Watch The Animation Traditional vs Simplified Characters

There are two general forms of Chinese characters. Traditional characters have been used for many hundreds of years and, so, are the characters that most Chinese literature, history, and philosophy are written in. Simplified characters are a more recent development and are used in daily commerce.

Sometimes people who learn one style are afraid of the other form. This fear is unfounded because there are some simple rules that will help convert Traditionals to Simplifieds and vice versa. Learning these rules helps ease the trauma of switching between the two styles, and if you think about it in just the right way, it's almost as if you're adding thousands of new characters to your vocabulary by learning the form you don't yet know. :)

If you really want to understand the gory guts of Chinese characters, Traditionals are the form to learn. But Simplifieds are now more common, so it helps to understand something about how to convert from one style to the other. This animation should help.