简体字 to 繁体字

[Ari 桑]

I'm planning to move to Taiwan within the next year. Because I have only ever lived in Beijing, I have little experience with traditional characters outside of KTV and watching Taiwanese movies and TV shows. While I have found those sources to be a good way to learn some traditional, there is of course the huge advantage of reading while the person is speaking or singing songs I already know. I feel like I should hunker down and really start getting myself familiar with traditional.

So, for those of you who have been in the same situation, what is the best way complicate chinese?

And also, in terms of writing, would it be acceptable to just learn how to read traditional? In general, would taiwanese people be able to understand written simplified? Do taiwanese have their own system of simplification?

谢谢您们

[calibre2001]

IMO, if you can comfortably manage written Chinese, then regardless of whichever script you know, learning the other takes very little effort to learn. It is the same language after all. The key is regular exposure.

Do you want to write 繁體子 or just to have no reading barriers when encountering it? If it's the latter, I think your method is fine. Just pay closer attention and make a more conscious effort to recognise it well.

[Lu]

Taiwanese can read some simplified characters, but unless they have had a lot of exposure to them, they have trouble reading entire texts in them. So if you just plan to write some small things for yourself, you can do without learning trad, but if you are going to follow classes or correspond with Taiwanese, it's better to learn to write traditional.

There are some special simplified characters here, like 点 that tends to get a 大 at the bottom instead of fire, and 關 that gets simplified the Japanese way. But there are not regarded as real simplified characters, just as 'handwriting', and as a result you'll see these and other, more regular simplifications only in handwriting.

The best way to learn it, I think, is first become familiar with trad radicals vs simp radicals, and with other elements that often come back, like 專. That will take care of a lot of characters already. Then try reading some things (books, newspapers, whatever), and look up the characters you don't recognize. I went from trad to simp without much effort, and although I still think that is the easier order to learn them, the other way around shouldn't be too hard either.

[Ari 桑]

Well, thats why I asked that second part. I'm comfortable with simplified, and would rather stick with it, since its fast to write, but if taiwanese people don't understand it, then its rendered somewhat pointless.

Yeah, I find when you can both hear the chinese and see the traditional written, its pretty easy to read. We'll see how things go.

[Mugi]

In what situations do you forsee yourself having to write Chinese by hand?

[adrianlondon]

Yeah, when I want to write traditional characters I just switch my input method on the PC and write pinyin as always.

The traditional characters usually look "similar" enough to the simplified ones (and some radicals have always been simplified the same way, patterns you'll quickly pick up) that you can guess the correct charatcer/word from the list and be pretty accurate.

I still find it amazing that they write 个 as 個 and 么 as 麼 I guess you get used to it and stop worrying about the extra strokes. My boyfriend thinks simplified looks horrible and I agree with him, but I'm glad that's what I learnt to write! I guess deep down I'm lazy.

[Ari 桑]

In what situations do you forsee yourself having to write Chinese by hand?

It what situations do you write english by hand?

[JimmySeal]

From what I've heard from other people, it shouldn't be much trouble at all to catch on with a bit of exposure and reading practice. Writing might be a bit trickier, but again, not an incredibly hard transition.

I'm pretty sure that most Taiwanese people can recognize some simplified Chinese, but maybe not in big chunks. I had forgotten how to write the Traditional form of bang1 (help), and wrote the simplified one and people read it just fine.

[Mugi]

It what situations do you write english by hand?

In that case, I fail to see why you asked the initial question ...

Surely you weren't considering learning how to write hundreds of traditional characters just to write down your name, the odd address or telephone number (the latter of which obviously doesn't employ different characters anyway)?

[Ari 桑]

I write handwritten notes to people all the time. Or simply write things to myself. I always study by hand, because writing it puts a character in my memory far better than typing it. And anyway, I simply like writing chinese.

I kind of see your argument when it comes to traditional. In the mainland, writing is never slow because most characters are no more than a handful of strokes. Writing traditional seems pretty tedious, or if writing fast, pretty messy. But considering that our world isn't completely digitized yet, I still feel that writing chinese is just as important as writing english in day to day life.

Well, I'm glad that the general consensus is thats its a decently easy transition. Good stuff.

[madizi]

As other posters already mentioned, the transition from simplified to traditional characters isn't so complicated as it seems.

Mainland Chinese used many methods to simplify characters:

- they totally changed the character or left some parts intact: 聼 --> 听, 頭 --> 头, 賣 --> 卖

- changed only one part of character (radical): 見 --> 见, 詩 --> 诗

- replaced one phonetic with another one which sounds the same: 廳 --> 厅

Radicals are always simplified in the same way (言 --> 讠，見 --> 见，食 --> 饣，etc.)

So, with this basic rules in your mind there won't be any problem for you to quickly learn traditional characters.

[Ari 桑]

I guess its that first group thats the tricky one, the one that doesn't bare much resemblance to the original. But I'll learn. Thank you.

[Mugi]

- they totally changed the character or left some parts intact: 聼 --> 听, 頭 --> 头, 賣 --> 卖

Learning the derivations of simplifications can be interesting in itself. 头 and 卖 are examples of 草书的楷书化 (regular scriptification? of cursive forms), while I think I've read somewhere that 听 has been used as a 俗字 (non-standard substitute) for 聼 since Song times.

[gato]

See this table for a summary of the simplification process:

http://www.stlcls.org/s-words/Simplified_word.htm

简化字总表

讠[訁]N20

饣[飠]N21

纟[糹]

钅[釒]N23

呙[咼]

[Lu]

The first group is the tricky one, but also the smallest one I think. If you read some traditional Chinese, you'll soon come across characters like 買 and 這, that look completely unfamiliar yet come up all the time. Look them up once or twice and you can read them.

[skylee]

The character "聼" is puzzling. IMHO it is wrong as the 王 below the 耳 on the left is missing and there are 2 unnecessary strokes on top (but such unnecessary strokes are not uncommon in some fonts for characters such as 場). But it always comes up when I type with windows IME. I was clearly taught when I was a kid that the character should be written in the order of 耳王十四一心. This is the correct character -> 聽.