简化字和繁体字
Simplified and traditional

你这一路写的都是简化字：书、车、门、马、学。你没觉得它们奇怪，因为你没见过它们原来的样子——書、車、門、馬、學。这一课看的不是新字，是你天天写的那些字是怎么变短的。

Everything you have written so far has been in simplified characters: 书, 车, 门, 马, 学. They never looked odd to you, because you never saw the older shapes — 書, 車, 門, 馬, 學. This lesson introduces no new characters. It shows how the ones you write every day got shorter.

所以“简体中文”和“繁体中文”不是两种语言，也不是两种词。一个北京人和一个台北人说的是同一句话，只是写下来的样子不同。大陆和新加坡用简化字，台湾、香港、澳门用繁体字。

So simplified and traditional are not two languages, and not two vocabularies. Someone in Beijing and someone in Taipei say the same sentence; only the written shape differs. The mainland and Singapore use 简化字; Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau use 繁体字.

类推是简化里力气用得最省的一招：改一个部件，几十个字一起变短。你在第七级学过的言字旁“讠”就是从“訁”来的，所以“语”“说”“请”一看就是一家的。

Analogy is the most economical move in the whole system: change one component and dozens of characters shorten at once. The speech radical 讠 you met in level 7 is exactly this — the old 訁 shortened — which is why 语, 说 and 请 look like relatives.

所以有的简化字比繁体字还老。写信、记账的人早就这么写了，简化只是承认了它。“书”四画，“書”十画；“车”四画，“車”七画——手上的差别很明显。

Some simplified forms are therefore older than the printed traditional ones: letter-writers and bookkeepers had been writing them for centuries, and simplification only made them official. 书 is four strokes against ten for 書; 车 is four against seven for 車.

这一类要小心：一个简化字有时候对着两个繁体字。“发”既是“發”（出发），也是“髮”（头发）。所以把简化字换成繁体字，机器常常换错——“头发”写成“頭發”就闹笑话了。异体字的整理也是这个道理：音义完全相同、写法不同的字，只留一个，比如“峰”留下，“峯”不再用。

Be careful here: one simplified character can answer to two traditional ones. 发 is both 發 (fā, to set out) and 髮 (fà, hair). Automatic conversion therefore misfires — 头发 turned into 頭發 is a well-known blunder. The tidying of 异体字 followed the same logic: where two shapes had exactly the same sound and sense, one was kept (峰) and the other retired (峯).