Traditional characters are the original set of Chinese characters that have been used since long ago in China’s history. They are usually made up of many complicated strokes.

Around 1950, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) began standardizing a simplified version of many of these complex characters.

This simplification began as the PRC’s attempt at decreasing nationwide illiteracy, but has unfortunately become a geographical divider, since different countries use different character systems. 

All you need to know right now is one major difference: simplified characters have fewer strokes.

For example, the common character 邊 (bin1) – “side” in Cantonese has 18 strokes in traditional form, while its simplified form (边) only has 5.

The good news is, 20% of traditional and simplified characters are written exactly the same way, so you’ll automatically be able to read some of both.

If you’re planning to travel or live in either Hong Kong or Taiwan, you’ll mostly see traditional characters, so you might want to start learning those.

However, if you plan to travel mostly in Mainland China—where simplified characters are standard — you should learn simplified characters.

Despite an official ban on religions, however, China remains a surprisingly superstitious society, and some people can take these beliefs so seriously that the government has actually had to initiate programs to remind people not to follow them too closely.

I’ll get into a few of my favorite Cantonese superstitions below.

1) Aversion to Used or Second-hand Things

In a red-hot, fast moving economy with a “Wild East” reputation, you’d think there’d be a big market for second-hand, or “ji6 sau2 (二手)” (literally “second hand”) goods.

After all, people are moving between cities and apartments all the time and new versions of products come out with crazy frequency.

Oddly enough, though, there’s a superstitious aversion to second-hand or used products that’s a subtle but important force in Cantonese commerce.

Part of it comes from the classic “face” construct, wherein one’s reputation takes a hit if it becomes known that they’re using second hand products.

Another part of it is that many believe while being in possession of a secondhand item, they’ll inherit whatever bad luck or misfortune of the item’s previous owner. For that reason, estate sales, which typically happen after bankruptcies, divorces, or deaths, rarely occur in China. 

The continuation of this superstition in modern times may also be because that “new” is the norm in China, and has been for a whole generation now.

It’s the world’s global manufacturing hub and construction is constant and ever-present given the low price of labor and materials, leading to a culture and atmosphere in which repurposing old goods or extending their lifespans is rare – there’s always something new on the horizon because new stuff is relatively cheap to make here.

2) Aversion to the Number 4 and Affinity For the Number 8

Lots of cultures have numerical superstitions, but Cantonese tends to take this to the next level. 

It’s commonly known that the word for the number 4, or “sei3 (四)”, sounds a lot like the word for death “sei2 (死)”, and thus is considered highly unlucky.

Many, though not the majority, buildings in China lack a labeled 4th floor, and license plate numbers, phone numbers and even addresses with 4’s tend to be considered less desirable. A study even proved that in North American communities with large numbers of Cantonese immigrants, addresses ending in a 4 sold for 2.2% less than average.

Addresses ending in an 8, on the other hand, sold for 2.5% more than average, which speaks to prosper, superstitiously attributed to that number.

The reasoning here is that “baat3(八)” sounds a bit like “faat3 (发)”, a shortened version of “faat3 coi4 (发财)”, or “to get rich,” which is a nice linguistic lesson in the way that words with the same tone but different sounds can be considered a strong rhyme in Cantonese.