< Home < Newsletter < Review In Chinese character for love we mentioned the difference between the traditional and simplified Chinese word for love. We prefer the traditional way because the symbol for "heart" is in the middle of the character. Love is not love without a true heart. A couple weeks ago we received a Red Envelope catalog. Guess what we found? They were selling a simplified Love (without the heart symbol) paperweight for $24! Although Red Envelope offers great variety and good quality products, we would rather see the Love character done in the traditional way. Simplified characters are fewer in number and are created to be easier to learn because the characters have fewer strokes. That is what many people believe and have been taught. However, many characters were simplified merely for the sake of simplifying! Quite often the genealogies, or the connections between TRADITIONAL LOVE characters, were broken as a result. Research indicated that learning Simplified characters made learning harder by the current modernized system because many relations between characters no longer existed. Try taking some English prefixes, roots, or suffixes out and use abbreviated words in their places and see if that helps in learning the language! Furthermore, by reducing the strokes one reduces the contrasts between the characters. Simplified characters are more alike and are more difficult to distinguish them than previously. This was most likely the reason we heard that it took more mental effort to read a paragraph written in simplified Chinese than in a traditional one. Related: 1. Chinese character for love 2. Self-inking stamp: Love 3. The true meaning of love T-shirt Review : Simplified Love simplifiedlove   Questions or comments: info@goodcharacters.com Phone: 1-559-292-5289. Toll-free: 1-888-678-NAME (6263) All images copyright (c) by respective designers and photographers. Copyright (c) 2004 Good Characters. All rights reserved.