Only learning to read?

[gato]

Interesting that nobody had mentioned Heisig's book here, and he hasn't been mentioned on this forum for a long time. He's a strong proponent of beginning with learning only the characters and not the pronunciation. Perhaps it hasn't worked that well for Chinese.

[imron]

You mean except for post #11 of course

[gato]

Just a reference to an old thread. Ha.

[rob07]

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

This is definitely doable and may even be the best way to make real progress in the language living outside of China due to the difficulty of learning speaking/listening without an immersion environment, although you have to be prepared for some serious delayed gratification.

I did this, although I found that after putting the effort in to learn the characters I remembered the pinyin (not including the tone) for most of them without any additional effort. I would agree it is natural for the brain to want to associate a sound with each character. And even if you only want to read, knowing the pinyin is very helpful because looking up multi-character words in the dictionary is much faster if you know the pinyin (and not just the meaning) of the first character, it will significantly increase the rate at which you can get through an unfamiliar text at least to start with.

If you can read to a high level then I think it is relatively not that hard to pick up speaking and listening just by watching a lot of Chinese language TV and movies (since it all has Chinese character subtitles) and later finding conversation partners.

Personally, I found that after learning only to read to a high level, and then focussing entirely on speaking and listening for a while, just knowing how the words sound has noticeably increased my reading speed and enjoyment after going back to reading.

[character]

I've sort of fallen back on only hoping to learn to read, for a number of reasons.

If you're just starting out, I would strongly recommend trying to learn the sounds of each character/word along with learning to recognize it and write it. You don't have to make learning the sound and writing a big part of your study, but spending an extra minute or two per character will pay off handsomely later on.

A lot of non-arthouse movie (and TV) dialogue is repetitive, so being able to recognize common words and phrases helps you use movies and TV shows as another learning tool. Not learning the tones early on will likely mean a constant struggle to learn and remember them later; pronouncing a character without the right tone is saying something you didn't mean to say. Developing a basis in the correct pronunciation will also help when dealing with Mandarin speakers with accents; you will be better able to guess what they are saying.

Characters are printed in a number of different fonts, so being able to write them helps you understand the essence of the character so you can recognize them in various representations.

If you don't want to invest in something such as Pleco, there are websites for the sounds and inexpensive books for how to write common characters.

[李白]

I think laying a solid memory trace of characters first by using a mnemonic strategy like Heinsig is a good idea. I used Tuttle’s Learning Chinese Characters Matthews to do learn for three reasons. Firstly, Tuttle’s incorporates the pronunciation, and secondly the tone. The final reason I used Tuttles was because the memory technique (mnemonics) are more visual and thus easy to remember than Heinsig or Ezchinesy. Sadly, Tuttle’s only has about 1000 characters opposed to 2280 in EzChinesy’s and 3000 in Heisigs two volume Remembering Simplified Hanzi. Since Heinsig and Ezchinesy have more characters they provide better economies of scale in learning. In addition, the brain seems to get fitter at learning with a bigger block of characters. Obviously you won’t know how to put words or sentences together with these books so you cant read.

To compare the new HSK 6 requires about 2600 characters. I do not think that includes people and place names.

I only got about 120 pages (of 360) into Tuttle’s before I left for China. Only learning symbols can get boring.

I found the main problem using this type of character based material was transitioning to meaning full passages. Heinsig recommends flash cards but most polyglots recommending only learning words in context, for example, using a reader. I used the NPCR because it’s a reader and because it is published by BLCUP, the same institution who administer the HSK. The NPCR also seems to have a focus on the HSK, although it maybe the old HSK.

Transitioning is difficult because the order in which words are build up is not the same as the order in which one need the words for speaking. For example a simple word like I 我 is about the 37th character in Tuttle’s. You can see the conflict here between character build up and its economies of scale and building up the most common vocabulary （and grammar） systematically.

So if I could do this again I would try and get to the end of Tuttles before starting reading and better yet gone on to the end of one of Heisigs book because of the economies involved in building the characters up and mental fitness. A caveat here is that I’d give myself a limit that fits into my expected learning time frame. You don’t want to be still reading Heinsig while everyone else has past HSK 6.

A side note, I am not sure if this exists but I think that the ultimate Chinese reader would build up characters, vocabulary and grammar systematically in the shortest possible space. It wouldn’t matter if it look like Dr Seuss nor if passage came after 200 – 500 words. This seems like low hanging fruit for authors of Chinese material.

How this relates to those in the Jing. When I was mastering flip cup at Pyros on Wednesday’s 5rm fake beer night, I talked to students from Beida, Tsinghua, Ren Min, BLCU and other schools in the village Wu. It seems that most of the programs bombard students with 40 -50 words a day with no technique for learning them. I think if you had the characters and a way to put them together into words you could capture most if not all of those words. That would accelerate the learning curve beyond the belief of most people on this forum.

[xkfow]

Learning this way will give you the illusion of quick progress but ultimately will hinder your ultimate goal of learning Chinese, this is really your goal.

If you ever plan to become fluent, your goal will not to be reading/thinking chinese in english, but in Chinese! ie Your long term goal will be to see "你好嗎?" and hear in your head "ni2hao3ma5?". You are not ultimately fluent in a language until you are able to think, speak, and dream naturally in the language.

[querido]

I agree with xkfow.

[李白]

Xkfong, Querido are you referring to my post?

Or that learning to read before speaking will slow you down?

Anyway, I agree with your 2nd paragraph xkfong, there is a difference between acquiring a word and activating it - being able to use it.

Not sure if this clarification is needed; I was commenting based on gato and imron’s comments on Heisig’s book - that it hasn’t been discussed for a while with regards to the OP “should I learn how to read first”. Basically, the underlying idea of using mnemonics and problems I had transitioning from character recognition to reading. In my mind this transition relates to should I learn to read first. I’m sorry my comment wasn’t very concise.

[jbradfor]

Your long term goal will be to see "你好嗎?" and hear in your head "ni2hao3ma5?"

I disagree. Your long-term goal is to see "你好嗎?" and not have any sounds in your head, but just understand it without having to think.

Same as you do in your native language. I hope you don't read out the sounds in your head when you read your native language. And I hope your lips aren't moving either.

[anonymoose]

I hope you don't read out the sounds in your head when you read your native language.

Isn't that normal? No wonder I'm such a slow reader.

[Gleaves]

I definitely want to go silent when reading as a long term goal. I think I timed this a while back and newcasters could get up to talking speeds of 250-300 characters a minute. So I figure until I increase my reading speed to about 300 characters a minute, I'm okay with allowing myself to sound things out or atleast partially sound things out in my head.

[imron]

could get up to talking speeds of 250-300 characters a minute

Yep, that's about what I've measured too. Native silent readers can get 500-700 characters a minute.

So I figure until I increase my reading speed to about 300 characters a minute, I'm okay with allowing myself to sound things out or atleast partially sound things out in my head.

I agree with this as well. The old HSK advanced required a reading speed of 250 cpm in order to be able to complete everything, so being able to read at this speed is still more than acceptable. If you can sound out at this speed in your head, it then provides a great platform for going completely silent.

[roddy]

I disagree. Your long-term goal is to see "你好嗎?" and not have any sounds in your head, but just understand it without having to think.

Same as you do in your native language. I hope you don't read out the sounds in your head when you read your native language. And I hope your lips aren't moving either.

Or perhaps you want to make the sounds in your head sub-concious - you want the orthography-pronunciation link to be so natural that there's no actual thinking about it.

Additional: I'm not going to spend all day reading about this, but I wanted to check a little on subvocalization specificially in Chinese. Psychology of Reading, Rayner and Pollatsek, p211, on Google Books - it might be less important, but it's still there.

That said, I'm not sure what practical use that information is.

[李白]

"I definitely want to go silent when reading as a long term goal"

Me too. This is my experience trying to read faster.

Speed reading Hanzi:

My reading is terrible so take this all with a grain of salt. Went I was a kid I read extremely slowly ( I’m probably dyslexic which isn’t a problem with Chinese) so I was sent to speed reading. The problem with reading slowly is concentration drift and you can’t remember what happened at the beginning of the paragraph, it affects comprehension. I found the same problems when reading Chinese. So I tried the speed reading techniques (which you can get a detailed summary of on T Ferriss’s sight for free) with Chinese.

Basically read something 3 times your target speed for 20 minutes, and take bigger visual bites (ie get a whole line of text into focus, then move down to the next line ) the brain adapts, then read at your target speed. No sounding words out, just a focus on the main idea which should be evolving as you read along. My comprehension actually increased a little on the bigger idea of the article, I was surprised.

However, in general for me, sounding out words is better because I speak better than I read. I can fill in the blanks and infer the grammar when sounding the text out. I self studied and got a shock at how fast one has to read for the HSK, so I think methods to learn how to faster are important and worth a look.

I was told about a new paper reader from the Yale press that focuses on punctuation in order to read faster. I have not tried it.

[skylee]

Reading too fast will kill the fun.

[imron]

True, but sometimes you want to read for fun, and other times you want to read for information.

Also, with people learning a second language, when talking about reading "fast" in that language, in reality it means reading at a speed that would be considered normal (or even somewhat slow) by native standards.

[Guest realmayo]

The OP talks about only learning to read: my sense is that separating reading from speaking is a particularly good idea for Chinese, when you're starting out. I think it would be cool to learn characters without their pronunciation, while at the same time learning intitial basic conversational Chinese, with heavy emphasis on accurate pronunciation there. But sooner or later the reading and the speaking need to be brought together, perhaps at a post-elementary stage, so they can start benefitting one another.

[Pingfa]

Hey there. Long time lurker here, love this place!

I started out learning some basic Mandarin, but then set it aside as I was primarily interested in learning to read. Eventually I decided it would be best to learn Mandarin alongside characters, mostly to better understand the language. Although I really should have started learning Mandarin alongside it long before, in the longrun I think it was most beneficial for me personally to focus on characters.

It won't apply to everyone, but I feel it would have taken me forever to learn to just listen; now that I can understand most of what I read and at a mostly natural pace, often I just need to glance at the subtitles to hear and comprehend everything that is being said, yet I'd be totally lost without them. In this way, I can learn Mandarin mostly passively through constant exposure.

In other words, what rob07 said.