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One important thing that travellers need to know if they are planning to travel to an Asian country which has Chinese as one of its official languages and stay there for a while is as to which country uses simplified characters and which uses traditional characters. In this article, I will write about what system the different countries use. Click here if you are looking to know how to learn simplified Chinese. Some of the countries teach its people and students how to do it whereas others stick to the older ones. The People's Republic of China, for example, uses simplified characters and has been using it for quite a while now. Singapore is different in that it has Chinese as one of its official languages but does not necessarily stick to any one of the character sets. It advocates both simplified and traditional characters although it does encourage its students to learn simplified Chinese. This is what most of the countries are doing these days and this is probably because of the fact that both sets of characters are still widely used in the world.
However, thanks to the wide popularity that simplified characters has received across the world, it looks like it is all set to replace the traditional characters as the standard in the coming years. Also, many of the countries abroad that have been teaching Mandarin for a long time now are also starting to teach their students how to learn simplified Chinese. An example of this is the University of British Columbia which very recently decided to switch to simplified Chinese after a very long debate. Similarly many other countries like Taiwan are seriously considering a switch and this looks like a trend that will continue. So I hope you enjoyed this short article on learning Simplified Chinese.
For more information, head to the author's blog at Learn Chinese Online. Check out a related article at learn simplified Chinese.
Among the various speculations that have been spreading around in news websites and newspapers is that India and China are going to be the world's next economic behemoths in the coming centuries. This has prompted much of the world to take note of the fact that business in the future could be conducted in the dominant languages spoken in these countries rather than the Western languages and the most common languages used until now such as English. Therefore, many people now consider it important to learn Simplified Chinese since China recently became the world's second biggest economy after recently overtaking Japan in the number two spot.
But what many people do not know is that these simplified Chinese characters are not used everywhere in the world as of now. Since the government of the People's republic of China introduced the system sometime during the 80's, it was used very much only in mainland China. Many of the other Asian countries which use Chinese as one of their official languages still continue to use the traditional characters that they were using until then.
Many countries like Taiwan, Macau, Hong Kong and Singapore still have Chinese as one of their official languages. But while many of them are considering a switch to simplified characters, some of them have not made up their mind yet. This also applies to many universities in various western countries which have been teaching Mandarin for decades now and are debating just like the countries are. However, breaking news was made when one of the universities in Canada, the University of British Columbia which has been one of the main universities teaching Mandarin decided to start teaching its students to learn simplified Chinese characters too. This shows how fast the simplified characters system is catching up which is more reason for you to learn simplified Chinese.
For more information on this, head over to this article on how to learn simplified Chinese. Also visit my blog on learning Chinese Online.
