Hi julien,
In total, Chinese has around 80,000- 100,000 Characters, among them, the most useful Characters are around 12,000 – 15,000.
Traditional characters look much more complicated than the simplified ones, however, I think traditional ones look more beautiful and elegant even though it is not easy to write and remember. At the moment, the mainland China is using simplified characters.
Because characters was becoming more complicated, people informally used shorthand forms to write certain characters. In 1958, mainland China’s government sanctioned some of the existing shorthands and at the same time simplified other characters that did not have a shorthand yet. This marked the birth of simplified Chinese script. “Only” some 500 characters (out of thousands) were simplified; the rest of the characters are the same in traditional and simplified Chinese script.
Hope this helps you to better understand the difference
Benny
Learn Chinese, Learn Mandarin from AskBenny
