Note: Transcript fully created by automated AI
[00:00:00] Jesse: Hi everyone. I’m Jesse Lin
[00:00:02] Angela: and I’m Angela Lin. Welcome back to another episode of, but where are you really from today? We are talking about something that we are not very good at, which is. Reading and writing Chinese Mandarin, um, and specifically the differences between simplified and traditional Chinese, because that has definitely been, I mean, personally, like a big challenge for me is kind of like navigating those two things when they appear.
[00:00:33] Angela: Articles or people write messages or whatever. Um, and kind of like getting to the root of what’s the history of like the divergence between the two, what are the main differences and why do we first gen kids have such an issue with understanding the two . All right. So we did a little bit of research, but if you know this pod, you know, our amount of research is, um, A Googling of many different things, but we are not experts as we never claim to be.
[00:01:08] Angela: So you can always write us in with your corrections, nicely with what we got wrong. If we got anything wrong. But, um, for me, it was like I had a personal interest in this topic because. Like, I think my first kind of like memory of seeing simplified Chinese growing up was in 2008 when, or 2008 or nine, because I visited Beijing with my family.
[00:01:39] Angela: And it was like after the Beijing Olympics. Um, and it was the first time that I had been. In China for a long time, like I was 18 or so at the time. And it had been, I don’t know, 10 years or something. So the last time I went and I’m sure, you know, I’m sure they used simplify Chinese on signs and stuff.
[00:01:56] Angela: When I visited China when I was a kid, but I didn’t care, you know, I wasn’t paying attention that stuff. But as an adult, I was walking around and especially. You know, 18, you and I went to Chinese school and, um, I think we’ve talked about, but growing up the community that we were raised in, like the Chinese speaking people largely were Taiwanese people.
[00:02:18] Angela: So then similarly the Chinese school that we went to taught traditional Chinese, and it was all like Taiwanese instructors. So we learned with like BPA MOA, which we’ll get into. Um, but yeah, so we, we only learned to like, read. Traditional. So I, it was around the time when we like graduated Chinese school and I was like, oh, just like as much Chinese as I’m ever gonna know.
[00:02:43] Angela: And then we go to China and I’m like, oh, I should be able to like, read everything. And I’m like, I can’t read shit. What are these characters? And it was the first time that I was like, wow, simplified feels like really different. So ever since then, it’s always been kind of like a diverging. Path for me. Um, and it, it, for me, it makes me feel a little like deficient, like.
[00:03:05] Angela: Not that I know everything in traditional Chinese either, but like the characters I do know, I feel like confident about, and I can largely kind of like guess things based on context, even if I don’t know every word, but when my dad sends like an article from China or something, I’m like, I can’t read any of this.
[00:03:23] Angela: And I, it like almost makes me feel worse about my already, like, you know, basic level Chinese understanding. Do you have like similar thoughts?
[00:03:35] Jesse: Well, you know, my parents are like, they don’t really have many ties to China, so it’s never been like a thing where I’ve had to be like I’ve had to encounter that or tried to.
[00:03:46] Jesse: Uh, read many of those characters, but you’re right. It is very confusing. And I think like, it’s even my parents are sometimes like, we can read it, but sometimes we have to guess what it is because you have to have like pretty good knowledge of most of the characters already to understand what the simplified version is, because I think there’s some kind of like, Um, what would you say?
[00:04:09] Jesse: There’s a method to the way that they simplify things? So it’s not just like random adjustments to the stand, the traditional characters, but there’s some like way that they went about simplifying all of them. So I, I think there are like some things that you can, if you’re already keenly familiar with the traditional aspect of it, you can probably tell what it is because most of the characters are.
[00:04:31] Jesse: Like, they’re not simplified to a way where if you look at them side by side, they’re completely different. Like some of the structure of each character is still the same, but it’s maybe like the interior of the character is like only three brush strokes instead of like 15 brush strokes or something like that.
[00:04:46] Jesse: So I think that. Yeah, it can be very confusing if, if you don’t even have full mastery of traditional Chinese, which I, I don’t.
[00:04:55] Angela: Yeah. I think that’s very true. And it’s also what I, uh, read on a bunch of Reddit threads that I was going down of, like people kind of discussing struggles with no, like reading between the two, um, I think you’re largely right, but let’s so let’s back it up.
[00:05:14] Angela: And from our like, Googling that we did explain a little bit about what we found of like where simplified came from and like what that method to the madness was. Um, so that everyone’s kind of on the same page. So from what I looked up simplify training use is like, H laws it’s complicated in terms of like, if you’re trying to pinpoint the exact history, because the like, I mean the main.
[00:05:44] Angela: The main thing about simplified Chinese that everyone thinks about is largely attributed to the fifties and sixties during the cultural revolution. Um, when, like everyone was illiterate in China. And so they, the communist party made like a really big push to introduce simplify Chinese as a way to quickly.
[00:06:08] Angela: Um, get people literate. And basically what they did was like slash a shit ton of characters out of the, out of the like list of all potential characters. Um, and they did a lot of those stuff, like you were saying where like, you know, some things that have like, just like a gazillion strokes that just like simply down to like an X or like something like that.
[00:06:33] Angela: Um, but others, um, I read that, you know, how in Chinese, Chinese is really confusing, especially for people who don’t speak it because there are so many words that sound exactly. Same, like they’re pronounced the same. They have the same intonation, but they mean different things. So something else that they did is that if there are multiple words with the same pronunciation, a lot of times they simplified that down by making all of them the exact same word.
[00:07:03] Angela: And usually the most basic, like the easiest to write. Um, one of the like five, if there were five, for example, um, So that’s how they kinda like slashed everything down. And then, but like to what I was saying about why it’s complicated is, um, like I remember when I talked to my dad about simplified Chinese, just kind of in passing and he was like, oh, simplify Chinese is like, ancient, actually.
[00:07:29] Angela: It’s like way older than people think. And. He’s like partially right. and partially wrong. Um, there’s like parts of simplified Chinese that come from really old times to like the Ching dynasty is what I found. Um, where I guess there was like a lot of cursive or like calligraphic, you know, type writing.
[00:07:51] Angela: And in that tradition, there is already. Kind of shorthand in some characters because it was easier to write. So a lot of the simplified characters, um, the way that they look in modern Chinese is like inspired by the cursive writing. So some of it came from that. So that’s why it’s like, oh, like you, you can claim that part of it is like fricking ancient.
[00:08:15] Angela: And then, but the majority of it came from like Mau times pretty much. Hey, everyone. We love doing this podcast. And if you enjoy our episodes, we would really appreciate if you could support us in any number of ways. First is by subscribing to us, rating us and reviewing us on apple podcasts and iTunes.
[00:08:37] Angela: Second is by telling a friend third is follow us on Instagram at where are you from? Fourth is supporting us on buym a coffee. You can find out more about all of these by visiting our Instagram’s Lincoln bio. And again, our handle is at where are you from pod. Thank you.
[00:08:58] Jesse: Yeah, I was gonna say like, although I didn’t really see much of it, like.
[00:09:03] Jesse: In terms of, um, information about its origin in the past. I’m not really surprised because I, I would imagine like for a language that’s been around this long, there must have been some simplification done already, like along the way, because otherwise, like how would. Most people have access to it. But yeah, I think it’s also like for people who aren’t familiar with Chinese, it can be very difficult to understand because Chinese is not a phonetic language.
[00:09:32] Jesse: It’s not like when you learn the alphabet, you can basically guess how to say every word that you read because it’s phonetic. Right. Even though you might not know. What’s Alber Jean, but you could say Alber Jean, when you read it, it’s a color, by the way. I’m like, what’s Algen, it’s a color. It’s a, it’s like a red, deep, deep red color.
[00:09:51] Jesse: Um, but it’s not phonetic, so yeah, you have to actually memorize what each word sounds like, which is why it’s such a difficult proposition. Like imagine, trying to imagine, uh, memorize what all the English words sounds like without understanding. the alphabet, like it would be close to
[00:10:10] Angela: impossible. Yeah.
[00:10:11] Angela: Yeah. Well, let’s get let’s, um, sidebar that, uh, the kind of like phonetic or alphabet part of it, because I think there’s, um, mm-hmm, , mm-hmm, a lot of interesting stuff to be had there. Um, the thing about like, not knowing how it’s pronounced, um, just the. by the way that it looks, I think that’s partially true.
[00:10:30] Angela: And then part of that is also where we now diverge as first gen failed Chinese school kids versus like native speaking people, because I didn’t dig into like, just like the so or deep, you know, whatever of it all. But part of what I read in those threads where people were kind of like debating between the simplified versus, or traditional and like pros, cons, blah, blah.
[00:10:54] Angela: Um, some people were talking about like, in traditional Chinese. Um, like the components are made up on purpose. Like everything’s really thought out in terms of like how each character is built and there are different components of each character and one of the components is called like a radical or whatever, which is usually like the, you know, like what’s on the side.
[00:11:19] Angela: Um, or like what’s on the top, right? Like there’s like gen Zong, which is like, The thing I wanna say. Yeah. Anyways. So like certain radicals will give you a hint into either what the character means or kind of what it might sound like. Um, because for example, like we talked about our names last time. And the middle word in my name is when, and like, it looks very similar to the word bowl.
[00:11:50] Angela: So if you know the word bowl and you looked at the word that’s in my name, you could probably guess , it sounds like one, and then you’d be right. Um, and there’s like a ton of where it’s kind of similar to that. So I think this part is like, it’s. In exact science of like every word you can exactly. Guess what it might sound like based on knowing the components.
[00:12:12] Angela: But I do think we as like for Shen kids who are not super native in reading and writing. Are at a disadvantage in like being able to leverage that kind of like, you know, foundational part of how the language was built versus native people probably would disagree with us that like, you can’t guess how it sounds based on, you know, the, the parts of the character.
[00:12:34] Angela: Um, so yeah, just playing devil’s advocate
[00:12:37] Jesse: there. Yeah. Yeah. I think that makes sense. And there’s probably also some, as you were mentioning, there’s some cult cultural context background. We lack that could be help that we haven’t been taught about because, you know, we didn’t grow up in an Asian country that can help you identify what some of those characters are because like the traditional characters are well, was the thing that I it’s like close to higher.
[00:13:00] Jesse: Gothics kind of, they’re like pick, pick pictoral characters, like they’re supposed to represent. Visually, whatever it is that it’s describing. So if it’s like water at some point, the like original version of it looked like a drawing of water, and then it got like adjusted, adjusted, adjusted. Tony became the character, but it’s supposed to represent visually, like what something is that it describes?
[00:13:23] Angela: Yeah, totally. And I, I think we were taught that in Chinese school and I thought it was like super cool. Mm-hmm um, yeah, there’s, there’s so many things like that. And it, it makes me also wonder if like, you know, if ancient Egyptian civilization still existed today, like. If you could trace back like what their modern version of their higher lifts would look like today, because it’s kind of similar in terms of like the evolution of Chinese, because yeah, a lot of them like even kind of crazy looking ones, like the character for horse is like so many strokes and it doesn’t.
[00:13:56] Angela: Look, you know, first, first glance, like a horse at all, but if you like, kind of like start massaging how harsh the lines are and like give it a few curves and a few, you know, creative liberties, then you’re like, oh, there’s a horse in there. like somewhere.
[00:14:12] Jesse: So, yeah. Yeah. And this is like one of those things that it’s just like really hard and someone can tell me if I’m wrong, but I feel.
[00:14:19] Jesse: When you’re learning a language, it’s really hard to do it in the vacuum of the culture that it comes from, because there are so many about. Context in which, uh, in which people use language in a specific way, and just like, uh, the specific kinds of conversations or the specific places that they’re having conversations that really queue you into, like what something might mean, if it’s, you don’t know what it is.
[00:14:43] Jesse: So I think it’s really hard to learn that in a vacuum. And we did go to Chinese school for almost like 13 years, but it’s not like we were. Using Mandarin all the time, or like reading and writing it all the time. So the context in which we were using, it was purely like academic. So there are probably like many situations where we just did don’t have the learning from that to be able to like, guess better at what the character might be.
[00:15:10] Angela: Yeah. I mean, to be fair, we did speak or at least I, my parents forced me to speak Mandarin at home and we had to read, you know, the Confucius text that we sometimes talk about, um, on this show. But yeah, I agree. It’s always been very. like more academic and then even speaking with parents, that’s, that’s just talking like that.
[00:15:30] Angela: Doesn’t help you with the reading and writing portion, which is why my speaking has always been a lot better than my literacy um, so yeah, totally. And I mean, it would be a whole other rabbit hole that I don’t think we need to go down, but like you mentioned the cultural context, right? Like we’re never gonna fully understand things like.
[00:15:53] Angela: Slang and like, you know, internet just speak or whatever, just the same way as like someone who’s learning English wouldn’t necessarily understand all of our random acronyms that we use all the time and online speak or anything like that. So, yeah, it is what it is. Um, but just adding like a little bit more color into.
[00:16:19] Angela: Again, kind of like why we are coming with it at a certain perspective. Um, traditional versus simplified also for those who don’t know, cause I didn’t know the exact countries, but, um, they’re both used today in like modern society, but it does kind of break down pretty cleanly into which countries like you can kind of tell which country someone’s from.
[00:16:43] Angela: Based on whether they’re using traditional or simplified Chinese. So simplified Chinese is like all of mainland China uses that. And it’s like, from what I’ve found, it’s it seems to be a little like up in the air. If they, if people who know simplified Chinese can always read traditional Chinese, I think it’s.
[00:17:06] Angela: largely. Yes, because again, they look like similar enough, if you’re native and again, with context, you can kind of like, yes, the rest, but it’s not like 100% crossover. Um, and then I think Singapore also uses simplified, but then Taiwan, which is, you know, where our family’s from is traditional Chinese. Hong Kong is traditional Chinese.
[00:17:30] Angela: Um, I forget if Macau is on. I forget which side Macau is on. I think Macau is yeah.
[00:17:37] Jesse: Traditional, I think traditional.
[00:17:38] Angela: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it’s funny because it is kind of like an identity, like giveaway right away. Um, and I think I may have mentioned this, but I helped Ramon with his startup, like, um, a few months back just for like a few weeks.
[00:17:54] Angela: And they have a discord channel of all like Chinese speaking people. And I could tell right away because they were all writing and simplify Chinese that they’re all from China. and I had to be like a temporary moderator for a few weeks, which is like one of the hardest things I’ve ever done because I was doing, uh, multiple levels of like translation to make sure that I was conveying things correctly, but I, I could only type in traditional cause I was like, I can’t verify, like if I chose to type in simplified using.
[00:18:26] Angela: Um, pinging, which we’ll get into in a hot second. Like if I did that, I would not be able to verify if what I’m typing is correct, because I cannot read simplify Chinese versus like, if I type in pinging and I have it. CR create traditional characters. I can more or less be like, yeah, that’s what I that’s the character I meant to write.
[00:18:47] Angela: Um, so I I’m sure they were kind of like confused about why they’re, the one person with like any sort of connection to the companies only, uh, writing in traditional Chinese, whereas everyone else was writing instant simplified. So we, we have dropped little sprinkles here and there about, uh, phonetic systems alphabet.
[00:19:12] Angela: And I’ve mentioned pinging now. So. One of the other like big differences. And again, this won’t make like commerce sense to those that don’t speak Chinese. So maybe you’re learning a lot today, but, um, there are like two different kind of alphabetic, um, systems that help people learn Chinese. And it does differ based on whether you are learning traditional versus simplified.
[00:19:38] Angela: And also largely like if you’re Taiwanese versus. Anything else almost, um, because there’s a random alphabet that was, it’s not random, but there’s an alphabet that is unique to Taiwan. Um, called ING Fu ha otherwise known more colloquially as BOPA, because those are like the first for, um, letters of the alphabet, much like you, you would say B, C, D.
[00:20:06] Angela: Um, and you learn that. As a child, like we learned it in Chinese school. And essentially what it is, is like it’s a set of, I don’t know how many it is. May maybe it’s like 20 something like the English alphabet, but you still have to like memorize each of those characters and what sound that they make. Um, so it’s not obvious when you look at a one of those alphabet characters, what sound that would make, but once you’ve memorized that sound.
[00:20:37] Angela: basically the way they teach kids is like you would have a book or whatever, and it would have the Chinese characters, but then next to it, it would have these like alphabetic, um, characters kind of spelling out the sound that that character makes so that you can start associating the correct pronunciation of a word with this alphabet.
[00:21:01] Angela: Um, so I mean, I loved it growing up and I was like, oh, I feel super literate. If you could just write everything in Bo booma I could like read everything. Um, but that’s not, that’s not super legit, I guess.
[00:21:17] Jesse: I feel like the association part did not really happen for me. I was like, oh my God, I can read these things so quickly using the Buffa, but then I’m I never remembered what the actual character was, because like you said, Um, there’s like, you know, maybe like 30 something characters and then there’s like, what was it?
[00:21:36] Jesse: Uh, uh, like four tonal intonations up, down flat punk punctu. Is that what you call it? Punctual punctu middle, like a what’s called like a staccato kind of yeah. Thing. Yeah. And, um, so it was just like, and, and you could have like three of them with one intonation, but that could still. Five characters, 10 different characters.
[00:22:00] Jesse: Like, so it was still really, really hard to like, remember each character because you have to like, specifically remember what it sounds like.
[00:22:08] Angela: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s where the memorization comes in. Um, and again, this is also where, like, we are probably at a disadvantage because native people probably. Have the, you know, like the components of the character could help them as well.
[00:22:25] Angela: But for us, it was literally just like, you gotta just memorize what these sounds are and which word it’s associated with. Um, but yeah, so that, that’s how Taiwan teaches kids, how to read. Um, but China and a lot of other Chinese speaking countries now use. Something called he, you pinging, which you’ve probably seen, or at least the words like pinging, because it is like the standard way of izing Chinese, uh, because it uses Romanized AKA.
[00:23:00] Angela: English. like, you know, Latin based, um, characters or sounds to spell out what a word sounds like. And I will also add, I found a fun fact about the quote unquote father of pinging. His name is. So yo GU um, and he died in 2017 at the age of 111. Get it y’all. But anyways, he, he is like largely attributed with creating pinging and.
[00:23:33] Angela: apparently at the time that he first started working on developing the system that would become honey pinging, 85% of Chinese people could not read or write. So it was like not only was making simplified characters, part of what expedited literacy, but like without honey pinging, as the kind of like aid in associating, the, the sounds with the characters.
[00:23:59] Angela: People would not have gone there. So one up to you, man, in big up in the sky or wherever you are. But, um, so yeah, so that, and as like a, just like a personal anecdote when it first started rolling out more in like, I don’t know, more broadly. So like I personally, again, remember it more in the kind of like 2008, 2009 timeframe, um, of when I first started learning how to use it.
[00:24:28] Angela: and like texting or like, um, on my computer typing with it. And I was like, this is magic because I couldn’t type, um, zing or B like, um, for anyone who’s ever seen a Taiwanese keyboard, they have the like, , you know, the alphabet that’s Taiwanese alphabet on the, the key pad, but it’s really hard to know how to use that unless you’re like native cuz it’s, it’s not super intuitive versus like hanging ping as someone who’s American born was like super intuitive for me because I was like, oh, I know what this is supposed to sound like.
[00:25:03] Angela: So like, I would just spell it out in, in quote, unquote English. And then it would like show me all the possible words that make that sound. And I could use like my context clues or like my memory of what that word should look like and, and type out what I wanted to say. So. like, I’m really happy that that thing exists because I, I would not be able to like text type at all in Chinese without honey pinging.
[00:25:31] Jesse: You know, what’s really funny is that like, I I’m, I’m fairly certain, we started learning it at the same time, because it’s something they rolled out in like Chinese school. Right. To make it easier for people to learn the characters. I feel like that’s, I’m sure I’m not sure you think so. Okay. That’s how I remember it, but I will say that my.
[00:25:47] Jesse: Familiarity or correctness in, in interpreting, um, the different kinds of phonetic alphabets, if you will, the Julianne versus Henry P I’m actually better at the DeWine. Like I understand it much better than the, he, you know, like a lot of the times I would be like, angel, I don’t understand how to this, like Z H a O what does that mean?
[00:26:09] Jesse: Like, I, it is just like, it wasn’t intuitive to me. And I’m also really curious because like, do people in, in China learn characters using honey P no. Right. It’s mostly for foreigners trying to learn because then they would have to learn the alphabet. And then I
[00:26:30] Angela: look, I don’t know the like full mechanics of it, but.
[00:26:34] Angela: Um, I think it was also aiding Chinese people because otherwise the article I read about the father of honey pinging or whatever, I don’t understand why they would’ve made that note about at the time, you know, he created it. Most people were I literate. Um, I think it must have aid in some way, but I, so I.
[00:26:58] Angela: get where you’re coming from in that, like, it doesn’t always make sense to pronunciation. And there was a tiny bit of like memorization for me when I learned honey pinging, because some, a lot of things make just like total sense in terms of like what it sounds like and what it looks like in the, um, English letters.
[00:27:16] Angela: But some of them are like a bit of a stretch and you have to kind of. Yeah, you kind of have to memorize like what they meant with that. Um, which is why, I don’t know if you found this in your research, Taiwan had rolled out their version of pinging, um, be it’s it’s complicated. So technically Taiwan did officially adopt honey pinging as their like, official way of, you know, um, Uh, alphabetizing or whatever Chinese in, um, or izing Chinese in 2009, but it’s complicated because there were actually four different systems like, um, phonetic sensations in Taiwan and there’s no.
[00:28:05] Angela: Requirement that any governmental body or any individual person use any specific one . So everyone’s like aha, as, and all over the place in terms of like the way that they’re spelling everything and no one cares and they’re not gonna like, bother to universalize it, but. there is a different, um, spec, like there are four, as I mentioned, but there was like one main one that they were trying to like push as the nude, like Taiwan way, um, called tone Y um, and they tried to rationalize that, like they were replacing some of the letters that don’t make sense.
[00:28:48] Angela: So like the ones that you probably were like, I Don. See how this makes that sound. So for example, like in Henry pinging, the X makes like a, she sound so like X I a O would be shell. And in Toon they use an S so that it, like, you know, that sound is like more intuitive. Um, and they made a few more of those kinds of like adjustments, but it just never picked up.
[00:29:15] Angela: Like it never became a thing. So Henry King is still like the main. You know, Romanized way of phonetically spelling out Chinese for most people across the world. Um, yeah. Yeah. I dunno.
[00:29:33] Jesse: yep. I, um, I don’t, yeah, that’s the thing is I don’t, I still don’t use any of it very much. So,
[00:29:39] Angela: I mean, I use it largely because, um, my mom texts in Chinese, so it’s my only way of like responding back to her in Chinese.
[00:29:48] Angela: I have to. in some way, and I’m not gonna be able to type in swimming full hall, cuz that’s so hard. So that’s why I learned honey pinging honestly
[00:29:57] Jesse: is texting. Oh, okay. Okay. Understand, understand. Well, we were just talking about like the differences between China and Taiwan. Did you dig, did you, I can, I’m gonna speculate why there are differences, but did you actually dig up any analysis about it?
[00:30:12] Jesse: Because like, for me I’m like, I don’t really know why there’s a difference and it’s mostly like, it’s like a. Culture as political capital kind of situation where it’s like, whichever one has the most cultural influence is like more official, like official the official China, cuz they’re, they’re both the official China.
[00:30:32] Angela: Yeah. I don’t think there’s gonna be a like, official answer to this, but the most obvious and speculated one is just for political reasons. Um, . I mean, as I said, honey, pinging is like the most used phonetic system for Chinese trans or not translation, but Chinese association across the world. And for Taiwan, not to really want to use that or like universally use that is largely because they wanna stay independent from China.
[00:31:04] Angela: Um, so yeah, that’s why, but I guess there’s also, I, if I had. There’s also a bit of like, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it in terms of like the use of ING Fu hall or, or BPA, um, that Chi Wiese character alphabet for teaching Chinese to kids. Cuz it’s the way that they’ve been teaching kids for like, you know, a long time and it’s, it’s worked.
[00:31:26] Angela: So they’re like, eh,
[00:31:28] Jesse: yeah, honestly. And then, like I said, from my own personal experience, learning to two things, like I, I think that for me buff is easier because it’s actually. it’s kind of like fewer things you have to learn because in the Henry ping version, you have to learn the alphabet than like what all of those, like a, B, C, D whatever.
[00:31:50] Jesse: And then you have to learn the combinations of some of those sounds as well in order to translate that into the equivalent of like Henry ping character. So for me, it was like easier to memorize fewer characters, even though they were like foreign than it is to at least when I’m like, thinking about it from.
[00:32:07] Jesse: Simplicity perspective, then it would be to learn the alphabet and then like the different phonetical pairings of what alphabet looks sounds like. And then like match that to a character. That’s like a lot of decoding that’s happening here.
[00:32:23] Angela: Yeah. I think to each a zone and everyone has kind of like different.
[00:32:27] Angela: Learning things that work better for them. Um, and actually, as we’re talking about like the different alphabet potentials and stuff, so remember I set my, um, new year’s resolution was to get at least like preschool or kindergarten level of Japanese down because we plan to live in Japan for a couple months this year.
[00:32:47] Angela: Um, so I’m learning it via duo lingo right now. If y’all don’t know that it’s a. It’s a really good app. It’s free, free version of ads, which sucks, but it it’s still like a pretty well structured, um, language teaching up. But anyways, so, um, Japanese has. Two alphabets as well. Um, and I won’t get into the history of it, but basically their, their alphabets are similar to BOPA in terms of like, if you memorize what sound that specific character makes, you can spell out every like Japanese word, essentially, like you could read it.
[00:33:26] Angela: You wouldn’t know what it means, but you could read it. And then like the exception is. Because Japan, China history, blah, blah. There are many like Chinese words also still used in Japanese. So then like a lot of times the lessons will like first teach you how it. Sounds in the Japanese alphabet. And then in the, like the next level up, they’ll make you memorize the Chinese character and associate it with that sound because in real life you will more likely see the Chinese character and not the Japanese, uh, alphabet
[00:34:03] Jesse: characters.
[00:34:04] Jesse: A and the character is like a traditional more similar to a traditional Chinese character, right. Versus a simplified,
[00:34:11] Angela: um, sorry, the Japanese characters or
[00:34:14] Jesse: the, like the Chinese, Japanese charact. They’re more similar to traditional Chinese characters versus simplifying. They don’t
[00:34:19] Angela: look like Chinese, the Japanese character, like the Japanese alphabet.
[00:34:23] Angela: It doesn’t look like Chinese, not the
[00:34:24] Jesse: alphabet, the words that it represents traditional.
[00:34:28] Angela: Yeah. Largely traditional. Although there were some it’s so complicated. Like once you go down the like linguistics rabbit hole um, there was someone on one of the threads kind of like piping in with like, oh, simplified as like Japanese and like.
[00:34:42] Angela: Then someone made the whole like side by side of like traditional Chinese simplify Chinese, Japanese. Yeah. It’s a whole thing. But I would say most of the time it is the traditional Chinese character, but sometimes they have ones that look like simplify Chinese and sometimes exist in simplify Chinese.
[00:35:00] Angela: Sometimes they made up and it was like a, a simpler version of the Chinese word that is not the simplified Chinese charact.
[00:35:09] Jesse: Well, that’s actually a good point that I, I think that I, it is also interesting to mention is that like the traditional characters represent some form of the heritage, like the traditional heritage of China from like thousands and thousands of years ago.
[00:35:24] Jesse: And I think it’s something that. At least from my perspective in talking to my parents and like from other, you know, just like my feel of Taiwan in general, that they hold like more important versus the, uh, folks in, in China. Because, you know, after the modernization of China, you know, from our conversations with other guests, they were kind of saying like, We don’t care about the past.
[00:35:46] Jesse: Like our motive now is like future, future, future. And so the simplification of the language kind of discards the traditions and the heritage around the language for expediency versus like, I think the people from Taiwan are more, they’re more protective of what that, uh, what heritage, that language, the traditional version of the language represe.
[00:36:11] Angela: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, there’s a reason why, when you see Chinese characters still in all the other Asian cultures, like you see some in Korean, you see some in Japanese, like sometimes Vietnamese things also have Chinese on them and it’s always the traditional word because that is. The time, you know, the era, the historical context in which Chinese had some influence, like Chinese society had some influence on those cultures.
[00:36:40] Angela: It’s not the like modern simplified down version of that language. And I agree. I mean, we, again, you, and I don’t know, like the full context of everything, because we are not super literate in the traditional Chinese characters either, but. like, I’ve always admired that there is so much, you could break down from like any given character of like where it came from, what it means and all that.
[00:37:05] Angela: And a lot of times with the simplified, they just take out the whole. like a whole part of the word altogether. And it’s just like, you, you wouldn’t know where that thing came from anymore, if that part was removed. So, yeah, which I think brings us to our clothes, our fortune cookie, we wanted to talk about, um, the most bizarre or.
[00:37:33] Angela: Crazily different word that, uh, between like traditional versus simplified Chinese. So I did a little bit of research. I’m sure. It’s not like I’m sure people who are like, actually literate would debate us on this. Um, but I found a few. Jesse, did you have a favorite though that you found that you wanted to bring to the table?
[00:37:54] Angela: Um,
[00:37:55] Jesse: honestly for me, they’re all really bizarre. um, I would probably say, like, if you look at them side by side, I would say like, that makes sense. But if you ask me to read something, I will be like, I don’t, I don’t know what that is. Like. Um, maybe the one that’s the most, um, jarring for me is mud. Cuz in simplified, it’s literally just like a box with like a da like a da like a little feather dash.
[00:38:26] Jesse: Yeah. On the side of it versus. Um, the traditional version of it. I know this one very well. And I also know the, the history of it, of it being a pictogram. So I’m like, oh, I know what this is because it looks like, um, like saloon doors mm-hmm like Western saloon doors. So that’s how I remember what it looks like.
[00:38:45] Jesse: But the, the simplified version doesn’t it just is a, it’s like a, it’s like a square without the bottom part of it. And there’s a little feather, feather, a stroke on the like, Left part of it. So it’s just empty. Yeah. So it doesn’t look like it doesn’t look like a door to me. So I’m like, this is . I dunno what this is at all.
[00:39:09] Angela: Yeah, I agree. I mean, yeah. Again, like all the traditional characters came from like a specific drawing almost right. Like the caveman type drawing. So you could. Guess you could extrapolate, but yeah, a lot of shit is just like completely wiped out. I had similar ones, so like, um, I also looked up though, like at, uh, when we were doing our research in terms of like how certain characters became what they were and simplified.
[00:39:34] Angela: So a lot of times they did exactly what you just said, which just like, they just like stripped it. Right. It was. They left, like just the outline, pretty much of the word. And they were like, this is the new word. And then sometimes they just like replaced it all together with something that doesn’t look anything like it, like there’s a zero like border or anything still left.
[00:39:55] Angela: There’s just like something completely new. Um, yeah, there’s a whole like series of them that are like, what happened here, but. If you know how to write Chinese, you may be familiar with like one of the, maybe it’s called a radical, I don’t know. One of the main components is sometimes this thing that’s like, um, at the top where there’s like a dash and then a stroke and then like a tail kind of right.
[00:40:20] Angela: There’s like this, um, Top component. And then there’re like a billion words that you there’s so many words that have that thing at the top, a dash it’s a horizontal line. And then it’s like, it’s like a tail or like a Cape off the, okay.
[00:40:38] Jesse: Okay. I think I understand what you’re saying. Okay. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:42] Angela: It’s a, it’s like a very foundational component of a lot of different characters in Chinese. And you would not be able to know like, what word is gonna be in there until, you know, until you have the like second part, the thing that fits underneath the, the Cape or whatever. Right. Um, so the word Guang, like.
[00:41:06] Angela: Oh, and I probably am getting this wrong, like Guang ch or like Guangdong or whatever I think is this good? Is this word anyways? So it is that whole thing underneath it, basically it has the word yellow, like underneath the Cape thing. That’s how you write Guang and the simplified Chinese. They just took all of the, the yellow out.
[00:41:27] Angela: So it’s just the Cape. It’s just the top thing and the Cape, and that’s supposed to be Guang, but like I said, that Cape top Cape thing is like the foundation of a million different words. God. And you’re just supposed to know, oh my gosh, that it’s supposed to be Guang. I’m like, okay, well, wow.
[00:41:45] Jesse: well, part two part two, uh, are names and simplified Chinese.
[00:41:50] Jesse: I like to go first on this, because mine’s exactly the same go mama Lin. My mom was like, my mom told me when we did the names episode. I, I said it, she said she’s picked my name specifically. So it was easy to write. And guess what mama. It’s not any different. It simplified it’s exactly the same.
[00:42:08] Angela: Well, spoiler alerts.
[00:42:10] Angela: So is my, even though so that, here’s where it’s like, again, there’s no like science necessarily like black and white, you know, element to the Simplifi versus traditional because I mean, humans still made the decision at the end of the day, in terms of like, which words were gonna get simplified down or not.
[00:42:29] Angela: And like, you’d think that the rule of thumb is if they has just. Too many strokes it to create the character. They would just like make it simplified. But it’s not always the case because like I, we talked about in the names of the episode, my name has a ton of strokes. Like the second and third words have so many strokes, but they, they don’t have simplified versions.
[00:42:50] Angela: It’s still the same characters. So D know y’all D. My name
[00:42:54] Jesse: is really, really short.
[00:42:56] Angela: They not, yeah, your shirt’s easy. So there’s a shit. It makes sense that it would not be simplified, but my shirt’s kind of hard, so I don’t know why it’s not simplified.
[00:43:04] Jesse: sorry.
[00:43:06] Angela: So, no, y’all any hoots
[00:43:09] Jesse: here we are. Yeah. Well listeners, if you had a good time listening to us chat about the differences between the language or you have some additional context you like to add yourself, or you just want to tell us some fun anecdote, maybe about differences in your name or some fun, confusing story that you encountered when you were trying to translate between the character sets.
[00:43:30] Jesse: Please go ahead.
[00:43:31] Angela: If you have any tricks for memorizing. Yeah. Yes. The difference, understanding the traversing,
[00:43:38] Jesse: the two. I mean, I still don’t know because traditional I’m still like, blah, you’re like Mala. I’m like,
[00:43:43] Angela: uh . Oh, son. .
[00:43:47] Jesse: Um, feel free to write us in, let us know what your experience is at. Tell us where you’re from@gmail.com or feel free also to DM us on Instagram.
[00:43:58] Angela: Yup. Um, and come back next week because we’ll have another fresh episode for you then. And until then, bitches.