The very traditional Chinese characters are very complex in forms. However, the Chinese characters we learned now are all simplified. For students who learn Chinese in China, it will be more difficult to learn the original Chinese characters. But they should learn some background knowledge about it.

Since the foundation of the new China, the Chinese characters have been simplified for several times. After all of these measures, there are less people can use the complex Chinese characters well. Here is some knowledge you can learn from the Chinese language school.

After the year of 1949, with the improvement of the cultural level of the ordinary people, the measure of simplifying the Chinese characters was carried out. Firstly, some groups of complex characters were simplified and replaced in the Chinese dictionaries. Another measure students study in China should know was take place in the 1970s. At that time, some simplified characters were simplified again.

For example, “愤” was simplified as “忿”, the part below ”赛” was simplified as “西”. This measure is cancelled after several years. But some people just graduated from the junior high school and the senior high school got used to the characters simplified for the second time. So, some cancelled simplified characters appeared in some commercial ad at the beginning of the reformation. These knowledge above can be learned when you attend to school to study Mandarin.

With the reunification of Hong Kong and Macaw and the deepening communication ways between Taiwan and the mainland China, the complex characters came back to people’s life. But students study Chinese should know that this recovery owed to the rapid development of the high technology. If you want to write a document with the complex Chinese characters, you can just change the typing ways in the computers, the simplified characters will become the complex ones.

At that period of time, nobody considered whether it is necessary to learn the differences between the complex characters and the simplified ones. And there were no lessons set in Mandarin learning courses to teach the complex characters. If there were no computers, the communication between people from the mainland and the overseas Chinese would be difficult. Or maybe the later generations can’t understand exactly the ancient books written by the complex characters.

Since the use of computer in our daily life and work became more popular, the efficiency of working is improved and many complicated process are simplified. However, on the other side, it makes people who like use computer become inclined to rely on it and then become forgetful. Maybe even students learn Mandarin in China can feel that.

Here are some examples to explain about this bad effect. Now it is needless for us to remember 20 telephone numbers in a flash if we use cell phone and we even forget out family numbers sometimes. And a phonetic input method in the chatting makes many mistakes because we always use the first character automatically, of course, it also has the clear meaning, but majorities of them are wrongly written.

What’s worse, we can do nothing of writing paper things without the computer after long time of using, we feel the characters are just in our minds but it’s really very hard for us to write it out in the paper even we ever went to school to study in China.

Such high technology makes us become addicted in whereas contains so many crisis, let alone people who just learnt two years of traditional characters in their college and then never read the ancient articles. And those who had never learnt them, the traditional characters are just like the Kana in Japanese, giving them a feeling of strange familiarity. Nowadays, more foreigners like to learn Chinese language, say nothing of our Chinese people.

The specification of simplified characters and the learning of traditional characters are necessary for a mutual communication internationally. And it can make us understand historical materials. If we don’t learn the complex Chinese characters, the downfall of Chinese traditional complex characters is unavoidable.

Therefore, when teachers teach Mandarin Chinese, they should tell some knowledge about the complex characters to increase their interest to learn complex characters, thus keeping the Chinese characters alive with great cultural background.

After knowing the introduction above, Chinese language learners will know more about the Chinese characters. At the same time, Chinese people should pay more attention too.