Yeah, it takes practice.
Not that it's completely impossible though, taking myself for example.
I remember it didn't actually took me very ong to switch to Simplified
when I first migrated to China.

Wondering how it works the other way around.

LyzTyphone:Yeah, it takes practice.
Not that it's completely impossible though, taking myself for example.
I remember it didn't actually took me very ong to switch to Simplified
when I first migrated to China.

Wondering how it works the other way around.

Not that hard, I learnt many simplified characters before learning the Japanese Kanji (effectively the same as traditional most of the time, except with 學 where Japan uses学, etc). Mind you I don't have much expertise in Chinese so my opnion might not be the best..

And for users of Facebook, there's a group with the name "Chinese Writing- Traditional/Simplified, they're just fonts!" which I think sums up the whole 'traditional' vs 'simplified' arguement. And its not just a Chinese discussion, just compare old Fraktur with the Sans-serif fonts of Germany today: (in German) (one thing they don't quite have there is the 'tz' ligature that resembles an R )

Besides, at small sizes, the simplified are easier to read.

The PRC government also wants to keep Chinese orthography stable--that is, not reverting to traditional forms, but not further simplifying or using pinyin.

I like the thoughts here. Just remember, computers can easily convert between simplified and traditional. People cannot. I have met some people in China who know the traditional characters. The vast majority do not. Still, I imagine the learning curve to switch between the two is fairly minimal, since the majority of the changes were to radicals and not entire characters.

"Outside" or "apart from" would work fine for ekster.

I recently was talking with a native Chinese speaker who read the hanzi well but had a harder time with hanyu pinyin. I think that for those who have learnt the characters, they are easier to read than a Romanization (besides saving space and being more traditional and beautiful.

Here's a good online dictionary with recordings of native speakers: http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Chinese/search.html

jchthys:Here's a good online dictionary with recordings of native speakers: http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Chinese/search.html

Uuu, bonega ligilo, jchthys!

I have to say that there is quite a good share of resources out for Chinese at the moment, soon it might be relatively easy to learn Chinese even if it's still very different to indo-european languages.

ceigered:I've noticed something interesting.

La ĉinaj lingvoj havas 1,000,000,000 parolantojn, jes? La ĉina ŝtato pledas por Mandarino iĝi la 'norma' ĉina lingvo en la tuto de Ĉina. Kombinu tio kun la fakto kiu estas ke iu parolantoj de aliaj ĉinaj lingvoj povas kompreni Mandarinon, kaj post kombinu tio kun la fakto kiu estas ke Mandarino komencas preni la loko de la Angla lingvo de la 'preferita dua lingvo en la laborejo'.

The Chinese languages are spoken by about 1,000,000,000 people, right? Then, the Chinese government is pushing for Mandarin to become the 'standard' chinese throughout all of the PRC. Combine that with the fact that some speakers of other Chinese languages can understand Mandarin, and then further combine that with the fact that Mandarin is starting to take English's place of the 'preferred secondary language in the workplace'.

FURTHER combine that with the fact that Japan uses Chinese characters and chinese vocabulary (for about every native Japanese word there's a Chinese word, or so they say) and same for some speakers of Korean, and you've got one hellova speaker base. With such a far reaching and influential language, what would Esperanto's future be in Asia against a mighty beast like Chinese? Could Esperanto's future uses be limited to general use only in the 'Western' sphere of influnce?

And I decided to practice some Esperanto at this late time of night too, so sorry if it's incomprehensible. (but what is 'then' in Esperanto, as in 'then look here'?)

Mandarin is used extensively throughout China, but not in the other countries. Most Vietnamese (who live just around the corner from China!) don't learn Chinese at all.

Esperanto has its place, but I feel that it's much more useful in Europe anyway.

ceigered:
And for users of Facebook, there's a group with the name "Chinese Writing- Traditional/Simplified, they're just fonts!" which I think sums up the whole 'traditional' vs 'simplified' arguement.

That's something new to me. I've never thought about that!

Besides minor exceptions. (As 黄鸡蛋 pointed out)
The traditionals and simplified sinograms are mostly in a one-to-one inflection. Someday people might cooperate to create a word code that contains ALL the different sinograms and let the font decide whether it should be Traditional, Simplified or even Japanese kanji!

For example, the sinograms 松/鬆 can, in font, shares the simplified character 松, while in code they are still apart. The same way works for 櫻/樱/桜.

That's going to solve a whole of compatibility problem as right now Zh-tw and Zh-cn OS system use different language code and thus do not communicate well.

ceigered:

jchthys:Here's a good online dictionary with recordings of native speakers: http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Chinese/search.html

Uuu, bonega ligilo, jchthys!

I have to say that there is quite a good share of resources out for Chinese at the moment, soon it might be relatively easy to learn Chinese even if it's still very different to indo-european languages.

Here’s another good resource I came across today: nciku

jchthys:nciku

Ah good ol' nciku. Only problem I've found with that site in the last year or two that I've been using it (forgot when I found it) was that it doesn't work when my internet goes over the usage limit and the speeds get slowed down.

Actually that reminds me of a question I forgot to ask ages ago - does anyone have anything to say about the synthesised reading of the characters on Nciku? it seems a bit odd to me at times.