So I'll be going to Taiwan to get my bachelor's this September, and currently I'm in gear learning Japanese. I've got the real real basic Chinese parts down, although my pronunciations and tones are better than average, I'm able to pinpoint differences between tones and 'zh' 'ch' 'z' 'c' 'j'.

Some obstacles that I thought might hinder me include looking at words and remembering the Japanese pronunciation of it. For example, I just read 悲劇 today, and the first thing that popped up in my mind was ひげき instead of the Chinese reading (which I don't know).

I guess to me what I need now is vocabulary. Lots and lots of them. Any resources where I can find em? I also don't really know good sites for 上网词典 too.

Besides that, any tips in rewiring language priorities?


Lastly, I'll be studying traditional, but so far I've only really ever studied simplified. As such I'm now too used to using pinyin. Are there any IMEs that can have me type in pinyin and generate traditional characters? I'm using google's IME right now, so if there are any settings or so for that I'll be really grateful.

You're better off just learning a typical traditional character IME. You're probably going to have to use other computers at some point, especially if you're going to a school.

ㄅㄆㄇㄈ (bopomofo, the hanyu pinyin/hiragana/katakana of Taiwan) are really not that hard to learn if you know a bit of Chinese and some hanzi.

E.g.
ㄌ (d) ~= 力 (lì)
ㄉ (d) ~= 刀 (dāo)
ㄅ (b) ~= 包 (bāo, upper part)
ㄆ (p) ~= ㄅ (se above, also there's 跑，炮，泡 )
ㄎ (k) ~= 虧 (kuī, 亏 in simplified)
etc.

I looked at it a few hours one day, and that was enough to learn them. It took longer to solidify the knowledge, and even longer to learn their position on the keyboard, but it's not really that hard.

A good IME is downloadable on
http://pinyin.sogou.com/
Click on the green 立即下载-button (NOT the blue下载浏览器 because this also concludes a new browser)
By pressing Ctrl+Alt+F you can switch between traditional and simplified characters.
You can type the traditional characters using Pinyin instead of Zhuyin (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ)。
By pressing Alt you can switch between English and Chinese input.
',' and '.' are used to scroll on the character bar (because there many characters having the same pronounciation).
This IME is great because there is a keyboard button you can click on and then you can decide between ㄅㄆㄇㄈ, ひらがな, カタカナ and other scripts (that's how I typed them :-) ).