definition	traditional	simplified	Cantonese	Mandarin
traditional characters	complex characters			faan4 tai2 zi6	(fan2 ti3 zi4)
simplified characters	simple characters			gaan2 tai2 zi6	(jian3 ti3 zi4)

The Chinese Communist government believed that by simplifying the written language, literacy rates would increase, which would lead to a more educated public and help improve the social-economic conditions of the people and of the country. Starting in the 1950's the CCP starting "simplifying" the Chinese characters that they deemed overly complicated.

While the simplified characters are easier to write, the main problems with them are:

1) Only mainland China adopted the simplified characters, Hong Kong and Taiwan still use the traditional characters. Since the people in Hong Kong and Taiwan are taught the traditional characters, they can't fully comprehend the printed materials and websites that come from mainland China because they don't recognize many of the simplified characters, and vice versa.

2) Two different encoding system were developed to display Chinese characters on computers. Computer documents or websites with traditional characters use "Big 5" encoding, and simplified documents and websites use "GB" encoding.

3) Simplified characters are just plain ugly, yeah, that's right...I said ugly.