What is Simplified & Traditional Chinese?

Variant forms of a given Chinese character have developed over time. For example Japanese has many simplified forms, such as 国 (country) which derives from the Chinese 國. The number of Chinese characters kept growing too. In the 1950's, Mainland China decided to reform the Chinese writing system. They simplified the shapes of many of the more common characters in use. For example, they chose the same form of 'country' as used in Japanese to replace the previous form. However, not all the simplifications adopted were simply taken from existing variants. The following shows a few examples:

The simplification process also simplified certain components that occur in many characters. For example the component derived from 言 in 語 becomes 讠in the simplified form of the same character, 语.

Simplification also attempted to define a relatively smaller set of characters for common usage than had traditionally been the case. In many cases, this meant that a single character from the simplified set was used in place of several characters from the larger traditional set. For example, 干 was used in the simplified character set in place of the following four characters from the traditional set, 干 幹 乾 and 榦.

Traditional Chinese is still used to write characters in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and much of the Chinese diaspora. Simplified Chinese is used in Mainland China and Singapore. It is important to stress that people speaking many different, often mutually unintelligible, Chinese dialects would use one or other of these scripts to write Chinese – ie. the characters do not necessarily represent the sounds. There are also a few local characters, such as for Cantonese in Hong Kong, that are not in widespread use.