"Instead of being caught in the dilemma (of whether to use traditional or simplified Chinese) , we should try to make the best use of the teaching systems on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, " Jen said at the annual convention of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) in San Diego.

He noted that China has put a great effort into setting up Confucius Institutes in foreign countries to promote simplified Chinese language learning, a trend that some teachers of traditional Chinese find worrying.

He said, however, that Taiwan, which is planning to set up "Taiwan Institutes" in Los Angeles and Boston to promote traditional Chinese language learning, should not disparage China's efforts, because it is a good thing that both sides of the Taiwan Strait are trying to promote the Chinese language among non-Chinese speakers.

Taiwan has qualified teachers, good teaching materials, and teaching methods that are very well accepted by the public, while China has an abundance of funds and teachers, according to Jen.

He contended that because Chinese-language teachers are in high demand, Taiwan and China should work together to promote the Chinese language throughout the world.

"Traditional Chinese cannot be replaced by simplified Chinese, as the traditional form was used to document history and therefore has historic value," Jen said.

Instead of "abolishing" the use of traditional Chinese, China chose to use simplified Chinese, which is similar in many ways to tradition Chinese, he added.

In the current wave of so-called "China fever, " the Chinese language has become the third most popular second foreign language, after Spanish and French, in American high schools.

However, according to Deputy Chairman of National Council Associations of Chinese Language Schools Steve Chang, simplified Chinese is gradually becoming the standard in Chinese language learning, and many schools in the U.S. have switched to teaching the simplified form at the request of parents from mainland China.

While both simplified and traditional Chinese characters are part of the Chinese language, traditional Chinese characters are at the root of Chinese culture and it would be difficult for one to understand the beauty of the Chinese language if one cannot read traditional Chinese characters, which has many pictographs and phonetic-loan characters, Chang told the Central News Agency.

Chin Mao Hsio-ling, a representative of the Association of Northern California Chinese Schools, suggested that it is better to first learn traditional Chinese characters then move on to the simplified set.

She noted that many schools in California teach beginners traditional Chinese characters so that they could understand the origin of the words and then move on to simplified Chinese in the intermediate classes.

"Learning simplified Chinese characters based on their knowledge of traditional Chinese not only helps students to learn faster, but keeps them interested in the classes," Chin Mao said.

(By Chiang Chin-yeh and Rachel Chan)