To Abolish the Chinese Language: On a Century of Reformist Rhetoric
Chinese is here to stay. There are enough people who speak it. Characters are not the problem. Simplified characters made it twice as complicated.<p>What Chinese and Japanese need are spaces.<p>I struggled for 2 years to study Chinese here in Taiwan. I tried many ways (see the blog), and wasn&#x27;t picking it up.<p>Then I wrote Pingtype, which puts spaces between the words, colours for tones, and a literal translation. I started reading the Bible every day using it, and also listening to music and reading the lyrics. Since then I&#x27;ve learned so much more.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pingtype.github.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pingtype.github.io</a><p>The problem is not the language. It&#x27;s the education materials. Now I think that traditional characters are better, because I can rebuild a character from typing only the parts I know into Pingtype&#x27;s keyboard and searching for a suitable match. I had to build my own tools, but I wish these could be popularised to help the thousands of foreigners who give up learning Chinese.<p>Support for Taiwanese Hokkien is also included in Pingtype, thanks to the Taigi dictionary for POJ transcription. See the Advanced -&gt; Regional section. It is very different to Mandarin, but learning Chinese is a necessary stepping stone. I&#x27;m working on a lyrics video of some popular songs by Fire Ex as some educational materials.<p>Please give me feedback on Pingtype; only a few hundred people have visited the page and it&#x27;s kind of depressing. I don&#x27;t know how to do marketing, so it&#x27;s not catching on. Even if the tone colours and pinyin don&#x27;t become widely used, I really wish that spaces between words could be introduced to this beautiful language.