Simplified and traditional characters
What's the difference between simplified and traditional Chinese?
Well the biggest difference is the appearance of the characters, for example: 爱, 不过, 担心, 说 these are all written in simplified Chinese, meanwhile the following are in traditional Chinese: 愛, 不過, 擔心, 說.
They all have the same meaning, only their appearance and amount of strokes changes. Another thing that changes is where they are used, simplified Chinese is mainly used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia, meanwhile traditional Chinese it's used in Taiwan, Hong Kong (Cantonese) and Macau.
Simplified Chinese was created in 1949 to improve China's literacy rate, the amount of characters that change between both systems is around 2,000, but it is still possible to learn both.
My experience with both systems
I first started to learn Traditional Chinese and I have been learning it for around 2 and half years, then six months ago I started to learn simplified, because I wanted to get my HSK certificate, and it's been quite a journey.
At first, I was struggling because traditional Chinese uses more characters and when I was learning simplified, sometimes I didn't understand why this character was there, one day I realized that simplified reuses the same characters, by this I mean that two characters from traditional, use the same simplified character, in that moment everything started to make sense.
Tips for learning both
My golden rule is to always prefer one over the other, whichever you choose that's going to be the one in which you are always making progress, learning new vocabulary, putting your subtitle in, etc. in my case I focus on traditional because it's the one I use in my classes.
Then with the other one what you are going to do is substituting, for example: if you learned a lot of new vocabulary in traditional Chinese you are going to look for its equivalent in simplified, then you are going to write it down, if you have time It's always better to look for its stroke pattern.
Another really important thing is to add your vocabulary into an Anki deck (a flashcard App), in one side you put the character in simplified Chinese and in the other use traditional and the more you review, the faster your brain will create a connection, and understand that their meaning is the same, and after sometime you will be able to read at the same level in both systems.
You also need to look for different ways to use each system, for example: I use traditional in my classes, to read poems and subtitles, meanwhile I use simplified Chinese in the HSK books, in 小红书, and to read novels.
You should also try to focus on the components of the characters, for example in the words: 說/说 話/话 謊/谎 the one thing that changes is the part of the character: 言, so from this you can know that most character that have 言 will change, and this happens with a lot of different characters.
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