Within a week of his remarks on Tiananmen, Ma voiced support for the acceptance of simplified Chinese for written text and the continued use of traditional Chinese for printed text. Ma had to clarify his remarks regarding simplified characters at a 15-minute speech before the sixth International Conference on Internet Chinese Education on 19 June 2009. Ma reiterated his policy of urging the Chinese to learn the traditional system; his previous call was for the ability of Taiwan's population to recognize simplified characters and not for simplified characters to supplant the traditional system in Taiwan. In a 2004 speech hosted by Microsoft Taiwan, he had proposed for the traditional Chinese characters (; literally: complicated characters) to be instead called the 'formal characters' () (then the translation 'traditional Chinese characters' would be more appropriate as well).