I wonder if anyone has some insight to help my decision along (:

I am going to be in taiwan for 1-2 years. We are moving in 6 months time. I am uncomfortable with the idea of giving up the idea of being unable to read chinese/simplified websites in the short term. But I am also uncomfortable about the idea of having to live and function in a country where I know less characters that I otherwise might.

Thoughts/suggestions?

I am leaning towards switching to just traditional by convincing myself I can always learn simplified later.

I would suggest learning whatever you have most opportunity to use, i.e. traditional in your case. I started off learning traditional, then switched to simplified as I was in mainland China, and have kept studying simplified. I can now read traditional reasonably as well. If you're exposed to traditional while being able to read simplified it's easy enough to pick up the characters that are completely different, and then you can read without too much difficulty as the rest is just different radicals. I imagine it'd be the same the other way round.

My advice is to aim to be able to read both eventually, and it would be good to be able to write fairly well with at least one of them too.

I agree with ximeng. Actually, something similar happened in my case: I learned Spanish when I was four, at the age of 23 came to Brazil without speaking a word of Portuguese but learned well enough to communicate in two months, because both languages are similar, and(like simplified v/s traditional) stem from the same linguistic origin. I wouldn't worry much about losing out on either - today I am a conference interpreter from and INTO Portuguese, as well as English and Spanish. Necessity is the best coach!!!

I would recommend learning to write one and recognize the other. You can always put that off for later. It's not so hard either, there's only about 2000 characters that are different, and the vast majority of those are only minor changes, for example 粮/糧, 战/戰, 银/銀. That leaves a relatively small number of characters that are totally changed. So, don't approach it like learning another language or anything, it wouldn't take very long to do at all assuming you are familiar with the characters in one form to begin with.

I get an unwanted lesson in traditional every time I go to KTV :(

You could download your whole list off skritter then process it to separate out all the ones with traditional variants, and just study them for a bit? Then you would learn which ones are different.

ximeng is right, you should take advantage of your environment. If you're immersed in a traditional character environment, that's what you should be studying to nail down what you're seeing in daily life. And why is it so important to read simplified Chinese web sites, anyway?

That doesn't necessarily mean you should nuke your current set of simplified characters, though. Maybe switch to studying both, or "traditional and previously added simplified".

I started with simplified and switched to both when I realized a lot of the Chinese people I was running into in NYC were using traditional. It's definitely a lot of work studying both, but you start to figure out the patterns after a while.

James

jww1066, I think you missed my point (:I am already studying both, and I am questioning the effectiveness.

Regarding reading traditional and simplified websites, in the field i work in, I have already started to find it useful to discover web sites returned by chinese search engines with more info on what I am looking for than an english equivalent.

Hello,

You said : "I am leaning towards switching to just traditional by convincing myself I can always learn simplified later"

No worry, one of the greatest advantage to master the traditional script is that you already virtually know most of their simplified counterparts (and if it's not the case, it takes only few seconds to find the equivalents).

As Digilypse said, you don't have to learn a new languages, so it won't be that painful.

加油!

It is possible to learn both - that's what I've been doing on skritter ever since I started a year and a half ago. But it adds a great deal of practice time. I live in Taiwan, so I do most of my reading in traditional, but to maintain my sharpness with simplified I do my Chinese pod lessons in simplified, and get lots more exposure working for Skritter and keeping in touch with mainland friends. I've been happy with my decision to study both, as it made my transition to Taiwan much easier, among other things, but the time investment that I've made is considerable.

Can anyone recommend a resource (preferably free) that describes the main changes that were made when the script was simplified? I'm sure they didn't just take one character at a time, but must have used some rules or at least patterns. Rather than trying to figure these patterns out, I'd like to read about them.
Rachael.

Here's a previous forum thread that mentions a couple of resources:

http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=31879490

James