I don't mind seeing Chinese people promote the use of traditional characters over simplified, even though there are plenty of reasons to use the latter. (Almost) every human belonging to a country has a certain sort of nostalgia towards their country's history and customs.
However non-Chinese pushing other learners to switch to traditional gets on my nerves everytime. And it's usually those non-Chinese who have never seen a cursive script and who have never even bothered to research how the simplified components even came to be.
On every Mandarin teacher's YouTube videos there's a bunch of comments shouting "WHERE ARE THE TRADITIONAL CHARACTERS??" and if a learner DARES to write something in simplified, there must be at least 1 reply urging them to switch to traditional asap, as it's simply the "better" and "easier to learn" written form of Chinese.
Sure, if Mandarin still were monosyllabic and there weren't so many new inventions, traditional characters would obviously make more sense, but now we no longer have to rely solely on a character's components to get its meaning. Even Japanese uses some simplified Kanji. Why doesn't anyone call Shinjitai Newspeak??
TL;DR: If you're learning Mandarin in order to be a functional speaker and prefer efficiency over aesthetics, the simplified character set would be a much better choice. No one stops you from looking up the traditional variant if you have trouble understanding a simplified character. Don't let politics and misinformation make your learning harder!
If it matters at all, I'm a foreigner as well. I studied traditional characters up to HSK2 and half of HSK3. Did they look pretty? Yes. Did they make more sense? Some did. 東 definitely makes more sense than 东. But that's the exception, not the rule. After switching to simplified, my learning of Mandarin sped up a lot. Nothing crazy, but definitely noticeable.
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