hey everyone,

I'm wondering if anyone knows(for sure) if some simplified Chinese characters were adopted from Japanese. Some examples of simplified characters used by both countries (China/Japan) are:
画，　国，　声，学，　猫，　旧，　会，万，宝
and there are probably many more.

I think that it's likely that Japan and China did a bit of copying from each other when they simplified their characters, but I'm really just speculating about that.

It's really interesting that both countries officially simplified their characters after World War 2. I wonder if that's a coincidence or if there is some reasoning behind that.

I'm a little bit surprised no one seems to know anything about this

As I understand it, the vast majority of the simplifications had been in casual use long before World War II for note-taking or as part of the "grass script" style of calligraphy. 国 is definitely an example of that; I've seen calligraphy from the Tang dynasty that uses it. The 20th century simplifications in many cases were just standardization of abbreviations that had been in use in some contexts, presumably in both China and Japan. The Chinese program was much more extensive than the Japanese, of course, and did include some novel simplifications, though not nearly as many as Mao's failed "second-round" simplification in the late 70's, which was almost entirely innovations.

yeah, there were definitely lots of characters that had short-hand versions, like 国 and 门 ， but I think a fair portion of simplified characters were made up after 1949. Like 发，旧　，笔，头，　体，写　all seem made up to me. Of course, I'm not sure, which is why I made this thread, but I definitely don't think that more than 25% of simplified characters were used centuries ago as short-hand variants. If the vast majority of simplifications were used, they why is it that when people in Taiwan scribble things down on a piece of paper, the characters are almost all different, expect for the characters that only have one version. I've seen a good number of scribble notes written by Taiwanese ppl and they usually don't have any simplified characters.

So, in short, I'm not convinced. It could be that this will take much more serious research than a forum thread.

Well, the Wikipedia page on the Second Round Simplification (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chinese_characters) says, "90 percent of the changes made in the First Scheme existed in mass use, many for centuries." The citation is to Ping Chen (1999). Modern Chinese: History and Sociolinguistics (4th ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 155-156. Unfortunately that looks like it's only available on dead trees, but now that you've piqued my interest I may see if I can scare it up at a library around here.

But just instinctively, I'm with you, if the simplifications really were that widespread in casual use, you wouldn't expect Taiwan people to have so much trouble deciphering them. I had always thought there might be an element of noble refusal to understand rather than actual inability there though; if we ever switched to using "c u l8r" instead of "see you later" in any official context, I'd claim not to understand it too.

well, with Taiwanese people, I know that if they're given a text that only has simplified characters, they can usually be able to recognize all the words by looking at the context. So for example, if they see
他问老师对不对 ， they will be able to tell what this is with the help of 他，老 and 不，　as these are mutually used characters. However, if they're only shown the character "对", and told nothing about it, I think a decent number of Taiwanese people would be unsure what it is. I think this would hold true for lots of characters, such as 尔，庄，发，范，从，农，处，and many more.