The idiot's guide to 繁体字?

[moluren]

大家好! I've been studying Chinese in school for a few years, but thus far all instructional materials have used simplified characters. This semester -- surprise! -- my textbook looks like this

Comments

[moluren]

I just had to suck it up and start memorizing.

. . . yeah, that's pretty much what I was afraid of. ;)

[iggy04]

無 = 无

That's a simplified form? I had no idea. xD

[moluren]

NEITHER DID I. Until, like, two weeks ago.

The More You Know.

[dustthouart]

You need to get a list of radicals and memorize the simplified versus traditional versions of them. That will solve 95% of your problems. The other 5% is brute memorization.

[iggy04]

"Brute memmorization"?

It's not that bad. It's not like every single character has a traditional. Some of them are the same. And some of the characters still look enough like their traditional counterparts that one could passively connect the dots.

本書 本书
學校　学校
沒關係 没关系

[dustthouart]

LOL calm down. "Brute" as compared to "brute force", ie, simple, no tricks, buckle down and do it. And I did say that was only the 5%, ie the tiny minority, of the OP's problem, not even of characters as a whole.

[iggy04]

Oh, that's what you meant. I thought you meant the process was ridiculously harsh, and I was like "... no, because passive cognition plays a huge part in it."

[jiawen]

You could also get a list of simplified/traditional characters. Many dictionaries also have such lists. Also, many dictionaries give the traditional next to the simplified. That can make looking up variations pretty easy. （Also, since you're studying Classical/Literary, I strongly recommend the 古汉语常用字字典. It is generally wonderful, and its simplified version has traditional and variant characters in parentheses.)

[moluren]

Wow! I never thought of searching for a simple list -- I guess I assumed there were too many simplified characters for that to be practical. But 510 is actually a manageable number. I'll be studying that, thanks!

[sakura_no_kage]

this makes me curious about how non-chinese learn chinese! switching between traditional to simplified.

[moluren]

This makes me curious about how non-chinese learn chinese!

First, we learn to laugh at ourselves. ;)