Many of the reasons for simplifying Chinese characters are untenable. Simplifying Chinese characters will cause great damage to culture.
1. After the simplification of Chinese characters, it is not conducive to the inheritance of China's five thousand years of traditional culture. After the promotion of simplified Chinese characters, many modern Chinese people can no longer read ancient classics directly. Even if ancient books are reprinted in simplified characters, ambiguities often appear, causing readers to misunderstand.
2. It is not conducive to cultural exchanges between mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, and is further out of touch with the Chinese characters used in foreign countries such as Japan, creating an artificial "different script for books". Singapore, Malaysia and other places adopted simplified Chinese mainly because of the increasing importance of the mainland in the world. The so-called general trend, traced to its root cause, still comes from the political power of the Chinese government.
3. Simplifying characters violates the Six Books' character creation principles, but it does not establish a complete character creation system, which greatly weakens the scientific and logical nature of Chinese characters. Many Chinese characters have lost their meaning structure, which makes the process of learning Chinese lose the learning method of inferring the meaning of characters based on their meaning structure. The current simplified character analogy system is chaotic, with exceptions or inconsistent analogies, and there is a high degree of randomness in which characters follow analogies and which do not. As a result, the Chinese character system becomes more complex and increases the burden on learners.
4. The development of Chinese characters is not just about simplification. Characters such as "you, you, right, hand, you, you" are all written as "you" in oracle bone inscriptions. It can be seen that the process of traditionalization has been going on in Chinese characters, and it has accounted for a large proportion in the development of Chinese characters. This is mainly due to the actual needs of definition, and it developed naturally, rather than using political power to force transformation. It has been nearly two thousand years since regular script was roughly finalized. It is careless and too "taken for granted" to describe "simplification" as the main development path of Chinese characters.
5. From the perspective of calligraphy aesthetics, the design of many simplified characters is not rigorous enough. At the same time, for calligraphy styles such as seal script and official script, the special beauty of the original calligraphy style is lost after simplification.
6. One word has multiple meanings, many similar glyphs produced after simplification, and the lack of phonetic and meaning structure, etc., all cause difficulties in reading and identification.
7. Many media, such as newspapers and websites, are forced to set up two different versions of Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese at the same time and/or related Traditional and Simplified conversion tools, which consumes a lot of manpower and material resources.
8. In computer processing of Chinese characters, the input speed is similar whether it is traditional Chinese or simplified Chinese. It is not necessarily true that simplified Chinese characters are more efficient. However, the design of simplified characters that can be used to represent numbers increases the difficulty of conversion using a computer, making the conversion results less than ideal.
9. Simplified Chinese characters are not directly related to the eradication of illiteracy. In areas such as Hong Kong and Taiwan that use traditional Chinese characters, the proportion of illiterate people is far lower than that in mainland China. It can be seen that the focus of literacy work is on the allocation of educational resources and education. In terms of policy, not simplified words.
10. Simplified characters created using the phonetic method may not be able to follow various dialects or ancient pronunciations, making it difficult for people in some areas to understand these simplified characters. For example, the character "Jian" uses "jian" as the consonant, taking into account the ancient pronunciation system and many dialects in various places. The simplified character is written as "ship", with "jian" as the consonant. This only takes into account Mandarin and cuts off the connection between the consonants and dialects and ancient pronunciations. relation. When studying the homophonic system of ancient sounds or dialects, simplified Chinese characters are often not credible.