Letters are signs that are used for exchanging thoughts between people. Letters can be made, developed and changed at any time, and they have the possibility of being simplified for convenience. The ancient system of Chinese characters was complicated because the characters originated from drawings. They were eventually changed, step by step, into a simple style easy for usage. In the 1950s-60s, China simplified its characters, which had been inconvenient to use for a long period. A number of characters that were generally useless were dropped, and a number of common but complicated characters were simplified. This process involved the simplification of characters, the reduction of the number of characters retained for common use. the design of new characters and the redesign of a few characters, the abbreviation of complicated spellings, and the changing of some characters to a new style. The motivation of all this change was to make it far easier to learn to read and write Chinese. However, there are weaknesses in the new simplified system, compared with the traditional style, primarily because simplification often ignored the traditional method of forming letters. This has resulted in major difficulties in understanding altered characters. It would have been better to analyse all Chinese characters according to the traditional theory before modern simplification had been undertaken. Because this was neglected, there are many modern characters that are not formed according to the traditional method. I have summarily studied all simplified characters from ancient to present-day China, but I have emphasized modern simplified characters. I studied ancient characters that evolved into simpler forms before analysing modern characters. I also studied some of the methods used recently to simplify characters and the resulting characters themselves. In addition I point out the reasonable and unreasonable aspects of those methods, and show some advantages and disadvantages of the simplified characters

• 柳在潤(전주대학교 한문교육과) | Liu, Jae-Yoon