Post complex Japanese and Chinese Characters

[jchen]

huh 

[greg]

i think your ambulance knows what's going on.......
just a quote from a post on this page....

[jchen]

oh but what do you mean by what my ambulance know what's going on? 

[greg]

lol the ambulance says "I think we have an emergency", and I quoted the post about "Lingchi"- cutting up people. So, the ambulance thinks there is an emergency and someone is being cut up.

[imperfection]

In the process of simplifying the traditional characters, not just a lot of strokes got lost but with those strokes also a lot of the original meaning. The traditional characters are very often made up of other basic characters and with this new composition giving them a whole new meaning. For example the traditional character for "to listen" (tīng):





The left part of the character means "ear" and the right part of the character depicts "virtue". Together that becomes "to listen". So an ear learning virtue becomes "to listen"! I find this fantastic and whenever I learn such interrelations between characters forming new ones, it makes me happy because I also learn about the Chinese culture!

In the simplified version, this all gets completely lost:



From this character there is nothing insightful about the Chinese culture or what ancient Chinese related to "to listen". There is no interesting story that you can make up for yourself to remember the character better. But you might say, this character is much much easier to remember, since it is so much easier to write. I tell you, you are mistaken. After you have studied hundreds of different characters, and you have to remember how to write "to listen", you will be more than happy that you can easily remember that it is constructed by "ear" and "virtue". No such crib for the simplified one, that would be that logic and teaches you about Chinese culture at the same time.



The above is from a blog I read somewhere back in 2007.