which form of chinese characters is most widely used in mainland China?

Question

I am attemptiing to learn Mandarian chinese ( I know its not oftern called that now but couldnt remember what it is called now sorry) but have got confused over what type of characters to learn.. I downloaded electronic flashcards and they have 4 setsTraditional (common),Tradtional (full), Simplified (common) and Simplified (full).Which should i learn?
Which is the most used in China in schools and on street signs menus and on tv shows etc. I dont want to do the simple ones if that is not in reality what is most frequently used. Someone suggest i leave the symbols and stuck to pinyin I do not want to do this and besides im dyslexic i find the pinyin harder lol!!

Answer 1

There are only two types of characters in use today, simplified and traditional. In Taiwan, Hong Kong and parts of GuangDong Province that are near Hong Kong, the newspapers, street signs, business signs, school textbooks, karaoke subtitles, movie subtitles and TV subtitles are traditional characters. In mainland, all of this is simplified characters. The trend, a very slow moving trend, is toward simplified characters as the national standard.

Spoken language is totally isolated from character writing. There is no phonetic aspect to any Chinese character system. Even in Hong Kong, most people read simplified characters fine but it doesn't affect their pronunciation of those characters. They pronounce them in GuangDong hua (Cantonese). Putong hua (means 'common language') is the Chinese government's choice for the national language. Getting the 45 percent of Chinese who do not understand Putong hua to change to it will take decades.

Chinese do not call their various ways of speaking "languages" as they consider any and all pronunciations of any Chinese character to be one language. Linguists find anywhere from 20 to 300 languages in China. If the definition of language is "tongue spoken and well-understood by one group but not understood by another group" then surely China has at least 300 languages.

If you want to learn to read and speak the most common language of the mainland, that would be Putong hua (Mandarin) and simplified characters.

Answer 2

Of course you can survive, because the simplified Chinese characters is now China's main text. As many have already been abandoned traditional Chinese characters, and only a few people know.

Answer 3

I guess you download wrong flash card. Characters cannot be divided into full and common.
About Chinese characters, you can refer to
http://www.hellomandarin.net
and
http://www.learnmandarinonline.org
Of course, you need to learn Simplified characters because only 3% Chinese people use Tradtional ones.
Pinyin is only a kind of phonetic symbol of Chinese words. If I do not write English words, but phonetic symbol of English only, example: not 'How are you', but '[hau] [a:] [ju:]'. Can you understand?
:)

Answer 4

Traditional one is used mainly in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Simplified one is used in mainland China.
Sorry, I don't know the difference between 'common' and 'full'.