How do you deal with characters at a very early stage?

[Patrick_ChineseForum]

Hi guys,

I've self taught myself Chinese since new year. Most of the study materials come from the internet (thanks to people here who recommended me many good ones). So far I think I'm progressing pretty slow. I tend to make sure that I remember everything (vocab, characters, pronunciation, grammar, etc) before moving on to the next lesson. I noticed that even though I could recognize the meaning of characters. I had a hard time writing them right especially those that didn't have obvious radicals and contained many strokes. Pinyin spelling was another problem that I had. Actually I didn't realize that until yesterday when I was trying to type Chinese in MS Word (kind of summarizing lessons that I've learned so far). I had to type in pinyin and a list of characters popped up for me to choose. Do you believe that I misspelled the pinyin about 8 out of 10 times! That was horrible! Frankly I haven't paid much attention to memorizing pinyin spelling because I could mimic and remembered the pronunciation easily. Now I feel like it's coming back to bite me.

Did you guys have these two issues: (1) writing Chinese characters that have many strokes correctly (we aren't talking about stroke order here, just write it correctly) and (2) pinyin spelling, when you first started out. I wonder if I should not worry much about writing characters and pinyin spelling at this early stage. Would it come easier ... maybe after I've studied for a year? I could progress faster if I don't have to worry about these two issues. What are you guys' experience/advice?

Thanks,

Patrick

[Iriya]

It's very important to get pinyin and the pronunciation right at the very beginning. Otherwise, you'll develop a lot of bad habits later on. Get somebody (preferably a native speaker) to help you with this. Chinese is impossible to study by yourself from scratch. (Unless you're already fluent in a pitch-contour tonal language.)

Forget the characters at this stage.

Let me give you a few examples of what kind of embarrassing situations you can get into if you can't pronounce the words right:

她是一个校花。

Tā shì yīge xiàohuā.

She's the most beautiful girl in the school.

她是一个笑话。

Tā shì yīge xiàohuà.

She's a joke.

It's not just the tones, either. Pinyin is very important.

我们上船吧。

Wǒmen shàngchuán ba.

Let's board the ship.

我们上床吧.

Wǒmen shàngchuáng ba.

Let's have sex.

Oh, and there's another dirty joke about a Cantonese guy who asked a waitress in Beijing "小姐，睡觉一晚多少钱" (shuìjiào yìwǎn duōshao qián) and got slapped. He wanted to say "水饺一碗多少钱" (shuíjiǎo yìwǎn duōshao qián)...

[renzhe]

她是一个校花。

Tā shì yīge xiàohuā.

一个 should be yi2ge.

一 is yi2 when followed by a fourth tone.

[Iriya]

But 个 is neutral here.

[icebear]

If you're having issues with pinyin I'd say drop everything and drill it for a few hours over a week or two until you can a) read all pinyin aloud with a reasonable level of accuracy (as confirmed by a native speaker!) and b) write the pinyin down for single and double syllable combinations that are spoken by a native. This is incredibly boring, embarrassingly so, but is well worth the relatively short-term investment. And even worth paying for 1 on 1 instruction (e.g. Skype), despite your study plans afterwards (independent or otherwise). Its just too 'easy' to learn early on relative to unlearning bad habits 6 or 12 months later, from what I've heard.

That said, once you've got your pinyin sorted and are moving on to words, basic grammar, etc, don't ignore characters!

Maybe this is best illustrated through my own example. I started studying Chinese sometime during early 2007, and initially learned only pinyin for a week or two (thankfully!), then jumped into a textbook, including all relevant characters for the first lesson or two, and then realizing I could learn a bit faster if I just stuck with pinyin. I went with that for well over a year. At some point in 2008 I became sick of having such a huge deficiency (as well as increasing confusion with homonyms) and started with the flashcards, with a huge backlog of words to catch up on. But no writing. Up to summer 2011 I had probably learned to recognize some two thousand characters and many resulting words from their combinations, but again was hitting a wall with too many characters blending into similar 'shapes', and not really reading with decent or enjoyable speed. So I decided (was strongly encouraged) to start writing - and the difference has been astonishing. In about 5-6 months I've learned to write around 1500 characters (and many more words) with a reasonable degree of accuracy/recall, and am finding reading incredibly more pleasurable now - since I'm forced to learn so much about the radicals in each it even (occasionally) helps with intuiting texts with characters I haven't learned, to say nothing about how much more naturally reading feels. Surely some of this is due to just long-term exposure to character recognition, but writing has had a really significant effect in a relatively short time.

The most bothersome (embarrassing/regretful) thing about this is that if I had learned 2 characters a day from the day I started learning words, I would have near/exceeded 4,000 by now. I say two a day because that number, if learned using a SRS system to determine timing (e.g. Anki), is a trivial figure; many language students will try to learn dozens a day with some degree of success (others may comment here). If I had taken a long view from the first month, or hell, the first year, and just got past my excuses and intimidation and committed to some trivial amount of time devoted to writing, I would have been much further with reading and writing now without a neglible change in the amount of time I committed to study.

So, get your pinyin sorted out first. Study words and dialogues for a few weeks with only pinyin if that suits you initially; maybe you're just dipping your toe in and don't know if you really are interested in Chinese or not. But early on, within the first month or two, I would suggest committing to whether or not you are in it for the long haul - if you are a minor investment in learning characters (say, 10 minutes a day, which I guess could net 1-10 characters if you use SRS for timing) will pay huge dividends over the course of a few years.

Edit: Realized I mostly responded with why, not how. I personally think using a SRS system is a must to ensure you aren't wasting time studying reviewing things you don't need. Skritter.com is a paid website which automates nearly everything (timing, card management) but the writing, which is up to you; I use it and think its well worth the money. Pleco.com has a iOS and Android (and Windows Mobile?) application which, with some minor one time fees and configuration time, will also make flashcard creation and management (timing) easy for you and allow handwriting testing; this pulls double duty as probably the single best (free) dictionary if you have a supported phone. A free flashcard alternative is Anki (http://ankisrs.net/), where you would use Anki to create the cards and keep track of the timing (when to study what), and then use pen and paper for whatever Anki threw at you each day (perhaps using http://www.hanzigrids.com/ for the handwriting). There are many SRS strategies and suggestions that you can find throughout this board, I believe, with a search.

Edited January 19, 2012 at 06:39 PM by icebear

[Patrick_ChineseForum]

Thanks for your guys advice. I've been warned about the importance of pronouncing the right tones a number of time. My first language is also a tonal language. Hence I truely believe it's critical to get it right. Hmm... I think I should share my background a bit. I'm not a typical westerners who hardly have much to do with Chinese. All my grandparents came from China. Pretty much all my older relatives (parents, aunts, uncles, etc) can speak Chinese. Sadly the language skill hasn't been passed along to my generation. :-( Even though we no longer live in China, we've maintained many traditions when it comes to wedding, spring festival, funeral, food, etc. To sum it up, I grew up with Chinese sounds/tones and got use to it (even though I don't know the meaning).

My frustration is that I couldn't spell pinyin correctly most of the time. Do people really memorize pinyin along with characters and meanings? For me, it's easier to remember the sound of words (I always learn from either video clips and basic pod casts that have natives do the talking) but trying to spell it in pinyin is tough. Do most westerners learn new words the other way around by memorizing pinying first, then try to pronounce it based on pinyin that they remember? I'm learning the opposite way by memorizing the sound first, then try to spell pinyin later based on the sound. Hmm... now I'm really curious how other people learn.

@Icebar: Thanks for sharing your experience and recommending Anki. I'm using it to increase my vocab as well. Yes I tend to remember words better if I could write them, but writing is another hurdle.

many language students will try to learn dozens a day with some degree of success (others may comment here).

Ahh I still can remember when I was learning English and Japanese. My goal was to learn ten new words a day. Did I succeed? Yeah only the first couple weeks. Then I started to forget words that I learned during the first few days. What a pity. I really expect SRS learning strategies would solve this problem. Its theory sounds very logical and reasonable.

@Iriya: Thanks for sharing your experience (especially the Let's have sex one; I'll pay attention to that word :-)

BTW I enrolled in a basic Chinese class and waiting for it to start next week.

[大肚男]

Hey Patrick,

I agree with Iriya that it is important to learn pinyin early on.

However, depending on what your goals are, my personal opinion is that tones are not critically important, and you should be able to use the right tone the more your listening comprehension increases.

What I believe is more important is to learn the difference between pinyin that may sound similar like ju, zhu and zhi.

From personal experience, I have noticed that native speakers have no problem understanding me no matter how badly I butcher the tones, but I lose them as soon as I pronounce "chi" as "qu".

Please note that I am not advocating not learning tones, but I am saying that don't let the extreme examples scare you or discourage you from talking to people, because context will often make obvious that if you are saying "women shang chuan ba", then you're saying Let's board the ship, not Let's have sex.

[David Wong]

Really! All this while I've been saying Let's have sex!

I think you should learn proper pronunciation first. And learn the rules of the pinyin system so that after hearing the proper pronunciation, you can then follow those rules to arrive at the pinyin. For example you should know when you hear "eat/eating" spoken, you can derive the pinyin for what you've just heard as chi1fan4.

There are only a few rules (there's a thread about that somewhere). An example of some important ones to know would be like the "i" sound following an 's' or 'z' is different from the 'i' sound that follows an x. And knowing that there are two "u" sound, and in some cases, one of the sounds is implied, (qu) while at other times it is explicit (lǘ vs. lú).

Those are the tricky ones I can think of. The rest should be fairly straightforward.

I've found that northerners speak in such a way that "chuang2" and "chuan2" are more easily differentiated. Some southern native speakers don't contort or stretch out the syllable with the "ng" ending as much, such that the two can often be difficult to tell apart.

[renzhe]

But 个 is neutral here.

The tone sandhi precedes the neutralisation here, much like in 哪里 , but no need to go off-topic This is one of the most confusing parts of tone sandhi for me personally.

Patrick, pinyin and sound basically match 1 to 1. If you have learnt pinyin correctly, you will be able to write down anything you hear.

[Shelley]

I think it is important to learn pinyin early, as you have found, incorrect spelling makes it hard to do things like inputing into IMEs etc.

I also think it is important to learn characters at the same time because the character contains information that helps you learn it's sounds, meanings and tone.

Learning the correct stroke order is also important because a lot of character handwriting recognizers use this as way of getting the right one. If you don't learn the right stroke order right from the start it will be much more difficult to "unlearn" the wrong way.

I would go for less quantity and more quality, learn things well and it will be easier in the end.

You have only just started on the great jouney that is learning chinese, don't rush, enjoy it, it will make learning a pleasure.

Good luck

Shelley

[Patrick_ChineseForum]

Patrick, pinyin and sound basically match 1 to 1. If you have learnt pinyin correctly, you will be able to write down anything you hear.

Umm... ok I didn't learn pinyin correctly then because I couldn't write down what I heard. I thought learning pinyin is all about knowing how all of them sound and be able to immitate the sound/tone. I guess I should pause on learning other things and start drilling down on pinyin spelling...

I would go for less quantity and more quality, learn things well and it will be easier in the end.

Shelley, I love your phrase! How many times have we heard that (but we don't always follow it ;-) Thanks for reminding me about the important of learning characters. Honestly the beauty of Chinese characters is what got me interested (not the sound or culture) in the first place.

You have only just started on the great jouney that is learning chinese

Great journey indeed! I still can remember the picture of a dictionary sitting next to my grandfather when he's reading Chinese newspaper. The weird thing is that I've known English for only about a third of the time he has known Chinese. I don't need a dictionary when reading English newspaper. My grandfather has read Chinese newspaper for decades. Yeah great journey as you said.

[imron]

icebear's post contains a lot of really good information. Characters are really important if you want to get to higher levels of the language, and even if you don't want to get to a higher level, they'll help you get to other levels faster - even if it seems like more work in the beginning. Take a long-term approach and commit yourself to learning a small number of characters every day - but do it every day (tools like http://www.dontbreakthechain.com/ and my own 100% can help).

Do people really memorize pinyin along with characters and meanings?

Some people might, but I don't, and I would also recommend against it. What I do is remember the sound, and because I've learnt pinyin correctly I know that I can work backwards and determine the correct pinyin if I need it. Knowing pinyin well also means that when I'm learning a word I know that the sound I'm committing to memory is also correct.

The key is to make sure you learn the pinyin system well to give yourself the ability to do this. Then it cuts down on the amount of stuff you need to remember.

[Patrick_ChineseForum]

@Imron: Thanks for answering my question. I can do better memorizing the sound than pinyin. Since I haven't mastered pinyin, I only learn new words from CCTV media: basic video and podcasts. So I only listen to how the native pronounce words (not how I would pronounce in pinyin by myself).

When it comes to learning new words and their sounds, I guess we have two ways of doing it. The first way is to memorize pinyin and produce the sound based on the pinyin. The second way is to memorize the sound and produce pinyin later if need be. I wonder which way is more popular among foreign leaners like us (those who don't speak Chinese as their first language). Is there such a survey or discussion about this? If there is one, please share the link. I'm curious to know how other people learn and which way is considered better.

The dontbreakthechain technique is also interesting. The length of the red cross chain can certainly motive people. I can see using this technique for both Chinese study and gym workout. Thanks for the idea.

[imron]

Since I haven't mastered pinyin,

Spend a few hours and do this. Take the time to learn and appreciate all the sounds that seem similar but are actually quite different, and make sure you can go from sound to pinyin or from pinyin to sound accurately. It will help you a lot in your studies.

Regarding which technique is better, I don't think it's instructive to look at which way is more popular among foreign learners. It is far more useful to look at what natives do, and they remember the sound and then produce the pinyin from that if they need to.