This is a question for the Chinese experts. Why in the world is there considered to be a difference between these two things?

特別
特别

This is the kind of stuff that makes me insane. It reminds me of Dana Carvey's routine about the little kid whose father has to buy the robot toy:

http://lavender.fortunecity.com/ducksoup/545/megatee.wav

hmm I pasted those into two different dictionaries and they both say it's the same...

Yeah, one is traditional and one is simplified; same meaning though.

I'm glad they simplified 別 to 别, otherwise I'd have to learn a new component. Now it's just 另 which, by the way, is the same for both the simplified and the traditional variant.

An interesting regional (northern) alternative to 太 and 特别 is 忒 [tēi].

If you look here http://zhongwen.com/cgi-bin/zipu.cgi?b5=%A7%4F you'll find that the component in the traditional character is "bone" (altered!). I'd say the simplification just finished the missing 5% of the transformation from "bone" to "separate". Nevertheless, all who are learning both versions will have to remember the small difference. :-(

I bow to your erudition.

Thanks! ;-) If you're interested, "méi" as in 沒有 is a similar case. The top right component used to be "húi" 回 (to return). The simplified version went one step further: 没.
Source: http://zhongwen.com/cgi-bin/zipu.cgi?b5=%A8%53

OK, here's another one. Skritter says that 只有 is simplified, while its traditional version is 只有. They have the same definition and pinyin. Is this something screwy in the DB or is there really supposed to be a difference here?

James

Where does it say that? 只有 has two forms because 只 maps to 只, 隻, and 祇 in traditional. So although there is no difference for 只有, some part of the site is not smart enough to figure that out when displaying it to you, since if we changed which traditional variant it picked for that word there would be a difference.

Sorry, I saw it in the word popup for 只有. If I understand the problem correctly, although 只 has multiple traditional forms, 只有 has only one traditional form, so I'd guess it's actually appearing twice in my practice list: once for simplified, once for traditional. Bizarre...

It's not appearing twice in your practice list; Skritter figures that out and only separately tracks the parts that are different between styles. The word popup has not been told to figure that out yet, though. Will see what we can do.

Maksym dug into this one and wasn't able to reproduce--the word popup for 只有 didn't have an alternate style link or anything in it. Has it been fixed, or do we misunderstand the issue?

@nick yup, it's fixed now. Thanks!

@nick I spoke too soon. The word popup for 列表 is now showing this behavior. 列表 shows up in the practice page with the orange background and "simp" so it's supposedly simplified; however, the word popup lists "--" as its traditional variant, and if you click on it you get 列表 again, with the exact same Next/Last/Spent/Success numbers.

We've got this bug on the list and have figured more about it now, but it's a bit of a trick. We'll take care of it eventually, though. For now, hope it's not a big bother.

I was studying just now and 布 came up with the red background, i.e. traditional; however it looks just like the simplified one and it shows up in the popup as

布 [布]
bù
cloth; announce; to spread

When I click on the [布] link, I get

布 [布/佈]
bù
cloth; announce; to spread

so they seem to be identical except for the contents of the [].

Is this the same bug? Why wouldn't it show up in the practice page as "both" rather than traditional?

James

A related bug. It's not smart enough to see that 布 doesn't differ even though 佈 does (only meaning "to spread").

I think the real bug is that I decided to study both styles. How long did it take pts to become a Jedi master, anyway?

James