Would learning traditional & simplified chinese together confusing for a child?

My little girl is 5 years old.


She's currently studying at ESF and her school teaches putunghua in simplified chinese.


We are looking at enrolling her in "after school" cantonese classes because her dad's side are Cantonese speakers and we feel this would be fun for her. Another reason is that HK still uses traditional cantonese. The cantonese classes we've enrolled her in, however, teach in traditional chinese.


If she does both, would this be confusing for her?

It shouldn't be any more confusing than learning characters and the alphabet....


If nobody tells her up front that they are two forms of the same character, she will probably not process them as the same, as the pronunciations are generally vastly different, but instead will have an "aha" moment several years from now instead.


My daughter is currently learning 3 languages [each with different form of writing], including putonghua, and she already differentiates the different written forms - she can't read, but knows which is which in our bilingual books.

"If nobody tells her up front that they are two forms of the same character, she will probably not process them as the same, as the pronunciations are generally vastly different, but instead will have an "aha" moment several years from now instead."


Hang on. As I understand it simplified vs. traditional do not mean different pronunciations. Unlike Western languages and alphabets, the written and spoken languages are decoupled. In other words there is little problem writing Cantonese in simplified characters and Mandarin in traditional. After all, simplified characters only came about after the revolution so Mandarin was written in traditional earlier.


Unless I have really misunderstood things.

You are correct that the two types of characters themselves do not mean different pronunciations, and that it is possible to write any of the difanghuas in both traditional and simplified characters. In fact, it is my understanding that the grammar is actually very similar, and the same written sentence can be read aloud in several dialects and will both make sense in the local dialect and be completely unintelligible to Chinese speakers who do not speak that particular dialect. [Back in the US, I often observed the situation where Chinese students from different parts of the country had to write things down to communicate....]


My point was that if she is learning traditional characters in a cantonese setting and simplified characters in a mandarin setting, she will naturally associate the traditional with the cantonese and the simplified with the mandarin. The 'aha' moment of course would be the realization that there is actually a correlation between simplified and traditional characters....

From our experience in kindergarten, I think there are some chinese characters that are the same in both Putunghua and Cantonese, right? Even if they are pronounced differently, they have the same writing. For example, people. It's the same chinese character for Putunghua and cantonese. If I say the word in Cantonese, my daughter knows how to write it. If I repeat it in Putunghua, she stares at me blankly. Is this a problem or will they work it out eventually?


She is more familiar with cantonese and I know she will learn how to read and write Chinese faster if she can do it in cantonese as opposed to mandarin (nobody speaks or understands mandarin at home). This is why I am so keen on enrolling her in after school cantonese. Our only worry is whether or not this will affect her Putunghua - will it confuse her? Her cantonese teacher tells her the chinese character means "yan" and her mandarin teacher tells her it means "ren"?


So would you recommend Cantonese classes or would you recommend just sticking to one? At the moment she's bilingual - she's fluent in both English and Cantonese. She loves singing in Mandarin but I doubt she knows what she's saying. Mum can't help in either of these, I'm trying to learn off my daughter's books myself so I'm pretty much at her level.

"I think there are some chinese characters that are the same in both Putunghua and Cantonese, right? "


The characters are independent of the spoken language. There is no Mandarin or Cantonese writing. You can write in either character set and then read it aloud in either language.



"If I repeat it in Putunghua, she stares at me blankly. Is this a problem or will they work it out eventually?"


Well, it should.



"Our only worry is whether or not this will affect her Putunghua - will it confuse her? Her cantonese teacher tells her the chinese character means "yan" and her mandarin teacher tells her it means "ren"?"


She will probably not be confused. Kids don't really see this kind of thing as an obstacle. They just absorb it all and it eventually comes out right as long s there is enough exposure.

"She will probably not be confused. Kids don't really see this kind of thing as an obstacle. They just absorb it all and it eventually comes out right as long s there is enough exposure."


Agree. My kids are native-speakers in English, and learned Catonese at Kindergarten with associated writing, and then learned Mandarin at Primary. It was never really a problem, because kids do not think like adults. They are open to the new experience. Though my kids have had far more school lessons in Mandarin, due to the local environment both are much more fluent in speaking Cantonese. They can read/write both traditional and simplified characters, but still hold a preference for traditional.

Axptguy38 is right! My son is 7 years old, he is in local school, we are native PUTONGHUA speaker, his chinese reading,writing obviously better than other students ( native Cantonese speaker).