A recent article on the linguistics blog Language Log entitled On Learning Mandarin in America raises some interesting issues. The author, Victor Mair, discusses the experiences of some Chinese American parents who tried hard to raise their daughters to be fluent (as well as literate) in Mandarin, but obtained very mediocre results.
Victor Mair blames the way Chinese characters (hànzì) are taught:
…There’s far too much emphasis on HAN4ZI4 from the very beginning. I believe that students should NOT be exposed to HANZI for **at least** the first year of instruction, and preferably not for the first two years. Only then should the characters be gradually introduced. Why? The answer is simple: students need to master the basics of the language (pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, syntax, idioms, etc.) before they are required to memorize hundreds of HANZI. It is essential to internalize the patterns and structures of the language before spending endless hours vainly striving to master large numbers of HANZI.
I think his conclusion is a bit extreme. Removing the study of Chinese characters from the beginner curriculum completely strikes me as taking the easy way out of a very complex problem. The real issue is that we need a better method to teach Chinese characters to beginners.
He does have a point, though. Many learners—consciously or not—may view the Chinese language itself as nothing more than a string of characters… almost like a code, rather than a means of communication. This is going to impact fluency, and teaching methods deserve a good chunk of the blame.
I’d like to you ChinesePod learners a few questions. How many of you are trying to learn spoken Chinese without the characters? How many think that learning characters is slowing you down or causing other negative effects? How many of you come from Chinese families and are trying to reach that higher level of fluency like the daughters in the article?
The field of Mandarin pedagogy still has a long way to go, but we’ll get nowhere without reexamining our methods from time to time.
I think you need to differentiate between a writing knowledge of Hanzi and simple recognition.
I don’t fret too much over mastering every nuance of Hanzi at my early stage; my intent is to get direct tutoring at a later date from one of the many Chinese students at our University. But I don’t ignore them either. Far from it. I drill them in a variety of ways — particularly using the facilities of CPOD here. But, again, knowing that my short-term goal is simple recognition relieves me of the anxiety others (who feel compelled to master them before moving on to each lesson) very likely feel.
Setting realistic incremental goals has served me well in other language pursuits.
I think adult learners need to start han zi from the very beginning. Amercian kids may benefit from a couple of years of blissful ignorance, they can catch up later. But adults won’t have time to catch up later, will appreciate some of the subtlties inherent in the writing system, and knowing han zi will probably assist their knowledge in the long run. That’s my experience anyway, at 2 years’ experience of study.
I’ve had two courses of 10 lessons now, spread gently over 8 months or so. In the first course, there was just of nod of the head to hanzi. The titles of the courses were given in hanzi, we learned 4 characters per lesson and were shown the order of the strokes for these characters. But there was no sense that we were expected to learn them. We were simply being exposed.
The second course turned the exposure up, in the sense that all dialogs and vocabulary were given in pinyin and hanzi, but again it was not expected that we learn them. It was given as an option as part of our homework.
I have found this to work well. Those in the class who have an interest in these characters are free to persue that interest. But the focus of the course is learning to speak putonghua and comprehend it when spoken.
Our teacher here in Cork, Ireland is very well organized and I’m sure this kind of focus is not accidental but carefully thought out by her.
I am not Chinese American. I am not in my first two years of learning Chinese. With that out of the way I feel that the Chinese language is intrically tied up in the characters. A child first learns by listening and then by speaking (very poorly) and progresses from there. I assume that learning any foreign language proceeds in the same way. But once the very beginning stages of learning are out of the way the characters really help with figuring out the language. Maybe I’m biased because I am a very visual learner and it is easier for me than the audio learning, but I love the characters. I am now forcing myself to learn simplified, I am in mourning, I love the traditional characters.
I decided from the start that I first want to learn to listen (understand) and speak mandarin.
Children usually first learn to speak before they are introduced to reading and writing. The reason for this is obvious, but maybe subtle. We are born to communicate with each other, direct languages skills like speech and signing are both biological and cultural inherent to being human. This is not the case for reading and writing. They are user interfaces to complex technology which are not nearly as natural to learn as forms of direct communication are. We don’t usually see text as being technological but it is one of the great technological advances ever.
I’m very grateful to be able to learn this language in such a convenient way. Thank you all.
When I started learning Chinese, we wrote in pinyin for the first week, then moved to characters. I think this was the best method, as pinyin can be a crutch. For example, in China, I am in a class with some Kyrgis who have been learning about twice as long as I. Their spoken Chinese is far superior to mine, but they are constantly asking the teacher to write everything in pinyin, whereas I have become pretty good with the dictionary, and can make an educated guess about the sounds of words by the way they are written. So, learning characters may slow you down at the beginning, but its never going to be less of a challenge. Might as well got on with it.
This is not just a problem in Chinese either. Any language which uses a different writing system, even if it is based on an alphabet, will be difficult to convert to. When I was learning an Indian language, we spent the firt semester using the Roman alphabet, then switching to Devanagari. I found the conversion extremely difficult, whereas when I learned another language with another script, I studied with people who didn’t know Roman letters, so I just had to add 36 letters to the alphabet I knew and move on. I know alot of Chinese learners who spent the first semester or year learning pinyin, and haven’t been able to shake it. So, I would say that if a teacher thinks it is too hard to learn characters the first year, maybe they shouldn’t learn to write at all (for the first year). As gmik states, this is how we learned our mother tongues. I think there is another thread where someone mentioned a school for Thai where the students done’t actually write anything for quite a while.
I have learned Hanzi from the very beginning for a couple of reasons:
a.) I didn’t really have a choice, you were required to learn them the two semesters of Chinese I took at my university.
b.) I started learning Chinese because I’m wholly interested in the language. I never looked at learning the Hanzi as a burden because i actually enjoyed learning them. Sure it’s frustrating sometimes when you forget how to write simple characters, but when i learn a new relationship between to Hanzi or i have a breakthrough about why one is pronounced one way and another is pronounced another way I feel a great sense of satisfaction.
c.) They are required for going beyond lower-intermediate. How many intermediate - upper-intermediate books that have texts written in pinyin are out there? I think i would be frustrated if I had to start learning the characters from a beginner book if my spoken level was upper-intermediate.
d.) I’m a full believer in learning a language from a massive amount of input. This way you get a good feel for the language. I’ve found it’s quite effective. If i read an incorrect sentence, it “feels” incorrect. I can’t always explain why, but i have a sense for how it should be. John Biesnecker wrote a good post about this method at his blog http://www.johnbiesnecker.com
Again it’d be more difficult to find input that’s in pinyin. And sure you could just watch a lot of Chinese TV, listen to tons of broadcasts, and have a hundred conversations, but sometimes it’s nice to relax and just read from a book.
Overall I think it just depends on what your goals are.
I think the early stages of learning Hanzi is a few dozen hours of learning to write characters like mouth, sun, person… While the early stages of learning to speak would involve sentences like “ni jiao shenme mingzi”. I think it’s unproductive to throw the Hanzi for that sentence at the beginner, it’s a mass of complexity to someone with no frame of reference.
I’m not sure it matters whether someone starts learning Hanzi at the same time as learning to speak. But I think we have to acknowledge that the two activities are not going to gel at first. It’s a while before you’re going to be learning to write everything you learn to speak.
I think it is probably best for adult learners to start learning Hanzi right from the beginning. In my case, learning the characters helps me keep straight all the different homophones. I would be frustrated to the point of giving up if I was trying to only learn spoken Chinese without reading and writing.
“But last lesson ’shi’ meant this and now it means something else.” “Oh, well it’s a different character.” (Repeat this exact dialog each week for a year.)
Except to make a point, you would not write in English “I’m going too the shop two buy to servings of tutti-frutti.” So long as you know what tutti-frutti is, this sentence as spoken makes perfect sense. As written, it makes no sense. This confusion is only worse in Chinese if you don’t know the characters.
Of course, a child will learn to speak before reading and writing. They also have the time to do it this way. If I learn the characters as I go, I won’t have to learn it all again at a future date. The characters are part of the language and almost all students studying Chinese will need to learn them at some point. Pay now or pay later.
AMERICA LAND OF THE ONE LANGUAGE - America is very good at making mono-linguals. After reading the article I couldn’t understand how the author went from the girls didn’t have good Chinese to it’s how hanzi are taught. If we separate out two ideas then I think it might be more productive.
First, why did the girls land up with poor Chinese, they had smart parents, they went to supplementary Chinese school and the parents spoke Chinese at home. My experience is that in America, if the parents know/speak English then their Chinese-American children will not have very fluent Chinese. As the parents went to ‘elite’ US universities I think we can assume they understood their children if the children spoke to them in English. Children want to communicate and they will take the path of least resistence. If they are all-English at school, all tv English, very few other non-English peers, then at this point the parents are on the losing end of all the social forces of America that will lead to a mono-lingual child.
The continum then continues, if one parent doesn’t speak English, or if both parents don’t speak English, this helps the child in the sense of forcing the second language. However, if both parents do not speak English the child will gain fluency in the ‘home’ language but then this often hurts the child’s English. I think you will also see more hispanic kids who are truely bi-lingual and can code-switch a lot, this may have to do with the similarities of English/Spanish. English and Chinese are too far apart. The Chinese parents shouldn’t beat themselves up over it. I only know one bilingual friend who is decent in both his English and Japanese. His dad spoke English/Japanese, his mom only Japanese. I have a Taiwanese friend who is now a physician, her parents both had very limited English, mom was really almost no English, my friend has occassional blips in proper English grammar, her Chinese is perfect.
Second, when is it ‘best’ to learn hanzi? I think this should be separate from the author’s ‘mixing’ of problems, as the daughter is only “moderately fluent for speaking and listening…” and her writing enough of a struggle that she resorted to machine translation, her daughter probably needs some sort of ‘remedial’ help. But I think we’re first talking about a ‘best case’ scenario right, learning from scratch.
I’ve watched my nephew learning English and it is a struggle to get him to write his stories, so I wouldn’t say English is any easier/harder than Chinese. If we’re talking about kids I think the natural progression is talking====>getting read to===>reading/writing. If it’s adults, then I think one’s purpose must first be considered, and then one’s goals. It’s perfectly okay to learn enough spoken without learning much hanzi. If one’s goal is true literacy then I don’t think learning hanzi from the get go is any hinderance. Although I am unsure about the theory that true fluency, a true second language native like grammar, requires first a long listening period, this would thus preclude speaking, reading, writing at first; it might be true.
Personally I’m at a stage where more often than not, seeing the hanzi soon after being exposed to a word, helps me to remember it. I have noticed a lot of things about how Chinese characters are taught to foreigners versus as taught to Chinese that I think result in helping non-Chinese in the short term but hurting them in the long term. Here’s what I mean:
Non-Chinese
1. Lots of emphasis on visually appealing/recognizable hanzi like ‘horse’, ‘heart’, ‘person’. Very little discussion and meat around introducing characters that are so simplified or removed from their ideograms, then quick jumps to pretty complex characters.
2. Characters are introduced according to school graders, not much relation to frequency in spoken Chinese. I never learned the hanzi for ‘gan’ to do until pretty far in. That’s like a SUPER common word and the hanzi is EASY, it should be learned like right after ‘ge’.
3. Very little variety in terms of exposure/practice with hanzi. Usually it’s just see the character in a book, then you try to scribble it 20 times.
4. A lot of hanzi/vocab lists.
5. Hanzi in isolation. Separated from their ‘measure words’, separated from good lexical chunks/phrases, a lack of variety of examples of use.
Most dictionaries go like this, 1. definition 2. Example: the army general said shoot the enemy.
Chinese
1. Lots of exercises and exposure to words of similar sounds or looks. This trains the mind to separate out and ’see’ the differences in characters.
2. Hanzi are learned in puzzles, calligraphy classes, by route, just lots and lots of variations and different kinds of exposure.
3. Lots of opportunity to have text read to them by parents and lectures, listen, repeat.
4. Lots of opportunity for feedback on written work.
5. The writing is built upon a solid spoken fluency.
My suggestions
1. Characters should be learned first in order of spoken frequency. This increases the odds of hearing, seeing the word again for reinforcement.
2. A separate track of learning hanzi by frequency in type of reading material, for example in newspapers and fiction. Again to increase the odds of seeing it when one reads.
3. Writing and feedback. Very few Chinese programs offer much in terms of an opportunity to write and get corrections. I took a quarter of Chinese at an American university taught by a Taiwanese lecturer and now that I think of it, I never once had to turn in a writing assignment. I took a semester of Chinese at at Chinese University, using BLCU texts, I never had any writing assignments, when I wrote something and turned it in, it never got returned to me.
4. Lots of exposure to karaoke VCDs, tv with sub-titles, online materials with subtitles.
5. A variety of exposure to the hanzi, to train the hand and the eye. This means some calligraphy, classes on how to write cursive script with a pen, exercises, puzzles, stories that bring hanzi with similar features together, to increase the separateness of each.
6. An electronic dictionary that allows one to write in an hanzi and get returned a selection of hanzi to choose from.
7. Exercises or online exposure, ie. texting, blogging, posting, mobile phone sms’ing, where one can practice typing in pinyin and selecting hanzi.
8. A wide variety of Chinese reading materials to choose from. I have found Doraemon and now Wang/King Comics nice ‘light’ reading.
9. Purging Chinese language books that have ‘explanations’ only in hanzi and mish-mash of sometimes there’s pinyin, sometimes there’s English, sometimes there’s hanzi. I’ll make a bit of a frank statement, I don’t think the BLCU texts preclude English/pinyin in some cases because of some pedological purpose, I think the writers just were too lazy or found it too tough to be consistent in putting in pinyin/English everywhere.
10. Different expectations about the learning curve for speech versus writing during instruction. I see teachers who I feel subconciously or conciously feel that the levels increase in synch. I don’t think so. Most people will quickly be able to speak a lot more than they can write, and that is OKAY, it is expected, it is natural. Lots of university programs raise the levels in sych, for example, here’s a dialogue, let’s speak it, now write every sentence, every character. That is an academic exercise to weed out students, not the best way to get everybody speaking and writing well.
And number eleven. It gets easier and easier, it really does.
Number 12. Chinesepod currently has no pedogolical approach to teaching hanzi expect thru the availability of pdf transcripts, translations and some simple matching exercises. I do believe that the strongest feature of Cpod is that the dialogues/words are VERY high-frequency, but Cpod hasn’t taken that vocab and mixed/matched/re-presented them enough in terms of learning to write them, and how to ‘write’ them into stories, compositions, ie. writing, to make it easy for learners. The word bank is nice, but that’s old school memorization.
我困了。春困。 春困当不主。主？
This artical raises many more questions as it answers. It can also be used to argue the point that learning how to speak before reading and writing doesn’t produce good results. It is unlikely the two sisters not raised speaking Chinese at home before starting school (and weekend Chinese lessons).
Many US universities have different Chinese classes for fluent but illiterate students and the other students who have no Chinese experience. The university where I attend class doesn’t yet do this. After being in class with a few “heritage” students, I’m not convinced the weekend class they all took were worthwhile.
My previous post was referring to adult learners. Although this may hit a cultural nerve, these daughters are in fact now adults. No matter how much the mother may want it, the girls will improve only if they want to.
I think you must consider how much time you have and your goals. I think learning hanzi has nothing to do with good communication skills in Chinese. Many persons including myself speak very well but only know critical hanzi such as men’s restroom and ladies restroom. I think it is great if you have time but if you don’t then toss that out first…spend time learning pinyin, some history and culture to back up the communication skills. The whole package is needed when working or traveling in China especially if you go to less safe places outside the big cities. Learning Idioms and famous phrases goes a long way in Chinese language. Remember to have fun!
“Shu neng sheng qiao” . ” Practice makes perfect”
USA is very far from most places which doesn’t speak English. I work in European company and spent time in China and we are constantly tagged with that mono lingual comment. It wasn’t until recently that it became affordable to travel to Asia or Europe unless you were retired. So why learn another language? There is good history why we don’t know so many languages. It is not few hour car ride to another country like in Europe. It is changing now. People like me and other Americans will put the “Fanyi” out of business soon. We will engage Chinese language like noone has seen before!
For people who are already exposed to Chinese language material (i.e. speaking it frequently at home, being a native speaker, etc.), hanzi should probably be introduced as quickly as possible- so that they’re in the early stage of language internalisation. For foreign learners, hanzi should not be ignored, or you’ll be crippled, that’s quite true, but the emphasis should be on speaking and listening more than reading and writing to a certain level. Indeed, learn the easy to remember/learn characters 马心你我, and other simple ones with high frequency. The issues begin when you’re learning the mixed radical/phonetic characters like 铁 or the like, where once you know the word’s spoken form, you can see the character and think ‘it’s something to do with metal that sounds like…oh, I see!’, where a beginner has to learn the shape by rote. That’s not to say that a learner should rely on pinyin. That’s a crutch. The characters are second to speech, and this will usually match the learning goals of most students, who would like to communicate directly, rather than simply to read the subtitles on the karaoke vids. I can see flaws in my argument already, but it makes sense to me. Feel free to pick it apart.
I will say that one of the things that keeps me from jumping in and going for a paid subscription to Chinese pod is the lack of integrated tools to teach me to read and write. I went into learning Chinese with different goals than others, perhaps: more than wanting to speak, I wanted to be able to read and write. Consequently, my oral chinese has suffered somewhat, but not nearly as much as I would have thought, while my written Chinese has crept along with my oral ability (relatively speaking). I can somewhat see how my goal has helped now that I can send and receive simple text messages in Chinese with my friends.
It seems really difficult for me to remember words and phrases when I just listen to them (Pimsleur got thrown out after a week because of that). The podcasts here are good because I already have a frame of reference for most of the beginner lessons so I can focus on some of the new words, but I find the vocab really sticks if I sit down and learn the character. I know that I can get the characters and such from the pdf transcripts of the podcasts, but I’d really like to have some kind of progressive character learning lessons…(”so you know these characters now, try and translate this dialogue” - type stuff). Not sure how it would look, but it’d be cool!
I agree with many of you that it’s a matter of goals. Some want to be fully literate in Chinese, while others will be happy with simply being able to speak and understand. I see no problem with that. Hopefully ChinesePod can accommodate both types of learner.
Jeff supported the idea of massive comprehensible input, which is an important part of Stephen Krashen’s theory of second language acquisition. Another part of Krashen’s theory is the Acquisition-Learning distinction:
Krashen’s theory relates to learning language, not writing. It’s important to make a distinction between the two. The issue of how closely adult language acquisition mirrors children’s language acquisition is still under debate, but if you agree with Krashen, you’re likely to support the idea that it’s most natural to learn speaking/understanding first, and writing later… as children do. Of course, you may totally disagree with this as well. It may not be the most practical approach for language learning. Personally, I liked the sound of how Brendan learned Chinese.
I also think it’s important to remember that the more time you take learning characters, the less time you’re spending developing your speaking and listening abilities. Again, the way you go about it should be closely tied to your goals.
Lantian, sounds like you noticed that ChinesePod has somewhat sidestepped the character issue. For now, we are focusing on language. We’ll see what happens with regards to characters down the road…
I’m think tackling hanzi early is a good thing. If you’re a serious student of the language then you’re going to have to do it eventually, and spreading it out over the initial acquisition of the language seems better than “go learn these hundreds/thousands of characters that make up a bunch of words you already know” at some point after you’ve been studying for a few years.
My wife was for a while teaching a Dutch businessman who had terrific spoken Chinese but couldn’t read even simple texts. She had to write everything out in pinyin for him to read. Seems a little sad.
Hi John @S. Would you happen to know if your two just posted references are available in Chinese somewhere. Certainly I can’t read that level of Chinese, but I’d like to share the ideas with some Chinese friends. If not, maybe you or John B., could do some pro bono translation! Cheers.
Strange as it may seem, I started learning characters long before I could speak a word of Cantonese or Mandarin. Now, when it comes to character recognition, I am ahead of the game. I can read entire sentences in Chinese now without resorting to pinyin. My speaking ability is lacking, I will admit. I think it is because, after seeing how mixed up Chinese grammar is compared to English, I find it hard to form sentences.
Lantian,
That I can help you with. Here’s a page summarizing Krashen’s theories in Chinese. Krashen’s ideas are not nearly as popular in China as is in the US, though.
pandagator,
My experiences are similar to yours, because I learned Japanese before Chinese.
Okay here is my take but bear in mind that everybody is different.
A quick read of these comment seems to place me as an extreme aquisitionist. I started learning 4 months ago, originally I tried hard to aquire Hanzi including writing them etc. It took a lot of effort and yes it was fun and interesting I probably managed to learn to write around forty to fifty characters in the first couple of months and recognise quite a few more by sight but it stopped being fun I was conetrating on characters too much and felt I would never learn to understand spoken Chinese at the pace I was going and certainly never speak it myself also the more I learned the more I got bogged down and the slower the learning seemed to get.
I dropped characters and my listening Chinese has improved massively since. All my dead time can be used (in car etc.) Plus all my focused learning time to aquire listening vobulary. Now I am using SKype and have found a local language partner to attack spoken ability.
Chinese TV is no longer a random babble I can usually distinguish almost every syallable (although not understand most of them) and recently instead of hearing random words pop out at me I am now getting whole sentances “how much is that”, “too expensive”, “come with your friends”, “you look tired”, “are you my friend” (all from a historical drama last night). The time from the odd word -> many words -> the odd phrase and sentance has been very short. I am sure there will be a much longer gap until I understand a whole conversation however the buzz from this progress has been huge.
Compare this with the similar approach I was taking with with. Characters. I was looking at a webpages of text and slowly picking away them (hence learning words for news, international, online, Chinese language network etc.) Problem was it was going to take ages and ages to ever get much out of a page like this (I mean in real time not running it through a translator or annotating in pinyin etc.).
The absolute bottom line is this I will be able to understand the gist of some Chinese news or tv in the forseeable and not too distant future. I will not be able to do this with a written page anywhere near so quicky given the same amount of effort and considerating the dead time restrictions. This means everything to me because I am a child mind (all be it a 39 year old child mind). I want to understand real world Chinese (whether written or spoken) ASAP and I will take the quickest root because the Buzz I get from it is huge.
My other aquisitional attributes, I don’t like grammar (I have very little technical English grammar knowledge but can still speak it). I don’t mind speaking broken Chinese (if it is understood I have made most of the journey, I will get better).
Last but not least, I have returned a little to characters becasue they are interesting and perhaps not surprisingly I have found that learning a bunch of characters (and yes I am actually strongly on the side of learning them in cohesive sentance or phrase context) is (for me at least) far, far, far, far easier when I have those words and that structure already 110% solid in the spoken form.
John at Sinosplice, your two links in your followup comment have been a really interesting read to me because almost every other word rings so true to my own experiences. In their speak, I’m at stage III where I understand known topics and can engage with a ‘cooperative’ and ’sympathetic’ native speaker. It is amazing how well they describe this as I have been trying to describe this to so many people when they ask how is my Chinese these days. I really recommend others read these sites, I wish I had seen them months, months ago.
About the two daughters, I agree with the massive comprehensible input ideas, but there are some details then go beyond just ‘watch a lot of tv.’, one of the details is that JUST a lot of comprehensible input is not always enough to produce verbalization or fluency, the cases with immigrant children show this, here they talk about that–and explain why the daughters have limited Chinese:
http://www.sil.org/lingualinks.....siveEx.htm
For me the characters are a fascinating(& inescapable) aspect of learning Chinese…but it is certainly requires dedication & time to master these.(I was fortunate to have a great mandarin speaker who taught me beginning writing & stroke order),as well as the tones for speaking.In learning any language we obviously need lots & lots of vocabulary as well as the grammar (&… depending on need/the written code for reading & writing). The point when my interest lagged was in trying to read texts (& tediously dictionary checking)..The sheer frustration & time taken in trying to extract meaning made it just an intellectual exercise & I had no energy or time left to apply what I’d extracted from the exercise.
When to learn hanzi? I think some needs to be learnt right away …particularly the most frequently used…(& there are great online sites that teach how to write) …but not at the expense of speaking & communicating ideas.
I think I’ve learnt too many words as separate items & not as the usable phrases or chunks that Ken keeps recommending we should practise to transfer easily to conversation. I love the sound of the language & happily parrot words I’m learning & hearing… but speaking (generating meaningful real sentences) is another matter altogether without an actual speaking partner. It needs a leap of imagination & some vivid stimulus .
Chinesepod is a great motivator…it’s wonderful to hear the language spoken every day…I’m making a real effort again to speak to an fascinating imaginary friend as well as my dog…& for me there is plenty of new vocab & hanzi to work towards aquiring in the Intermediate & Advanced segments …all it needs is time & perseverence& the hope of going to China to use it.
Thinking further on this and related subjects I think that are two critical points.
What type of learner are you? Academic institutions have to find fairly generic solutions that get the best results with the largest majority.
Individual, self-motivated learners may be intelligent enough to pick from a path that suits (enjoyment can be as important as effectiveness).
So we have to consider that person A may learn Chinese best by working heavily with characters. And person B may learn best by listening and then speaking. At some point maybe both A and B can listen, speak, read, write Chinese pretty well (well done they have both done a good job and both are getting a buzz out of it). Maybe each has different strengths and weakness but hey these are probably reflected in their native toungue (some people speak, much better than their written composition and vice-verca).
Bearing this in mind there should always be a disclaimer when we tell people our ’special techniques’ as they my not apply universally.
Now consider person C he is doing a course in Chinese and is left to whims of educational fashion, current thinking, the skill of the teacher etc. God help person C and for their sake let’s hope that person C corresponds to the learning norm.
My wife is involved in education (small kids and special learning needs) She has both a pragmatic (lots of experiance and three kids of our own) and academic (she did a degree in it and has to keep attending training as part of her job). Her only comment was ‘you can gaurantee that which ever way it goes in a few years time some people will have very persuasive arguements for the opposite approach’
The most effective way to teach will always be based on the needs and abilities of the individual student and ’system’ is a compromise.
With the resources of the Internet particularly Chinesepod, I think that we will start to see a new breed of second language Chinese speakers. Yes they will be a colourful mix and they won’t be cloned from the same bunch of standard grammar books, but some of them will have something to teah all of us.
The nearest analogue from my own experiance is formal versus informal music training. There are good points to both, if someone is at a particular ’stage’ in an instument then you know exactly where they stand however you have to recognise that there are some great musicians jamming away our there who learnt in their own crazy way.
I think Chris and others have touched upon a good point. A tend to agree that when and how to study Hanzi depends on your personal style of learning. For me, the following things have worked very well.
Right from the start of my study of chinese I’ve started to EXPOSE myself to Hanzi without trying to LEARN them. That is, I use either input which has Hanzi, Pinyin and translation next to each other or I use digital content so I can use an annotator (I use DimSum Chinese Tools, a free download from www.mandarintools.com). The annotator really helps because it saves me a lot of time which I would otherwise have spent looking up characters in a dictionary.
Secondly, I’ve started to WRITE some Hanzi quite soon, again, without trying to memorize them. I’m glad to say that this approach is working very well for me as I am starting to remember more and more Hanzi without having made a conscious effort to learn them. Perhaps someone might find this approach useful as well.
I have studied mandarin for about a year, mostly in community college courses taught by a mandarin speaking Taiwanese teacher. He did not emphasize hanzi at all, but did teach us pinyin right away. The focus seemed to be more on tone, pronunciation, vocab and grammar (in that order). Personally, I find learning chinese without characters to be ideal. I would consider myself a casual learner, but learning without the characters is fine *as long as there is pinyin*. Personally when I hear a character, I can see the pinyin in my mind, and I can remember that pinyin. There is no way I could remember that hanzi right off the bat, as that’s not the way my mind works.
Now that my tone and pronunciation are good, I care most about grammar, and then vocab. When those are solid, you’ll see me move onto hanzi. I’ve been absorbing some hanzi just by default (the frequency of seeing each character), and because of the way that ChinesePod’s learning center presents the characters and sentences to you via mouseover, but hanzi is last on my list of priorities.
I see the process my brain takes per character like this: Hanzi -> Pinyin (Spelling/Visual) -> Pinyin (Hearing/Sound) -> Meaning
In summary, personally hanzi is useless to me if I can’t understand the grammar of a sentence, or know the meaning of the word behind the hanzi, but in time I will end up focusing on it I’m sure. For now hanzi requires an extra (and very difficult) step. Pinyin however, is a must for me, as it’s an easy way for me to “picture and save” even with tone marks, new words in my head.
I sure feel illiterate sometimes when I look up some unfamiliar hanzi character and realize it’s something like 当然 or
德国 or 如果 which really are very familiar (dangran, deguo or ruguo)… You hear something so much but then the hanzi looks like a creature from outer space. Speaking of which, 菜单 (caidan, menu) did answer my question about what 单was, which always reminded me of some little alien with antennae. It’s kind of neat though, to realize a strange looking character is actually very familiar.
(Like 当 which I knew as the backwards E with 3 wild hairs, not realizing it was dang of dangran…)
For me, it reminds me of — 1) talking to people every day on the phone, but not seeing their face; and 2) walking down the street and seeing the same faces, but not knowing who they are; and 3) finally putting 2 and 2 together– oh, THAT person I keep seeing, is the same one I’ve been talking to over the phone!! Oh, you’re dang! and you’re dan! and you’re de! Like a reunion. Kind of. But I always like to look at Chinese characters even if I don’t know them, like looking at faces from someone else’s school yearbook.
Chinesepod could fairly easily expand its offering into teaching one to read Hanzi. Create a ‘graded’ reader, interlinear. A graded reader is one that would begin with a subset of the most frequently used characters several at a time, and repeats them many times in different sentances. after awhile, one could become familiar with hundreds of characters. Writing hanzi, seems like it would be very troublesome and slow to learn, but could be taught in much the same format.
Good idea, Mark. It doesn’t have to be a part of the lessons. Ideally it wouldn’t be. There are heaps of graded readers out there, but a lot of them are really not well considered in which characters/combinations they use. I’m sure a Ken and Jenny (or a John from Sinosplice）approach could give it a new style and relevance. Especially if the readings were about things like menus, maps, train stations, letters, children’s stories and popular culture (perhaps they could include the Word on the Street…).
I’m reading (slowly) through an advanced reader of actual modern short stories with vocab for low-frequency words and short grammar notes for difficult sections. “Advanced Reader of Contemporary Chinese Short Stories” - selected by Ying Wand and Carrie E. Reid. The advanced readers are OK, but the beginners are usually a bit of a Barry (Crocker = shocker).
I began learning Chinese at a foreign language institute in Korea. I was the only non-Korean in the class. All of the other students had learned about 2,000 traditional characters in secondary school, and after spending a week learning the basics of pronunciation, we were expected to read and write characters from the first lesson. Prior to the class, I had bought Chinese character practice books for elementary students, reasoning that if these books could teach a seven-year-old how to read and write characters, I could learn from them, too; having worked through about 100 characters, I was familiar with stroke types and stroke order, so I wasn’t totally illiterate. Nevertheless, it was harder for me and I worked my buns off memorizing characters to keep up with the class. It was worth it, though, as I never had to go back later and learn how to write basic vocabulary. Literacy is part of language, and there is no reason not to introduce Chinese characters from the beginning to learners of all ages who already have some literacy in their native language.
Lantian,that may be true of certain immigrants in select areas, but the vast majority of the children of immigrants can speak the mother language, because that’s what the parents speak at home, and because they need to speak to their grandparents. Honestly when I lived in California, pretty much everybody I knew could speak a foreign language pretty well. I know I’ve seen statistics but I’m lazy to Google…anecdotes are more interesting anyway.
Your advice boils down, learn the most common characters and try to use them in daily life. I don’t think anybody would disagree, but…
HANZI WEBSITE - I came across a website this morning for learning hanzi, it’s quite elegant. Something interesting is that it presents two daily words, one at an easy level and another at a higher level, and indicates their HSK levels. I’ve been clicking around, seems fun.
http://www.cm-prep.com/content.html CM Prep
Hi Jeff, I guess our experiences are different. Realize that in California immigrant communities usually provide the kids with a much richer environment for input and language-peers. I would suspect the daughters did not have this kind of environment, so as a result their Chinese is limited. I think my main point is that this should be expected. Just having parents which speak the language at home is not enough, especially if the parents also speak English.
BTW I think learning the characters by frequency increases their chances of being re-seen in other contexts which allows for retention. I think ‘using’ them is a different track. One’s vocalization/fluency progresses on it’s own on a separate track. It’s not just memorize a word and then try to use it outside.
In Australia the immigrant communities vary a lot in terms of language retention. For some communities (notably the Dutch for some reason), the language retention rate amongst second generation immigrants is something like 10%. For other communities, often larger, there is a much higher retention rate due to the need to use it for talking to relatives, community groups, churches/other religious centres etc. There are heaps of factors involved though. Other ones include the density and cohesion of the community (a nod to Lantian there), publicly available resources (libraries, music, movies etc.), language similarity with the dominant language, and the community views on the language itself (i.e. is it embarrassing to speak that language at home or in the shopping mall etc.). The language retention rate amongst Chinese in Australia is one of the highest (but I don’t have any figures with me - it’s in a textbook at home), but it varies by city, dialect, residence (permanent, refugee, citizen etc.). Other large communities with high language retention include Vietnamese and Spanish (especially Chilean).
I think in America it can be very easy to retain language in some areas due to the concentration of a particular ethnic group within an area of a city (Chinatown, Little Mexico etc.), but outside it, as Lantian says, there is less day-to-day language use, which will lessen anybody’s skills without a lot of effort. The day-to-day contact is what makes ChinesePod useful for studying Chinese, because with something new every day, you will at least hear or read some Chinese, even if you only understand a word or two.
Hmm. The original topic of the thread has warped somewhat, but I think it’s still relevant. Bringing it briefly back, the effect this has on when someone should learn Hanzi is, that in this situation, if the girls had been living in or frequently visiting a Chinatown area, they might have better reading skills because of their better spoken skills, but the example doesn’t necessarily apply to other learners because of the different situation.
Because my BA is in Russian and I have taken three languages at the undergraduate level and have been an ESL tutor for a number of years as a volunteer here in America, when I decided to study Chinese and really strive to get to a high level with it, it seemed natural to me to evaluate my learning style. Our volunteer organization trains us to recognize that everyone has a learning style, something that comes from their learning experiences up to that point, and all of the classes I took in languages with a non-Latin alphabet (Arabic and Russian) used transcription for a week and went on to using the main alphabet right away. Because of that and my high-visual learning style, the Mandarin class I took that was oral and pinyin only frustrated me immediately, and I gave it up for John DeFrancis’ Yale published readers that give a list of ten characters and use them immediately in sentences/paragraphs, and I found myself really making progress. However, though learning style is an important consideration, I would be leery of a program that used pinyin or transcription for long periods of time, especially years, because I would be concerned it would cause major interference later when the student moved on to try to learn to read characters. Your mind would have the pinyin so ingrained that it would resist characters. I can’t imagine trying to learn to read English in Cyrillic after years of using the Latin alphabet. It doesn’t make much sense to do that. A lot of resistance to learning characters is, in my opinion, attitude and too much emphasis on memorizing every stroke in sequence. Recognition is good enough, especially if you type on a word processor that eliminates the need for stroke order charts. I have also found taking up some basic sketching can help one learn to be attentive enough to catch the small differences between characters. It’s important not to let the idea that Chinese is “so hard” because of its writing system become a handicap because, truth be told, every language can be a beast at some point. If had known Chinese was so easy, I would never have chosen to struggle with six noun cases in Russian as my major.
I guess I’ll stick my neck out here and make a fairly bold statement. I really believe for non-natives, focusing on Hanzi is a waste of time in terms of learning the language. I offer proof points for your consideration:
1. Consider that every person on the planet learns their native language exclusively through speech until they have basic fluency.
2. Additionally, in most cultures if you go far enough back in time it was only the elite classes that could read and write, yet the rest of the population got along quite well with just verbal communication.
3. Ok, how about if you’re a tourist? Don’t you have to be able to read street signs, etc. to get along? Not if you’re going to do what 90% of China tourists do and visit the major cultural areas, where you’ll find a significant and ever increasing amount of signage in both Hanzi and pinyin and even English speaking service and shop workers. These crutches for foreigners will become even more common as the 2008 Beijing olympics approach. And, of course, they all speak Chinese so as long as you do too you’ll get along quite fine, thank you.
4. Ok, if Hanzi isn’t necessary, then what about pinyin? Is that worthless as well? Absolutely not! In my mind pinyin is absolutely essential. Why? Because (especially non-Asian) foreigners’ ears are tuned to hear the sounds of their native language and their tongues are tuned to producing the sounds of their native language. Pinyin is essential to allowing them to see visually what a particular word should sound like and, admittedly it does give the learner a relatively simple and natural way to store away vocabulary they might want to keep track of for later reference (i.e. flash cards). And, as mentioned in previous posts, if you can type and you know pinyin, then you’ll be able to bang out a substantial amount of hanzi on your little electronic translator for that taxi driver who just can’t understand you.
So why bother with Hanzi at all? I haven’t gotten to the level where it will really benefit me yet but I know there will be a time when I want to tap into China’s rich written culture and for that Hanzi will be essential. I often find when reading my “Romance of the three kingdoms” novels that my eyes wander from the English page (right side) to the Chinese page (left side) in fascination, wondering how all those characters correspond to the English text
I have to confess, I didn’t always have this view. I spent a lot of time and energy learning to read/write every new character I heard. As my native-Chinese father-in-law watched me spin my wheels he would always remind me of me some famous guy in China who’s 100% fluent with flawless diction but only knows 4 characters (I still don’t know who the guy is). He would gently tell me my time would be much better spent focused on building verbal communication skills and then worrying about Hanzi once I could actually speak. I now understand what he was talking about and I think he’s 100% right. So, in my opinion, spend your time learning to speak. Then you can ask all your new Chinese friends to show you how to write those nasty characters!
Tom wrote: “if you can type and you know pinyin, then you’ll be able to bang out a substantial amount of hanzi on your little electronic translator”
I would change this point to be that if you only know pinyin, stick to it and don’t even try to rely on an electronic translator and characters. If you’ve ever tried to read something written be someone who doesn’t know the difference between two, too, and to or there, their and the’re, etc., you’ll find Chinese much worse. Trying to read characters that are the right sound but likely wrong tone and meaning is maddening. It is even worse than trying to read text message English.
It depends a bit on your reason for learning the language, I guess. Would I have all the time of the world at my avail, I would prefer to learn Chinese the way Chinese kids do: by linking characters to objects the way Western people to with their words. Kids have a couple of decades to do that, and we usually don’t. As I had to start learning Chinese after already starting a job in Beijijng, there was a requirement for survival that came first. Pinyin is quite good at delivering that. After a short while, however, you reach the limits of pinyin: you have tons of identical words. Meaning that you have the same workload as if learning Hanzi: you have to remember meanings on top of what you see. So the (much) better strategy is to start learning the charcters very soon, maybe from the very beginning (just to get used to it). From my experience it also keeps motivation up much better than pinyin. At the end of your pinyin career, you won’t even be able to read the most simple of menus (which is a shame, because you will always have to eat things that you already know…). When learning Hanzi, you can see the success on every street corner, because you suddenly recognize what these shops are selling.
I started learning to recognize characters after about three months of study, at about the same time I started to come across numerous homonyms. The real motivation was to be able to read road and highway signs so I could find my home out of the countryside on weekend motorbike trips. Necessity is the mother of invention, or in this case, the motivation behind learning. There’s not much point in learning characters unless you need them; they’re not going to stick otherwise.
WHAT IS THE DICTIONARY MEANING OF WORD “YANSHU”
@Yanshu: 鼹鼠 (yan3shu2), mole.
I do not know what the purpose of that question was, but I would suggest that you consult RFC 1855.
I consider my journey of learning chinese a successful one so far, and here is my opinion about hanzi: I first started with 6-7 casual lessons (in the course of a month) with a chinese classmate back in Europe. I learned simple phrases like “ni jiao shenme mingzi” “renshi ni hen gaoxing” and “ni shi na guo ren?”, and the hanzi for every new word as well. The result? Even these simple sentences seemed like a nightmare to me. I just couldn’t take in all this information. Then I came to Shanghai, and started over, ignoring hanzi completely. As a result, it took me 2 months to be able to hold simple conversations and get around. But then, after 4 months in total, I started feeling that I need hanzi knowledge to advance further, as I now knew too many “chang’s” and “bao’s”, and needed a way to distinguish them. So I took advantage of a 6-month period away from China to catch up with hanzi (I learned no new vocab during this time, and didn’t practice speaking at all). Now, after another 3 months in Shanghai, my hanzi is to a level of 80% of my spoken chinese. And every time I learn a new word, I decide to learn the hanzi if: it is reasonably easy (simple, reminiscent of another one that I know, or the radical helps, etc), or in case it’s hard, if it is really useful or often used/seen. For example, some food names have complex hanzi, but you need to read the menu. Some adjectives on the other hand, you use them in your speech very often but you ll never need to write them.
My advice is ignore the hanzi at the begining (good point above about people learning their native language exclusively through speech as babies). The point to start learning them may vary, I would say after 3-6 months for those that try hard, study intensively and get to practice in a chinese environment like I did, and about 1-1.5 year for more casual learners.
I arrived at the approach described by Stavros in a more roundabout way but I now do pretty much the same, i.e. every time I learn a new word, I decide to learn the hanzi if: it is reasonably easy (simple, reminiscent of another one that I know, or the radical helps, etc), or in case it’s hard, if it is really useful or often used/seen..
The result is that I seem to take in a lot more and still be no longer exhausted (incidentally, same happened when I switched from traditional to simplified characters).
Ditto with dictionary entries, I now use the 现代汉语词典 Chinese-English edition that I refer to very often, attempting to read definitions in Chinese first and looking up the English only when this is too hard.
Yv