For some time now, I've been meaning to make the transition to learning traditional characters. To this end, I created a list of traditional variants of the 5,000 most commonly used characters.

The list has 1,890 characters. You can find it here: http://www.skritter.cn/vocab/list?list=agtzfndyaXRlLXdheXIWCxINVm9jYWJMaXN0SW5mbxi1_rVZDA

Note: If you have been only studying Simplified, but want to preview this list, you must first change your study settings to view the traditional characters. In Account settings, Study settings, you must set "Character Style" to Traditional. If you want to continue only studying simplified, make sure after you preview this list you return to your study settings and set it back to "Simplified."

This is exactly the kind of list that I've been wishing was on here so first let me say thanks, I just have a couple of comments though.

1. Taking just a quick glance at page 801-1000 I see that you have not only included traditional forms but also all (!?) variants (not the same thing as I'm sure you know), which is kinda cool but is that really what you wanted? I'm just a beginner at learning traditional forms but I imagine that including variants is an unnecessary addition and makes for much more work and means you end up learning forms that are super rare. For example 弔 and 勲 (which isn't even in my (big) dictionary), and there is even one which isn't able to be shown (at least on my screen), I just get:

㼝 wǎn: (variant of 碗) bowl; cup
椀 wàn: bowl; cup (Japanese variant)

maybe some editing is in order (or at least think about weather including all variants is really useful).

2. 5000?! Seems a lot. I think if you had made the top 1, 2 or 3000 or divided the list up in to two groups it would have been better, still beggars can't be choosers :-).

Antimacassar:

1) I actually don't know much about traditional characters or different variants. For example, 么 seems to have two slightly different variants (麽 & 麼). From what you wrote, I'm guessing some variants are commonly used in HK & Taiwan, but others aren't?

According to the sources that I used to put together the list:

姦 is a variant of 奸
弔 is a variant of 吊
勲 is a variant of 勋

Also, there are 3 variants for 碗: 㼝, 椀, 盌

My problem is that I don't have any context for traditional characters - I don't know which of these are in use. I am going to have to work my way slowly through this list, slowly reading traditional texts, before I know enough to be able to edit the list. I may find that one variant is archaic and never used; in which case, I'll eventually delete it. But I expect that to be a years long process, as learning traditional is a side project for me. But I'm sharing what I've done so far, so anyone else can use this as a starting point.

2) As for using the 5,000 most common characters as a starting point for traditional variants... you have to start somewhere ;) I'm not expecting to ever finish studying them. It was just a nice list to have.

I think the best thing that could happen from putting together this list is that some people who are much better at traditional characters than I am would remix this list, edit it, and then publish it. I went into the list info and added info on the sources I used to put together the list, in case anyone wants to make changes or see how I did it.

I just used those 3 as a random example. IMO I just think it would have been better to have left out variants, especially rare ones.

Actually I ran into this problem recently, since I bought a book that uses traditional characters and I kept seeing a character come up all the time 裏, which I was surprised to find out meant 里 which I had thought (since I learned it here?!) in traditional was 裡. Maybe some sources differ, but according to my dictionary the accepted traditional form of 里 is 裏 and 裡 is a variant.

Again, sources may differ, but if the character is the accepted traditional form then there should be some way for students on skritter to be aware of this (maybe yellow colour for variants?), or at least it seems obvious to me that for students learning traditional characters it would be useful to know if the character they are learning is considered to be (or has) a variant or not.

Maybe someone else here could give some more info, but the way I see it with variants is that you are learning something similar to Second round of simplified Chinese characters in 1977 (like 仃 for 停), i.e. something kinda cool to know but not very useful. Like I already said though, maybe there are some variants that are more accepted than others so it might be hard to asses weather or not the character is the accepted standard or not (similar to problems with which stroke order is the correct one maybe?).

Yeah I completely agree with you. When I made the list though, I had one big problem: I don't know which of the many variants is considered the "accepted" traditional form. Because I have never studied them before.

I think this is when the Skritter community steps in, and identifies which characters are too archaic and should be taken off. I don't want to waste my time either studying something that I will never encounter.

I think the list is a good starting point for people; you can use the "remix" function, and edit it if you know which characters are too archaic. Then if you publish it, that would be a much better list.

I have given this some thought. We could easily do an scanning of sources with traditional characters to get the usage. However, that should be the same as for simplified since the usage is not much different. There are much more differences regionally and even more between e.g. mainland China and Taiwan. I think that we also could use the normal simplified to traditional conversion and skip the archaic versions. Many of those are not at all in use. If you are interested I can create a frequency list with only traditional characters based on the corpus I got from movies and or newspapers.If i run that against UNIHAN I can strip out all characters that are simplified and get the most commonly used traditional form. In addition we could include variants as an separate list. Many of those variations are not in use in modern language but can be found in classical text. That is important once you are very experienced and study classic scripts but for average students it should be enough to cover daily usage. Just my thoughts.

@Mandarinboy

sounds great!

Something slightly off topic I've come across， though perhaps of interest, is that as I've been looking through atdlouis's list I've realised that going from 简体 to 繁体 isn't as easy as I'd first imagined. I thought if I just re-added the top 3000 characters that I learnt in simplified with the traditional setting on that would be enough. Actually it is for simple conversions (e.g. 马 馬), the problem is for 繁体 characters that were joined together in 简体 to make one (e.g. 頭髮的髮 and 發现的發 are both 发 in 简体, the problem being that 髮 wasn't included in the above mentioned list).

This also highlights another problem I've found which is often Skritter seems to be confused about what exactly is the right character to use or weather it is specifically a 繁体 or a 简体 or both.

For example 只 in 简体 has 2 tones (1,3) and is 隻 (1) and 衹 (3) (at least according to my sources) in 繁体 but Skritter seems to think that 衹 should be 祇 (which is actually used in 简体 2 so how can it be classed under 繁体 even if it is the accepted version?).

Another example is 团 which is both 團 and 糰 in 繁体, but Skritter doesn't recognise 糰 specifically as a 繁体子。

I've also noticed similar problems with some other characters (to give some examples蒙,累,罎,縴).

And it would be much better if Skritter showed if a character was a variant or not. Should I learn 鈎 or 鉤? According to my dictionary I should learn the former but on this topic Skritter is silent (similarly with 顔,顏).

The moral of the story is I guess, don't just rely on Skritter when learning 繁体 if you already know 简体 and also it would be much better if Skritter highlighted variants.