Oof well that's rough.

> that you couldn't come up with anything reasonably common like the 發/髮 → 发 pair (because there isn't anything comparable going the other way) indirectly proves the point I was making.

Nah I just wasn't thinking straight.

著 -> 著（著作）、着（说着） (this is a common automated translation error from traditional to simplified, search for e.g. "说著")

覆 -> 覆（覆盖）、复（答复） (复 then aggregates other traditional characters）

帳 -> 帐（帐号）、账（账单） (technically 賬 exists but if we're excluding 祇 as a common but non-standard variant, the same holds true for 賬)

and probably some more I'm missing again.

Though the number of common one-to-many mappings in either direction is quite small (I'd guess maybe 10ish clusters), which brings me to my second point.

> although in reality it's probably moot, since people will learn either one or the other first depending on their individual circumstances.

It's moot because it is trivial to go from one to the other (for reading! It's harder for writing) regardless of direction. You give me a native speaker who has only ever seen one character set in their whole life (which is actually quite rare) and I can have them reading slowly in the other character set by the end of the day, and fluently by the end of a week. There's a set of rules for translating between radicals and then maybe in the ballpark of 100 exceptions (in either direction) on top of that and that gets you effectively full fluency.

> But in that case it also says something that the software didn't handle the conversion well (implying that perhaps whoever wrote it didn't know about it), and that people posting this stuff also didn't correct the obvious mistake (suggesting they didn't know either).

The automated translation error is usually an artifact of people being lazy and not checking the translation (see e.g. my 著 example). The fact the software doesn't get it is because differentiating the different cases is a hard NLP problem but an easy human-solvable problem so the investment isn't usually made. But probably part of it too is that this is starting to get into writing in a different character set, which is harder than just reading it.

But to get back up out of the weeds, I was mainly reacting to support mrslave's assertion that

> The Chinese I have asked who learnt Simplified Chinese characters in school attest to being able to read Traditional Chinese characters with very little additional effort

which is true and holds up even if you strip context as you mention.

> If you really wanted to know, you'd have to show them the characters in isolation. Try for example 發. I bet it's not going to be so straightforward.

I've actually played this game with friends (all PRC speakers) once before, i.e. quizzing each other on individual traditional characters. There was only one that threw even one of us for a loop (叢) and would've been obvious given context. Everyone got everything else out of maybe 30 irregular characters (i.e. don't just follow standard simplified radicals).

I think "on the spot" was supposed to mean "without having seen the character before but seeing its context," I don't think mrslave meant literally ab initio but I dunno at that point I'm putting words in mrslave's mouth.

While I agree with your three points in the second half of your reply, I don't think that was the initial thrust of your parent comment.

I interpreted your initial comment to mean that switching from simplified characters to traditional characters is both non-trivial and harder than going from traditional to simplified. Moreover there was the added implication that PRC speakers don't generally know individual traditional characters, but are only able to guess at them when given additional contextual clues. Perhaps I'm completely distorting your claim, but it is regardless a common claim I see on English language forums, so I don't think I'm pedantically attacking a strawman.

I disagree with those points.

It is trivial (relative to most other things language-learning-related) to go from simplified characters to traditional characters (and indeed to go the opposite direction) and it is not appreciably more difficult in either direction. Moreover I think you're drastically underestimating the proficiency of the average literate PRC speaker in understanding traditional characters. Keep in mind there's still quite a lot of exposure to traditional characters despite its absence in the educational system. Signs, foreign film subtitles, decorations, trademarks, etc. traditional characters pop up all over. There's also a ton of cultural imports from Taiwan that preserve their traditional characters. Because it's so trivial, this passive osmosis is enough to attain essentially full fluency in reading traditional characters.

I have such a strong reaction to this not because of insider nit-picking, because I've seen so many examples of Chinese language learners hemming and hawing over whether they should go for traditional characters or simplified characters when there's effectively no difference. Fluency in one makes fluency in the other trivial, at least if you don't care about being able to handwrite both. Choose whichever has the better teachers/resources/etc. or just flip a coin. There's no advantage to one over the other. Barring your environment, the only time I could find even a shred of advantage to choose traditional characters over simplified characters is if you're exclusively studying Classical Chinese and not any modern variety. Even then the advantage is far far less than a lot of people proclaim.