I mentioned this in my last entry, but, since hardly anyone who reads this Journal reads Chinese (Chinese is one of the languages in which speakers cannot be necessarily expected to be able to read and write, unless they were raised in China, Hong Kong or Taiwan), I'll reiterate some of the facts. One thing I mentioned was that, yesterday, I visited Seattle's China Town and found it to be really beautiful. There was Chinese everywhere - characters I could actually read and understand – and I was biking slowly down the streets staring up and pronouncing the characters under my breath, probably looking like an ass. My main aim in going there was to visit this bookshop called Kinokuniya, which, internationalists would realize, is a Japanese name. I had feared that it would be a rundown little Asian store with mostly Japanese books and a tiny Chinese section, in which I would find nothing useful. But I was very pleasantly surprised and happy, for once, to have been mistaken. Kinokuniya is a huge bookshop with loads and loads of both Chinese and Japanese books. On their second floor, I found the entire collection of Harry Potter books in Traditional Chinese script. Really amazing stuff.

When I came home, I found a note in my mailbox telling me that there was a package waiting for me. When I went to pick up said package and inquire what it actually was, I was, for the second time in one day, pleasantly surprised. So, in a move to combine two of my favourite interests, Harry Potter and Chinese, I have started reading Harry Potter in Chinese. Yes, very clever indeed. These books (I ordered Book One, because it's the simplest, and Book Six, because it's my favourite) are in Simplified script, and are thus easier for me to read. I have great reverence for the Traditional script but I have reasons to think it is occasionally less practical, and even, gasp, occasionally less beautiful (I could get stoned for saying this in certain parts). That is what deterred me in buying any of the HP books at that bookstore for myself - reading in Chinese in any case is very demanding for me, and doing it in Traditional would be even more so.

Reading Book One has been slow work. I decided to read what the inside cover said before I moved onto the actual content, and that proved to be a wise move because it foreshadowed clearly what an uphill task reading the book was going to be. This book, whose English version I can read in the time between a fairly late breakfast and a fairly early lunch, is one whose inside front cover took me one hour and a half to fully decipher. Of course, I could have read the thing in five minutes and gotten the gist of it, but my aim in reading this book is to document all the words I don't know. So, for every character and every word I don't know, I stop and look up in my dictionary, and looking up characters, you ought to know, is an absolute pain. I wish, I really wish they would switch to a phonetic script for Chinese! Today, I spent about two and a half hours in reading approximately one and a half pages of text, and most of the time was spent in looking up characters in the dictionary. By the middle of page 2, and including the inside front cover, I have learned 180 new words already.

Of course, as far as using a phonetic script goes, this is viewing the situation from my point-of-view, being a foreigner learning Chinese and one who is simply daunted by the thousands of characters I would need to learn in order to be able to read anything interesting, and I acknowledge that, in essence, I am putting forward the view that the language be simplified to make it easier for the learner to learn. I do know it is very much arguable whether this is a practice that should be encouraged at all. After all, the government of mainland China did try to do exactly this (in principle, not in practice) in the 1950s. Although Máo Zédōng's original intention was to abolish characters altogether and just used a romanized script like the Vietnamese do, in the end, what they actually ended up doing was just simplifying the most common characters such that they needed fewer strokes to write. For example, 歡 is written 欢 amongst Simplified characters and 儀 as 仪. Most of the Simplified characters are easier to read than the Traditional ones, especially at small font sizes, but the debate lies not in that but in their beauty as characters. In their proportion and balance. For example, 氣 looks like 气 in Simplified and you can see that it looks like something is missing in the latter. In fact, that's what I thought when I first saw it, and went and asked my Chinese teacher about its weirdness. She wrote the Traditional character for me and I saw, and understood. The Japanese have gone a third route in simplification by turning the same character into this 気. In this way, they've maintained the proportion and balance that Chinese calligraphers cherish, while still making the character easier to write. However, the Simplified script, in favour of making itself easier to learn, has forgone aesthetic principles in many cases and has given us ridiculous characters like 广, 产, 气, 国 and 飞. This is why, in my previous entry, I have chosen to use the Simplified or Traditional form for each character depending on which one I prefer and have not stuck to any standard.

And this is why I feel that the simplification of Chinese characters was a huge disaster. Not in that it wasn't a good idea, but in how the idea was implemented. It would have been terrible (aesthetically and practically) if the Chinese had abandoned characters for a Pinyin-based system, but I think it was worse that they chose to artificially concoct a new script. If nothing else, it created two competing standards of Chinese, and now there are even more characters for anyone to learn if he wishes to become accomplished at Chinese, because, in the end, you simply have to learn both Simplified and Traditional.

The Japanese, I feel, have struck a decent balance between giving up characters entirely (which the Koreans and others have boldly done) and between using characters for everything. What the Japanese do is that they take the key meaning-giving words in the sentence and write them out as characters, while writing out all the grammatical particles (prepositions, tenses, etc.) in their phonetic script (Hiragana). This greatly reduces the number of characters you need to know to be literate in Japanese (around 1200) as compared to Chinese (2000). This kind of a hybrid system would greatly benefit Chinese because a lot of the words are disyllabic and thus use two characters to write, such as 美丽 (měilì; beautiful) and 事情 (shìqing; affair, matter, thing), but their meaning can be deciphered from just one character alone. So, 美 alone means beautiful and 事 alone means "thing (to do)". But, in order to use their disyllabic forms (which, I guess, are often used because they give a better rhythm to the sentence and are also used to disambiguate), I'd have to learn two more characters, which doesn't really give me any more meaningful information about the word but adds to the number of characters I have to learn. And having a phonetic script also means the language is a bit more forgiving. For example, you can write out words you don't know the characters for. In Chinese, unless you're on a computer, you're just stuck and have to resort to Pinyin which simply looks ugly when placed side-by-side with proper characters.

Anyway, it is unlikely that the Chinese are going to do this any time soon because they just love their characters too much.

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