If you are going to learn chinese, you should learn traditional chinese, beacause simplified chinese often takes out the important parts and the real meaning of a chinese character, if you're able read traditional chinese, you're likely able to read most simplified words. Traditional chinese are more interesting and complicated to learn because they contain alot more strokes.

Hi, Andrew Wirtz. People in China rarely use traditional characters. They are mostly used in Taiwan, HongKong... And traditional character users could read simplified characters perfectly. About how important traditional characters are, it depends. If you are going to stay in China, they are not important. However, if you are intersted in them or Chinese traditional culture, you may try it. By the way, many of my contemporaries think traditional characters are much more beautiful.

traditional characters are widely used in hongkong,taiwan and macao.if you learned simplified well,you can recognise most of the traditional characters.so,you don't need to learn them on purpose.but if you are interested in traditional characters,you can use more time to learn them.

In mainland and Singapore, they use Simplified ones. The Traditional Characters are more helpful for you to understand the culture and why the characters means what it means. For example, why does the character: 國（simp：国）means country？或inside related to域（area）and the outside is an boundary. area with a boundary= country. So look through traditional Characters, it's more easier to understand. Part of Modern simplified characters comes from Japanese simplified Chinese characters (know as Kanji), like 国 I just mentioned. In Chinese Calligraphy works, Traditional ones are the ones beening use. In mainland education, students is been asked only to recognize the traditional ones.

what i can say is that ,tradition is very important