I think it would be nice to be able to do the traditional and simplified courses in parallel. When trying to swap over, it seemed like my progress would be partially reset, though I’d prefer it if the system treated them as two separate “languages”, similar to how something like Duolingo focuses.
I thought about creating another account just so that I could run through both courses, but I am not sure if I want to pay two subscriptions yet
While I am working through the simplified course, I do often watch Twitch streams and Let’s Plays from people that live in Taiwan, meaning I get exposed to that writing quite a bit. Even if I see the simplified curriculum through to the end, I don’t know that I’d want to lose all of my progress on the content that differs between the courses at that point, if that makes sense.
If I can pick your mind for a bit, if there was such a way to simultaneously do both, how would you like it to behave?
Would you want to learn characters that have a different visual form only? Or also “re-learn” those that also have a different pronunciation across the strait as well?
Would you want to “re-learn” all words again that contain characters which have different visual forms? Or only re-learn words that have different pronunciation across the strait? E.g. 朋友 is peng2you3 in Taiwan, peng2you5 in China.
My guess is that most users who want to take advantage of the other course are probably more focused on learning the different visual form of the same characters alone, and not much else. Maybe maybe also learning the characters that look the same but are pronounced different. (e.g., 質 is zhi4 in China, usually zhi2 in Taiwan for most uses).
I think for characters where the meanings are the same, then if possible having those use the same progress would be great.
As for the tone differences between Taiwan and the mainland, I think it would be nice to have those vocab words come back with the new tones. I noticed in the simplified course that we have both peng2you5 and peng2you3, however if you answer with peng2you3 the system tells you that isn’t usually how it is said. Sort of using this as a way to highlight the differences could be useful and build on top of the knowledge people already have.
One possibility is to be able to have access to traditional cards as well as simplified. During the review, there could be an indicator on the card saying if it it should be the simplified card (where peng2you5 is correct) or the traditional version (where peng2you3) is correct. The characters that are shared don’t need to be duplicated.
If it was implemented this way I would probably skip the traditional cards where only the pronunciation differes since I care more about the visual differences.
There isn’t anyone that I watch too often as I am still learning and so I jump around to get used to the sounds of the language from different people. I’ll usually go to Twitch, then swap to the “Live Channels” option, filter to 中文, then sort by viewers and pick whoever is playing a game I like.
