megan.smith on May 6, 2015 | reply

Simplified is used in Mainland China, while traditional is used in Taiwan.

I am in Taiwan, so I study the traditional, Though my school in the US used simplified because most of the staff was from mainland China.

yangboxcom on May 7, 2015 | reply

The PRC has a population of 1.3 billion while the ROC, HK and Macua have a combined population of around 35 million.

In terms of usage it's a no contest.

However learning both wouldn't hurt. Many of the characters are the same anyway.

It's not like every single character has two different forms.

yangboxcom on May 7, 2015 | reply

Sorry I meant Macau not Macua.

kevinmiller790 on May 11, 2015 | reply

Thanks for the info.

Erin Gao on June 13, 2015 | reply

As a beginner, I suggest you to study the simple characters first. And after several years of studying, if you have interest, you can learn some of the traditional characters.

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nchueng1 on June 13, 2015 | reply

I started learning traditional, but picked up simplified along the way. Either way, better to learn both. But for me, I thought it was easier to go from traditional to simplified because it is easier to discern the radicals and parts of the character.

Xiao Hu on June 27, 2015 | reply

For my money, traditional is the superior character set. Traditional has all the beauty, elegance and grace of Chinese characters. Besides that, traditional has all he meaning and etymology still intact, with simplified...not so much.

Take the classic example of the character for love, simplified is 爱 while traditional looks like this 愛. Traditional has a heart 心 in the center of it. Supporters of traditional always say, how can a person love without his or her heart?

Let's take another example. The character for happiness 慶 in the word for celebrate 慶祝. Simplified is made up of 广(vast)＋大 (big)＝庆, while the 慶 in 慶祝 is made up of (among other components) a vast 广 and a love, （which in ancient times was written with just a heart 心 and the character for "go slowly" 夊） ＋ the phonetic 鹿 ＝ happiness. So the question is, how can a person feel happiness without a heart?

These examples are all over. The thing about simplified is, it was created with an emphasis on simplicity of WRITING, so the way they attacked this to just cut out as many strokes as possible. Often removing semantic elements and leaving only the phonetic, EG： 關 guan1 (to close), which was originally made up of 門 (door) +guan 丱. However, when they simplified it, they used the phonetic 关 (also pronounced guan) from a variant character 関, for the modern, simplified character. Without the door, the concept of "close" is compromised.

There were many, many unsatisfactory compromises made when the PRC government created the simplified character set. The emphasis was on two things, 1. phonetics, 2. reduced stroke count.

This leaves the new Chinese characters, in quite a few cases, cut off from their original etymological roots.

The characters I hate the most are sell and buy 买 and 卖 as in their originan forms 買 and 賣, the lower part was a picture of a shell 貝, which was used as money in ancient China. So anything relating to value, money, profit, etc. was often written containing a 貝.

Now, having said all that, simplified is still worth learning as it's used by people from mainland China. As others here have pointed out, the numbers (1.3 billion) alone make it worth learning simplified.

For my money, start off learning one set or the other (I prefer tradtional as mainlanders can read it as well), understand the etymology behind they characters, and learn that character set well before moving on to the other. Once you've learned it, you'll find it's just a small jump from one to the other.