HK and Macao use traditional characters, sure, but it’s not because they “adopted” the characters that the ROC used. They became foreign colonies during the Qing dynasty, which also used traditional characters, since simplified characters weren’t invented yet. However, they are used to write the cantonese language, not the mandarin language that the ROC used.
Singapore transitioned to using simplified character and now you’ll pretty much only see mandarin written in simplified there. Malaysia is in the process of transitioning, hence it’s more of a mess.
Taiwan still uses traditional out of some sense of national pride
However “traditional” is not the original characters exactly, and some traditional characters are already simplified to some degree
oh wait this is a meme why did i type all this
oh wait this is a meme why did i type all this
Because I got to learn something cool about languages.
Most Mainland Chinese people still know how to use traditional characters for historical or aesthetic/artistic purposes. There’s a bit of a complex from some Taiwanese and HK elitists who think China is trying to impose simplified on everybody or that people who use simplified are dumb, but there really is no “right” script. Traditional characters definitely look more aesthetically pleasing than their simplified counterparts, but also making it easier for people to gain and maintain literacy is much more important than some notion of tradition.
Traditional characters definitely look more aesthetically pleasing than their simplified counterparts
not always in my opinion. sure, 區 looks better than 区 whick looks like an “image not found” 車 and 龜 do look like a wagon and a turtle while 车/龟 look like… runes? 頭 has a bean in it which is cute， but i do like the minimal aesthetic of many simplified characters like 广, 门, 县, 个, 书 etc where 廣, 門, 縣, 個, 書 look unneccessarily complicated and cluttered
Its possible that since my exposure to traditional characters has mostly been in contexts where they must be aesthetically pleasing that they become associated with that in general. You do have some good examples of unnecessary clutter though funny you bring up 廣, since I always felt the removal of the phonetic element made it lose its charm when simplifying, similarly, the simplification of the metal (釒) radical to 钅 sure saved me a lot of effort in school but I did like symmetry of “gold”.
i didn’t start learning chinese seriously until moving to china as an adult and was exposed to simplified characters long before traditional. i worked in a 广场 and though “广 makes sense, it looks wide and spacious”. later in HK/TW i often misread it as 黄 until i got used to it
Japan jist stealing the characters and doing their own thing with it
English did too. It uses the Roman alphabet. Japanese also includes a number of “Chinese” characters that are unique Japanese and are either not used in Chinese or were later adopted by the Chinese language.
Ok but what about smartphone countries?
Better question is which “smartphone country” would be missing… Samsung Republic?
So funny to me how proud Americans are of ‘rationalizing’ English spelling when all they did was make it 0.00001% less insane
