starting an online Chinese character class for free for learners

[imron]

So I think that the question of whether, or to what extent, one can relate, for example, the sound of 尤 to those of 就, 优, 犹, 扰, 忧, etc. depends in part on the extent of one´s knowledge of Chinese phonetics and Chinese historical phonology.

I think this is the whole point of what rogerdunnhawaii has been saying.  You can have no knowledge or Chinese phonetics or historical phonology, but you can still see that characters 就 and 扰 have a shared component, and his program will tell you whether they will have the same sound or a different one, along with any other characters that share that same part and may or may not have the same or similar pronunciation.

 

That can be a very useful thing to know, and in my opinion, it's unreasonable to expect learners to have a deep understanding of Chinese etymology and phonology before they can start to appreciate these sorts of things.

[Sobria-Ebritas]

 

rarer characters are more likely to be ones with funky pronunciation

 

Are you sure about that? The data I have collected do not seem to show any significant correlation between frequency of use and pronunciation similarity or divergence.

[imron]

This is just from my personal experience with reading, and when I come across a character I don't know but that has a component I recognise.  Quite often the pronunciation is different from what I might initially suspect based on the pronunciation of similar characters.  I haven't done any specific research on this, but it's been a common enough occurrence that I've noticed it.

[Sobria-Ebritas]

Thank you, Admin. One problem I find when talking about similarities and differences in the pronunciation of characters is what should exactly we understood by "similar" and "different". Probably there is a gradation between completely identical and totally different, and in that gradation there are points where the distinction between similarity and difference becomes fuzzy. By the way, it seems to me that there is a tendency to consider that two pronunciations are more similar when they differ only in tone than when differ in some other respect. But that´s leading me out of the thread, I´m afraid. Sorry.

[OneEye]

After this post, I'm going to step out of the discussion, because I think it's obvious we're talking about different things at different levels, and frankly I don't have the time to hash everything out here. I've talked some about this elsewhere on Chinese-forums, and I can give book references (they're all in Chinese) to anyone interested in knowing more, just PM me. It's not a bunch of arcane, obscure academic knowledge like people here seem to think. The more you know about what's really going on with the writing system, the easier it is to learn the characters, the easier it will be to recall them (even if you haven't had to write in years), and the easier it will be to predict how unfamiliar characters might be pronounced. This stuff is directly applicable to anyone learning Chinese, not just us disconnected academics, and doesn't really take all that much specialized knowledge (most any Taiwanese person would probably recognize 称 as simply the cursive form of 稱, for instance, and high school 國文 textbooks are full of information on phonetic relationships). It's not specialized if any 16 year-old native speaker is expected to know it.

 

Two things I'd like to clear up first:

 

Maybe the learner just needs a basic phonological knowledge and a well-researched book or two on characters, maybe Sunrise Method might help.

 

I was suggesting that you read a book or two on the subject, not that learners should. I think a teacher has a responsibility to understand what they're teaching, and while you have some knowledge about it, there is a lot wrong with what you're doing that makes it clear where your deficiencies lie.

 

Secondly, I want to apologize for insinuating that you may have ripped off ideas from my friend. He hadn't yet started doing those talks when you were at ICLP. I'm not going to mention his name here though, sorry.

 

And I'm out.

[Sobria-Ebritas]

Has someone read this paper? Any useful information for learning Chinese characters in it? It was published by the Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association (JCLTA). Unfortunately, it doesn´t seem easy to get access to it.

 

Author:

Alber, Charles J

Journal:

Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association

Date:

01/01/1989

Volume:

24

Issue:

1

Page:

97 - 104

 

The Most Recent List of 3000 Most Commonly-Used Characters and Their Phonetics