Are characters necessary to become fluent in Mandarin?

[zhouhaochen]

We have a lot of students who tell me that they "want to speak Mandarin as fast as possible" and therefore "not waste any time with Chinese characters" as they are not interested in reading Chinese books. I disagree with that strategy in general and to save myself explaining the same thing again and again, wrote a blog post about it

 

http://www.livethelanguage.cn/learn-chinese-characters/

 

However, that is only my opinion and I thought would be a good opportunity to ask the community here, do you guys agree that in the end you need characters if you want to become fluent? Anyone ever met a fluent Mandarin learner who did not know Chinese characters? I never have, but who knows, maybe he is out there?

[anonymoose]

I have met quite a few. Most of them are old and didn't have much of an education, so yes, it's definitely possible.

[Demonic_Duck]

I can't imagine anyone ever building up much of a technical vocabulary in Chinese without being able to read, but there's nothing in principle to say they couldn't become fluent (and after all, illiterate native speakers exist for any language you care to name). I think they'd be severely handicapping themselves in the long run, though.

[querido]

Edit: What I had posted was not applicable to Mandarin. The following corrects it.

The FSI program in Mandarin is "88 weeks (second year is in the country), 2200 hours".

http://www.geolanguage.org/archives/sla/gurt_1999_07.pdf

That gets the student to "Speaking 3" and "Reading 3" which are defined here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20071030055051/http://www.govtilr.org/ILRscale2.htm#3

http://web.archive.org/web/20071030150239/http://www.govtilr.org/ILRscale4.htm#3

That program starts with audio and Romanization only, for 16 weeks full time.

To zhouhaochen:

You asked whether or not they will need reading and writing "in the end". That's pretty far away. So since your post is also about how to get started, I posted the above just to share the strong case for starting with listening and speaking.

[Demonic_Duck]

I'm not sure that militates in favour of starting without characters. Where's the evidence to show that approach is any more efficient?

 

My gut instinct is that in the long-term it's less efficient, due to the fact you'd be going back over what you'd already learnt to assign characters to words. I'd imagine this would lead to a lot of e.g. not knowing whether it should be 向 or 像, 在 or 再 etc. (and that's even without thinking about multi-character words, which if anything would probably cause worse problems). This seems redundant to me, and would be avoided if you simply started with characters.

[OneEye]

At the considerable risk of derailing into a discussion about the definition of fluency, I'm going to point out that "fluent" refers to speech. It means that it flows. It doesn't have much to do with reading and writing, and it doesn't necessarily have much to do with "advanced" vocabulary (which is generally just another way of saying "vocabulary that any native speaker would know but for whatever reason doesn't get taught to learners until later"). I personally believe that attaining a basic level of facility and fluency in a language before worrying much about reading and writing is the best way to go about it. Obviously, reaching a higher level will require you to read, but literacy training would go much more smoothly if you begin from such a base. I know I've been banging on about this recently, but language is sound, not ink, and I think language teachers tend to put the cart (literacy) before the horse (language ability).

[Lu]

It really depends on what you want. If you're going on holiday to China, or want to say some polite things to your business partners, there's no need to learn to write everything you can say.

 

But even in those cases, I'd recommend learning a little bit of characters. Even if you're never going to write even a birthday card or a note to your ayi, I think that if you want to learn Chinese in any meaningful sense, you need to learn enough characters to see that they are not weird squiggles; to be able to reproduce an unfamiliar character in a way that a native speaker can read it; to compare the characters in the address with those on the street sign you're standing in front of, such things. Any halfway serious learner of Chinese needs to know what radicals are and the three or so most common ways characters are constructed. If you don't want to learn that, then you don't want to learn Chinese.

 

The way I learned Chinese, we started with lots of pinyin, then simple sentences and simple characters. It took a long time before I could write the things I could say, but I got the idea of what characters were and what they did early on and I think that was a good way of learning.

[character]

I've seen it in Chinese class that those who delay at least learning to passively recognize characters quickly start to struggle with homophones.  Learning the rules to write characters well enough to look up unknown characters in Pleco takes an hour or two. 

 

Beyond that, it's harder to see more knowledge of characters as a requirement, assuming the student has classes/tutors that enable progress without requiring character-focused work. 

 

I think it's beneficial to actively learn characters from the beginning, including writing them a lot, but not everyone has the time for that.

[querido]

I agree with OneEye.

In particular I agree that the thread is about listening and speaking; the original poster asked if it's possible to do it without characters. (He didn't ask "what's the most efficient way to learn both listening and reading".)

To zhouhaochen:

In addition to Demonic_Duck's #3 there's the example of blind people, and although some could be said to have learned through their fingers that is still not through the eyes (characters). (Learning through the fingers would be another proof that the visual channel is not essential.) So, your original question is answered, but if I may continue... :-)

The thread is about listening and speaking.

My own experience (six years) is that learning to read, even learning to read aloud quite convincingly, even listening to the audio of texts that have become familiar or memorized previously (like podcasts), had little to do with listening comprehension of un-memorized audio (which is what we're talking about).

Some of the best posters here say that to learn X, do X; that one should listen and speak in order to learn how to listen and speak isn't controversial. My contribution is to point out (because others might have missed it too) that to train your ability to understand speech that you have not previously memorized you should listen to speech that you have not previously memorized! :-) That would require a live person, or maybe a graded-reader audio that is long enough to evade memorization, or radio, etc. In my experience, learning to read and write the transcript is of little benefit (to listening comprehension, which is what we're talking about).

Edit: I also agree with character, above.

[johnk]

Anyone ever met a fluent Mandarin learner who did not know Chinese characters?

 

 

I know two heritage speakers who speak fluent Mandarin but who can't read or write.

 

But I would also say that heritage speakers and illiterate natives do not count as they learned the language as a first language. 

[icebear]

I know two heritage speakers who speak fluent Mandarin but who can't read or write.

But I would also say that heritage speakers and illiterate natives do not count as they learned the language as a first language.

Strongly agree with the second point. What works for a native learner in youth isn't what is necessarily most efficient for an adult learner with different expectations and capacities.

Keep in mind that those heritage learners had an entire lifetime (probably at least a few decades) to cement language concepts bit by bit, with or without characters.

Most language learners are interested in communication in a few months, competence in a year, and "fluency "in only a few years (e.g. within a bachelors program). In that case I think it's worth getting into characters ASAP, i.e. once past the first few lessons, merely to build the habit of mindlessly memorizing 3-5 per day which will help incredibly in the medium term. Neglecting one aspect of the language for too long will inevitably drag on the language learners progress later on.

[sparrow]

Consider English speakers who can barely read or write. Are they fluent? Yes. But do they speak well? Often times, their vocabulary is piss-poor and can't easily discuss topics that require advanced language abilities.

 

Remember that native speakers spend a good two or so years being spoken to constantly, plus have the advantage of being babies, which means their minds are extremely adaptive. They are essentially listening to language full-time. And by the time they are four years old, they have the vocabulary of a four-year old.

 

In that sense, I would not be surprised if it took a non-native speaker a few years to pick up the language without the aid of reading. I think they would progress faster than a child because they are adults already, but I can't imagine they would be able to deal with anything too advanced.

 

An exception to the above hypothesis would be a program specifically designed for promoting fluency without literacy. It would have to include about 5000 words in pinyin and provide enough listening, reading, and speaking material—all using pinyin.

 

I think it's possible, and I bet one could approach (achieve?) fluency in three months or so with such a program if it were 2 to 3 hours per day. By three months, participants should have a vocabulary of about 1000–2000 words. Students would study grammar at home to understand, then drill. Classes would have to be small and students would need to be constantly speaking, practicing, and drilling in class. It could work, but it would be specialized.

[tooironic]

Sure you can attain fluency without learning hanzi. But why would you want to?

 

For me, Chinese characters are probably the most fascinating aspect to learning Chinese.

 

But then again I understand some people just wish to attain a basic level that would allow them to communicate when travelling or making friends, wish is fine of course. But I don't believe it would be possible to move beyond the beginner/intermediate stages without learning characters. There are just way too many homophones.

[Demonic_Duck]

@sparrow: Whilst I wouldn't be surprised if a decent level of fluency was achievable within three months (and if you think Benny Lewis fits that description, it's already been proven), I think you're vastly underestimating the intensity of study that would be needed. Try more like 8 or 10 hours a day and you'd be closer to the mark.

 

In an intensive environment like that, where the aim was simply being able to converse decently well on basic topics, I guess leaving characters aside might be beneficial. Assuming there were longer-term goals involved, however, I still think it'd end up making the overall workload greater.

 

Edit: To clarify, everything I've posted in this thread refers to learning to read characters. Learning to write them is another kettle of fish entirely, and is unnecessary (beyond knowing basic stroke order) if you're able to rely on a computer or smart phone all the time. I still think it's a useful skill to have though, for that 1% of situations where you don't have that option.

[JustinJJ]

What's the point in not learning characters at the beginning. Assuming someone is learning say 10 or 15 words a day, why not learn the characters as well to have another way of remembering the words you learn? Wouldn't this translate into more active recall of the word during conversations also as you may be learning the word better?

[Lu]

 

why not learn the characters as well to have another way of remembering the words you learn? Wouldn't this translate into more active recall of the word during conversations also as you may be learning the word better?

In the beginning especially, learning the characters is definitely not another way of remembering the words, it's rather yet another very difficult thing you need to remember in addition to the already very difficult words. So I think it's probably not helpful in learning the words. And ten characters a day, in my experience, is horribly many in the beginning. It'd start with perhaps one a day, or ten a week, or some such number. But I agree that learning characters from the beginning is useful, even if you only learn a few.

[Ruben von Zwack]

One problem I see is that there is more than enough material out there to teach you "nǐ hǎo" and how to buy groceries in Chinese, and you can master that just fine without characters, of course.

 

But if you aim for a bit more, you will need native material. Even then, if you focus on listening only, so you just listen to the radio and watch TV shows, how would you avoid characters when using a dictionary? Like you pointed out in your article, the homophones would really be a problem if someone had no clue of the squiggles they were looking at. Not just for obvious cases like shì, but also for multi-syllable words.

And how would you navigate a Chinese website to obtain your audio material? Sure, there are popup dictionaries, but what pain would it be to be forced to hover over each and every word!

[tooironic]

Interesting, I was assuming that "knowing characters" included how to write them, at least in most cases. Especially for the first 500 or so most common ones - I would argue it would be harder to memorise them if you didn't learn how to write them. Surely they are simply too abstract to link to sound and meaning alone.

[sparrow]

@Demonic_Duck:

 

I went to Beijing with zero Chinese. I had two hours of class each day, plus an additional hour of two-on-one twice per week. I studied an extra few hours everyday by myself. I wasn't fluent in three months, but I could navigate the city, act as a crappy translator, make travel plans on the phone by myself—planes, hotels, travel guide, etc., which I did when my mom came to visit...

 

I wasn't fluent, but I was pretty good. And I spent a significant amount of time learning characters. I imagine if I had been in a program built around pinyin, my progress speech-wise would have been MUCH faster.

 

Note: You mention that you were talking about reading characters. I'm not sure if I'm confused, but to be clear, I'm talking about a hypothetical program that, beyond pinyin, would not teach reading or writing at all. Furthermore, if such a program existed, I would discourage people from attending it because I'm not a fan of illiteracy. But that's just me.

 

 

@tooironic:

Sure you can attain fluency without learning hanzi. But why would you want to?

 

I feel the same way, but I have met many who wanted such a program. Many. Characters are interesting and fun to write, but not everyone agrees.

 

Let's be honest: An alphabet or syllabary are easier to learn than +2000 Chinese characters. And Chinese could function without characters, barring any tongue-in-cheek poems written entirely using the syllable shi—after all, when Chinese people speak, everything that is heard can be conveyed via pinyin. Characters are a cultural relic that some do not want a part of.

 

For a portion of Chinese learners, the above fact makes characters seem unnecessarily tedious. Myself? I enjoy them and find them culturally important.

[JustinJJ]

Maybe it just depends on how you learn them. Initially I just added 10 characters a day from this frequency list http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html.

I would just test recognition and not learn to write them. Looking at my anki stats now the most I ever spent on character reviews a day was 15 minutes, so only a small fraction of my daily study time was devoted to characters. These characters I'd be seeing with 'natural SRS' as well as I would see them everywhere e.g. in textbooks, so while it seemed tricky initially, after a year I had gone through a lot without needing to spend an exorbitant amount of time on them.

 

I'm learning traditional characters the same way now, adding 5 a day and only spend around 5 minutes total reviewing characters.  

 

It seems so much easier to me to learn a new word with its characters, but perhaps it's because this is the way I learnt words from the start. Maybe it's just a coincidence but when I was in China I saw a high correlation between classmate's reading and speaking ability after say a year (but maybe this reflects more time some people spent learning Chinese per day).