Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission Deputy Minister Jen Hong (任弘) said on Friday in Los Angeles that Taiwan and China each have their own advantages in terms of teaching Mandarin and should combine their strengths to make Chinese learning easier for foreigners.
“Instead of being caught in the dilemma [of whether to use traditional or simplified Chinese], we should try to make the best use of the teaching systems on both sides of the Taiwan Strait,” Jen said at the annual convention of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) in San Diego, California.
He said China had put great effort into setting up Confucius Institutes in foreign countries to promote the learning of simplified Chinese — a trend that some teachers of traditional Chinese find worrying.
He said, however, that Taiwan, which plans to open “Taiwan Institutes” in Los Angeles and Boston to promote traditional Chinese, should not disparage China’s efforts, because it is a positive thing that both sides of the Taiwan Strait want to promote the Chinese language among non-Chinese speakers.
Taiwan has qualified teachers, excellent teaching materials and popular teaching methods, while China has an abundance of funding and teachers, Jen said.
He said that because Chinese-language teachers are in high demand, Taiwan and China should work together to promote the Chinese language throughout the world.
“Traditional Chinese cannot be replaced by simplified Chinese, as the traditional form was used to document history and therefore has historic value,” Jen said.
Jen said China had not “abolished” the use of traditional Chinese, but chosen to use simplified Chinese, which he said is similar in many ways to traditional Chinese.
In the current wave of so-called “China fever,” the Chinese language has become the third-most popular foreign language in US high schools after Spanish and French, he said.
However, National Council Association of Chinese Language Schools deputy chairman Steve Chang (張正義) said simplified Chinese was gradually becoming the standard in Chinese-language learning and that many schools in the US have switched to teaching the simplified form at the request of parents from China.
While both simplified and traditional Chinese characters are part of the Chinese language, traditional Chinese characters are at the root of Chinese culture and it would be difficult for one to understand the beauty of the Chinese language if one cannot read traditional Chinese characters, which has many pictographs and phonetic-loan characters, Chang said in an interview.
Mao Hsio-ling (毛小苓), a representative of the Association of Northern California Chinese Schools, said it is better to learn traditional Chinese characters first before moving on to the simplified form.
She said that many schools in California teach beginners traditional Chinese characters so that they understand the origin of the words and then move on to simplified Chinese in the intermediate classes.
“Learning simplified Chinese characters based on their knowledge of traditional Chinese not only helps students learn faster, but keeps them interested in their classes,” Chin Mao said.
RSS