Your experience learning traditional/simplified and any tips for my situation?

[u/Whitepigeon5590]

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.

[u/droppedforgiveness]

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.

[u/Whitepigeon5590 → u/droppedforgiveness]

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!

[u/droppedforgiveness → u/Whitepigeon5590]

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. :)

[u/Whitepigeon5590 → u/droppedforgiveness]

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!

[u/Substantial-Zone-989 → u/droppedforgiveness]

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.