Revisiting the question ‘Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese?’
By: Ryan Phung
Tags: Chinese Language, Simplified Chinese, Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Heisig

Having gone through the journey of studying 1,500 Chinese characters, I feel it’s time to revisit this question that I asked in the beginning, with the benefit of hindsight.

I did choose to study Simplified characters, but if you ask me the same question right now, my answer would be Traditional characters, for the following reasons:

1 — It takes about the same effort to study either set, if you use the Heisig method. He wrote two books: Remembering the Traditional Hanzi (RTH) and Remembering the Simplified Hanzi (RSH). Regardless of which book you choose, you will still need to make up around 3,000 mnemonics, that’s it.

2 — It is easier to learn a Simplified character knowing the Traditional character than the other way round. Most of the time, you need to remove some strokes, or replace a complex component with a simpler component.

For example: consider the character 仅 (simplified) and 僅 (traditional), which Heisig assigned the keyword merely. In the simplified version, it is made up of the component 亻(keyword person) and 又 (again). In the traditional version, it is 亻(person) and 堇 (spinach).

I find that going from 僅 to 仅 is easier on the brain. The logic is that we’re replacing the component 堇 with 又 for the sake of simplification. To go the other way round from 堇 to 又, I usually have to try to make up a new mnemonic story to incorporate this more complex component into the character. It’s as if I have to learn a new character, with the added danger of mixing it up with a similar mnemonic in my brain.

3 — If you intend to learn Hán tự (Vietnamese characters derived from Chinese), Kanji (Japanese) and Hanja (Korean) later on, then it’s better to study Traditional characters. Since each of these character sets is based on the Traditional character set (with some of their own simplification). For me this is a really nice perk of going Traditional.

4 — If you like calligraphy then consider that people usually do calligraphy in Traditional characters.

5 — If you intend to study through reading comic in the beginning like me, then consider that there are a lot more good quality comic translations (including manga and manhwa) into Traditional characters.

6 — I feel that Heisig’s Remembering the Traditional Hanzi has a better logic to it than his Remembering the Simplified Hanzi. For example in RSH, 丬 is treated as if it’s derived from 兆, while in fact they are completely different components (when I learnt it I did feel something was off because their stroke orders differ so much). In fact 丬 is the simplified version of 爿, as correctly presented in the RTH.

7 — The only reason that I think you should start with Simplified characters is that if you are not a very creative person and needs to rely on https://kanji.koohii.com/ to look up stories created by other people, then consider that koohii seem to have more simplified characters than traditional characters (because it’s more based on kanjis).

If you’re also starting out like me and have this question in mind, hope my insights help you make a more informed decision.

Happy learning :)