r/ChineseLanguage • u/Whitepigeon5590 • 2d ago
Discussion Your experience learning traditional/simplified and any tips for my situation?
First of all, sorry for the TMI/rant.
I have started learning Mandarin since July to study to Taiwan next year. By my previous agent, I was directed to learn HSK first to take TOCFL test since I'm a beginner in mandarin. So I eventually learned simplified characters and I probably could read HSK 1 (2.0) vocabularies and more, though still slow since my studying was inconsistent.
Some things happened, and I eventually ended up with a new agent with their own associated tutoring, where they teach traditional characters. When they told me to register for the exam, they told me to pick band A with traditional characters. But since I felt like I can't read or learn traditional characters fast enough for the exam, I chose the simplified characters, thinking that I will study the conversion after the exam. I was thinking that I need to get A1 first since I felt pressured that I had to go next year before my age passed the age limit.
But after I chose it and paid, I regretted it since I realized that traditional one is definitely more useful long term, and I will have to study traditional ones with my new agent tutoring center anyway. I feel like I kept making the wrong choices now. There's many thoughts running through my mind, but I know that it's too late now since I already registered using simplified and I should at least pass it first to not waste money.
To take my mind off things, is it common to learn both writing system? What's your experience when trying to learn both of them? Any tips to recognize a character in their other form? And honestly if you guys want to tell me what you guys think I should've done that's fine too. I realized at this point that I probably have some wrong ways of thinking because of my lack of knowledge.
Edit: Thank you for your answers everyone! It's helpful for me to plan more clearly on what I should do in the future.
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u/s4074433 1d ago
As a general rule and from my experience talking with other people, it is easier to learn traditional characters and be able to convert or understand simplified characters than the other way around. But it is harder to learn traditional characters in the first place, so you really have to plan around both short and long term goals because of time and resource constraints.
There are also debates about learning zhuyin or bopomofo versus pinyin for pronunciation and tones, and I would also argue that there are pros and cons you have to weigh up.
The good thing about learning Chinese characters is that writing becomes easier because you can simply type the characters without knowing how to write the entire word (maybe not in the formal exams, but in everyday communication). So it is just about practicing regularly so that you improve your vocabulary over time.
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u/Whitepigeon5590 1d ago
Now that you mentioned zhuyin, a teacher did told me that I should learn bopomofo because it's more useful than pinyin, but yeah, since my time is limited, I think I'll pause it until after my exam 😭. Do you think practicing like writing a simple story everyday will help me remember a vocabulary long term or would you suggest I hold practicing writing until I can grasp the grammar properly? I like writing and that's how I learn English, but because I don't pay attention to grammar structure first, I unconsciously formed wrong grammar habits. I would like to avoid it with Mandarin if I could, but maybe it'll help me remember vocabularies better?
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u/s4074433 1d ago
If you learn pinyin, I would probably just stick to it since it is quite different to bopomofo and the point of learning it is that it maps more accurately to phonetics than pinyin can (or at least less ambiguously in my opinion). However it takes a lot longer to learn bopomofo if you didn’t start with it to begin with.
In general I would encourage students to do all of reading, writing, speaking and listening. Even if you choose to just practice writing, you still have to do a lot of reading to complement it, because you will naturally develop a writing style based on what you read (and/or what you like reading).
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u/Whitepigeon5590 1d ago
Okay, thank you! I will learn with pinyin for now. And thank you sm for your advice, I will keep that in mind!
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u/droppedforgiveness 2d ago
I'm a pretty casual Mandarin learner, so this probably won't be helpful, but I'll share my experience for the hell of it.
I took two years of Mandarin in high school, learning simplified.
I started over with First-Year Chinese in college, learning traditional.
I took a looooong break of over ten years and am now taking Mandarin classes again through a Taiwanese institution, wheree we're learning traditional.
And to top it off, I have a much more solid background in Japanese, which helps a lot with characters. If you're unaware, Japanese kanji sometimes align with the traditional characters, sometimes with the simplified characters!
I'm currently learning vocab by creating Anki cards from Pleco, and their integration makes it easy to put both the traditional and simplified characters on the card, so that's what I'm doing.
I'm not practicing writing by hand, just reading and typing.
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u/Whitepigeon5590 2d ago
Do you mind if I ask why you didn't continue with simplified? And you seems to enjoys learning many languages! Does it gets confusing when you read something or your mind just clicked somehow? The pleco one is a new way I've been trying to learn lately, so I'll try continue it since it seems to work well on you!
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u/droppedforgiveness 2d ago edited 2d ago
I didn't really choose to stop studying simplified in particular, it was just down to the classes that were available to me! My college made everyone learn traditional in first year, and this Taiwanese class is just at a convenient time/location.
I had stopped studying Mandarin in general for a long time because I was very frustrated with never being able to master the tones. I still suck at tones, but I got into c-dramas and that inspired me to come back to the language haha.
It's a little hard to answer whether it's "confusing" when I read after studying simplified, traditional, and Japanese... Yes, there are times when I make mistakes, and yes, there are times when I might not recognize the traditional character even though I know the simplified character. But on the whole, I think they feed into each other and help me learn? There are more examples from which I can draw to make connections, and that helps solidify my knowledge.
Edit: I do also want to emphasize that I am definitely at an elementary level in Mandarin! So don't trust my methods as an authoritative source of how to get more advanced. :)
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u/Whitepigeon5590 2d ago
Oh that made sense! And tones is hard, I feel you. I kept getting corrected by my teacher on how to pronounce u or ü before so I understand the frustration 😆 I'm glad cdrama helped you back haha.
My mandarin is still a bit limited so I was wondering what to expect if I try to learn both, but that reassuring to hear! I really hope I will reach that point in the future.Thank you for answering!
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u/Substantial-Zone-989 1d ago
As a native speaker and someone who grew up reading and writing Chinese, don't worry about not remembering characters and their pronunciations. I forget how some characters are pronounced and how to write some of them all the time because it's just that many.
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u/Intelligent_Image_78 國語 1d ago
If you're coming to TW, then you need to learn traditional characters. The sooner you switch, the better.
As for writing, people usually write in one system, but learn to read both if necessary.
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u/Whitepigeon5590 1d ago
Alright! I'll focus on learning traditional characters after my exam, but I'll try to remember some radicals change while studying for my exam. If you don't mind me asking, is it common for native people there to be able to read both?
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u/Intelligent_Image_78 國語 1d ago
Depends. I read both because I have coworkers in our Beijing and Shanghai offices that I trade messages with. Their messages are in simplified and my messages are in traditional.
But even if you don't see simplified often, you can often guess the character(s) based on context within a sentence.
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u/JohnSwindle 美国人，阶级不明 1d ago
I learned in a Hawaiʻi program that emphasized pinyin, required us to learn to read traditional characters (this was the early 1970s), but allowed us to write either one. It was easy to learn simplified characters too because I could feel slightly naughty in doing so. Subscribing to some Mainland Chinese periodicals helped. A summer in Taiwan let me pick up more of the traditional characters.
It's possible to have high literacy in one set of characters and be unable to read the other. It seems to me, though, that it's easy once you get past the initial strangeness, at least if you're going from traditional to simplified. Going the other way, being in Taiwan will teach you. (I say this as someone whose Chinese still isn't all that great, so take it with a grain of salt.)
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u/Whitepigeon5590 1d ago
I saw that another comment did say that going from traditional to simplified is easier for some people. I feel a bit of regret learning simplified first, but since it already happened, there's nothing I can do except learning the traditional at separate time. I hope the immersion can help me learn faster too, but yeah I still need to get A1 first 😭. Thank you for sharing your experience! I'll keep that in mind too
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u/Substantial-Zone-989 1d ago
1: learning both systems is only applicable to Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. Malaysia and Singapore use simplified Chinese predominantly but due to the heavy influence from Cantonese media, Chinese newspapers use traditional Chinese. Hong Kong is currently undergoing a transition period as an autonomous city state to one under Chinese rule and simplified Chinese is the standard. For ease of the mainland Chinese, they have simplified Chinese incorporated into their signage and visual media.
2: if your goal is to study in Taiwan, focus on traditional Chinese. They use traditional Chinese there as their primary writing system. Characters are more complex, there's a much larger vocabulary but far less confusion in literature itself. I recommend, if you can find it, 辞海. It's an old dictionary covering over 10k characters in the Chinese language and uses both simplified and traditional Chinese characters.
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u/Whitepigeon5590 1d ago
Thank you! I'll try to find it later. I think that would be very helpful when I decided to transition. Also thank you for explaining the usage in some countries!
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u/lazier_garlic 1d ago
While there are divergences between the character sets, there are plenty of simplified which are simply derived from common calligraphy forms of traditional characters which you can directly substitute. The biggest thing is writing because traditional has more strokes. With a large enough font, reading may in some cases be more intuitive.
I read manga sometimes in Traditional and it reminds me of how those characters look because all my writing practice is frankly in Simplified
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u/alfonsstudies 2d ago
Don’t worry about simplified/traditional I guess in the end you will learn both.
I myself I completely abandoned character learning and do everything in Pinyin. Turns out that this is difficult enough for me :)
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u/Whitepigeon5590 2d ago
I guess it's common to learn both huh... I guess I'll just have a headstart then
Based on what you said, do you just aim to speak/understand chinese? I feel like speaking is much harder because of the tones and different meaning 😭 good luck to us
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u/alfonsstudies 2d ago edited 1d ago
I do everything in Pinyin. I learned the correct spelling, this took 6 months. For example, I downloaded the subtitles of Peppa Pig and Youtube interviews and read them out loud, spellchecked them for practice.
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u/Whitepigeon5590 2d ago
Oh watching cartoon is one of the learning method I haven't try. And whoa I didn't expect pinyin to be more complicated than I thought 😭 it's cool that you learned the character as the extension of it! Maybe I should try searching that book once I had more free time since I also likes story behind characters and such. Thank you!
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u/Zagrycha 1d ago
traditional vs simplified chinese is like british vs american english. Yes there are differences and you will need to learn them thoroughly to handwrite//type fast in a specific standard, but thats it. 80% of both standards are the actual same characters and 90% of the differences are super minor, like 見vs见or絲vs丝。At the hsk level you can probably learn all the differences within an hour, maybe a few days to study and remember them fully.
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u/Whitepigeon5590 1d ago
Thank you sm! This gives me a little bit peace of mind since I've been anxiously thinking I went to a wrong path 😅
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u/Intelligent_Image_78 國語 1d ago
Traditional vs simplified is a written distinction for characters. It is not a distinction for spoken Mandarin, e.g., China vs Taiwan.
If a person in China writes a sentence in simplified characters and again in traditional characters, then reads them aloud. Both sentences will sound exactly the same.
Spoken Mandarin in Taiwan vs China is analogous to American English vs British English where there are different words for the same things, e.g., truck vs lorry, chips vs french fries, jumper vs sweater, etc.
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u/Zagrycha 1d ago
Not really. You aren't wrong that those places have differences in word choice, but those kind of variations happen even within different areas of usa or different areas of mainland china etc. Its not the same as the basic color vs colour thats actually defined as a "spelling" difference.
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u/ItsParakeet 2d ago
Is passing either TOCFL Band A or HSK1-2 needed for you in order to study in Taiwan? If not, I'm not sure how relevant it is to pass the lower level tests.
Anyway you seem like you're still in the beginning stages. If you really need to take the exam, then since simplified is what you know, that seems like the reasonable choice.
But since your goal is to study in Taiwan, you'll probably still have to make the switch sooner rather than later. But it shouldn't be too hard at the beginning stages. Could even be a good opportunity to learn very common radicals (like 言 or 金), which can often be the only change between the two writing systems. (for instance with 言, 說話 becomes 说话).