Hi! I'm a boy who started studying Chinese by himself without attending any kind of school or teacher; I bought the book the University of Rome uses and I'm learning from it only the simplified characters. Recently I added traditional characters on Skritter... but when I came into the difference between 学习 and the traditional one that I don't know how to write on my computer.
So, I thought, should I learn traditional too? I would do it just for fun...

I would guess that most people learn only simplified.

Some people who are in or want to communicate with those from Taiwan (and maybe to some extent Hong Kong, Macau, and Guangzhou) learn only Traditional.

People who want to study the Chinese language more thoroughly learn both.

An anecdotal data point: Most mainland Chinese who I have asked (graduate students in their 20s) can barely read traditional characters (except of course for the common subset).

I used to study both on Skritter, but after a while it got a bit too much. Especially when the differences are marginal, it seems pretty pointless to study them both when you could invest the time in studying even more characters. So I'm back to Traditional only.

I can only speak from the perspective of someone who mainly studies traditional characters: When you study to read both sets a little, you'll quickly notice many basic rules of simplification you can apply to many characters; then you'll be able to read simplified Chinese alright.

There is one thing I think is for sure: If you really want to study both sets, it's easier to focus on Traditional and learn Simplified in the process; I heard the other way around is much harder. Especially if you have studied Japanese before (saw your profile!) since Kanji are much closer to traditional Chinese.

I follow Schnabelhund here, the big advantage of learning traditional first is that you (virtually) don't need to learn how to read/type simplified, it comes naturally.

@Aland: There is a difference between not knowing how to write/read a traditional character alone and read a text (i.e understanding) as it involves a lot of "guessing" and "deja vu" from games/tv/ktv.

In my case I only use traditional to communicate with mainlanders (I don't have simplified Chinese on my work PC) and I never had issue about characters, manly about certain very specific terms/wording (電腦 vs 計算機...etc).

and to finish (but this is only based on my experience) but I think that traditional characters are easier to remember than their simplified counterpart.

from my humble point of view i would say its a waste of time to learn traditional characters.

why do you think they invented the easy characters in the 60s?
i guess that "lao bai xing" = the average joe would have to spend less time learning/ remembering them.

i would say: go for the simple ones ONLY!

Will really like to hear more views on this from veterans on the site. Will love to add traditional characters and Japanese script to my know how post learning simplified characters.

Tortue may be right that it's easy to go from traditional to simplified, but I don't have the experience. A friend of mine with super Chinese learnt traditional first, and he still feels much more comfortable with traditional script. Learning traditional when you want to learn simplified seems like an unnecessary entry barrier to Chinese.

I've only found one downside to learning simplified only: most KTV songs are in traditional.

Unless you are in TW/HK, I'd just stick with simplified. No end of material for it, and the majority of people use it. Can always learn traditional later to be completionist, or if the need arises.

I second Byzanti on this one; the only time I've ever missed not knowing traditional is at karaoke. Maybe some day I'll get around to it, but for now I'd still rather spend my time building my vocabulary rather than learning the same characters twice. Chinese takes long enough to learn as it is.

Thanks to the inputs here i am sure will stick to the Chinese simplified for a yeari am pretty sure maybe longer.

It depends on your goals and where your interests lie. I started learning just simplified, but now I study both because:

1) Not everything I want to read is coming from Mainland China.
2) I have completely fallen in love with the characters, and it's not really a tedious task for me. I just can't contain my curiosity and fascination for both systems.
3) I've started to learn Japanese, and I'm finding knowing the traditional characters helps tremendously with that.

I'm studying both because it's interesting and fun.

If learning both get to be too much and stops being fun, then I suppose I'll just switch to only simplified.

I will say that using Skritter to write characters over and over definitely makes me appreciate the value of simplified...

Another vote for both. Originally, I just learnt simplified. This was also the standard approach in the UK. Later I came across traditional when doing some classical Chinese (long since forgotten).

It helps a lot to learn traditional from the point of view of orientation, knowing the traditional 214 radicals and forms. And apart from Hong Kong and Taiwan, what about pre-simplified texts, before Second World War?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for studying both! But maybe we should be more selective which ones to study. We don't need to study, say, both 話 and 话 or both 飯 and 饭 with Skritter once we learn both variants of the radicals. But I'd never have guessed 認識 corresponds to 认识, so it makes sense to add them both. Only if I weren't too lazy! :(

Do you guys who study both have a list of characters of which the two variants look nothing alike?

Hi! Thank you! I didn't aspecto so many answers!
I think that I'll persue studying both as "snowcreature99" does and suggests! I'm still attending high school and here in Italy the only foreign language taught is English! So I'm studying it just for my fun and I think that untill I find difficulty in studying them both I'll keep on with it.
In this way, if I'll actually need Chinese, I'll know both!

To Schnabelhund: up to now, I set Skritter to give me both simplified and traditional characters of each character I put in simplified. So I'm studying every character in both ways.

To back up Levi, even if you live in Mainland China, reading traditional is useful - a lot of the best (and uncensored) printed reading material in Chinese is printed in Traditional characters - stuff you might pick up on a trip to Hong Kong or Taiwan. Also, overseas Chinese communities tend to use traditional characters. But as @junglegirl rightly points out, it is a lot of work - I waited until a year into my Chinese studies to start on traditional characters and that worked for me - I lived in China and needed basic Chinese as quickly as possible.

Seconding Schnabelhund. As a simplified student, I'd love a study list that only contains characters with complex simp-trad variants. I don't need to relearn 语/語, 们/們, 遗/遺, etc., but I want to be at least capable with traditional writing. (I'd make a list myself, but having only just hit 1,000 characters, it'd take me years.)

This short vocab list is not quite what Schnabelhund and I are after, but it's probably a helpful start: http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=37902455

@adamd and @Schnabelhund, one fairly flexible way to do what you want is to switch to studying simplified and traditional in skritter, and make sure you're adding from still adding from all your old lists. Skritter will "catch you up" on all of the traditional variants of the simplified characters you've already learned - if there are any you don't want to study, just ban them when they come up.

But honestly, I don't think it's worth it - when you're studying both systems, you'll only spend a tiny fraction of your added effort learning the easy ones like 門, and these tend to be beautiful and great for impressing people - it's characters such as 壽 and 棄 where you'll spend your real time.

Kudos to you, adamd， being able to write both sets is a high goal! I'd be happy already if I could merely recognize Simplified as easily as I can Traditional. That's why I used to have Pinyin (Simplified) and Definition (Simplified) on my study list together with Writing/Tones/Pinyin/Def (Traditional).

Unfortunately, as it turned out, Skritter can't tell the difference between my progress in Simplified and that in Traditional when it comes to Pinyin and Definition. I'd even nuke my progress if it'd keep track of the progresses separately.

Now, my setting is "Traditional and previously added Simplified" without adding any Simplified items. This way, Skritter at least tells me if an item is traditional or universal.

@Chris: Yeah, I used to do something similar (only that I didn't ban the obvious items - I pushed them away as "too easy"), but still got overwhelming after weeks of studying, I have to say. I guess I'll resume studying Simplified when I have more time on my hand - I'm gonna graduate really soon.

@Chris Clark: Thansk for the tip. Elimination by banning is a really good idea, but it could affect my simplified studies. My current thought is to just note the more complex trad-simp variants as I see them, and dump them into a custom list every few weeks. I could also set aside Pleco for traditional flashcards only, keeping the two writing systems completely isolated.

@Schnabelhund: Thanks! It's a long way off, but I definitely intend to be at least capable of reading enough traditional to function in TW, international Chinatowns, etc.

[quote]
An anecdotal data point: Most mainland Chinese who I have asked (graduate students in their 20s) can barely read traditional characters (except of course for the common subset).
[/quote]

That's interesting, as I've found the opposite. I've seen my girlfriend (who is from PRC) read stuff with traditional characters before so I've asked her about it a few times. She was surprised that I didn't expect her to be able to read them and told me that pretty much everyone she knows can read traditional, although they may not be able to write them. Apparently, they do not learn traditional characters at school but everyone knows them just from reading traditional characters around and figuring out what the characters are from context (she doesn't recall having to look up the traditional forms in a dictionary). In fact, she barely seems to perceive the two scripts as distinct because when asked, she has to think about whether the script is written in traditional Chinese or simplified lol.

Perhaps this is not the case everywhere in China though, and perhaps it depends on people's levels of education? I've also heard that many people in Taiwan are (understandably) not so good at reading PRC simplified characters (they might sometimes use Japanese simplified forms in writing).

As for the original question, it really depends on where you want to go. If you want to use your Chinese in the mainland or Singapore, learn simplified. If you want to use it in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, etc then you should learn traditional.

I've only been to the mainland so I can only comment on that. Where I was in Yantai, Shandong, About 90% of text that you will read on shops/signs etc just by walking around is written in simplified Chinese. The rest is written in traditional. Traditional Chinese is not banned any longer in China as some would have you believe, and its actually quite popular when used in company slogans and the like. I guess its considered cool or educated or something. Simplified Chinese is used for any official. That said, by comparison, I saw very little traditional Chinese when I was in Beijing. I would therefore say that learning traditional is not a waste of time, but unless you are interested, I'm sure that the time could be better spent elsewhere.

Pretty much everyone I've met from China can read traditional just as well as simplified. I've found after reading some classical Chinese and some modern day traditional, picking up reading of traditional is pretty fast after you know simplified. Lots of things are just really intuitive haha.

Obviously writing is still hard :(

Sorry to clarify- by 'read' I meant feel comfortable reading books in traditional. In my experience they can decode the characters, but reading a novel etc. is painfully slow- the equivalent for us of reading a book written in Olde English or an annoying blackletter font. It is possible but frustrating.

@ Alan

Perhaps I've read too much traditional recently, but I feel like I'm only very slightly slower at reading traditional as compared to simplified. That is to say, I read reasonably until I reach a word I just don't know and then decide to look it up or just keep going heh. One can usually figure out if it's a common word by context.

Most people from the mainland I've talked to seem to have no trouble switching and reading either, at least for stuff on the level of like newspapers or just single characters.

Maybe we are comparing different things- my experience is mostly with native speaking graduate students who have read almost all simplified for their entire lives, and find that their speed reading and skimming ability is severely reduced when reading traditional. I could very definitely be wrong though, I not a first hand source.

Ah, skimming might be reduced. I've not asked people about that. I've only asked them to read it outloud and they seemed to not really stumble on traditional stuff. I should see how people feel about skimming. Thanks for bringing up this interesting thing.

People I know in China can generally read the traditional characters, but find it very hard going - they wouldn't be able to face reading a book in them for example.

I'm just learning simplified, but would like to learn traditional if I got an opportunity to study Chinese full time.

As some more anecdotal evidence, my wife is from the mainland, but she doesn't seem to have too much trouble reading traditional newspapers and websites that use modern horizontal left-to-right typesetting. Novels and other full length books from Taiwan, though, still seem to use mostly vertical, right-to-left typesetting, and that seems to slow her down dramatically. In my own VERY limited experience since I've tried to start actively learning the traditional characters and glanced through some of her books from Taiwan, reading north-to-south is really a pain in the ass, and I think it would take a while to get used to, even if it were in simplified characters. I would expect that to be a major factor in a native speaker's ability to skim a text, totally independent of whether it is simplified or traditional.