I’m spending this week trying to dig deeper into a question: What does the Big Brain want?
Yesterday we talked about personal growth. It seems that few of you actually have a compelling need to learn Chinese. You seem to be driven by other things - curiosity, self-improvement, etc. This obviously has implications for how we spend our time over here: I want to be sure we’re producing stuff that you actually want.
One question I have concerns learning characters. What is your attitude to them? Are they as important to you as learning the spoken word? (Remember, you have limited options in terns of study time and focus.) We could emphasize them more, if that’s what you chaps want.
I’m also allowing for the possibility that a good number of our users may be too busy in their work and family lives to post comments here. This type of learner may well be learning Chinese for purely work-related purposes and they may be under-represented in these discussions. Such a group would have different needs than say, people who treated learning Chinese more as a personal endeavor, so I want to be sure we don’t ignore such people. (We’re nothing if we’re not inclusive.) Does anyone have any feedback to share on this point?
Ken Carroll
What does the Big Brain want?
A method to gauge progress.
As for Hanzi, I strive for a simple recognition vocabulary and care MUCH less whether or not I can reporduce them from memory.
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For your information here is the unconventional moderne priority for learning chinese in France (priority to the basis) :
1. recognition of basic Hanzi (2000 to 2500)
2. recognition of basic vocabulary
3. grammar and chinese structure
4. Sound recognition of basic Hanzi and basic vocabulary
5. computer writing
6. speaking
7. recognition of more Hanzi (2500 to 4000) and vocabulary
8. hand writing (optional)
Hi Ken - I suppose you know about this: http://www.assetlanguages.org.uk/. I have not heard of anyone taking the exams yet, but I gather you can take gently graded steps in speaking, reading and writing individually. These were introduced, I gather, as the normal exams GCSE/ A level in languages like Chinese were too hard for non-native speakers and so no one wanted to take them (or to let their students take them in case of embassassing failures). Interesting because of what you need to know in terms of characters at each level. Some of you UK podies who, like me, find a goal to aim for a good motivator (sad, I know) may be interested.
I’m interested in learning to recognize the characters well enough to type. It’s so easy to do this (especially on a Mac :).Ken, you’ve discussed this in an interview before.
I’m not so interested in writing the characters. Maybe one day, way way in the future!
Tricky Ken,
Can you somehow capture the essence of learning to quickly pick up basic reading skills by using subtitles and text messaging?
I think there is something in that that has the potential to leave the traditional learning methods standing.
I would make the distinction between teaching reading skills and simply teaching the characters. Reading skills are conscious strategies that are not necessarily intuitive (most people probably don’t know about them) but are useful in reading Chinese. (Skimming, scanning, guessing meaning from context, etc, all the up tp critical reading, and so on.) These I would recommend for someone who has to read a lot or read stuff quickly, for example on a HSK test.
For the rest of us, character recognition is probably enough. As people have pointed out here, predictive software can be really useful for that, but we could do a lot more on ChinesePod to introduce new characters and put them into etymological/cultural/historical context - all ways to help you recognize and remember them. That’s what I was referring to in this post.
Ken Carroll
For myself, I find the characters provide peerless insight into the language. I wish I had started with the characters at the same time I started learning to listen; learning them reinforces my listening and disambiguates the pinyin. CPod is actually pretty useful in this regard; I don’t know of another source of flash cards that provides cards for character combinations.]
But I know a lot of people who see the characters as just a distraction from learning, rather than an enrichment.
Reading aloud helps me a lot. Hanzi only, no pinyin. I cut and paste the intermediate dialog from the podcast and hanzi from the transcripts and use these for study.
Although I can do it myself, having five separate sections to the transcipts would help: Simplified characters, Traditional characters, Pinyin, English translation, and vocab.
I would love to learn the chinese characters along with the spoken language, but aren’t the characters used on Chinesepod the traditional ones? I may be wrong, but I think most of China now uses the simplified characters and those are the ones I am interested in learning. My Chinese teacher is from Beijing, and she reads both but only writes using the simplified characters.
But hey! I really love this site!
meiguoren,
We use simplified characters.
Ken Carroll
JN, that’s pretty cool. It seems to me that CPod could use the asset languages specifications as a useful adjunct to what is being covered in the lessons or the grammar tags. For example, the Asset Languages intermediate specification starts with a notion that somebody should be able to demonstrate “use of the verbal aspect marker 了 with reference to the future”. The example they give: “你吃了饭就去做什么？”. I don’t know how the 了refers to the future in that sentence, or where to find it in the CPod grammar tags, if at all.
This might be something for the Big Brain (any relation to Big Bird?), since tags to external references such as testing standards might reasonably be outside of the scope of CPod itself.
Ken writes:
“…but we could do a lot more on ChinesePod to introduce new characters and put them into etymological/cultural/historical context - all ways to help you recognize and remember them.” This would be wonderful. I started out expecting to have nothing to do with the written aspects but now I have turned around completely and very much am interested in the characters. I have been studying the traditional characters supported by a weekly study group using one of the Harvard books. We also read aloud to help us learn them. I study them also using the Wenlin program which I use to research the historical context. If you study them this way the characters are sometimes easier to remember as you associate them with the radicals. I think it makes it more interesting and fun. How would you plan on doing this? It doesn’t seem to fit with the nature of your program. If I had to choose between this and making the podcasts interactive to allow us to practice I would opt for more spoken practice over help with the characters.
I picked up some character books recently to supplement my chinesepod lessons. The reason is for personal improvement, getting back to my roots, and the possibility that I may need it one day for work. Pile on work, family life, school, and my time is very condensed to but a few moments throughout the day. That’s one of the strengths of chinesepod. It fits within most professionals busy lives. The other reason is just keep my brain going and understand the history of the character set. I was overly ambitious with chinese characters, and the sudden realization of the lack of time got in the way. My time spent on reading/writing practice has been eliminated, but I still find time for chinesepod. Maybe if you’re team created character flashcard games for the video ipod that matched the audio lesson for the day, I’d be able to squeeze practice in during lunch.
Just searched, unfortunately there is not developer SDK for the iPod. Maybe hosted wireless character based games I can play over my cell phone during lunch? Pardon my previous post with the horrid grammar.
Ken, how absolutely timely of you! I was just discussing this yesterday in my own blog!
I’d love to learn more about the characters. Given how much we look at them in the daily course of our lessons here, it seems only fitting that it should be part of the curriculum. Perhaps it can be a premium feature, much like the grammar tutorials. Completely optional, but there for you if you want to delve deeper.
I’d be all over it.
This immediately points to a different approach between levels, with zh-chinesepod requiring the former, particularly the media stuff (媒体), but also to upper intermediate.
But I’m not entirely sure what you mean by character recognition, is it pronunciation, meaning of individual characters, words, or just basic identification for say, dictionary lookup or some other need?
In any event, I personally find the etymological / cultural / historical context of characters of very little help to memorize characters (could be good fun though, the Singapore Strait Times have published cartoons on the subject).
What I do find useful is exploring phonetic components even if it is tricky to use them predictively (Wenlin is good for this). This is generally neglected, focus typically being on ‘radicals’.
Well, I’m sure there’s innovative things that can be done, too bad there’s no standard mp3 platform, PDAs/smartphones may be more of an option, and I’m sure something really cool could come out of a partnership with Pleco…
Yv
There are lots of good things coming with the premium subscribtion, but I they require that you work at the computer, and connected at that - there are ways to take *some* of the content offline but these are work arounds.
However there’s one very simple thing that would encourage character recognition, and that would be designing font enlargement into dialogue and expansion pages. Been requested in many occasions, and sure would mess up site design a bit but hey, that’s a quick win…
Yv
There seems to be less support for learning the characters than I would have thought, which is kind of surprising. Although I can completely understand why this is the case, since learning the characters is hard, time consuming work (comparitively speaking), I would agree with Greg and add that you are only learning half of the language and half of the culture if you can’t read the characters. Maybe I’m biased because I’ve been learning the characters all along, but I find that the writing reinforces the speaking and vice versa. It’s nice to be able to picture the characters in your head while you speak. And when you’re scanning through your memory trying to think of that word that is escaping you at the moment, it’s nice to be scanning through tangible characters, not arbitrary sounds. I kind of picture the characters as the foundation of the language, while everything else is built on top. It’s things like this that separate the mind of a native Chinese person from that of an English speaker, which is something you miss if you don’t know the characters.
Ken, I thought that the one lesson in which you did spend some time describing the “fu” character was really helpful. I can honestly say that I remember that character better than the rest because of how you picked it apart piece by piece, and derived its meaning based upon the pieces. It’s amazing how much easier things are to remember when we assign little devices to them like that. Whether spending the time each podcast to pick apart characters is the best use of the time is debatable, but I think it would be a shame if Chinesepod put less emphasis on the characters instead of more.
Ken,
No interest in learning characters. Since I’m determined to learn to speak Mandarin, and finding this somewhat daunting and determined not to give up, the idea of learning characters as well is overwhelming. It’s something I would love to do later when I can hold a conversation.
I am a businessman who travels to China several times a year. I learned 5 other languages in my life time but learning Chinese has an added challenges, reading and writing.
My approach to this challenge is patience in learning processes.
We tend to loose interest in subjects over time, if we can not achieve an almost “overnight success” with the subject matter.
Learning languages are lifelong endeavors, especially if you do not live in that country full time. you have to realize that many of us are hardly proficient in our own languages, so one should not set unrealistic expectations about learning new languages, this will lead to disappointments and we ultimately loose interest.
We should accept the fact the process will take a long time and requires patience.
Now that I am learning mandarin, my main objective is to have fun learning it on my own pace.
Enter “Chinese Pod”, this is a very powerful tool that was not available before internet, with every lesson I am able to learn real life conversations which makes learning fun and curious, because I know I will be able use these bits and pieces in real life.
I still do not recognize the Chinese characters but this does not bother me because one day I will learn that too. It is an accumulative process, the more you learn the more you want to learn, just keep it fun, and not only learn the language but learn about the culture and history also, this will keep you interested in the subject matter for a long time.
Be patient and Make it Fun!
Brent
“Greg T-K (谭一格) says:
..learning them reinforces my listening and disambiguates the pinyin.”
At first, learning character was really daunting, but everyone starts from zero. I was very tone-challenged before deciding to learn the character, now I’m much better. I agree with Greg T-K of what he said.
Jeff, let me second your comment on the discussion of the “fu” character. That wasn’t only helpful, it was fascinating, too.
Greg — 了 and its finer uses are ultimately something of a headache, but basically in this case, it’s acting as an aspect marker indicating a change in a situation - making this not so much “after you eat, what…” as “having eaten, what…” This is a pretty common usage, but it’s counterintuitive if you’re thinking of ‘le’ as a tense marker.
As for the topic at hand: I’m a big believer in character knowledge — both reading and writing — because I think that it makes things easier in the long term. Granted, my learning goals are probably different from most people’s — but learning characters can be a lot of fun. (Admittedly, nerdy fun. Also, there’s some strong words in that thar link, so don’t click if you find that kind of thing offensive.)
One reason that I find writing characters important is that it really reinforces - in my experience, at least - character knowledge, retention, and recall. It doesn’t take very much effort, once you’re past the first stages — just dull repetition — and it has a pretty big payoff.
For me the characters are the key to the language, Greg T-K and Jeff already explained why.
In the beginning I actually wanted to learn only reading and writing - until I found Chinesepod, fortunately. I think, you should keep your focus on spoken Mandarin. The transcripts are important, but enough for me to satisfy my hanzi needs. The font enlargement would be helpful, though.
I feel it is important to be able to recognize characters for many of the reasons given by others, but I don’t necessarily think that’s where ChinesePod should invest its resources. I think the podcast is the centerpiece of ChinesePod and the thing that sets it apart from other language learning systems. There are other resources available to help learn characters, so I’d rather see ChinesePod put it’s available resources into the speaking and listening pieces. That said, I do find the occasional explanations of the characters very very helpful.
One major reason to study characters that I found out rather quickly at a low level was the limitations of learning to speak Chinese, which has become exacerbated now that I’m at a more advanced level. Learning to read means you can communicate/read anything from the region, even some Japanese and Korean depending on the era and other factors, but learning to speak Mandarin limits you to merely one dialect. In my city now that I want more speaking practice on complicated subjects, my most educated Chinese friend’s native dialect is Xiang, and Mandarin is a second language to him that he has told me he doesn’t pronounce properly. Some of the other local immigrants speak Cantonese, or even Taiwanese Mandarin which switches some of the sounds to the point it’s confusing, so speaking has it’s own challenges that I haven’t quite figured out how to get around yet.
Ken this one has really flown over (or under) my radar.
What is character recognition for if not reading?
I can only imagine a kind of slow? character recognition might be useful to me if I lived in China and Taiwan (for reading signs maybe).
I also thought that maybe for pinyin input but there again there is even an input system online that shows brief definitions undereach character that pops up so even the unitiated can bash chinese out like a maniac if they know the pinyin for the words (please tell me there isn’t a desktop system that does this because I will write one next year and make a small fortune :)).
Perhaps it is actually faster to aquire recognition of lots of characters by reading (I think so).
I think there is a very big danger for people to get sucked into studying characters from the get go, just becasue they are fascinating or beautiful or because each one apparently has a discrete meaning. But I think it would be perfectly possible to learn 5000 discrete characters off by heart and still not be able to read or speak Chinese in any meaningful way.
By all means add some character elements but please make it clear to new starters that there is an alternative so they can make up their own minds. If people want to learn characters then fine but I am 100% convinced that for the majority in the long run they will learn to read and write Chinese faster if they delay the character learning (it is down to personal choice). The nearest I came to switching to another language in the early stages was the almost impenatrable wall of character that seemed to face me in some of the lesson comments, coupled with the fact that so many voices and approaches on the web stifled learning by advocating taking a strong dose of characters in the early stages “chinese newbie character constipation syndrome”.
Chinesepod with its audio approach brought me back down to earth thank god, so as long a there is no change in tack in that direction then that is fine with me.
For me learning the hanzi is all important. It disambiguates not only the pinyin like someone else said but also what I hear. Some sounds are too similar to really distinguish in my brain without the added support of knowing the characters involved.
Important for all people struggling with the font size: use Firefox. Font enlargement through the menu or Ctrl + mouse scrollwheel does not work with MSIE but it does with Firefox. When I use the ‘dialogue’ and ‘expansion’ modules I always start by increasing the font size. If I need more detail I use the ‘mouse over’ box to see a better picture of the character. If I want to know how to draw the character, especially the stroke order I use one of the websites (zhongwen.com, …) or one of the free tools (dimsum,…) to help me.
Marc in Belgium
Ken,
I can’t imagine learning a language without addressing the reading & writing aspects along with the listening & speaking. This makes learning Chinese extra challenging for me, as a person who grew up using a roman character alphabet to read & write several western languages.
I think that this is a bonus, and I get pleasure from the challenge. The advantage that I have is time; I have a lot of time on my hands.
I do much of my reading & writing study using your podcast material, along with texts I find elsewhere: poems, recipes, email correspondence, etc. I really enjoy those lessons where you discuss, even briefly, the history of a given character.
The balance of reading/writing and listening/speaking ebbs and flows, in my case. The one constant for maintaining interest for me is that as much of the study is within some real-life context. For while I really enjoy the process, I do hope, eventually, to be able to travel to places where only Mandarin is spoken and be able to meet people, take care of myself, make friends, work, etc.
../iliana
I was learning Chinese for my own reasons before I married and had a baby, now they are my main focus and need more attention and dedication as more is at stake. I was hoping more of an explaination of characters was given. Example being “hao” the two parts of the character being elements of two other characters…. like one part is “zi” from child. Although it may look abvious to some people it was not to me and this helped alot in forming a system in my mind of how to start recognizing characters (which is only the last few weeks been a think I feel willing and strong enough to consider taking on. If there is part of Chinese pod which already gives this please direct to the right section. A character archive, same as lesson archive.
To use Hao as an example - A breakdown of the two parts from other characters make up Hao, inform which other character it comes from if it does and what they have in commmon to be put together in Hao. first part from woman and second part form Chind, both seen to be “good” so used to make word hao - good. Maybe include a few examples of how to use the word, a few sentances maybe to give idea of context to use in.
would halep see character a little clearer as opposed to an overwhelming creation of lines….
Thanks….
Have a good one…
By the way Ken, love your voice and humour,.. helps when feeling homesick…
More than just Characters -
ChinesePod is already the greatest PodCast that there is, even without any further improvement. But will that always be so? It’s important to keep improving, but do most people really listen to a PodCast to learn Characters? I’ll agree that it’s occasionally interesting to hear about some notable aspect of a Character, but you aren’t really going to teach Characters that way. There’s already enough software out there that’s better suited to this purpose, and anyone can just buy a program and own it, so I wouldn’t expect a potential subscriber to jump in because of it. I’ll agree with Erica, as usual … to improve from where you are now, make the PodCasts more Interactive. As previously advised, this can be formulated in a premium PodCast, if that makes it more doable from a format and revenue perspective. After all, this is supposed to be ChinesePod, not Chinese Programmers Paradise. Interactive is the single most important improvement that you can make. Go from input-only to input, processing, and output. Next, create a deliberate bridge series between Elementary and Intermediate, or at least create a designated Upper Intermediate level. I’ve heard some Newbie lessons that were more advanced than some Elementary lessons, so there’s some overlap there for better or for worse, but I’ve never found the Elementary lessons that serve as a gateway to Intermediate. (I know, entirely selfish of me to ask for it, but am I alone?) Also, I would like to hear more discussion at the Elementary level about how to properly construct a sentence from known vocabulary. If you change the word order in some sentences, you have a different meaning. But how, when, where, and why? That’s very important to know in order to spontaneously create correct new sentences from already learned vocabulary independently of repeating memorized sentences. Also, the PodCasts often seem rushed, and I suspect needlessly so. Detail is left out in the interest of time. Since one PodCast doesn’t pick up from where the last left off, who knows when you’ll be back, if ever, to provide the extra detail that was left out. Lately, I’ve noticed a little review at the end of some lessons, which is really, really great, but it’s rushed. Does Cinderella’s carriage change back into a pumpkin if the PodCast takes another 5 or 10 minutes? These observations don’t detract from the truly wonderful and amazing work that’s done here.
My main focus has been on improvement with my spoken Chinese, with some practice on the computer typing pinyin input to convert to Hanzi. And so I have tried to improve my character recognition ability, with little or no writing practice.
However, I think that any enhancement to Chinese character learning would be of benefit.
Perhaps you could provide a section which explains the 214 radicals and how these can be a valuable learning aid. I recall that you did a show on “Looking Up Characters in a Dictionary”…some additional (basic) podcast lessons focused on characters would be great too.
Thanks !
Marc,
I can’t understand how knowing a character helps distinguish sounds that are the same.
Don’t you have to take a stab at the meaning to select the right character in your head. If you can do this already you don’t need to do it (if that makes any sense).
A number of people have put forward a similar arguement, but surely knowing 20 or so characters for shi4 means that if you hear shi4 you have to understand its meaning from context to select the right character. If you can do this you should be able to go straight to meaning and the character can go hang (unless you are writing). You don’t need to know 20 characters for shi4 to speak Chinese, just that there are 20 meanings for this sound.
This is spoken language, I now have a horrible suspicion that if you learn the meanings from the characters rather than from the sounds then you are stuck with a mental process that needs to virtually convert spoken language to written language (which is where you are learning from) in your head and then ‘read’ the language to understand it. This wouldn’t happen if you were learning another European language becasue there is a closer match between the sounds and the written words.
Is there a remote chance that my suspicion is correct at least on some level. It would explain an awful lot that has been confusing me. The way I learn, the sound is the meaning, I only learn characters for sounds and associated meanings that are already familiar friends. This also means (still to be proven but starting to pan out) that as I learn to read I am learning to convert a stream of characters straight into a spoken narrative in my head (fast parsing) and as I get better the spoken narrative will vanish and the characters will convert straight to a stream of meaning (very fast parsing and what happens when I read English).
Sorry to go on so but this is like a revelation to me. It perfectly explains the strong feelings I developed against learning characters too early becasue when I tried to do it that way it felt like I was wading through treacle.
Also this implies difficulties in the early stages because your ear has not developed enough to hear the Chinese sounds properly so you can only learn meaning and character at this point and the all important appropriate sound that a native speaker would use is out of the equation. Hence my strong aversion to learning characters until I am ready for them.
This also fits in nicely with the vital role of pinyin in the early stages.
Although my initial goal was just spoken Chinese, I’d actually get more use from being able to read and type Chinese and already have a little. After a year of learning spoken Chinese, I’ve not yet had the opportunately (or maybe just not courage) to use on it someone who may actually understand me.
Frank Fradella has a great post on this topic right here:
http://blogs.chinesepod.com/newbie/
If you’re not reading Frank’s blog, well you should be!
Ken Carroll
Looks like the scales really tip in favor of learning characters. I still can’t figure out how to teach writing in a podcast. The number of comments here shows how passionate we are about this (compared to the previous read/write web post).
I’ll vote for keeping the podcast all about spoken Mandarin.
My point: I was never interested in characters. Too many, too difficult, need to start when you are 3, I am too old, and a few more excuses….
However, working in Hong Kong I know maybe 100 just accidentally, cause you see them often and they tend to be the simpler once.
Then, a few month ago, here on CPod there was a blog, saying, that in the PC age you don’t really have to write… The PC does that.
That gave me a paradigm shift. So, I did install the Chinese input on my English Win Xp and used 中文 in QQ. If you know some Pinyin then it’s really easy.
Character recognition improves a lot in a very short time. Good thing with the PC, you can’t miss a stroke. Still have to know what character to chose though.
OK, with that method I will never be able to handwrite. But i don’t have to. Frankly, how much ENGLISH we handwrite nowadays? And if I need to write a character I can still use my PDA anyway…
However, CPod needs to cater for both parallel, those who want to learn, and those who don’t. But CPod should focus on the current way to write, that is via PC. Handwriting is so much out of date and has little practical applications.
Of course in a formal language school you will handwrite till your fingers bleed. But that’s because they developed their material in the 1960s and made little changes since them.
CPod seems to be more open minded and hope that they can see this more radical approach.
Just my 2 fen…
For me, learning how to read and write the characters are an important aspect to the learning process, just as important as speaking. The written word in any language is a powerful tool. I hope to become well rounded with Chinese and find learning to write, type and recognize characters quite useful and enjoyable and not really that difficult. I notice also, that not many people outside of China use the zhuyin system to learn Chinese; I am not sure why, as I have found it much easier than pinyin. Does anyone here use zhuyin, or am I alone?
I have a lot of admiration for the adult learner who learns to both speak and write Mandarin well. But I also sympathize with Chris (mandarin student)’s position.
For me, the decision to postpone and maybe forgo learning the characters was an easy one. Right from the beginning, it seemed to me that learning spoken and written Mandarin together would be equivalent to learning two or three languages simultaneously. Even in European languages, I have seen too many students get bogged down in reading, writing and grammar and never acquire oral/aural proficiency.
Over the years, studying four different languages, I’ve analyzed and tweaked my study methods. I’ve found that, for me, after an initial period of seriously studying the sound system, the quickest and most efficient way to oral/aural fluency is to spent virtually all my study time listening to and imitating native speakers. (Using recordings, media, live eavesdropping and eventually conversation) Over the years, many people have told me that my way is not the best, but they never seem to learn as quickly or well as I do, even though many are as smart or smarter than I am. I feel that time spent studying characters would simply slow down my progress.
That said, I must confess that I yearn to be able to read Chinese. I have bought a set of flash cards and sometimes look at them while I am taking my bath. But so far I have resisted the temptation to get side-tracked by studying them seriously.
Ken – I took a look at Frank’s blog, and you’re right: He is a genius. He should teach Characters, if anyone should, as soon as he figures each one out for himself. With his method, even I might actually enjoy learning the darn criters. But look at what we have here … grown people, an author even, making up creative, but convoluted modern stories to remember some jumble of squiggles that were once meaningful pictograms which originally had their own stories to tell. Man takes a giant leap … backward.
Hiya Ken.
Thanks for clearing up my confusion about the simplified characters. I guess I misunderstood my chinese teacher when I showed her one of the newbie lessons. Rats! I no longer have an excuse for not learning them!
In regard to those of us who respond to the blogs maybe not being a representative sample, I think the standard technique is to form a hypothesis based on anecdotal evidence (blog posts in this case) then use statistical techniques (surveys, product pilots) to confirm the hypothesis.
Anyways, in regard to characters, I think writing is an integral part of the language, but I’m somewhat impatient to learn the language so I’ve focused on pragmatic things like learning to recognize characters, enter them by computer, draw them well enough to look them up in an electronic dictionary, etc. So far, I haven’t delved into caligraphy or spent time writing characters over and over again by hand, which Chinese friends tell me is the way they learned.
As to us self-improvers having different needs then people who learn the language of necessity or career motivation, my interest is a little broader, maybe. I really liked the lessons on anthropology, banking etc (stuff that’s a little off the beaten path), but I really appreciate the tips on everyday usage, as well.
30 Love - When I first started playing tennis in China I didn’t know how to keep score. In Chinese that is.
I had fun, I went along with things, my partners kept score, or the occassional ‘deuce’ in English keep me on track. Then I started to learn ‘bi’ which is the Chinese version of ‘to’ when comparing scores. As in forty-bi-fifteen, well nobody understands me if I say it that way; si shi bi shi wu, or 40/15, or 四十比十五.
I think reading and writing Chinese is the same, it’s part of the game. The communicate in Chinese game. While we can get along fine just playing, being able to keep score is also part of it. Being able to take in all the sights and sounds of the game make it more meaningful.
It’s taken me a good year to be able to say only about what 6 tennis words, 15, 30, 40, (I’ll exclude deuce and out which is typically yelled in English-like form), bi, 40-all si shi ping, 40/5 si shi wu. I still haven’t gotten ‘advantage or ‘tie-breaker.
If we were to apply my analogy to the written Chinese lexicon, 1 year: 6 words, x years : 20,000 words….hmmm. The game, it’s for a lifetime. Serves up. 我发。
Just going to throw my two cents in.
I’m not totally sure what I’m going to do with my chinese as of yet, but there are certainly useful characters that people could benefit from. Just the daily stuff that one might see around, the sort of common but impromptu situations that chinesepod generally deals with.
Chris — what’s nice about knowing characters is that when you’re talking about something, particularly something technical - in this example, medicing - and you hear an unfamiliar term - say, fàngshèzhì - you can break it down: zhì there is probably 治 as in 治疗, “treatment,” and then fàngshè is probably 放射, 放 as in “emit,” 射 as in “rays,” and so you can parse the new term fàngshèzhì to “emit-rays-treatment,” or more properly, “radiotherapy.”
Granted, if you can keep all of the possible meanings for each syllable in your head, then you don’t need the characters to do this — but I’ve found that characters make nice mnemonic anchors for this kind of thing. It’s possible to do without, to be sure — after all, a majority of people throughout history have been illiterate, and most of them did more or less OK — but I don’t think that learning characters really takes nearly as much effort as it at first appears to. There’s a large initial investment of effort, but once you have one or two hundred characters under your belt, you can learn new characters in terms of other characters: as Sunny said above, 好 “good” maps into 女 “woman” and 子 “child,” and if you know 女 then you can make all kinds of other characters — a woman 女 under 宀 a roof gives you 安 “peaceful.” 女 plus the sound made by horse 马 gives you 妈, “mother.” And in a delightully un-PC traditional character (it’s been made less sexist in the simplified form), three 女 women together equalled 姦, “treachery.”
Anyway, I guess it’s clear that I’m biased in favor of learning characters, though I’m also not sure how one would teach them in a podcast.
interesting & exciting discussion!
we japanese start to learn chinese by “reading”, cause we roughly can understand the meaning of chinese letters that are similar to japanese ones.
we always have the image of letters in our mind when we read/speak chinese.
so it is extremely interesting to find that non-汉字 people start to learn chinese by sound, changing “ideogram” to “phonogram”, and also i personally cannot stop admiring their (or your) effort!
it would be an excellent way to learn chinese from the sounds, and actually chinese government also once had planned to change chinese characters to phonographic alphabets to make it easier for not-so-well educated chinese.
but anyway it is unavoidable for advanced learners to read 汉字, so i listed up some suggestion for foreigners in japan to learn japanese 汉字 for reference.
1) pay attention to each element of one 汉字 and make up the network of similar 汉字s.
i cannot explain well because of my poor english, so pls. refer to this web site. The key is “Component Analysis”
http://www.zhongwen.com/
2) every “ideogram” has its own history/story so to create a series of imaginative stories is the key to learn 汉字
3) remember how to write and write many times by yourself, forget the meaning. we cannot memorize everything, so just remind the shape of 汉字 when you write.
4) do not think that to learn 汉字 is difficult but think that to learn 汉字 is interesting.i introduce some web site to show interesting attempt to learn japanese character(=so called KANJI)
http://www.kanjisite.com/
http://www.nuthatch.com/java/kanjicards/
http://www2.gol.com/users/jpc/.....anjiLearn/
I would suggest that characters make terrible mnemonic anchors because of the effort required to learn them.
Also just to make it clear I have never advocated not learning them , I just think that the learning process should proceed in a more natural order. Literacy as part of being an educated person comes after learning the basic mechanics of a language for your first language. I learnt to speak pretty reasonable English, then I learn to write it and extended it a bit, then I read more and ‘got educated’ I suppose it doesn’t matter in the long run I can do what I like, it is a shame if more people keep being put of Chinese becasue of too early exposure to characters.
I actually think it is a very bad idea to drive your learning from the written form of Chinese it should work the other way around.
Learn Chinese faster, the Shanghai way
By Ho Ai Li
WHEN the Shanghai Experimental School started using computers to teach pupils to recognise Chinese characters first before reading and writing in 1991, many experts were sceptical.
Even the school’s teachers were somewhat ‘uneasy’ as it was untested, recalled Ms Han Rujun, 37, a senior teacher at the research-oriented institution.
But the results have been encouraging.
Pupils can learn 1,000 characters per semester - five times as many as what they formerly learnt, she said. They learn up to 2,500 characters in two years.
Ms Han was here to showcase the school’s methods at a 1 1/2 day conference for primary school Chinese teachers which ended yesterday.
Sorry, parts of the last message disappeared during transmission. This article appeared in the Straits Times newspaper and the link to the article is now dead. I didn’t reproduce the whole thing because thats a no-no right?
Having spent inordinate amounts of time over years to learn 汉字, and not without success, and still fascinated by the written word and unable to do without, I have to agree with chris(mandarin_student) that characters make terrible mnemonic anchors, for the spoken language.
Conversely, you can read faire amounts of Chinese without being able to understand much of the spoken language. As Ken said, you this by Skimming, scanning, guessing meaning from context, etc., you learn to read ‘graphically/pictorially’ without sub-vocalization, you hardly need to know the pronunciation, there are textbooks that teach you those skills (e.g. for HSK preparation).
I would disagree with Brendan though, that once you have one or two hundred characters under your belt, you can learn new characters in terms of other characters. For me, the graphical examples she gives might work for the first 100-200, even 400 characters, but don’t scale up when you reach 2000-3000. Aside from the sheer number and mnemonic effort required, there’s no correlation between complexity and frequency. But if nothing else, most 汉字 have a phonographic component so those are useful anchors that you inductively learn. Another point is most words are made up of 2 characters, 3 in a number of cases and 4 for 成语 and other frequently used expressions. You learn those as oral patterns in one sound block, focusing on any single character won’t help but learning them all together will require substantial effort.
Yv
I agree with Chris that characters have little mnemonic value as a means to remember the words. My point was that, if you do wish to learn the characters, there are a number of things you can do to help remember them. Discussing their etymology is one way.
Ken Carroll
Ken,
Here is an idea for the evolution of chinesepod. After the audio podcast, you can developp some little video podcast that would be a sort of Karaoke version of the intermediate lessons. It could be a transcription of the full text in mandarin with a series of one or two sentences in chinese written in white at the same time on a black background and we would see on the screen the progression of the characters during the prononciation.
Everything Jenny say will be on the screen and the words explained in english will be underlined. It’s also a great way to explain chinese grammar with different colors for subject, verbs en complements.
Continue the good work.
From all I saw Chinese is deeply embedded in the written language with its eons of development - much more than e.g. English or German.
The characters encode semantical units (morphems) that carry most of the meaning of the words in which they are injected. I started to remember Chinese words relatively efficiently only after I invested some time in founding a comfortable socket of character recognition knowledge.
For the very first steps you might not need the Hanzi but as soon as you start heaping up vocabulary the only efficient way to fork through all those homonyms is by connecting them to the Characters.
I personally love Chinese characters. However, personal attachments aside, If Chinese is ever to emerge from its elite cocoon and become a widely-taught world language on a par with English, French & Spanish, it will have to become alphabetic. This is especially true if one is considering teaching it in the public schools to anyone but heritage learners (students of Chinese heritage).
Pop-culture - I figure that when pro-ball players are sporting hanzi, or hanzi-like characters on their skins, that means there’s quite a bit of interest. Did you know that the homeopathic and alternative-medicine markets are multi-million dollar markets in the U.S.
What’s so hard about having an interesting 5 minute hanzi podcast that describes the strokes, somehow magically appears in my iPod visually, and has some interesting anecedotes, menumoneuics, and banter (geez, hanzi is easy compared to English spelling! I know I got 3 out of 3 wrong in those last three words).
I figure 2 pods a day of high-freguency, high cross-pollination characters would be a great free or premium service or some combo thereof. On top of the regular conversational podcasts. Just be creative and have a variety of approaches.
Why not commit to trying this for 100 characters? It can give Cpod a chance to work out the back-office production, test the market, give the Cpod audience a nice pilot series. 50 days to fun-literacy, 1.5 months to a whole new visual world. And a possible cure for Ken’s phobia.
If you keep it up for 6 months you’ll pretty much blow away all the other materials out there. Flashcards will become the confetti of learning materials.
试试吧！
Henning,
From what I can see Mandarin Chinese is so not embedded in its written language that you can write Cantonese or other dialects in it and even Japanese (give or take a few characters). Try associating French sounds with English writing (eg dog is pronounced chien (or whatever it is), do this for every word and you can write French in English (now do you see the difference).
You are looking at it from the point of view of someone who is learning a language upside down (IMHO). Yes there is a cultural element which I applaud but that culture is not always related to ‘Chinese’ spoken or written as you would recognise it in the Mandarin you are learning today. In fact the only reason that the written forms have remained so consistent over time is that they are NOT solidly linked to the sounds (any warning bells here?). If we hadn’t changed the way we write English from early English to modern English it would be even more confusing to foreigners than it is now
A semantic unit or morpheme is actually far more relevant to the sounds if you are talking about speaking and listening to spoken Mandarin. And yes I still continue somehow to learn vocabulary mostly through sound and pinyin with the writing coming much after.
I didn’t need to know the characters to make the connections of hua4 in dian4hua4 xiao4hua4 shuo1hua4 pu3tong1hua4 jiang3hua4 dui4hua4 etc. etc. etc. what I needed was just a mental switch to accepting Mandarin that I heard as a stream of syllables that may or may not be associated to adjacent syllables (somewhat different to the English I am used to). After a conversation with my Skype partner about the differences between a picture and a photograph I am aware of a new hua4 associated with drawing relating words (lots of them of which I know just a few so far). I don’t seem to have any problems keeping the two separate or myriads of similar cases. I know the character for the first hua4 (at least to read) because I have been working with many of its words for a long time. I don’t know the character for the drawing one eventually I will but I don’t need it at the moment.
Most Westerners who start to learn an Asian language do not fully understand the implications of the differences in the writing system and are in no position to make such important decisions at the start. Most Asians don’t fully understand the implications because they grew up with it (it just is!).
The unwashed masses are never going to learn Chinese unless there is a huge change in focus. Without that change Mandarin Chinese is just for academics, mavericks, anal retentives, people who like pretty symbols, people who are forced to learn it, hobbiests who either have bags of time or don’t care whether it takes 10 years to learn …… etc. Oh and of course Chinese people
For a comprehensive discussion of the Chinese-embedded-in-hanzi fallacy, check the book Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma by Wm. C. Hannas, relevant chapter online, The Homonym Problem in particular, under http://www.pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html
It’s a fascinating book, the main argument being that Chinese could, and should do away with characters much as Vietnamese did, and Korean to a large extent.
Yv
Incidentally, one thing I learnt in Hannas’ book is that some bold Japanese politicians had proposed at the end of the 19th century had proposed that English replace Japanese as the national language, in an effort to speed up economic development…
Yv
I really don’t think the characters are going anywhere anytime soon. And it doesn’t take all that much effort to learn them, even if you learn them slowly, you will still build up a fairly decent word library after a while. And lets face it, a person still needs to write by hand, as a computer is not always available or when the person you are trying to communicate with doesn’t understand Mandarin. For example, I often go shopping at a local Chinese grocery store which is owned by a Cantonese speaking family, but who can understand what I want if I write out what it is that I need. Here the spoken word takes a back seat to the written.
Chris & co,
Learning the characters is not that difficult.
It’s like a little game of memorization but you must train yourself to get meaning, pronunciation and link with key vocabulary as fast as possible (say, less than 1 second).
Because at the end the most challenging task is to read movie subtittles quickly enough to follow a movie. To do that, you can’t read precisely every characters but you must rather learn the differences between them.
In my head I don’t see the full stokes of the character but only what makes it unique among the 4000 other.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I’d agree that most existing Chinese-language teching methods tend to way overemphasize characters at the beginning, and that thinking of Chinese as being “made up of characters” is a fallacy that ends up really hurting people’s spoken ability. That said, I’ve found that they’re useful and necessary once you get beyond a certain point in your studies.
I’ve found that learning characters in terms of components does scale up, but that may just be because I write in longhand as much as possible, so I’ve got the muscle memory to back things up. And really, for all the scary figures that you read about characters, for most intents and purposes, learning the most common 500-1000 will stand you in pretty good stead, assuming that you’re not interested in reading literature.
Anyway, I guess it’s about differences in learning goals, as discussed in an earlier post. My goal is to be able to use Chinese as well as an educated native speaker, and so for that, characters are a necessity. If I were only interested in being able to get around, then I guess there’d be no need to learn, except for maybe things like “MILITARY COMPOUND” and “HIGH VOLTAGE” and “THIS TOILET IS BROKEN.”
As for the romanization of Chinese: it’s been demonstrated pretty conclusively that it can be done completely effectively for modern Chinese, provided that one writes in a colloquial register (there’s a fascinating article about this by Victor Mair over at pinyin.info); that said, if full romanization was ever going to happen, it would’ve been in the 1950s. For now, barring seriously major upheavals in linguistic policy, it ain’t looking likely, despite the best hopes of stalwarts like DeFrancis, Mair, and Zhou Youguang.
@goulnik: I stumbled across Hannas’ site before but was deterred by its zealous appeal. Although he might have its point I have the slight impression this guy is biased.
I personally witnessed an email-exchange among native mandarin speakers several years ago which had to be conducted in Pinyin because of a missconfigured Mail-Gateway. This led to several *serious* misunderstandings, which where eventually solved when GIF-Pictures of the crucial Hanzi-characters were exchanged.
I also got the impression that Chinese adults *think* in those characters (this is what I meant above with “embededness”). The kindergarten kids still think in syllables, the adults in Hanzi (A sidenote: I saw Chinese kids who learned English by memorizing written English words completely distinct from the pronounciation - and treated each character as if it were a stroke. No connection to the pronounciation. A didactic nightmare).
@chris: In your Hua4 examples it is indeed relatively easy to trace back the meaning to 话 and not to e.g. 画, 化 or 桦. But what about for example hua4zhuang1 - could be 化装 (dress up) or 化妆 (put on make-up)? 装 and 妆 divide the two words in your memory and they suddenly do not blur into each other anymore.
My personal (yet still untested) theory is that Chinese would not have all those homonyms without Hanzi. It is the written language that needs precision because you have less richness and context in your expression. If your writing follows your pronounciation, the differentiation needs to be already in the spoken word. In Chinese this is not necessary as the meaning of a character is often detached from its pronounciation.
A very pragmatic argument:
If you go to China and you do not know how to read characters, you are transformed into a helpless pre-schooler - believe me, I had that feeling more than once. This year (after the character learning) it was as if I could suddenly see after a long time of blindness, although I still have enough blanks left. I felt like in 1st class once again, when I enthiusiastically deciphered all those signs
And even if Hannas had highly profound and valid arguments, he would not change China overnight.
my take: I would like more emphasis on learning the characters. I’ve started this on my own, I find it’s interesting the learn how they’re formed and it gives a deeper knowledge of the word.
Some others have remarked on traditional/simplified. I do like having the traditional in addition to simplified (as there is on the pdf transcripts). I’m in the states and most of the schools seem to teach tradition, I wouldn’t want to see that completely left out and attention devoted only to simplified.
thanks
A curse upon you Ken for starting me on characters again
@henning I admitted many times before that if you actually live in China or Taiwan there is a more pressing pragmatic need to learn some characters however most of these discussions kick off on the basis of foreigners learning Chinese and if we assume a big take up then it is probably safe to say that most of these foreigners will learn in there native country even if they visit China later.
If a chinese person randomly blurts out the word hua4zhuang1 you have no way of knowing whether they mean to dress up or put on makeup, neither would I or any Chinese person that may be passing. You need a contextual que before you can ‘decide’ which character to pick, I need the same contextual que to decide which meaning to assign to the word. If you take your arguement to the extreme then illiterate Chinese people are rendered incapable of talking about makeing up or dressing (rather unfair) .
I have actually asked five Chinese speakers who after a few seconds thought assured me that they didn’t think in characters (you can tell this subject is a particular bugbear of mine :)) maybe they are not aware of it? Again how do illiterate Chinese people think, I suspect there are many illiterate Chinese who are very capable and agile speakers (particularly in commercial enterprises) it would surprise me greatly if educated Chinese people would add another layer to slow down their thoughts.
You have probably noticed that most Chinese people do not think about tones either. I often see them tell me the wrong tones when I ask and then backtrack and correct themselves. Usually if I ask it is obvious that they repeat the word in their head to get the tone even if they had said perfectly in a sentance a few seconds before.
I do agree that the character system has probably limited the number of sounds in Chinese, probably due to a reluctance to overload existing characters or even worse invent more of them to learn ;).
I will learn to read Chinese but even a Chinese pre-schooler has already pick up some pretty good understanding of the spoke language so why should I start before they do?
My comments are biased because I live and work in China. But I’d add that in my opinion, there are a number of really, really good textbooks on learning hanzi out there. I think character learning is, at the end of the day, well served by traditional hard work and rote memorization. This old school methodology allready allows you to learn hanzi on your terms, where and when you wish to, and at the pace you are comfortable with. So I don’t see the drastic improvement in methodolgy and outcomes that I do in learning spoken chinese via ChinesePod.
Right on, Ma Ding
I’d be interested in citations of your favorite hanzi-learning textbooks, if you have them available.
谢谢,
../iliana
I have actually asked five Chinese speakers who after a few seconds thought assured me that they didn’t think in characters (you can tell this subject is a particular bugbear of mine
You have probably noticed that English, French, Italian, etc, speakers do not think in words spelled out in Roman either. They probably do think in words (meaning something approaching a collection of morphemes or something like that, just as Chinese people do).
How do illiterate people in the Western world think? Children are an example. They do not fail to think and speak simply because they cannot read and write.
I have spent a long time learning some Cantonese (mainly at home) and can order food and converse at simple levels and understand more. It is only recently that I have developed more of an interest in characters and can now relate some characters to their Cantonese pronunciation as well as their Mandarin pronunciation.
However, the point I am making is that language is primarily a spoken spoken and mental activity. It is secondarily a written activity, mainly for the literate, and with some literate people engaging in just as much (or more) written as spoken activity, although many people read much more than they speak.
You have probably noticed that most Chinese people do not think about tones either. I often see them tell me the wrong tones when I ask and then backtrack and correct themselves. Usually if I ask it is obvious that they repeat the word in their head to get the tone even if they had said perfectly in a sentance a few seconds before.
You know, English, French, Italian, etc, use tone as well, just in a different way to Chinese and other tonal languages. I don’t believe that English speakers are aware of the tone of voice they are using either. Tone, and other stress indications, are automatically added as the need arises.
As to learning characters, I am starting to find that I can recognise the components in characters and when I see new ones on a truck or sign (even in the SF Bay area, or in China Town) I have started to decompose them into their individual pieces as an aid to remembering them later. However, the only way to learn them is to write them down again and again and to read texts with them in.
So why not provide transcripts in .gb or unicode format so that the characters could be studied and analyzed using Clavis Sinica or Wenlin?
Hi chris,
well I guess I exaggerated there. Of course you can think without written symbols. But when it comes to *conciously* analyzing language the foundamental unit a Chinese adult applies is the symbol, not the sound. If there is ambigiouty in the spoken part you ask for the character. In our example you will hear: “西装的装码?”. Those phrases come up a lot, because you have all the ambigiouty and the characters are the remedy.
The problem with written language is that there are no contextual cues and neither do you have the possibility to interact and ask for the context. That is why reading pinyin is so tedious (and sometimes close to impossible - see my anecdote above). Just try it out with the zh-transcripts - reading the Hanzi version goes much smoother, because you do not have to scan the text back and forth to guess the context and deduct the meaning from there.
Another point I want to repeat here: At a certain point the characters give you a learning boost. It makes remembering easier, because you will find that many words can be more or less directly deducted from and remembered with the characters. Many words seem to be constructed like lego from the semantical blocks that come with the Hanzi.
Eventually you do not get around learning the written language, even if you are not in China - maybe even more so. Written communication is just as important as spoken (right now we we communicate in written language, don’t we?). And you learn a lot from written materials. Those are all in Hanzi.
David Porter, select all in the pdf transcript, copy and paste into Wenlin, or NJStar for that matter. This works fine except from some of the earlier Advanced shows (all you’ll need is remove a few extra line breaks.) Incidentally, those tools can easily switch between simplified and traditional, which make one of the versions superfluous.
Someone asked earlier why change methods that have been proven over the years, yeah, why do we even bother with computers? And just because they’ve worked for so long doesn’t mean they’re not more effective ways (this goes for any language education, not just Chinese, see TCSL discussion on http://blogs.chinesepod.com/20.....able-tcsl/).
But talking of tools, you can also use Wenlin for stroke order animation, flashcards, component exploration, and Pleco on the go also for flashcards, easily exported from ChinesePod vocab lists.
Yv
I suppose a lot of people are drawn to Chinese because of its ‘mystique’ and the characters play a big part in that. For good reason. Characters are indeed fascinating to a foreign learner. However over the past 4 or so years of studying Mandarin (on and off) I’ve come to realize a few things:
1) Characters are beautiful….. Characters are amazing… Yes yes there truly are. But learning them is borderline impossible, and the only way, it seems, to effectively remember them is by hammering them into my brain by rote learning, and quite honestly that’s just not always the most enjoyable thing to do.
2) I’m probably not going to dedicate my life to Chinese. Therefore, I’m probably never going to be able to actually read Chinese - not beyond simple daily things. And that’s just a sad reality. I can currently recognize around 1000 words, but I’m continually forgetting and confusing them. I’m still working at it, but I honestly don’t know what I hope to acheive. I used to think I would one day it would be nice to be able to read a newspaper, but I’m beginning to wonder why the hell would I want to read a newspaper in Chinese anyways. Is it really worth a million hours of rote learning so that one day, in the distant future, I can sit down with my green tea and my Chinese newspaper?
3) Maybe I’m wrong… maybe it’s not that hard… But I know one thing for sure: I can make far more ground with speaking and listening. Pinyin is my friend and I’ll never leave it behind. In fact, I’m beginning to take a strong disliking to purist, hardcore people who say bad things about ‘relying too much on pinyin’. There’s no shame in pinyin, and occasionally, I think, we might just be a whole lot better off with more pinyin and fewer of those pesky characters that I can’t understand….
First of all, I want to learn characters because it’s part of the language, and because one of my main reasons for learning Chinese is to be able to read Chinese research in my field.
Second of all, I’m fascinated by all the arguments that Chinese will have to smarten up and be romanised if it expects to be allowed onto the world stage to compete with English, etc., etc. As if Chinese has to comply to what we want. Hasn’t anyone noticed how big China is, and how many Chinese people there are? It’s all very well for ChinesePod to say we can ‘learn Chinese on our terms’, but some of the terms are dictated by the language itself, and hanzi is one of them.
Margaret,
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the Chinese language has to ’smarten up’ or conform to outside standards. But the TCSL methods have to. As I see it, we’re looking for a workable method that helps non-Chinese to learn the language. If we find one, more people will learn it. If we don’t, less people will. It’s simply a matter of which tools we use. No-one is demadning that we tamper with the Chinese language in order to benefit ourselves.
Ken Carroll
I’d love it if someone could come up with a new pedagogy for character teaching, but to the best of my knowledge, the only way to learn written Chinese is to get serious about it, realize that learning anything requires a certain investment of time, and then set about doing it. It’s not a tremendous amount of fun to write out each new character twenty times, but once you’ve done it, the characters are yours. And in the experience of everyone I know who’s ever studied Chinese beyond the phrase-book level, it just gets easier and easier to acquire new characters as you go along. The rote learning is boring, to be sure — but you can do it while you’re doing other things! Write out characters while you watch TV or listen to music; you’re mainly just trying to get them into muscle memory anyway. It’s still probably never going to become the national passtime, but it does make those study sessions a bit easier to get through.
Jeff has a point when he suggests that newspaper content is not exactly the most stimulating thing to read: I remember after about three or four years of studying Chinese, realizing that I could read a newspaper, and then thinking to myself, “(1) Wow, I can read a newspaper!” and then “(2) Wow, that was so totally not worth it!” That said, you know, they have books here too, and some of them are even pretty good — and fun contemporary authors like Han Shaogong, Wang Xiaobo, and Wang Shuo haven’t been translated into English much yet.
By learning only spoken Chinese, one shuts oneself off from the treasure trove of written materials that China’s amassed over the centuries. (Or over the century, if you limit yourself to modern Chinese.) Conversations are fun too, but when I think about all of the enjoyment I’ve gotten from reading (and writing) in Chinese, I can’t help but think that, no matter how much time it might appear to a beginner to save, the decision to be an illiterate is a fool’s economy.
Damn got to reply to that
I personally am not making a decision to be illiterate, there often seems to be an ‘educated’ elitism element creeping into these character discussions. All I am suggesting is that it is far more economical to learn to write a language that you have already mastered the speaking fundamentals in.
I am personally convinced that you will end up learning to read much faster this way and that the blind rote learning, scratching away approach (that can’t have fundamentally changed since people were doing it by oil lamps) is the true fools economy. The economy being that you don’t take the time and brain effort to think about the learning process beforehand.
Ken,
In attempt to add something constructive, by all means investigate how to help us with characters but please don’t be forced to tip your hand and provide anything that even resembles the frankly inefficient “one character at a time, scratchy scratchy approach”. People can get this from countless other places anyway.
God knows how but we need an innovation, maybe something like a videohotpot that uses captions and audio but somehow mentally rewards the listener for getting ahead of the game and deriving meaning from the cations (just a throw away thought).
I would suggest that character recognition on an individual basis is a poisoned chalice and that a reading based approach is the way to go. This is not Chicken before egg because I know for sure
that if you have the right materials you can start reading some material quickly (but only if as I keep on saying you already understand the words and language that you are attempting to read).
BTW just to extend my own plan into the future to make it clearer.
Once you can speak Chinese competently and have learned to read Chinese competently then of course it is perfectly natural to start deriving further vocabulary by reading and thereby become literary and educated by Chinese standards.
Hong Kong Library - I’m at the library. It’s cleaner than the best 5-star hotel in China. They issue little earmuff covers for the headphones at this internet kiosk. Impressive is what I’m saying.
Anyway, I bring this up because I am here vacuuming up English, I’m reading everything, newspapers, magazines, fiction, non-fiction. My friend in HK said I was a bookworm. I said, look - I’ve been on a starvation diet in China, leave me alone!
Every book and word represents a person, why not meet a lot of Chinese people. So I’m with Brendan, if one has the interest and time, no reason not to become literate in Chinese — yes that means hanzi. Sorry, but the paparazzi mags don’t come in pinyin.
Conversely, I don’t think writing a character 20 times has ever burned a character into my muscle memory. Writing a certain charcter a few times, and seeing/using/writing it did burn it in. Low frequency characters I wrote repetitively and quickly forgot. Brendan’s got a certain ‘knack.
But I don’t think writing hanzi is particularly hard, the traditionaly pedagogy does need to change though. I think something along the order of
1) context-rich introduction,
2) various forms of output (ie. via texting, writing, tracing, etc), and
3) rich followup exposure, would go a long way.
kmk suggested a karaoke type of approach for video, that’s one concrete suggestion.
I also think there’s got to be much more effective ways to organize transcripts than hanzi followed by pinyin followed by transcription in the same font size and colour.
zh.chinesepod is making one tiny but useful step by using colour to highlight some key vocab.
Another option to consider is the equivalent to furigana in Japanese, i.e. pinyin in tiny font size above Chinese characters (same principle used with bopomofo in Taiwan). I guess you’d need to develop your own tools there, haven’t seen it done yet. For the Newbie and Elementary levels, you might want to mix and match, always have the most basic characters without pinyin (在,的,了,就,我,你,是 etc.) and small piyin on top for the new words.
This is all static stuff, if you were considering more dynamic tools, you could have a knob to adjust the amount of pinyin cue displayed, from all to none. Could be an enhancement to the Expansion stuff, also including recordings.
In any event, what’s clear to me is audio is probably the worst channel for this.
Yv
Chris — Apologies if I came off as being a jerk or an elitist there. Didn’t mean to.
I agree that character recognition on an individual basis is pedagogically worthless. I remember reading about a test program in the northeast that trained children in Pinyin for a year, then taught them characters after having taught them to think of words on the ‘ci’ level rather than the ‘zi’ level. Apparently it produced marked gains in literacy — though of course it was aimed at native speakers of Mandarin to begin with. (Most of the Chinese textbooks I’ve seen to introduce characters within the context of bisyllabic words, as well.)
I certainly wouldn’t advocate a heavy focus on characters at the outset of one’s studies, but I don’t think they should go neglected either. And I absolutely agree that a new, working system for learning characters would be great — but I haven’t seen anything out there yet that can beat rote memory for it. And not for lack of looking!
Anyway — I do agree with you that there’s a lot to be said in favor of building up a good spoken fluency before attempting the writing system; I just think it’s important not to focus on one to the exclusion of the other. (And a converse example — I’ve met one or two eminent scholars of Chinese literature who will remain nameless These guys are literate to the point where they could shame a mid-Qing dynasty literatus; they’ve forgotten more characters than your average Chinese grad student has ever learned; they go around reading seal-script inscriptions for fun while they’re taking a break from deciphering oracle bones — and they can’t speak worth diddly. A cautionary tale.)
I think goulnik’s suggestion for some furigana/ruby-like system of mixing Pinyin and characters is a good one. I also remember seeing a Beida textbook from the 1950s that gave text solely in characters, but also indicated the tone (but not romanization) over each character. That was pretty cool, I thought. Also, your idea about dynamic pinyin cueing is awesome — and I imagine it’d be pretty doable (er…doable by someone other than me, I mean!) since there’s a lot of frequency data for words and characters out there that you could base the thing on. Very, very cool idea!
Also, I just checked out your site with the dictionary of cursive character components. Thanks so much for making that available — it’s a really cool resource.
I have no doubts (I may be totally wrong, but I have no doubts) that there are ways to make the learning of characters more efficient.
Of course the question is “More efficient than what?” Well, for me, it always comes to down to how cognitive you make it. If it’s more cognitive, it’s more efficient. If it’s brute force memorization, then it’s less efficient. Brendan mentioned how he would envisage characters in his mind’s eye by personifying them, etc. That’s a cognitive technique.
Some learners are able to figure out lots of such techniques and this makes their learning more effective. There are endless techniques you could use to enhance how youidentify/retain characters. I guess our job, if we were to stress characters more, would be to
- codify a list of effective ones (Big Brain, get to work)
- come up with some new ones and embed them into the learning process here on ChinesePod (I guess I’ve built a career doing this kind of thing!)
Now I’m not volunteering to radically change how we do things on ChinesePod right now becuase I don’t have the time for it. However, you may feel free to send us any suggestions you have in terms of mnemonics, cognitive strategies, etc. We could certainly put a list together. (May be one for the forums.)
Ken Carroll
Brandon — I would love to be able to read those contemporary Chinese writers. The problem is that, unless I’m getting this wrong, it’s going to be a nutcase 10 year mission to get to that stage. Or maybe 5 years if I lock myself up in a cell with a Chinese dictionary and few thousand pads of paper.
I suppose a lot depends on what we actually call ‘reading’. Again, maybe I’m being too pessimistic, but it seems like after 4 years I’ve only scratched the surface. Anything literary requires such an immense character base. If I have to look up words all the time then I don’t really count that as reading. So I wonder if all the work is really worth the pay off.
Chris — a reading/context based approach is interesting and definitely a move in the right direction. I’m with you 100% about speaking first. Also, I agree that the ‘character by character scratch them out again and again’ is not the most effective way. Unfortunately, I still don’t see a way beyond flashcard sessions and rote learning…. I don’t know the solution but maybe technology can save us. Great idea about subtitles that you’ve posted here and elsewhere (and using software in the background).
Lantian: “I don’t think writing hanzi is particularly hard” What are you talking about man?! Do you mean writing an individual character, or writing a letter to a friend? Do you mean writing