Flash cards w/o characters. Why not?

[Kelby]

Hey folks!

A while back I asked for some feedback on a book I'm working on to give newbies packed with my best practices.

(you can find the thread here http://www.chinese-f...-love-feedback/)

I've been going back through trying to make things a bit better, and I edited my section on delaying the learning of characters today. I've heard this is a bit of a hot button topic here, so I hope I can get some feedback from everyone. Those for, let me know how I can express everything better. Those against, rip me apart

Edit, here's the thing in forum post. Note, the cards I reference are in the PDF.

"My 2 cents on why beginners should exclude characters from flashcard learning

If you were to ask me one of the things that will slow you down the absolute most in Studying Chinese, I would say getting into characters too soon. Characters are one of the cool and nifty things that make Chinese such an interesting and brag-able language to learn, but to me diving right into characters with no other knowledge in the language is one of the biggest mistakes you could make when starting your study.

When you take on an alphabetical language, you often first need to learn how that alphabet is used. After that point, you can turn your attention to reading and more importantly learning things off flashcards. That’s a major advantage to learning an alphabetical language; the ability to start building reading skills from a very early point. For Chinese, however, you initially won't know how to read a character just by looking at it.

A conventional flashcard places a word or sentence with an English translation on the back. This allows you to learn how to translate a word, and recognize its meaning when you come across it in natural language. Also, provided the language is alphabetical and you’ve learned that alphabet, you can relatively easily pick up how to say each item or at least ballpark its pronunciation. It’s rough going at first if you don’t know the alphabet, but you get into it.

Because being able to sound things out is such an important skill, people usually dive into learning the alphabet of a language first. In college I had a roommate who studied Russian, and at the start of his class I saw him diligently learning every last letter. After that point, his decks were populated with vocabulary cards. For him, learning the alphabet was the key to beginning to build his vocabulary and it had to happen in two steps; alphabet first, vocabulary building second.

I wager this is the way that most of us are used to learning a language. The hang-up for us learners of Chinese is that our target language has a lot more ‘letters’ to learn than the average language. Learning every single character, or even learning characters in isolation of words, is highly impractical due to how vastly far it can push back the building of the vocabulary needed by a beginner.

Characters are one of the things that makes Chinese so cool to learn, but learning them without any foreknowledge or proficiency in the language can lead to trouble. Since characters are so integral to the language I feel most of us automatically think we need to try and take them in, but there are a couple of big issues with doing this. The first big issue I see is that focusing on characters often confuses our goals. When the vast majority of us take to a language, we are looking to be able to speak it fluently. After all, a language is first and foremost a means of connection between people. Characters have nothing to do with speaking though. One could always argue that focusing on writing and reading first can allow for written communication right off the bat, but I have met many a learner who can brag about the thousands of characters they know who are still too nervous or unrehearsed to actually talk effectively with a Chinese person. That’s entirely because

they focused on a completely separate skill than speaking. Their focus was on learning characters, which will make them literate, where what they really need for verbal communication was to practice speaking, which will make them fluent.

This might seem like a no brainer, but it’s staggering how easy it is to use a method that won’t get you to the goal you have in mind. The biggest thing to remember when deciding when to dive into characters is that you only learn what you practice, and while some crossover exists between skills, you will not magically be able to speak perfect Chinese by dedicating five years to learning 10,000 characters.

There’s also the fact that this character fixation serves as an all too handy excuse to keep from diving into speaking. I wager many a student has held off on focusing on their speaking abilities until they have ‘enough characters.’ The number of people who say they’ve studied a language but can’t speak it in my mind is due entirely to a focus, for whatever reason, on reading over speaking. For example, fear of embarrassment or sounding stupid naturally makes us want to build up our skills until we can express ourselves in a way we’re accustomed to. It’s a scary thing to switch from being an articulate person to feeling as if you can’t speak as well as a two-year old. Many people, take this fear and deal with it by hiding behind their character study until they hit some arbitrary number. But again, that’s focusing on a skill that won’t get you to your goal, if your goal is to be fluent. The third issue I see comes with the taking in of new material. The cards that you use for learning an alphabetical language and the ones that you use for learning Chinese, through characters, are much different.

Your average flash card looks like this:

Front:

Question

Back:

Answer

Pretty smooth. You can use the question side to quiz yourself over the word in your target language, and you can use the answer side to practice translating from your mother tongue into the target language. For all intents and purposes your card has you learning one thing at a time. You can use it in one of two ways, but the focus is only on one skill; vocabulary building or translating.The primary issue that I ran into while learning Chinese was that there was too much on each card. Here’s what my cards looked like. Front Back The primary issue is that there is a whole lot more effort that needs to be expended to learn each card to completion. 1) You need to go over what each set of characters means, 2) how to translate each word into Chinese phonetically, 3) how to translate each word visually (as in what characters represent the concept), and 4) you have to learn the phonetics for each character so you can read it. That’s twice as much stuff to learn, just by adding one more item to the card. You will find more success by creating as few barriers for yourself as possible. In comparison to this Chinese flashcard, the first ‘standard’ one is significantly simpler, and will require less time and effort to learn.

My cards:

Front:

变成

Back:

Biànchéng

to become; to change into; to turn into

My advice then would be to separate everything out. If you take the answer side that has both pinyin and definition on it and separate it out into a card of its own, you have the same thing as my ‘standard’ card above. If you’re looking to learn the character, separating it into a stack with character and definition and one with character and pinyin will greatly lower the mental impact of studying the deck. For the beginner, I absolutely recommend creating a ‘standard’ card that deals with pronunciation and definition only. Doing this will make your study as low impact as possible. Low impact means easier building your vocabulary and retention, which in turn can yield immediate results if built properly.

To close out my case, please don’t take my advice as a statement of the worthlessness of character learning. As a learner, the most important thing is the achievement of your goals. If you are in a Chinese class and need to do well on your tests, by all means learn the characters you need to. There is no way that learning characters will make you worse at Chinese. Focusing on learning characters at the expense of learning a skill more closely related to your goals on the other hand will absolutely slow your progress. If you’re looking for fluency, don’t get caught in the trap of focusing on or hiding behind characters. If you’re interested in becoming a calligraphy master, by all means learn as many characters as you possibly can! Just keep your study materials tied to your goals, and you’ll find success."

I threw it in a PDF to make it more readable than just a forum post ;)

Spare no criticism. I want to improve this and I know I can't do that without some good discussion on the topic and heavy criticism of the thesis.

Why a Beginner Should Delay Studying Characters.pdf

[Hofmann]

Actually a forum post is easier to read.

I'm a rather impatient reader, so if I were writing this, I'd summarize your argument in the first sentence.

[Geray]

I am learning English. I agree with your idea though we are opposite. I think no matter which language, its aim is to be used by person, people can communacate with each other easily through language, so the best way to learn a foreign language is to use it , communicate with others as frequently as you can. I have studied 8,000 english words, but my english is still poor. the common Chinese character we often use is only 3000, as a Chinese people , i only know about these 3000 Chinese character, i can listen, speak, read, write normally. but even i learned 8000 english words , i can't do the same thing. I analysis the reason is that i do not use it frequently.

[li3wei1]

I haven't read it, but the title is a bit off-putting. You might consider something along the lines of "It's possible to put off characters and still learn Chinese". Just because method A worked for you doesn't mean that methods B, C, and D are wrong for everyone. Of course, if you've included references to studies that show that statistically speaking, students delaying characters consistently perform significantly better than students who don't, then I take it all back and grovel before you.

[Kelby]

Hofmann, as soon as I'm back by my computer I'll post-ify it in the OP.

As for a one sentence synopsis: IMHO characters should be excluded from flash card study for the first few weeks of Mandarin learning so as to allow a student to begin establishing spoken vocabulary and a phonetic feel for the language.

Sorry, it's a run on sentence ;P

li3wei1, perhaps I'm thinking too sensational. What do you think of this? "My 2 cents on why beginners should exclude characters from flashcard learning,"

At this point the chapter is based on my opinion and logical reasoning, but I'd like to understand the subject on a more scientific basis. When I was on study abroad back in the day, many of my classmates came from a pinyin first background (both semesters of beginner's Chinese were taught this way) and they wiped the floor with those of us who studied the traditional way (me included). That's no study, but their results certainly made me envious and incredibly curious.

Apologies, perhaps since this is at this point opinion it shouldn't be in the "resources" section.

[li3wei1]

Okay, I gave it a quick read, and my impression is that you're attacking a straw man. You point out the problems with over-focusing on characters (which readers of this forum are very familiar with), and slide into the conclusion that it is better to ignore characters, at least for a while. I don't think anyone is advocating that you start by learning all the characters, or even that you start by learning any specific number of characters. Most teachers and textbooks take a balanced, speaking-listening-reading-writing approach, based on a widely held belief that these skills are interrelated and cannot be developed efficiently in isolation. You're advocating an approach that leans heavily in one direction, and supporting it by arguing against an approach that leans heavily in the other direction.

When I was on study abroad back in the day, many of my classmates came from a pinyin first background (both semesters of beginner's Chinese were taught this way) and they wiped the floor with those of us who studied the traditional way (me included).

When you say 'wiped the floor', do you mean in speaking/listening, or in overall competence? If they spent all their time learning to speak, and didn't know any characters, I would expect their speaking to be better than someone who divided their time and could now read basic texts. However, if they had subsequently caught up to you in character recognition, and were still better at speaking, then there may be something to it. Were they all from the same school? Maybe they just had a good teacher, or spent more time on it than the other students? With their program, when exactly did they start learning characters?

I did a bit of a search for academic studies on delaying characters when teaching Chinese as a second language to adults, and found nothing. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places. If anyone has better access to the literature, I'd be interested.

[Guest realmayo]

I definitely think there's a very good case for beginners studying characters separately from the spoken language.

As for whether you study them as soon as you start the spoken language, or whether you delay a bit, I think that comes down to common sense, taking into account different personal situations, if you're self-studying or in a class etc etc.

If I was running a syllabus I'd have most of the beginner classes focussed on pinyin, pronunciation, basic vocab. And separate to that, a class on characters, showing how radicals work, how pronunciation is often indicated with components, teaching how to write and recognise characters starting with the most basic components -- all without any necessary overlap with the vocab that's being taught in the other classes.

Once you understand how characters work, how to break them down, how to learn them, only then should they be integrated with the rest of the language course. That's my theory!

[Ruben von Zwack]

I'd sign up in realmayo's school!

[Kelby]

li3wei1

In review I pity the straw man I'm bullying. Perhaps because this is serving as an explanation for why my book includes no characters, it's really not even an argument. Perhaps looking at how the unbalanced approach does against a balanced approach would make this more relevant

As for those classmates, they did awesome in speaking but couldn't read that first summer. They did all have the same teacher and he was amazing (he was the one who supervised us during both summers I participated in this program). They started learning characters in their second academic year of Chinese and that summer they were better at reading than the rest of us too while still bearing us out in speaking (or at least confidence). There were some real prodigies there though. One of them got pretty far on the China Bridge TV program in 2010. I'd have to look a little deeper into how their class was structured and how they each studied. Yet even at that the sample is way too small to draw any real scientific conclusion that the method they used is more efficient. I'm suspecting I was in a class full of outliers.

realmayo, you and I are in the same school of thought

The book I'm working on (doing major changes to it, BTW) looks to build a personally tailored base of knowledge before independently chasing goals in the different areas of language. I'm gearing the book toward independent learners as well, if that sheds a little more light as well

[Guest realmayo]

Are you going to charge real people real money for your book?