Mandarin Literacy

[FinalFan18]

Is it absolutely essential to memorize the characters when learning a new word or is it more efficient to let progress in the spoken language take temporary precedence?

As in, would it be better to learn the more common characters first and separately from learning new vocab so that vocabulary can be built up faster in the spoken form? Just wondering if not learning how to write a new word in chinese right away makes things more difficult or illiteracy more difficult to overcome.

[anonymoose]

If you know the characters, it might help you to differentiate some of the homophones.

Also, I think it takes longer to become proficient at reading and writing than oral communication, so if you don't want literacy to lag behind your oral skills, I would recommend starting earlier rather than later.

That said, some people are only interested in Chinese as an oral communication tool, and don't ever bother to learn characters. But I think being able to read (if not write) will be of great help to your overall Chinese once you reach the intermediate/advanced level, because you will be able to learn from authentic sources rather than just textbooks (few of which don't use characters at this level anyway).

[morningdew]

I'd argue that learning spoken Chinese first is much more important. The spoken language is simpler than the written Chinese, and furthermore, basic spoken Chinese is actually very simple as far as languages go.

[animal world]

Thus far, I've not lived in a country where Mandarin is the official language so my comment may be worthless to you. I'm not the type of person who could use words in speech without having a clue about how they are written. If i were to live in China, it would drive me nuts to see signs all the time and being at a complete loss what the characters might convey. For others, this issue may be totally irrelevant or trivial.

When i started out, i learned the pinyin of words. Separately, i used a book to learn characters. This book had a systematic approach and was pretty good. For a while there was little to no overlap between the words i knew in pinyin and the characters i had learned. This was rather frustrating. Eventually, my knowledge of characters overtook the pinyin which i now use only for learning to pronounce new words. If you have the time at all, i would suggest you spend at least a little of it on learning characters. That way, you'll readily pick up words just from walking through the neighborhood. At some point then you'll notice that you make nice progress on all aspects of the language evenly.

[simonlaing]

I think anonymoose's answer is correct. It depends on your goal.

If your goal is to live in a english friendly environment like Shanghai or Beijing, and learn enough to get by and have basic conversations; then learn the pinyin and a couple of important characters like 男， 女厕所 ， 啤酒。It will be enough.

But, if you want to get a deeper knowledge of Chinese language, relate to chinese people on a deeper level in their own language, live in 2nd or 3rd tier Chinese city for a long time, understand the news or TV soap operas, you should learn characters early.

When you learn the characters you should also practice writing them (Try to learn the radicals(mini characters in other charactes like 女 人 etc,) and that the sounds often comes from the right half of the character and the meaning from the first half.(most of the time))Or at least practice typing them in sentences or essays to show you can use them.

I learned pinyin with just reading , for the first two years, but had to go back and practically relearn almost all the words with their character meanings and their pinyin meanings. (Don't make my mistake as well.)

Figure out which goal you want to reach and follow that method.

Also, don't kid yourself both ways will be difficult. Though people get more impressed when you tell them you speak and write Mandarin. It has lots of other benefits aswell...

Good luck.

Simon

[renzhe]

I'd argue that learning spoken Chinese first is much more important. The spoken language is simpler than the written Chinese, and furthermore, basic spoken Chinese is actually very simple as far as languages go.

But do keep in mind that this is only true if you live in a China or a predominately Chinese-speaking environment.

In my experience, this NEVER works when learning abroad. Out of perhaps 100 Chinese learners, I've never met a single one who spoke Chinese with any amount of fluency who hadn't spent time in China.

As a comparison, almost everyone who starts learning Spanish in Germany is conversational after a few semesters.

[Daan]

I think being able to write the characters by hand is not always necessary, especially now that you can use computers to type Chinese. It's learning characters by heart that takes up most of my studying time and to be frank, I've been tending to neglect that part of my studies lately, focussing on reading comprehension and writing essays using the wonderful Google Pinyin IME.

Of course, I am not saying you shouldn't learn how to write characters by hand, but there's a balance to be struck. I think that you should definitely know how to write the most common 1,500 or so characters. But after that point, I asked myself: is it really worth your while to practise writing characters such as 打噴嚏 every day, when even native speakers often don't know how to write those characters and the only time you're probably going to need them is at the HSK?

As said above, it all depends on your goals, and this is something you have to decide for yourself. I would say: be sure to learn the most common characters in the beginning, but don't make it sacrosanct. The way I see it, knowing a word doesn't equal or require knowing how to write its characters. In my opinion, and the way I look at knowing words, it's perfectly possible to know a word without knowing how to write it.

[Dawei1]

I agree with Moneydew, that it is quite possible to develop functional spoken skills without learning characters. I'm the kind of person who needs to see a person's business card in order to remember their name, yet teaching techniques such as Pimsleur (i.e., spoken only) were able to imprint Chinese into my brain. In most situations, I'm just functional, but it is still really fun.

This said, close colleague who is fluent in Japanese had always told me "to learn the language, you really need to know the characters." After 4 years of learning mainly spoken Chinese, I started learning characters about 1 yr ago. I can't tell whether it helps or hurts my spoken Chinese, i.e., would the time I spent with characters be better spent on learning spoken words? I often forget what I've learned, but I don't think knowing characters would fix this problem. (The only solution is that offered by Renzhe, i.e., living in China or a Chinese rich environment).

One huge value of learning characters is the wonderful connection it creates with Chinese colleagues. Pinyin is almost useless for communicating with Chinese, whereas Chinese colleagues are always pleasantly amazed to receive an e-mail that includes characters. Another thing that was a big help was learning how to up my PC to allow typing in characters (it's quite easy).