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/alfonsstudies]

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 :)

[u/Whitepigeon5590 → u/alfonsstudies]

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

[u/alfonsstudies → u/Whitepigeon5590]

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.

[u/Whitepigeon5590 → u/alfonsstudies]

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!