1. Reform is conducive to accelerating the spiritual civilization construction of the Chinese nation.
The Chinese nation is a creative nation, and China's ancient civilization is famous all over the world. Modern China was regarded as a country full of illiteracy and backward science and technology, mainly because of the long-term ignorant and barbaric feudal rule, which deprived the broad masses of people of social conditions for improving their culture and developing science and technology. In addition, as a tool to master culture and a bridge to develop science, the complexity of Chinese characters itself has to be one of the factors that cause this backwardness.
Half a century has passed from the founding of New China to the arrival of the new millennium, and the number of illiterate and semi-illiterate people in China still exceeds one fifth of the population. As far as the effect of education is concerned, countries that use pinyin, such as North Korea and Vietnam, can complete literacy tasks in three or four months. It will take us at least two years to read. It is difficult for adults to read, because as long as they don't continue to learn and practice repeatedly, Chinese characters are easy to forget after learning, especially those with similar shapes, which are more likely to be confused.
Improving people's quality and cultural level mainly depends on popularizing education. Because of the complexity of Chinese characters, it is difficult to get rid of the time-consuming and laborious situation in primary and secondary education in China. Imagine that with dozens of letters and a set of orthography, after a short period of study, students can pass the word barrier and read, write and use words on the computer. There are 7000 words in Modern Chinese General Character List and 3500 words in Modern Chinese General Character List. Teenagers in our country should master these common words and at least graduate from primary school. Nevertheless, it takes about14 of time and energy to learn Chinese in junior and senior high schools, and the effect is not satisfactory. Students in grade one in French primary schools have the ability to read, students in grade two in Italy read newspapers and write letters, and students in grade three in Russia read novels. Our students spend 2-4 years more than those countries that use pinyin. To master about 7000 common words, I'm afraid most college students can't reach this level.
If a person wastes 2-4 years just learning Chinese characters, how much time will more than one billion people in the country waste? No matter how distinctive and unique Chinese characters are, the shortcomings of time-consuming and laborious cannot be ignored. As Mr. Su Peicheng said in the Outline of Modern Chinese Characters, Chinese characters are numerous, complicated in structure and lack of a complete phonetic system.
Second, the reform is conducive to the early realization of China's modernization.
2 1 century, the world entered the information age and electronic age. In the development of science and technology, all countries and nationalities are racing against time, and new scientific and technological achievements keep pace with the times. The modernization of science and technology is the premise of the modernization of industry, agriculture and national defense, and the modernization of characters is the foundation of the modernization of science and technology, in which the "Guan" in man-machine dialogue is a complex Chinese character.
Pinyin characters facilitate technologies such as telex, electronic retrieval and electronic translation, but it is difficult for Chinese characters to use these high and new technologies. It is precisely because of Chinese characters that the application scope of high technology is expanding, but it is still limited. It is difficult for writing to be mechanized, automated and electronic, and it is also difficult to provide an "information" pillar for modern science and technology efficiently. As Mr. Su said in his textbook, "It is very difficult to machine and process information with Chinese characters".
Third, reform is conducive to international exchanges.
The development of transportation is changing people's concept of space. In the face of modern means of transportation, the earth has become smaller, the distance between human beings and the universe has been shortened, and all ethnic groups at the ends of the earth seem to be separated by a wall. With the development of global economy, the exchanges between countries and nations are becoming more and more frequent, and cultural exchanges and exchange of needed goods are more urgent. It is not easy for China to learn a foreign language, and it is even more difficult for foreigners to learn Chinese and write Chinese characters. In the eyes of foreigners who use pinyin, Chinese characters are called "Rubik's cube" and "integrated circuit", which is daunting. We have been using Chinese characters for a long time and lack the social environment familiar with pinyin. To learn a foreign language well, you must go abroad or start with a doll. Chinese characters, a special symbol that is difficult to speed up, waste time and, more seriously, national life. In addition, Chinese characters are syllabic characters, which are often inaccurate and inconsistent when some international scientific and technical terms and proper nouns are introduced. If the international phonetic alphabet is adopted, the above difficulties or inconveniences can be solved or improved, which is exactly what Mr. Su said in his textbook. At present, "it is difficult to use Chinese characters in international cultural exchanges."
So the understanding of Chinese characters must be dialectical. Chinese characters have a glorious history, which was independently produced and developed. The structure of meaning and sound developed from the structure of form and meaning, from painting style to symbol regular script style, and the simplification, standardization and entry into the coding system of Chinese characters after the founding of New China all show that the function of Chinese character recording language has been strengthened, not weakened. But looking around the world, human characters have developed to the phonetic stage, while Chinese characters are still in the ideographic stage, which cannot be said to be backward. Any kind of phonography, especially phonological writing, is much simpler, more efficient and more advanced than ideographic writing. Although it is the general trend of the development of Chinese characters to simplify from complexity, it needs to be deeply realized that the principle of ideographic will give way to the principle of phonetic expression sooner or later; It is inevitable that the backward system will give way to the advanced system sooner or later.
Character is a symbol system established by social customs and has relative historical stability. Chinese characters were created by the Han nationality. After thousands of years of development, the Han people have deep feelings for them. However, the progress of the times is not synchronized with the development of Chinese characters. Understanding Chinese characters from the needs of society in the new era, there are indeed many inconveniences in the use of Chinese characters. Therefore, while Chinese characters continue to play a role, we must consider the issue of further reform.