Only learning to read?

[TommyMcdonalds]

Do you think learning only to read chinese characters for now, and then learning to speak them later, would be easier in anyway?

That way I can get used to the characters, and be able to communicate with Mandarin speakers who don't know English?

[Iriya]

How do you imagine "reading" characters without learning how to pronounce them?

[TommyMcdonalds]

As in, seeing something like 你 and being able to say to myself that it's you. Or seeing 好and being able to say it's good =3

[jbradfor]

I assume the OP meant "reading" as in "being able to understand a written text", not "reading out loud"

[jbradfor]

Been thinking about this, and it certainly should be possible. In fact, I would hazard a guess that most Chinese literature grad students and professors can read Chinese well, but are probably less than fluent in conversation. And not learning the pronunciation will probably let you learn to read faster.

What confuses me is that you also state " be able to communicate with Mandarin speakers who don't know English?". This seems in direct conflict with only learning to read. Unless you plan on only writing to them?

[rezaf]

<_< In the long run it will slow you down. If you don't learn how to read and pronounce them at the same time, something like 你 will be connected to "you" in the English part of your brain then when you want to learn speaking Chinese first you have to undo that connection and then make a new connection to "ni3". It's always better to have separate sections of your brain for different languages as much as you can.

I had an old Korean classmate at beginner level and although she was able to understand most of the characters she had a hard time learning to speak because those characters were already connected to the Korean language.

[Iriya]

As in, seeing something like 你 and being able to say to myself that it's you. Or seeing 好and being able to say it's good =3

How would you read compound words then? e.g. 输入? transport-enter? This is just silly.

[jbradfor]

@Iriya, by "learning only to read chinese characters", I don't think the OP really meant just learn each character in isolation. One would have to learn words as well.

But that is separate from the original question, that of separating learning the meaning from the sound.

[anonymoose]

That's how I learnt Chinese initially. It is certainly possible, but given that the greatest reward comes from face to face conversation, it seems like a lot of work for little payback.

By the way, the only reason I learnt like that is because back in the day, I didn't really have any resources for spoken Chinese. I just taught myself using a book.

[Shelley]

I can't imagine how you would be able to learn them but not speak them. You might as well learn the pinyin as well as meaning and by then you are more than half way to speaking. and it would be like learning everything twice. I would recommend doing it together. In fact IMHO i think it ia ridiculus way to attempt to learn any language. I am learning from books, and I have taken some classes but I don't have anyone to talk to on a regular basis but I still practice speaking outloud and in my head. I feel it ties it all together when you learn it together.

Good luck with what ever method you go with.

Shelley

[Gleaves]

Tommy - Because most characters have phonetic components, I most often see people suggest that you learn both the meaning and the pinyin reading at the same time. Like mentioned above, its good to keep that connection in your head. Look up Heisig on the forums if you want to see similar discussions.

[Ah-Bin]

I also learnt Chinese this way for two years, I did learn romanization for each character but didn't concentrate on getting the tones right. I had real trouble in oral exams, but got top marks in composition and comprehension. After two years of university level Chinese I went to Taiwan. By the time I got to there I had to write characters on my hand sometimes when I couldn't remember how to say them properly.

When i got the chance to speak more, I hardly ever learnt words from conversation that I didn't know how to write already, as I already had at least 800 characters memorised before I started speaking on a regular basis. what I found is that it helped me understand unfamiliar compound words I heard in speech, because I could visualise the characters that they were composed of. Another advantage of knowing the characters

This was 15 years ago, in New Zealand where mandarin speakers were still hard to find (I remember hearing some at a bus stop and getting close to see if I could understand anything), and there were very very few resources available, basically the university coursebook, the little red Oxford dictionary, and a book called Reading and Writing Chinese by William McNaughton, (tradtional script only) I notice that people tend to learn in a different way now, because they have more access to speakers and sound files of spoken Mandarin.

In the end after about six years I found that I enjoyed reading Chinese a lot more than speaking it, and by then I had learnt how to look up characters by radical very quickly. This didn't help with speaking either, there are still plenty of characters I know the meanings of but only have a vague knowledge of how to read them out aloud.

Just a historical reminder as well that Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese intellectuals learnt to read and write Chinese for hundreds of years, and very few of them could pronounce it in a way that would have been understood in China. In the first two countries you can still find people who read Chinese but speak minimal to no Mandarin.

[abcdefg]

Do you think learning only to read chinese characters for now, and then learning to speak them later, would be easier in anyway?

I was impatient and did it the other way around: first learned to talk and then had to go back later to learn to read and write. It was easier for me to make quick progress that way, but in retrospect, I now wish I had taken a more balanced approach from day one and learned Chinese as a "package deal" consisting of conversation and reading as the top priority with writing ranked just a bit behind those two.

Summary: What is easiest in the short term is not always easiest in the long term.

[kdavid]

The first thing that comes to mind is the incessant repetition of poorly pronounced Chinese as you read to yourself in your head.

I learned speaking first, reading second. At my current stage of development, I need to work on my reading speed and formal Chinese. I've reading a lot, and read everything out loud. I've found it's made a big improvement in pronunciation.

IMHO, if you learn reading first, and don't learn to pronounce things correctly in your head, you're going to fossilize a lot of errors. This will make learning to speak correctly more difficult.

[rezaf]

@TommyMcdonalds as everyone is telling you a balanced approach is preferred but if you are very impatient you can first learn pinyin and talking and later on you can start learning to read the characters but not the other way around.

[anonymoose]

you can first learn pinyin and talking and later on you can start learning to read the characters but not the other way around.

Is that a suggestion, or are you stating that as a "fact"?

[rezaf]

If the OP's goal was to read Chinese literature or classical Chinese or things like that I wouldn't have said that but since he mentioned he wants to be able to communicate with Mandarin speakers as fast as possible I would say talking to them and understanding what they say is the fastest way.( :rolleyes: Unless he means communicating with deaf Chinese speakers)

Edit: Everything I say anywhere on this forum is just a suggestion(at least from now on )

[sagua]

I think its a myth that Chinese can be read directly as ideograms. That would only work for a very limited number of characters. My own experience is that talking comes first. Some course teach pinyin fist without the student seeing the characters but that's not necessarily satisfactory either-- Chinese has so many homophones. Remembering the characters in English would seem like a strange intellectual exercise.

[Hofmann]

I think it would help one remember characters if a Chinese pronunciation is associated with each character learned because about 90% of characters are phono-semantic compounds, which I think are difficult to remember without a pronunciation. Since you're aiming to learn Mandarin anyway, why not make it Mandarin?

[jbradfor]

The phono-semantic nature of most Chinese characters has been mentioned more than once as a reason to not learn reading only. But I don't see why.

I agree that the phono-semantic is very useful for learning the pronunciation. But, about 2000 characters in, I don't think I've learned the meaning of a single character via its phono-semantic nature. I use the radical for that, but only the meaning of the radical, not the sound.