Taipei Times: Studying in Taiwan
January 29th, 2007 by MarkDavid, turned up a surprisingly balanced article from the Taipei Times about learning Chinese in Taiwan. In the past, I’ve found most of that papers pieces about tourism or learning Chinese in Taiwan to be little more than advertisements, this one was long and pretty well thought-out.
Learning Chinese is hot, but you would hardly know it here in Taiwan, where many people want to speak English. From kindergarten to business school they believe it is the key to higher earnings. They may be right, but the gains of teaching the world to speak their own language have been relatively neglected and the government is scratching its head and wondering what to do about it.
Taipei Times: Chinese, if you please
For once, they address the reality that faces any westerner who comes here to learn Chinese- when Taiwanese people see a western face, most want to speak English, not Chinese. The article also explains some other issues facing students here such as difficult visa regulations, haphazard romanization of Chinese words, higher tuition costs, non-standard proficiency tests, and the government ordered crack down on private Chinese-learning schools.
Unfortunately, the article included some of the same old propaganda:
Even so, many students, teachers, course directors and officials defend the teaching of traditional characters and said they believed learning simplified script is not as easy or as useful as its backers thought. NTU teacher and administrator Lu Cui-ying (盧翠英) said simplified characters were easier to write but not remember.
There are a lot of synonyms in Chinese, she said.
Therefore, if the characters are similar this causes problems with reading. “Using traditional characters makes it easier to read,” she said, adding China’s literacy rate was much lower than Taiwan’s 98 percent. “Actually, having learned traditional characters it is easy to learn the simplified ones, but not the other way around.”
Taipei Times: Chinese, if you please
Simplified characters are much easier to remember than traditional characters, in my experience. I’ve lived in Taiwan for four years and I’ve only spent a total of two weeks in mainland China, but there are still some characters for which I can’t write the traditional form as well as the simplified form. Sadly, one of those characters is the character for turtle, 龜->龟. I used to live in a city called 龜山, and had to write that turtle character every time I filled out my address for an entire year. And I still mess it up about half the time when I write it. Other simplified characters that I was able to commit to memory without ever needing to practice them are 讓->让, 認識->认识, 個->个, 號->号, 馬->马, 還->还, and 達->达. I’ve never yet met anybody who honestly found it easier to memorize traditional characters than simplified ones. Furthermore, simplified characters are more phonetic, which makes them easier to read in many cases as well. The claim that Taiwan’s literacy rate is 98% is just absurd.
Taiwan does have some advantages that the article overlooked, though. The largest one, in my opinion is the openness of the culture, and the economy. In mainland China, it’s a lot more difficult to try to “just fit in” and live a relatively normal social life. Taiwan, on the other hand, is pretty multi-cultural by Asian standards. I might stick out a bit, but I don’t have to worry so much about everybody trying to rip me off because I’m a foreigner, or about accidentally setting off some political rant. Another important factor in language learning is being able to integrate into local society. Long-term opportunities to do so are pretty abundant in Taiwan. I know several westerners who have moved here, stayed a while and then gone on to become permenant residents with open work permits. A couple have even become citizens. Try doing that in China.
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January 29th, 2007 at 2:55 am
Hey, you know what they say about simplified characters; simple characters for simple people right
I think the traditional characters are by far the coolest, however unnecessary in most situations — perhaps something like formal cursive writing in English meaning that they’re great for birthday and wedding cards, but it’d be a pain to take work notes in them. However on the other hand I think some of the simplified characters are overly simplified. For example 還->还 just seems to be a bit too much for me to the point that if you don’t know what the traditional character is, you don’t know what the meaning of the simplified character would be just by looking at the parts. Over simplification could cause the characters to loose their special trait that makes them not an alphabet that is only meaningless sounds, but instead meaningful characters with sounds which is what makes them so cool in the first place.
January 29th, 2007 at 3:50 am
The big boom in people studying Chinese over the last ten years isn’t because the world suddenly realized how beautiful Chinese characters are. It’s because China is rapidly becoming a major world power.
January 29th, 2007 at 7:54 am
You post examples of simplified characters which are much easier to remember how to write. There are other examples of simplified characters where the simplification has taken away the phonetic or the meaning of the character. e.g. 廣 => 广
There are advantages and disadvantages to both systems. I wouldn’t say one is particularly better than the other. Simplified characters might certainly be easier to write by hand, but when it comes to reading then simplification doesn’t necessarily make it easier.
January 29th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Today 30 millions people are learning chinese, tomorrow maybe more than 100 millions, but it seems that most of them are learning simplified chinese.
What’s the position of the Taiwanese authority about it?
January 29th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
That’s very true Mark, but your blog tends to carry more information about Language, and less about Business. So from the aspect of language studies as an interest, I would prefer the traditional characters.
January 29th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
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January 29th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Very well, let’s talk language. I think simplified characters are easier to read because they are more phonetic on the whole. I’m not completely convinced that 廣 is easier to read than 广, due to the inclusion the phonetic 黄. On the other hand, I am completely convinced that it’s easier to learn to read simplified versions of characters such as 達 -> 达 (dá), for which 辛 (xīn) is a much poorer phonetic match than 大 (dà). Every single group of students I’ve ever met in the states (who should have less bias than those who have already chosen to come here) felt that simplified characters were easier to learn to read. The same is true of most students who have studied in both places.
The important issue when talking about what is an advantage or a disadvantage of a learning destination is the needs of the students. How to best serve students is one of the central themes of this blog. Considering that most students want to learn Chinese either to further their careers or to be able to communicate with a billion people, it’s a bit disingenuous to tell them it’s an advantage to learn a script that won’t get them those jobs and is only used by a very small minority of Chinese speakers. Darin, do you have any Japanese friends who want to learn Chinese? Which script would they rather learn?
January 29th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
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January 29th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
Well, as for Japanese people learning Chinese, I think it’s just the same as you or I; if they go to Taiwan, they learn traditional, go to the mainland, they learn simplified. Most Japanese characters will be sorta in the middle, somewhat simplified, but not as much as those in mainland China.
But you’re looking at the language as a means for business, while I’m looking at it as an art — there is really no way we can agree when our goals are different. Certainly if one wants any form of Chinese for the purpose of doing business, then the only choice would be Mandarin, simplified characters and all. I’m thinking more about the meaning of the characters, and the meaning of the radicals. Sure they can be simplified and one can just say that the simplified version has a certain meaning. When one asks why, it’s easy enough to answer it by saying that it’s a simplified version of an older character that actually looks like what it means. For me personally in terms of ‘cool-ness’, I’d rather use the character that looks like what it means. A simple example would be country. 国 vs 國. The traditional one actually says an enclosed area of land. The simplified one is just a simplified version. If I didn’t know the traditional character, I wouldn’t know why the simplified character means country, it would just remain as another one of those “that’s just the way it is, deal with it” things that people have to deal with when learning about a different language/culture.
Hands down I agree with you that if you’re looking to business in the Chinese market, you need to learn what works in the largest market. However I have no intentions of doing so, and am attracted to the meaning and artistic facet of the more traditional characters, so I choose them personally because they are ‘cooler’.
January 30th, 2007 at 1:00 am
Frankly, it’s just not that big a deal. Those who learn Chinese in Taiwan will certainly have no trouble learning simplified if they decide to move to the mainland to develop. So, yes, traditional is harder to learn, but ostensibly they started learning English in Taiwan for a reason…family or friendship connection, a liking for the society, culture or landscape. If they have that connection then they might like to return to Taiwan on occasion, in which case their traditional skills will be very useful to them. Not to mention the window into Chinese culture that a knowledge of traditional script opens up to them. It’s for the individual to decide whether it’s worth the extra effort to learn. Just like it’s up to the individual to decide whether or not they want to learn to write at all.
January 30th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Very true. I’m not really sure what it has to do with ways Taiwan could capitalize on the CSL boom, though.
January 30th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
Well, the truth is traditional characters is always going to be a niche segment in the chinese learning market. Just like Dr. Pepper is going to be a niche product — it ain’t going to drive coke out of th business. However, this does not mean that Taiwan cannot do very nicely indeed out of the general rise in interest in Chinese provided we recognize that fact and target the right demographic, just like Dr. Pepper is a success on its own terms.
Actually, I think Taiwan can learn a lot about how to market itself as a language learning destination from Dr. Pepper advertising. Their approach right now (as you’ve described it…i haven’t really been paying that much attention) kind of reminds me of the “Be a pepper!” (http://youtube.com/watch?v=dQDAStpSj-8) era ads of the seventies except even more unsubtle. Rather gauche and simplistic actually. It’s an equivalent of a Dr. Pepper ad that say “We’re just better than coke. So there. Don’t go drink any of that nasty coke or you’ll regret it.” They’ve never been dumb enough to say that. Instead, they’ve left out any mention of coke and just said how original their product is. Similarly, we should just emphasize that Taiwan is the only place where you can learn traditional script that has continuity with Chinese history and how cool it is without fighting battles we can’t win by insisting that it is somehow objectively better than another system that is currently in use by way more people.
Dr pepper ads have moved with the times, by the way. I don’t recommend that we adopt the jokiness of the latest ads, since language aquisition is a considerably bigger commitment than picking up a can of soda. But we should observe how they now project a kind of solitary fanaticism in their followers. Instead of saying “Drink Dr. Pepper so you’ll be cool like the rest of us,” the ads are saying “Because you drink Dr. Pepper, you’re special.”
We should be playing the same kind of angle. “Is traditional script harder to learn, you bet it is. That’s why 95% of wannabe chinese learners can’t hack it.” Let the insinuation hang in the air that the more elusive product is the more desirable one.
January 30th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
Yeah, that’s a really, really good idea. I think that kind of marketing would work well.
January 31st, 2007 at 12:08 am
I am not Darin, but up until last year I worked in a traditional Japanese company in the countryside that had just opened a factory in China. As a result, we all studied Chinese from a language teachter who visited our office twice a week. This teacher was from Beijing, by the way, so we learned simplified characters with a heavy Beijing “-er” accent.
As a native english speaker who had prior experience with Chinese learning, both traditional and simplified were okay for me. However, my coworkers really did not like the simplified characters. Many times the instructor would write something on the white board and when she looked at the class, there were many stupified faces. The instructor, who had lived in Japan for over 15 years and studied Chinese literature in college, would then write the traditional equivalent on the whiteboard. Even if the traditional Chinese character was different from the Japanese character, a good number of the students could immediately recognize it.
January 31st, 2007 at 1:00 am
It’s very unsurprising that so many could understand traditional characters, considering that Japan also used them until the writing reform and character simplification of the MacArthur era. It’s also unsurprising that the company chose to have you guys taught in simplified characters.
January 31st, 2007 at 1:24 am
This is a good idea on a number of levels. Besides being good from a sales standpoint, it will also tend to attract the most ambitious and hardest working students. And those are the students Taiwan should want. Students who respond to this sort of image will be students who learn Chinese well, and they’ll make Taiwan’s Chinese programs look good.
Right now Taiwan has a very low-quality population of foreigners. For the most part, the intellectual and the sophisticated students go to Japan, the adventurous and the ambitious go to China, and the unskilled and debt-laden come to Taiwan. I suppose since Taiwan’s such a haven for long-term ESL teachers (no offense Mark), it’s unavoidable.
January 31st, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Should we really be conflating the ESL teacher and CSL learner pool? There’s some overlap, but those are distinct populations.
Taiwan does certainly get a lot of ESL teachers because of the attractive terms Taiwanese jobs offer. ESL teachers are going to be a different population from Chinese learners, especially if they only intend to stay for a year or two. Frankly, how many qualifications should you require for teachers whose jobs involve work with students who are very young or whose not studying at a very high level anyhow?
February 1st, 2007 at 3:21 am
Howard, I don’t see why there should be anything inherently bad about being an EFL teacher, or especially a long-term one. Teaching, really teaching is good work, and it can genuinely influence people’s lives for the better. That said, there is a depressingly large number of half-hearted teachers.
Battlepanda, a lot of western Chinese students teach English on the side, both here and in mainland China. In fact, I’d say most. Those that are in it for money, though, would obviously not go there, though. That may be part of why we see less serious students here.
February 3rd, 2007 at 9:11 am
Related to Battlepanda’s Doctor Pepper suggestion, it is basically the same suggestion that Apple has used: “Think Different.” Well, everyone else is using Windows, but, well, you know the rest.
As for which is easier, I tend to disagree that simplified is easier in all situations. I started with simplified, and it probably was easier in the early days, when I was only thinking in terms of strokes rather than component parts. As time went on, my ability to break a character down into its component parts increased, and I gradually stopped thinking about written Chinese in terms of number of strokes. For instance, it is easier–at least for me–to think of the character (míng明) as two component parts rather than eight strokes. As time went on, this skill made it easier for me to recognize characters and to figure them out even without a dictionary. I think you don’t learn that as much if you only learn simplified. To a point, you do. Yes, there are radicals, and there still are components, but you also lose something of the logic of many of the characters. If you only learn simplified, there will be a point beyond which you won’t be able to go in your learning of Chinese. Maybe you don’t need or want to go beyond that point. That depends on your purpose. If you only care about doing business in China, and Taiwan isn’t part of that mission, then perhaps simplified is enough. But that is not everyone’s goal. If you want to learn Chinese on a deeper level, and gain insight into the complexity of the language, culture, and history, then I believe learning traditional in addition to simplified is necessary. There are people with such goals in mind, and Taiwan can reach out to them, while at the same time stressing the openness of Taiwanese society.