There are currently two forms of Chinese writing: simplified (used in mainland China and Singapore), and traditional (used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau).

After coming to power in 1949, the Chinese communist government began a writing reform that involved simplifying the characters to make them easier to learn, and creating a phonetic alphabet based on Latin letters: pinyin.

Of the more than 50,000 existing characters, 2,236 were simplified. It is therefore important to note that the existence of a "traditional counterpart" only concerns some of the characters.

50,000 characters is a frightening number. Keep in mind that a Chinese person masters on average between 3,000 and 4,000 characters. The history of Chinese writing is very long — more than 3,000 years. Its literary wealth is impressive. Many characters are no longer used. With the 900 most common Chinese characters, you can read 90% of the characters in a newspaper. This figure rises to 97.97% for 2,500 characters and to 99.48% for 3,500 characters.

The courses on this site are based on simplified writing. Traditional writing is offered as an option for those who want to learn both forms. The courses have been designed to make this learning as efficient as possible. The teaching principle is to present traditional writing as a logical extension of the course, integrated into the progression so as to avoid having to relearn everything. The courses and exercises are built to give you the ability to switch from one script to the other easily.

To make learning traditional characters more efficient, keep in mind that simplification followed a number of rules. For a learner of Chinese, three of them are worth knowing:

1 - The simplification affects one character component and applies to all characters that contain that component. For example, we have seen the character 吗 which is made up of 口 the mouth and of 马 the horse. The "horse" component 马 is a simplification of 馬. Thus, all characters with the "horse" component 馬 will have the same simplification of this component:
媽 ⟶ 妈          螞 ⟶ 蚂          碼 ⟶ 码          嗎 ⟶ 吗    etc.

Likewise for the character 见 (to see) which is the simplification of 見 and which is found as a component in certain characters:
現 ⟶ 现          視 ⟶ 视          寬 ⟶ 宽    etc.

This logic lets you learn a large number of simplified ⇆ traditional pairs and greatly speeds up progress in studying traditional Chinese writing.

2- The second simplification rule of interest to the learner is the replacement of the phonetic part of a Chinese character. Some Chinese characters, called "phono-semantic compounds", are made up of one part indicating the meaning and another giving a pronunciation clue (sometimes not obvious, given how Chinese pronunciation has evolved). For example, the character 種 zhòng "to plant" is made up, on the left, of the element 禾 "cereal", which gives the meaning, and, on the right, of 重 zhòng (heavy), which gives the pronunciation clue. This component was changed to 中 which is pronounced zhòng (to hit a target) or zhōng (middle).

This second rule is less obvious than the first, because it is less systematic. However, the logic is still a great help for the Chinese learner who wishes to study simplified and traditional writing at the same time.

3- The removal of one or more components. For example, the character 開 "to open" was simplified by truncating the component 門 "door", keeping only 开, which is easier to write. This simplification rule is easier when you first learn the traditional Chinese characters and then the simplified ones. It remains very useful for the learner, however, even if they start by learning simplified Chinese writing. The remaining component gives a clue and aids memorization.

Finally, there are other simplification rules, but they are of no help to the learner. We will not cover them, so as not to overload the course with unnecessary information.