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Choosing Characters to Study (Traditional vs Simplified)

jamainearrington6319
New in Town
Posts: 1
Joined: November 1st, 2010 1:30 am

Choosing Characters to Study (Traditional vs Simplified)

Postby jamainearrington6319 » November 8th, 2010 2:58 am

Ni hao,

I just recently joined ChineseClass101.com about two weeks ago. I've been navigating through the site to understand all of the features and casually listening to the podcasts to understand what is in store for studying Chinese.
I have also studied some Japanese so I know a little kanji. It seems that Chinese uses two styles of characters (traditional vs. simplified).
Does anyone have any suggestions on which characters I should choose to focus on? Like how I should decide?

If I focus on simplified characters will I be able to read traditional if I travel to places like Taiwan or Hong Kong?

jane1000288416
Been Around a Bit
Posts: 26
Joined: September 8th, 2010 1:32 am

Postby jane1000288416 » November 10th, 2010 3:18 am

Hi Jamaine,
First of all, welcome to join ChineseClass101. I hope you can stay with us to continue to improve your Chinese.
You are right that there are traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters. For mandarin Chinese speakers, we use simplified characters. It is also the offical language in China which means people all over China should be able to read the simplified characters and speak mandarin although with some local accents.
On the other hand, the traditional characters are mainly used by Taiwanese. Generally speaking, traditional characters tend to look more complicated with more strokes. Japanese kanji is more closely related to traditional Chinese characters than to simplified Chinese characters.
Then there is Cantonese which is a major dialect spoken by some Southern Chinese people and HK people. Cantonese uses traditional characters but its pronunciation system is quite different from mandarin Chinese.
As to decide which form of characters should you study, I guess it all depends on whether you are going to spend more time in mainland China or in Taiwan? Does it make sense? Sorry about the long answer.

Jane
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