Or are there really that many that I'm asking a dumb question?
I've started learning traditional characters first and once I gather the knowledge of around 2000-3000 characters I was thinking of learning the simplified versions of the words I know, and in order to make an Anki list I was wondering if there's one comprehensive list with all the different words/characters.
謝謝!
There's one here with 2580 characters.
For your purpose, instead of learning from a huge list of word pairs, you can use OpenCC. It allows you to convert between simplified and traditional Chinese. One big advantage of learning with this tool is that you can also learn different word-choices among the Chinese-speaking communities, e.g. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mainland China.
Also though there are a couple hundred exceptions you might need where entire arrangements of radicals are changed, for the most part you just need to learn the minority of radicals that change between the two. Most of the characters you will come across are the same - 9; those that aren't, most change a radical in a standard way. I learn the two concurrently, 85 adds much less than learning the characters themselves.
