"The Chinese Language, Ever Evolving"

I came across a NY Times blog today discussing how written Chinese has changed and is changing. I am sure a good percentage of people know that mainland China's system is based on simplified characters introduced in the 1950s to substantially increase literacy, and that Taiwan still uses the traditional system. The KMT were adamant in retaining important parts of Chinese culture, which included the written language. I find the traditional characters much easier to understand, because even if I do not know the character I can guess its meaning based off of context and if I know one of the radicals. I find this to be invaluable as a student, because it allows me to connect to the culture much faster while learning Chinese. I do not have many memorized and would be useless in mainland China. Check out the article below:
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/chinese-language-ever-evolving/