One issue with learning Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan is that they use traditional characters when writing, while China uses simplified. To be honest this hasn't been much of an issue, as for most times when I read simplified chinese, I know what the word is.
Perhaps that the real issue is every Taiwanese person who says to me that traditional chinese is "so beautiful, just like a picture." this always frustrates me, because to be honest, it looks nothing like a picture. In fact they have gone out of their way to make it look less like a picture and just more complicated for us poor foreigners who are struggling with the language.
Case in point, the picture above is for the word "pen." The way it was first written, it actually looked like a hand holding a pen. This first character is simple, beautiful, and easy. However over time the characters have evolved to become more complicated and further away from their origins.
So I have a brilliant idea to stop the argument between the two countries as to which style of writing is best, traditional or simplified. Let's just all go back to earliest way of writing the characters, to when they were truly drawings, and not just soulless words.
Going back on eight thousand years of culture, just to make the language easier to read/write for one stupid foreigner, isn't too much to ask right?
A little bonus info for you. In yesterday's posts i mentioned a few different dialects spoken in both taiwan and china...Taiwanese, Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, Hakka. Well all these languages, as well as many words in Japanese, as well as Korean before it was changed to it's present style, and a few odd words in other Asian languages all use the same Chinese characters. The only difference is how you pronounce them.
For example, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Chinese, Hakka, Japanese, and a few more, all write "big mountain" the same, but the way they each pronounce it is different. This is one reason why in Asia, tv shows almost always have subtitles, so regardless which dialect you speak, you can always read the subtitles to know what is going on. It also is why as long as I have a pen and paper, i should be able to "talk" to anybody in Asia......I hope.
