Are characters necessary to become fluent in Mandarin?

[renzhe]

I think we can hear and speak faster than we can read

Are you sure about that?

[Ruben von Zwack]

The problem is that the range of words used in conversation and listening is going to be smaller than what you would be exposed to with reading.

I can testify to that from my English experience. For example, I am a bit of a Richard Dawkins fan, so I watch his lectures and discussions online, and I understand them 100%, not one unknown word. Same goes for those discussions between Dawkins and Neil de Grasse Tyson or any other science guy.

When I read their books though, on each and every single page there will be between one and four English words that either I haven't come across yet, or that I've seen before but only have a rather fuzzy idea and wouldn't bet my life on really understanding their meaning. Almost exclusively it's adverbs (80%), sometimes a verb, never nouns.

[Ania]

The problem is that the range of words used in conversation and listening is going to be smaller than what you would be exposed to with reading.  You might get more words, but they will be more of the same words (which is good for reinforcement, but not necessarily vocab).

I believe that's very true. I think that anyone who has mastered a foreign language (or at least got to a very advanced level) knows that at some point "regular" exposure to the language (i.e. radio, TV shows, movies, even regular news) is not enough to expand your vocabulary. There comes a moment when you realize that such exposure can no longer teach you anything and you need something more to advance. And that, I believe, you can only get through reading a wide range of texts. Of course at lower levels exposure to the language in TV shows or movies is great, precisely because there is a lot of vocabulary that is repeated and it's great for reinforcement. But for very advanced students, the range of the vocabulary is simply not enough. Obviously I cannot say that from my experience with Chinese, but it's what I observed when I was learning other languages, and I would imagine the situation is similar here. 

[li3wei1]

li3wei1 said

I think we can hear and speak faster than we can read

Are you sure about that?

 

 

Nope. And to clarify, what I meant was that we can hear faster than we can read, and speak faster than we can write. The second should be obvious, especially for Chinese, the first can be tested with a transcript of some fast-paced natural dialogue.

 

On the vocab question, yes, at higher levels, you'll want to do some reading to get the rarer words (and in Chinese, the written expressions that you'd never get in conversation), but whoever I quoted originally was talking about going from 5000 words to 10-15K, and I think at that level conversation still has a lot to offer.

 

I don't want to turn it into an either/or debate, because most people's learning programs will be a mixture of everything, and it's probably best that way - a bit of reading, a bit of conversation, some passive listening, some flashcarding, and a whole lot of wasting time on Chinese Forums.

[anonymoose]

But for people who only want to learn oral Chinese, why should they need to learn the vocabulary that only appears in text anyway, since reading was never their objective in the first place? As Ruben pointed out above, she can understand 100% of what Dawkins says in his lectures and discussions. Surely that's enough for anyone who only wishes to listen to lectures and discussions.

 

Not that I advocate learning Chinese without learning characters, but the argument that one needs to read to be exposed to a wide enough vocabulary to become fluent doesn't make sense if the additional vocabulary learnt is not things that people apply in speech anyway.

 

I'd say the main advantage of reading for those that only wish to become orally proficient is that reading can still fortify the elements that are common to both written and spoken Chinese.

[alanmd]

Just to add one small point- handwritten Chinese is a dying art among the current generation. Native Chinese PhD students have told me that they frequently forget how to write characters that they are perfectly able to read and type using a pinyin IME.

This is also happening in other countries- I've heard that schools are considering dropping cursive (joined-up) writing, as handwriting isn't such an important skill nowadays.

So I wouldn't worry too much if you are second language learner who is read-only. My own progress in French vastly improved when I focused on spoken language and stopped worrying about all of those homophonic verb endings. I have used Skritter and have developed my own Chinese handwriting web app, but I only care about getting a few hundred characters right- the rest I just attempt to write to help me to remember how to read them.

[Ruben von Zwack]

Hm, a dying art, I don't know about that, not in absolute terms at least. I thought people were obsessed with hand writing when I was in China last autumn. I guess as with most things, there can be contradictory currents within one and the same societies at the same time.

[li3wei1]

I was going to point out that with new technologies, texting and emailing are becoming much more important, so some degree of literacy is required to maintain a 'normal' lifestyle, but these could easily be replaced with voicemail, so maybe not.

[alanmd]

Maybe 'dying' is a bit strong, the current generation can't hand write (or spell- thanks spell check) as well as their parents, and that's probably been true in most developed countries for about 100 years. I think it's hard to deny that there is a global downward trend in the importance of handwriting, I'd love to see evidence or anecdotes to the contrary as I can't find any.

 

The trend from Mao Zedong's beautiful cursive hand, to his grandson's barely literate scrawl, is I would think fairly typical: http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/pictures/mao-zedong-grandson-mao-xinyu-photos-handwriting-calligraphy.html - I'd love 

 

My own very biased sample was highly educated Chinese students in their early to late 20s, and they all agreed that they were losing the ability to handwrite more obscure characters that they were perfectly able to read. They were also in agreement that their parents handwriting was much better. 

 

Anecdotally: my own grandparents' (English) handwriting (educated in the 1920s) was a beautiful flowing cursive copperplate script, my parents handwriting (educated in the 1950s) was regular and decent looking, and mine (1980s/1990s) is an ugly but functional scrawl. Many schools have already stopped teaching cursive handwriting, it's gone the way of long division and times tables (my sixty-something mother still knows what "eight sevens" are in an instant, I just perform the multiplication in my head, and most kids today reach for a calculator...).

[alanmd]

About texting and email- that's correct, but that's not 'writing' Chinese characters, it's typing pinyin and reading and selecting from the results. I can probably do that for close to 1,000 hanzi characters, but I'd be surprised if I could hand write more than a couple of hundred correctly. If I had the choice between reading & pronouncing 1,000 more words, or being able to write the 1,000 that I already know perfectly, I'd go for the new words in a heartbeat, as writing the ones I already know is fun but of no real use.

[Ruben von Zwack]

 

The trend from Mao Zedong's beautiful cursive hand, to his grandson's barely literate scrawl, is I would think fairly typical: http://www.chinasmac...alligraphy.html -

 

Made my evening. 

 

[renzhe]

As Ruben pointed out above, she can understand 100% of what Dawkins says in his lectures and discussions. Surely that's enough for anyone who only wishes to listen to lectures and discussions.

It surely is. But Ruben is not illiterate, and I assume that she is even more literate in Dutch than she is in English, the two languages being highly related.

The question is whether you can acquire the needed vocabulary by just listening, without reading. And understanding a Dawkins' lecture 100%, this will include some anthropology, religion, philosophy, basic political theory, evolutionary biology and some formal logic.

I'd struggle to devise a listening-only programme that will teach you all that and have you understand all these concepts 100%.

[Ruben von Zwack]

Uh-oh, I guess my example raises more problems, the longer one thinks about it. What I really just wanted to point out was that written language and spoken language aren't the same, as in spoken language is more simple.

 

 The question is whether you can acquire the needed vocabulary by just listening, without reading. And understanding a Dawkins' lecture 100%, this will include some anthropology, religion, philosophy, basic political theory, evolutionary biology and some formal logic.

 

That's a good question. I guess we all agree the answer is no. But at the same time, I think you may indeed get quite far if you listen to a lot of educational radio programmes over the years. Certainly far enough to make a good conversation partner on dinner parties! But without reading, how would you be able to scan the radio's weekly schedule and figure out which shows are for you?

 

I am experiencing this problem in Chinese currently. It is such a pain to download interesting podcasts, and do the most basic things online, cause my reading is still so rudimentary.

[gato]

I am experiencing this problem in Chinese currently. It is such a pain to download interesting podcasts, and do the most basic things online, cause my reading is still so rudimentary.

Try the "优听" app (available for both iOS and Android). It provides a curated set of talk shows and radio stations (ranging from 相声 to celebrity gossip to books and history).

See: http://www.appbrain.com/app/优听电台/anyradio.all

[Silent]

 

The question is whether you can acquire the needed vocabulary by just listening, without reading. And understanding a Dawkins' lecture 100%, this will include some anthropology, religion, philosophy, basic political theory, evolutionary biology and some formal logic.

Why is that the question? I can't think up any reasonable reason why not. The fact that reading helps people to expand their vocabulary is not relevant. People are able to learn vocabulary without reading, so why would that not possible for any of the vocabulary Dawkins uses? In the extreme just hire a teacher to repeat his talks over and over again.

 

I'm in no doubt that reading helps to build vocabulary. However I'm convinced that this is primarily because reading is an efficient way of getting a lot of varied comprehensible input, the basis for learning. Getting a qualitatively comparable audible input is very hard as people tend to meet 'average' people and audio books and taped lectures are poorly available compared to books. Still, the comprehensible input might also be achieved by hiring a bunch of good 'teachers' to provide lots of input. Possibly a mix of input methods is more efficient to learn vocabulary, but other factors like amount of exposure, attractiveness of presentation and personal factors have probably far more impact.

[gato]

Still, the comprehensible input might also be achieved by hiring a bunch of good 'teachers' to provide lots of input.

You'd also need to hire a human dictionary if you can't read. It's certainly possible if you have enough money and don't mind bringing your human dictionary with you everywhere you go.

[tysond]

 

 

 It's certainly possible if you have enough money and don't mind bringing your human dictionary with you everywhere you go. 

 

Also known as the spouse technique. 

[gato]

Might not be as user-friendly as Pleco. Definitely not as easy to upgrade

[abhoriel]

well, drawing from my personal experiences...

 

I started learning Chinese with a big focus on learning characters. I did not have a tutor or a course (I'm already a full time student in something totally different). By the time I went to China a year and a half ago, despite knowing around 1000 characters, I could not communicate very effectively! I could handle very minimal conversations and not much more. Even more to my surprise (at the time), I couldn't read very well either. From looking around at written Chinese on signs and stuff, I could read what was written out loud but couldn't understand it. This was because I hadn't studied words and grammar very effectively.. Also, for words which were composed of more than one character, I would know what characters were in the word but not necessarily remember the order they were in... that made me sound pretty dumb..!

 

So was all this a waste of time? Should I have just forgone learning characters entirely? Well spending more time on listening and speaking (and grammar and words) would definitely have helped me. I learnt a huge amount of listening and speaking whilst I was in China, and I actually found that knowing the characters helped the listening and speaking a lot. Learning things is all about making associations, that's how our memory seems to work. Knowing characters provides a good basis, because when I hear new words, I can figure out the characters that compose them which helps me to remember the word much better. Also I can sometimes understand a completely new word which I have never seen before, just by knowing its characters (just like you can figure out English medical/scientific words by knowing the Greek/Latin roots). I've noticed that this works even when hearing (as opposed to reading) new words.. Finally, reading is probably where I learn the majority of my new vocabulary.

 

However, I think its definitely possible to learn to speak and listen to Chinese fluently without knowing characters. But I also think that knowing characters really helps, even with speaking and listening. I think that taking a balanced approach to Chinese is very important.

[renzhe]

Why is that the question? I can't think up any reasonable reason why not.

But it's surely quite theoretical. It might be possible to reach an advanced level in a language without ever reading any of it, but most illiterate people have basic vocabularies, and most people with advanced vocabularies can read. You sometimes hear about functionally illiterate people who made a career in some field or other without people noticing, but these stories are a bit like the bearded ladies and thos people who swallow kitchen utensils -- extremely rare curiosities. For the most part, illiteracy implies rudimentary language skills, and I don't think that it's a coincidence -- it is simply an incredibly inefficient way to learn a language.

Every time I hear about mastering Chinese and fluency at a high level, but without learning any characters, I imagine a South Pole expedition on pogo sticks. Sure, it might be possible, and it would make the best National Geographic story ever, but pretty much all these expeditions either quit after 100 metres, or they ditch the pogo stick after 200.

Same with Chinese. Of dozens of Chinese learners I've met who vowed not to learn characters, they all either gave up on Chinese, or eventually took up characters. "Chinese without characters" for me belongs in the same category as "beach body overnight with no effort".