters, hand-written short forms and all the other things that bother traditionalists are all going to happen anyway. Simplified characters are no less “real Chinese” than the modern metropolises are “real China”.