What is the difference between traditional and simplified Chinese?
Simplified Chinese is used mainly in the People’s Republic of China (mainland China) and Singapore.
Traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and by the large Chinese-speaking communities worldwide in the USA, Canada, Europe, South America, South East of Asia etc...
Two written forms: Traditional and Simplified Chinese
Chinese is written with thousands of distinctive characters called ideographs. These characters consist of two elements -a "signific", which indicates the meaning of a word, and a "phonetic", which indicates the sound.
About 40 years ago the new government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) made the decision to simplify the written Chinese language to make it easier for the general populace to become literate. Thus two distinct versions of written Chinese came into being - Traditional and Simplified Chinese.
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