In the development history of the Chinese characters, many names have been used to name the complex and simplified Chinese characters such as Jianti Character, Zhengti Character, Suti Character, Jianhua Character and Fanti Character and so on. The different calling ways of the Chinese characters have various meanings, which will be explained in the following parts. First of all, let’s pay some attention to the so-called Zhengti Character and Jianti Character in the history of Chinese characters.

In the history, for the purpose of providing much convenient to write Chinese characters, people changed those characters with complex strokes into the simplified characters with fewer strokes. In some cases, they even replaced the complex characters with the simple characters with the same pronunciation. If you study in Chinese learning programs, you should know those characters mentioned above are called Suti Characters or Jianti Characters. The Zhengti Character is similar with the Jianti Character but the former one is used in the official formal documents or in the books. But there is no specific number of the Jianti Character used in the folk.

Jianhua Character is a kind of character style formed after doing some changes and simplifying the simplified characters popular in the folk in accordance with certain rules and principles after the Chinese Government put forward the simplified characters scheme in the year of 1956. The Simplified Characters Table published in the year of 1986 listed 2235 Jianhua Characters. Later, more 265 characters were added in the year of 2009.

At the moment, some overseas students who study as volunteer in China might feel confused about the differences between Jianhua Characters and Jianti Characters. In fact, Jianhua Character includes many Jianti characters but those Jianti characters not listed in the tablet are not Jianhua characters. The Jianhua characters published have only one character type but the Jianti characters in the folk have several different character styles. Therefore, they are different and Jianhua Character can be called the standardized Jianti Character.

Fanti Characters are the complex characters with more strokes before they were simplified. Now, let’s move our attention to the difference between the Fanti Character and Zhengti Character. The former one appears with at the same time when the simplified characters appeared. From the aspect of characters application, the Fanti characters were mostly Zhengti characters at the beginning. But they all belong to Fanti Characters from the perspective of the simplicity of the strokes.