ceigered:
And for users of Facebook, there's a group with the name "Chinese Writing- Traditional/Simplified, they're just fonts!" which I think sums up the whole 'traditional' vs 'simplified' arguement.

That's something new to me. I've never thought about that!

Besides minor exceptions. (As 黄鸡蛋 pointed out)
The traditionals and simplified sinograms are mostly in a one-to-one inflection. Someday people might cooperate to create a word code that contains ALL the different sinograms and let the font decide whether it should be Traditional, Simplified or even Japanese kanji!

For example, the sinograms 松/鬆 can, in font, shares the simplified character 松, while in code they are still apart. The same way works for 櫻/樱/桜.

That's going to solve a whole of compatibility problem as right now Zh-tw and Zh-cn OS system use different language code and thus do not communicate well.

ceigered:

jchthys:Here's a good online dictionary with recordings of native speakers: http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Chinese/search.html

Uuu, bonega ligilo, jchthys!

I have to say that there is quite a good share of resources out for Chinese at the moment, soon it might be relatively easy to learn Chinese even if it's still very different to indo-european languages.

Here’s another good resource I came across today: nciku

jchthys:nciku

Ah good ol' nciku. Only problem I've found with that site in the last year or two that I've been using it (forgot when I found it) was that it doesn't work when my internet goes over the usage limit and the speeds get slowed down.

Actually that reminds me of a question I forgot to ask ages ago - does anyone have anything to say about the synthesised reading of the characters on Nciku? it seems a bit odd to me at times.