If my son learns simplified Chinese in an immersion school, will it be hard to learn Traditional Chinese?

Question

How hard will it be for him to learn how to read and write traditional latter in his life?

Answer 1

I started learning traditional characters while I was in Taiwan. However, once I went to China, and really worked hard at learning characters, I was only learning simplified. Right now I know enough traditional to get my way around, but could not read much in it. But with a little bit of work, I would be able to. People in China CAN read traditional (though most don't like to), but they all will write simplified only. It is important to be able to understand the basics of the traditional characters, and to even be read short works in it, but having studied simplified first, it will just take a little extra effort to learn the traditional ones (just for reading) Don't need to know how to write them unless he wants to be in Taiwan or Hong Kong)

Answer 2

It won't be any harder than it was for him to learn the simplified characters, but it will take more effort to learn two writing systems.

First of all, we should identify that we are actually only talking about writing systems, not a different language. The language he is learning in school is the same, it's just that there are two possible writing systems for that language. It might be hard for you to conceive of this, because English doesn't really have that situation. All of the mental knowledge he has about the meanings of words and the sounds of words is still the same. The only difference will be that he will know two symbols to represent each word.

In the case of Chinese, learning the writing system is basically memorizing a set of pictures. I'm sure that the school spends a lot of time working with the children on helping them to memorize which pictures stand for which words. Since the Traditional Chinese characters are different pictures, it would mean that he would have to do more memorization to learn these new characters. However, I suspect that the second writing system would not take exactly the same amount of effort as the first, because literacy skills are apparently transferrable. For example, if a child learns to read one language, we often find that it's easier for him/her to read a new language when he/she learns that one. Chinese would be something like that, I think: after learning one writing system, he would be able to transfer some of his literacy skills to the new writing system. But he would still have to learn it!

Answer 3

It depends on how much Traditional Chinese he's exposed to. Say, for example, he learns Simplified Chinese at school but reads (or tries to read) books in Traditional Chinese, he can actually pick up Traditional Chinese quite easily. I know quite a lot of people who are in this situation. Traditional Chinese becomes quite easy to recognise and read when you come in contact with it often but writing it could be hard because the characters are so much more complex.

Answer 4

I'm learning chinese right now in high school (as an elective) and many of the traditional characters I've seen are fairly strait forward to understand, but he might have to study them for a bit before he can regognise both types easily. ^_^