Characters, words, sentences

[Lugubert]

In a thread, Jamuna asked

How many words (to read' date=' write and speak) should be known to a beginner and how many words for elementary level in Mandarin Chinese?[/quote']

I had more questions than answers.

55 years ago, I absorbed those language facets (and also oral comprehension) in fairly equal progressions for English and German. Soon afterwards, French reading and writing were no problem, but conversation was way more difficult.

Skip half a century and a number of languages, and I'm at extremely different levels for Chinese. I'm not too bad at translating from Chinese, if I can make full use of my dictionaries. But I wouldn't dare to write one sentence for a native speaker to read but for very elementary stuff. And on the very few occasions when a person in China has (seemingly) understood what I was saying, I have been totally helpless when they replied.

Another problem, which interests me a lot: in that thread, everyone discussed the required number of "words". Would that mean the Chinese equivalents to some number of English words, or the number of known Chinese entities that you'd regard as "words"? In the latter case, how many characters will have to be known to read those ”words”?

My problem (well, one of many) is that I've seen nice and smooth diagrams that pretend to show that if you know x characters, you’ll understand y% of a Chinese text. But if you know that 大 means big and 小 is small, that won't help you to understand that 大小 can mean size. Add Chinese grammar, and you'll more often than not be totally lost even if you know all the characters in a sentence and even all the words they make up. Think 的 and how to relate that to "Western" relative clauses and the multitude of its other uses that explain much of the mess Internet makes of Chinese translations.

[abcdefg]

...I've seen nice and smooth diagrams that pretend to show that if you know x characters, you’ll understand y% of a Chinese text. But if you know that 大 means big and 小 is small, that won't help you to understand that 大小 can mean size. Add Chinese grammar, and you'll more often than not be totally lost even if you know all the characters in a sentence and even all the words they make up.

I completely agree and also think those on-line language proficiency tests that claim to estimate how many words you know from the results of a 15 minute vocabulary quiz are rather useless. (Clavis Sinica has one.) http://www.clavisinica.com/character-test-applet.html

[imron]

This discussion on reading fluency might also be of interest.

[johnk]

Hi,

I don't think you are raising any new questions here, you are stating things that anyone who has studied Chinese for any length of time has discovered.

It is relativately easy for a speaker of one European language to learn another European language. European languages are not that different. It is much harder for a speaker of a European language to learn Chinese. For example, I could hold a telephone conversation with a stranger in Italian after approx 18 months of casual study. I have intensively studied Chinese for 4 years and I can barely express myself with someone I know in a face to face situation.

It is not just the number of words you know, it is knowing the idioms and expressions. Learning that kind of stuff takes a lot of exposure and it comes very slowly.

The idea that if you know x number of words, you will understand y% of any Chinese text is nonsense.

There are lots of academic studies where people count characters or words and compile word lists and/or frequency tables. This leads to statistics like that for any given Chinese text, 95% of the characters will be from the first 3000 most common characters. So then you get the erroneous concept "if you can read 3000 characters, you can understand 95% of any Chinese text".

A character list or word list may be useful as an indicator of what to study, but personally I think their usefulness is overrated.

If it is any consolation, Chinese people sometimes get things wrong too. Last week a Chinese colleague was reading one of my texts and she got a character wrong. I sometimes ask native speakers about some sample HSK question and I occasionally get answers that disagree with what is in the book.

For a European, learning Chinese is a long term undertaking, probably a life-long undertaking.

Enjoy the ride, there are lots of contradictions and fustrations. Don't let them get you down.

Recognize your victories, however small and cherish them. They are your motivation to keep going.