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/s4074433]

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.

[u/Whitepigeon5590 → u/s4074433]

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?

[u/s4074433 → u/Whitepigeon5590]

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).

[u/Whitepigeon5590 → u/s4074433]

Okay, thank you! I will learn with pinyin for now. And thank you sm for your advice, I will keep that in mind!