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Thread: Which is better? Simplified Chinese Character or Traditional Chinese?

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[quote=CHRISWAUGHBJ,231496]1: I'm sorry, but you're statement could easily have been interpreted as racist.
2: Racism does not have to be directed at one "race" to be racist. Most racists I know hate everybody who is of a different "race" from them.
3: Casting aspersions on my knowledge of any language is not a valid debating tactic.
4: Moving on: Why compare China with developed countries? China is not a developed country, China's education system is still quite poorly developed and many Chinese children still do not have access to education. And many of those who do have access to education only have access to very poor education. This is why China's literacy rate is still "only" in the region of 85%. Let's compare Hong Kong and Taiwan with developed countries, since they are the most developed regions of China: All of a sudden we see comparable literacy rates. How could this be? Hong Kong and Taiwan still use traditional characters! Clearly literacy rates have more to do with access to and quality of education than the complexity of the writing system.

Now, clearly you don't understand how literacy is defined or how literacy rates are measured. The survey I cited defined the adult literacy rate as the percentage of the population over the age of 15 who could read and write a simple sentence about themselves with understanding. That's a much lower standard than you seem to be applying. I believe the Chinese government standard is the ability to read and write the 1500 most commonly used characters. Those characters make up somewhere in the region of 90% of all Chinese texts. So using the literacy rate from the survey I cited and the Chinese government's standard for literacy, we can safely assume that roughly 85% of Chinese people aged over 15 can read 90% of what is written in Renmin Ribao.

Let's get this straight: Literacy is not the ability to read every single word or Chinese character. Nobody can do that. Even in developed countries, very, very many people have very basic reading and writing skills. Just after I graduated I did a course in Adult Literacy Tutoring, and some of the things I learned in that course were surprising, shocking, even: In New Zealand, which for many, many years had literacy and remedial reading programmes that were the envy of the world, 30% of the adult population were functionally illiterate. That was 70% of unemployed people. These people were not totally illiterate, but their reading and writing skills were so poor they struggled with things as "simple" as job applications or welfare application forms. Given the definition of literacy used by the survey I cited, we can assume that the same applies to all countries- many of those considered literate actually have very basic literacy skills and would probably struggle to read their hometown's newspaper. That is why you're "example" of a 7 year old Russian being able to read anything written in Russian while a 20 year old Chinese struggles with Renmin Ribao is irrelevant.

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