Learning Chinese without Chinese characters

[tabel]

Does anyone know of any Chinese language programs in China or Taiwan (preferably) that use only pin-yin (or bopomofo) in their classes and materials. I know that most(?) programs do this for their first classes, but then switch to using Chinese characters. While I plan to learn to use characters some day, I am looking for a faster track to learning to speak and understand, which are my priorities. Are there programs for learning Chinese without Chinese characters?

[navaburo]

The FSI course uses strictly pinyin, and is quite extensive, if a bit dated. It is public domain.

Learning Chinese by Julian K Wheatly is a beginner text all in pinyin. Most of the material for it can be downloaded for free from MIT's OpenCourseware website. (I started with this text and I felt it gave a solid foundation.)

You may want to study characters in parallel, and then bring your efforts together once you are feeling more confident.

[navaburo]

Sorry, just re-read your post and see you are looking for programs in China. I can't help you there. All I can say is, learn as much as you can before you go! Getting a foundation in pronouncing pinyin correctly and writing characters may be assets to you whatever program you choose.

[zhouhaochen]

I work for LTL and so can mainly comment on our courses here.

As a school we focus a lot on speaking and using Chinese, but even our regular group classes still have about 25% of reading/writing in them. I do not think you will find a group program that leaves Characters away completely once you go beyond beginner level (for which there are good reasons, but thats another question). What we do however offer is a 1on1 program that teaches only pinyin (using the 体验汉语口语教程/Experiencing Oral Chinese book series, which use pinyin for all four books of the series) in Beijing and a full immersion program that exclusively focuses on spoken Chinese, both during class in Beijing and Chengde and especially during the full immersion part in Chengde, for students who want to improve their spoken Chinese as fast as possible.

[mokushiroku]

We offer tutoring in pure Zhuyin or Pinyin, but in my honest opinion (and experience with working with such students), students who start out relying on phonetics never throw that crutch away.

I honestly recommend you start with characters. Even the national Chinese test for foreigners, the HSK, ditches Pinyin after the beginner level.

Do you really want to be fluent but illiterate in Chinese? In the end, it's your choice. But have an end-goal in mind before you do something that rarely anyone else does.

[renzhe]

While I plan to learn to use characters some day, I am looking for a faster track to learning to speak and understand, which are my priorities. Are there programs for learning Chinese without Chinese characters?

There aren't many, and I believe that the reason is that learning Chinese without characters is actually considerably slower and more difficult. It means learning without a dictionary, without subtitles, without any books, without any comics, without any grammar explanations and it typically makes it harder to get any help from native Chinese speakers who will naturally explain things using characters and often find writing in pinyin exotic. All of these factors make an already difficult language even harder to learn. The result of this is that as soon as you get beyond very elementary things, most courses start teaching characters because continuing without them is hard.

In other words, most programs teach Chinese characters because that's the fastest way to learn spoken Chinese.

It does seem counter-intuitive and it is often a discussion point on any Chinese-language forum, but the fact is that the fluent learner who skipped characters in order to perfect spoken Chinese quickly is a mythical beast whose existence is disputed. Everybody has heard of such a person existing somewhere in China, but nobody has ever seen one It's like an award-winning classical concert pianist who can't read music. It's probably possible, but I don't know any. People who can play Chopin all read music. People who learned Chinese as a foreign language all read characters.

[tysond]

Assuming your goal is increasing spoken fluency as fast as possible, 1:1 lessons, tutoring, language exchange, friendship or dating are effective strategies.

All of this can be done in addition to learning characters, i don't see how skipping the characters (say 30 mins a day) will make much difference in time to acquire oral skills, as it is unlikely the rest of your day is full. The people who acquire oral skills fastest are mostly those with lots of immersion outside their programs.

Character study, once you know the basics, can largely be done alone and being able to read opens the door for even more independent study.

[character]

To add to renzhe's point, if you don't start to learn characters soon after starting to learn Chinese, it will be very hard to keep the many, many single character words which sound like other, different single character words separate in your head, especially if you are not great at hearing tones.

Humans are great at recognizing patterns. Learning to recognize characters is surprisingly easy.

[Johnny20270]

i started off learning chinese without characters, by going through pimsleur etc, despite what others advised. However, when I started learning characters (in word forms rather than single characters) I found it helped immensly. As a native english speaker I found great difficulty with the amount of homonyms in Chinese, especially with which the frequency of the 'de' particle is used.

Actually I find learning characters tedious but efficient when employing the use of software like ANKI and HSK lists. It definitely will improve your speaking level. even with pinyin I am constantly confusing ou and uo like zuo and zou, but the characters actually make it easier to speak.

[amvtop10]

I've always thought that learning Chinese without character was better because you won't have to stress on remebering characters but instead focus on learning the language. Also, I forget the characters when I do not use it. Teachers just teach too fast these days and it is hard to keep up (when you have other stuff to do and class), making you learn character makes it worse.

Strokes are also hard to remember. I am usually saying them right but I think it is because it comes out naturally for me but when I write it on paper and being tested. I get them all wrong!

if you plan to go back in learning characters after being able to understand speak fluently , almost everyone never really goes back. I hear that a lot.

Also, if your teacher do not speak your native language, do not take the class. I studied Chinese for 4 years every saturday with little kids and I learned Nothing! My parents kept forcing me to take the class and I did not want to. The book had no pin yin, teacher did not speak English, I had no idea what they were saying. Waste of money

[WestTexas]

I don't think learning to hand-write the characters is necessary. Learn to hand-write maybe the most common 200-300 or so, just so you get a feel for how characters are composed. It will make learning more characters easier. However, with less common characters, I think learning to write is a waste of time. It's just not a useful skill. Even many Chinese have to pull out their cell-phone to double-check how to write less common characters.

Of course, proponents of character-writing will cook up all sorts of scenarios where you need to be able to hand-write but can't pull out your cellphone to look the character up (like Chinese do). I'm not convinced. I live in a town with like 5 native English speakers, have been here for 3 years, and have never needed to handwrite anything. Just use the cellphone and enter the pinyin. If you can recognize the character when reading and know the pinyin, you can enter it using pinyin.

If you need to write for school, learn to write. Otherwise, I think it's skippable.

Reading characters is completely different though. If you can't read, you're going to be stuck with more basic vocabulary, you won't be able to use a proper Chinese dictionary, and most importantly, your Chinese-learning environment is going to be severely limited. No signs, no websites, no news, no subtitles, no books, no QQ in Chinese, etc.

[Johnny20270]

yes I should have clarified that I only learn to read characters, not write. I have no intention of learning to write characters, too far too much time required and practically pointless in my view. when I need to read something, I can just use my phone with the camera character recognition function or failing that (for odd script, street signs etc) I can make some attempted at hand writing it into the phone.

Come to think of it, I hardly ever write english!

[Ruben von Zwack]

Actually, in my opinion, avoiding to learn the basic + - 300 characters is more difficult, and will cause more labour and complications, than just going ahead and learning them.

[dnevets]

I learned Chinese using only pinyin for a while. It worked out pretty well for me. I used some books called Chinese Made Easier, which are heavily reliant on pinyin and introduce characters very slowly. These books are great for picking up lots of vocab and have very clear grammar explanations. I highly recommend them. I completely avoided learning any characters at all until I was halfway through the 3rd of 5 volumes... So my speaking improved in leaps and bounds, my vocab and grammar were good... I just didn't feel the need to read and write at that time. When I finally decided to give it a try, my reading and writing caught up very quickly, and I don't feel like starting this late disadvantaged me at all. If I could do it all again, I'd do it the same way.

I'm sure this statement will attract a little vitriol but... honestly, for a lot of people learning Chinese, I can't help but think that avoiding characters (intially!) is the best thing to do. Focussing on just speaking and listening a lot in the early stages helps massively with motivation because you can really feel that you're getting somewhere quickly. In many cases, being able to have a conversation with the locals is going to be a lot more useful than being able to read and write. I suppose it depends what your motivation is; I'm speaking as someone that wasn't studying formally, it started out for me as a spare-time hobby (the obsession didn't come until later, when I decided I'd try to tackle reading and writing too ), I had no ambitions of passing HSK - though I did later take HSK, and didn't do any worse than would've been expected if I'd been studying in the 'normal' way with a 4-skills approach in a classroom.

[imron]

is going to be a lot more useful than being able to read and write.

I don't see anyone here really advocating the need to read and write - in fact pretty much everyone has said being able to read is useful, but that you don't really need to worry about writing.

People tend to lump these two skills as being basically the same thing (I definitely used to before I started learning Chinese), but for Chinese they're really two separate things. Anyway, count me as someone who thinks learning to read the words you're learning will help you learn more effectively.

[Johnny20270]

As an example I thought 以为 (yi3, wei2) was always pronounced 一为 (yi1 wei2) but when seeing the characters, the tones stuck firmly. Of course, one can just get that from the pinyin alone, but the characters cemented the view

I always wonder why language schools (those in London) include writing and not keep it as an optional extra.

Also, I take the view that HSK should be redesigned? I would have thought that writing should be an additional optional extra for HSK so you could possibly achieve a HSK certificate in either "listening+reading+oral" or all 4. The inclusion of writing puts me off completely.

[Ruben von Zwack]

Doesn't need to be re designed, because:

1) there is the HSK oral exam.

2) HSK 1 and 2 are passive reading, including pinyin, only. And for higher levels of language competence, wouldn't it would be quite unconventional to not include active writing (or typing or what ever) into the defition? Not just for Chinese but for most languages in this world?

[Johnny20270]

yes but Chinese is uniquely different isn't it when compared to European languages The shear amount of characters makes hand writing a huge task. Writing pinyin and selecting the character is much much easier. Perhaps I'm misinformed but I was of the understanding that with HSK you actually had to hand write? Have I misunderstood this?

[imron]

Have I misunderstood this?

There are now places that also allow it to be done on computers.

[Ruben von Zwack]

I'm not gonna argue against the fact that Hanzi are a pain. Everyone who denies that is... in denial!

Yeah, I guess it's a misunderstanding! No writing at all in levels 1 + 2, just reading, and the sentence comes in Hanzi and in Pinyin.

From level 3 on you need to "produce" the hanzi, but if you take the electronic exam, you can type. I don't know if, when you type, there will be a pop up for you to select the right one, but it's hard to imagine it would be any other way? There are people on here who took the computer based HSK, I believe, they should know.