Both of them derived from the Ancient Chinese. But traditional Chinese reserved more ancient Chinese characters, grammars, and other ligual elements than Sim Chinese. After China PR was established, the government and some scholars applied a law of sim Chinese, it is them who created sim Chinese. While people in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, and Singapore are using traditional Chinese. People use sim Chinese could read trad Chinese articles more or less (expect some certain People's Names, some places' names and other nouns.) and vice versa. But they are unable to pronounce and speak using the other one. Generally speaking, it's too difficult for a foreigner to identify all the differences between sim Chinese and trad Chinese. Even the natives are hard to tell. I just give you a common sense about it. Hope it helps.

Good question. Glancing carefully at their appearances, you will soon find tra Chinese has much more strokes then sim Chinese. But in some cases both of the two share the same characters. There are several ways of modification in that law Frank has mentioned: (this is only a result of my observation and classification) *on the left:tra Chinese, on the right:sim Chinese For 难检字 (characters could be hardly split into parts): 1.simplify or modify the character, examples 飛（飞），爾（而） 2. Remain the same, examples 生（生），由（由） For 可检字 (characters could be split into parts): 1.simplify or modify only one part of the character, examples 言—〉讠 :說（说），話（话） 車—〉车 軟（软），轍（辙） 2.simpify o modify both parts of the character, examples 轉（转），體（体） 3.reserve one part the character, examples 凖（准），條（条） 3.replace it with another one ,examples: 於（于），頭（头） 4.Remain the same 位（位），起（起）

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