Simply Chinese: Recipes from a Chinese Home Kitchen

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Most characters, both simplified and traditional, have built-in meaning in some way. However, one of the big arguments in favor of traditional Chinese is that the meaning is clearer and deeper. Traditional characters looked (and often still look) like the “idea” behind them – the meaning; hence “ideograms”. Note: Chinese words in this article will be written as “simplified/traditional,” then accompanied by the pinyin and meaning. e.g. 中国 / 中國 (zhōng guó) — China. Characters that are the same in both forms will only appear once.

The need for simplified characters can be a hot button issue. Here’s a little bit of the cultural history to help you understand why. The Evolution of Chinese Writing They fall into four categories, which are explained below with examples. Category 1 example: 习 / 習 (xí) — habitChinese is not an official language in Malaysia, but over 90% of ethnic-Chinese students in the country are educated in Chinese schools, which have been teaching in simplified characters since 1981. Traditional characters are also widely used by older people and are likewise widespread on billboards, to a greater extent than in Singapore. Most of Malaysia's Chinese-language newspapers compromise by retaining traditional characters in article headlines, but opting to use simplified characters for the bodies of articles. In Indonesia, Chinese is not an official language. However, the country is also home to a sizable ethnic-Chinese community, and similarly to Malaysia, ethnic-Chinese students typically receive their education in Chinese-language schools that almost exclusively use simplified characters. Traditional characters are seldom used, typically only for stylistic purposes. Simplification of Chinese characters caused the resemblance between them and their meaning more or less disappearing, but often, you are actually able to guess the meaning, and that’s mostly thanks to radicals. Cantonese cooking is all about playing around with simple and fresh ingredients. It's about making use of all those flavours and letting the dish do its thing. It's not as complicated as people think - everyone should give it a try," she enthuses. Her grandparents ran such a café in the courtyard of their home, in the seaside village of Tai Mei Tuk, and one of her childhood memories is waking up and eating a spam and egg sandwich.

For example, the character 水 ( shuǐ) – “water” changes to a form of radical: 氵and keeps its meaning.She loved food and was so passionate about cooking," says Suzie about her mother, who passed away suddenly when she was just 16. They love being in the kitchen with me cooking, eating and communicating through food," adds Suzie, who continues to juggle her new-found career as a 'celebrity chef', with her own accountancy business. FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons. As the source of many Mandarin Chinese textbooks is mainland China, the majority of textbooks teaching Chinese are now based on simplified characters and Hanyu Pinyin– although there are textbooks originating in China which have a traditional version. For practical reasons, universities and schools prepare students who will be able to communicate with mainland China, so their obvious choice is to use simplified characters. Chinese people needed to write down pronunciations in dictionaries. Chinese does not have an alphabet, so how to write down sounds was a big problem in the beginning. Nowadays, the Mandarin language uses Hanyu Pinyin to represent the sounds in Roman letters.

The book is aimed at the home cook, with the majority of ingredients available from your local shop or supermarket. The Chinese language is like a big tree. The base of the tree started thousands of years ago. It now has several main limbs. Some people call "just a branch" what other people call a main limb, so you can say there are six or seven main limbs. Each of these main limbs splits off into branches about the way there are branches of English spoken in Great Britain, the United States, Australia, India, and so forth. Just as the Romance languages all come from the area around Rome and are based on Latin, the Chinese languages all have some common source, so they keep many common things among them. It is common for Hong Kongers to learn traditional Chinese characters in school, as well as some simplified characters incidentally, usually by consuming media produced on the mainland. For use on computers, however, people tend to type Chinese characters using an IME with a traditional character set, such as Big5. In Hong Kong, as well as elsewhere, it is common for people to use both sets, due to the ease of conversion between the two sets. [ clarification needed] Taiwan [ edit ] Remove those two components, and the character becomes 发, which is the simplified character used for hair. Add the Shaoxing wine, light soy sauce and oyster sauce and mix, then add the peas and pineapple and mix well. Taste and season.The Traditional Characters are now used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Chinese from Mainland China uses the Simplified Characters, but may recognize Traditional Characters. If you wore your hair down, you were a rebel or dissenter. If you were being punished, your hair would be cut, or you would be shaved bald. Notice the top two components of the traditional character for hair, 髮: Simplification of a component—either a character or a sub-component called a radical—usually involves either a reduction in its total number of strokes, or an apparent streamlining of which strokes are chosen in what places—for example, the ⼓ radical used in the Traditional character 沒 is replaced with a ⼏ in its Simplified variant to form 没. [4] By systematically simplifying radicals, large swaths of the character set are altered. Chinese characters. Some simplifications were based on popular cursive forms that embody graphic or phonetic simplifications of the traditional forms. In addition, variant characters with identical pronunciation and meaning were reduced to a single standardized character, usually the simplest amongst all variants in form. Finally, many characters were left untouched by simplification and are thus identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies.

Bergman, Peter M. (1980). The Basic English-Chinese, Chinese-English Dictionary: Using Simplified Characters (with an Appendix Containing the Original Complex Characters) Transliterated in Accordance with the New, Official Chinese Phonetic Alphabet. New York, N.Y.: New American Library. ISBN 0-451-09262-7.The plan seems to have worked. When the simplified writing system began to be taught, China’s literacy rate was around 20%. It’s now estimated to be around 95%. There are ongoing disputes among users of Chinese characters related to the introduction of simplified Chinese characters.