Should I Learn Traditional or Simplified Chinese? It's not the question you think.

You haven't learned a single character yet, and you're already stuck.

You opened three Reddit threads. One person said 繁體 is the "real" Chinese — the one with soul, the one Confucius would recognize. The next person called that romantic nonsense and told you to learn 简体 because "a billion people use it." A third told you it doesn't matter, just pick one. They are all giving you bad advice. Not because they're wrong about the facts. Because the question they're answering isn't the question you actually need to ask.

Here's what nobody says out loud: the binary itself is a trap. "Which is better" presumes there's a universal answer waiting at the end of enough research. There isn't. The right script depends on facts about your life — facts no Redditor knows. So before you spend the next year of your life building muscle memory, you need a framework, not a flame war.