When to start writing by hand

[hedwards]

I saw a topic from a couple years ago about whether or not it was necessary to learn to write by hand at all. Personally, I think that if you're going to go really deep with your studies, that handwriting is a necessary component at some point.

 

It's my observation that learning to write too early means that you spend a lot more time and energy on it than you would after you've spent some time reading and working with the characters. The way that the radicals and components work together is something that makes more sense later on than it does initially. I know now that after a couple years of study that the amount of effort it takes me to deconstruct and memorize a character is substantially less than it was a year ago.

 

There's also the issue of the other things you could be doing with that time early on. Things like actually speaking and learning more grammatical constructs to use with the vocabulary and even just using the words to communicate.

 

My question then is, does anybody have any thoughts about how best to balance this? It's clear that it's a bad idea to start writing immediately, but it's equally clear that there's draw backs that come from waiting too long as well.

[Lu]

It's my observation that learning to write too early means that you spend a lot more time and energy on it than you would after you've spent some time reading and working with the characters. The way that the radicals and components work together is something that makes more sense later on than it does initially. I know now that after a couple years of study that the amount of effort it takes me to deconstruct and memorize a character is substantially less than it was a year ago.

Isn't (part of) the reason the amount of effort is now less that you have come to understand characters better through putting lots of effort into it? If you had started later, it would quite possibly just have become easier later as well. I'm not sure if there really is an advantage to reading-but-not-writing in the beginning. As has just been discussed in another topic, writing is a good way to learn characters (although not the only way), and it is though writing the various components that you get to know them better, see them come back in other characters, which in turn makes those easier to read (and to write).

I started learning to write from day one (simple characters like 人 山 大). It was at that time the best part of learning Chinese. I really think there's no point in waiting. Writing strange scribbles is even more interesting than learning to read them. My 'working with' the characters happened because I needed to remember how to write them, and in the process I learned the various components, the small differences between them, how they fit together... It was after some years of learning that I could look at a character, name the various parts to myself, and learn them after only writing them down a few times, but that only came after learning to write for quite some time.

[hedwards]

Probably, I think that a large part of it was the time I spent trying to look characters up in my dictionary. When I first got to China even things like 牛 and 生 or 土 and 士 would seem very similar to me, but after a few months of seeing characters everywhere, and familiarizing myself with the radicals things sped up.

 

Whether one is actively working on writing or reading, either way you wind up having to learn to deal with the radicals and components. I'm not aware of a realistic way of learning large numbers of characters that doesn't require or use such knowledge of the characters.

 

Personally, I found that trying to learn so much about a character to know it was unrealistic and slowing my progress. Knowing how to read, write, pronounce and the meaning of a character is the ultimate goal in many cases, but for less commonly used words, it's probably more than what most folks really need and it's somewhat easier to learn to write a character that you're already familiar than it is to learn it from scratch.

[kikosun]

I have been learning to read, but not write characters. I think it is the difference between recognition and production. Obviously you need to know the characters a lot better to be able to produce them (write them). And I acknowledge that for most of the characters I "know", I only know at a recognition level. But my immediate goal is to be able to read articles and short stories written for natives. I have learned a lot faster focusing on reading than I would have if I included writing.

I think when you start writing depends a lot on your goals and situation. I live in the USA and my goal is to become proficient at reading and speaking. I only have so much time to devote. I'm sure if you lived in China, writing to some extent would be necessary for day to day things, so writing may be a higher priority.

[Xiao Kui]

I wrote each character & word 5x each from the beginning. This really helped to cement them in my memory.  I know 3200+ characters and many more words. 

[hedwards]

@kikosun, there's degrees of knowing, even though I'm a native speaker of English, there are tons of words that I "know" but fail miserably to spell and have failed to spell correctly for years.

 

In my opinion, there's something to be said for learning to read a lot of the characters first because it's an easier level of familiarity to hit than being able to write them. So, you get to start enjoying newspapers and comics and probably pick up on how to right some of the less complicated characters while memorizing them.

 

Being outside of China, you clearly have less opportunity for just soaking them in than I did, but the ultimate question is whether or not it's working for you. If you're remaining motivated while going for the higher standard first, there's nothing wrong with that.

[eion_padraig]

I agree that trying to be able to write by hand slows down one's vocabulary acquistion quite a bit. In fact, I've only learned how to write characters this past year accidentally by using Skritter on my iPhone. My primary purpose with Skritter was to develop my vocabulary with new words that are relatively high frequency or particularly useful.

 

Now, I'm actualy a bit surprised at my ability to write words that are a bit less common, but I write relatively slowly still so it's never going to be fast. I almost never "write" characters unless it's a new character that I'm trying to look up on my electronic dictionary when I can't guess the pinyin. All my "writing" is for text messages, WeChat, or email, so I find it much faster to type in using pinyin entry.

 

Again, if you never learn to write, you can end up in situations where you can only type in Chinese, but with the increasing presence of cell phones it doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

[OneEye]

I'm glad I started learning to write early because I write Chinese by hand on a daily basis. Of course, you have to consider your goals. If you don't ever see yourself needing to take notes by  hand, for instance, or write on a whiteboard during a presentation (I had to do that just yesterday, actually), or whatever, then maybe learning to write isn't worth your time.

 

Another thing to consider is that learning to read handwriting, especially cursive, is much easier if you can write yourself. I couldn't imagine learning to read something like this without first knowing how to write fairly well.

[wibr]

I think especially in the beginning it's good to do some handwriting, not necessarily to help remember the characters, but to develop a stronger relationship to them. I did a lot of skritter when I started out (almost for one year up to 1500 characters) and although I hardly do any handwriting anymore you can show me any character and I guess I can write most of them in the correct stroke order even if I have never seen them before. If you have never written characters before you will have a hard time doing it since you probably end up copying e.g. an address like a drawing of some kind, which is slow, error prone and will look ugly. So the postcard to your new Chinese girlfriend will arrive at someone else's doorstep.

 

Also, writing/copying characters can be quite relaxing and it's always good to use many ways to attack the problem "characters".

[Ruben von Zwack]

I wrote from day 1, I was studying Japanese at university then. We had to hand in a page or two neatly written on (wide ) grid paper once a week and get feedback on the handwriting.

 

Of course you do not practice the characters from your textbook 1:1. Some of the comments above make it sound like it. That would make things more difficult than they need to be. We were taught selected characters: 大小本日山水and 田 and so forth. I would think every sensible course would do that. It's not that you sit there for hours, sweating over a dictionary and trying to produce 橘子 and 葡萄.

 

I think my time was well invested. It wasn't too much time anyway - an hour per week maybe, plus the homework. The benefits I took from it:

I can write quite fast and effortlessly, on a paper or in my phone's electronic dictionary.

My hand writing is decent - I don't think it needs to be beautiful, but the handwriting of some students is just so painfully off.

I can guess other peoples' handwriting (to a degree).

I can memorise and produce complex characters relatively effortlessly because they are just built from those same "beginners'" characters anyway.

I can leave other people sticky notes

 

 

It's a small investment with large benefits, in my eyes at least.

A practical question: how does someone who cannot write at all, or only with difficulties, look up unknown words in an electronic dictionary? I know Chinese just type the pinyin, but us foreigners usually don't know the pronunciation.

 

I do agree that it is good to keep speaking and writing apart for a good while. But it doesn't mean to exclude writing. Just treat it separately.

And I think it is necessary to have a teacher or another form of good guide when you begin, to prevent mistakes or bad habits sinking in.

[hedwards]

@Ruben, a person like that would memorize the radicals and then spend a lot of time trying to guess how many strokes there are in a character. Or if they're lucky, come across a dictionary that uses a better indexing system that doesn't assume you know how to write the characters you wish to look up. These days, I suppose that Pleco takes a lot of the guessing out of the process, so long as you're not dealing with calligraphy.

 

I don't typically look characters up manually any more, but I don't think the hours I spent looking things up by radical was a particular waste of time either. I think the time I spent really looking at the characters to figure out which one I wanted was vital to learning to decompose and discriminate them.

 

@OneEye, those are certainly good points. I don't expect for there to be one definitive opinion that fits everybody. Personally, I don't bother writing anything by hand unless I have time to make it easily recognizable, so I'm not really sure if that would help at all with reading typical handwriting. Past experience suggests that you have to be writing less carefully and more quickly. That or spend time learning about calligraphy.

 

But yeah, I think if I needed to take notes, that would be a good reason to focus on being able to write earlier on, rather than spending the time trying to develop a larger passive vocabulary.

[Shelley]

I started writing from the beginning, I am a firm believer in learning characters, pinyin and tones together from the start.

 

Writing is important to help cement the meaning, pronunciation, and etymology (which I think is important).

 

Learning stroke order helps with looking up in dictionaries, and I feel everyone should know how to use a paper dictionary even if later electronic dictionaries are used.

 

Learning to write acts like a mnemonic for me to remember its meaning and phonetics.

 

Also characters are very beautiful to look at and we need as much beauty in this world as we can get.

[JustinJJ]

When you want to sit the HSK exam outside of China you may need to learn to write by hand.

 

In Sydney they only offer 笔试考试 not the 网考. It's annoying as I can read but not write and I was hoping to sit HSK 6 this year. Either I'll have to sit it in China at some point, learn to write or not bother with it.

[Koonder]

It's better to start writing right away. It takes a long time before your writing doesn't look like 3rd grader.

[hedwards]

Koonder, that's not really my experience. How good characters look is primarily a function of the time and care that you put into writing them. Even in English when I try writing quickly I wind up with a mess, even though I write most of the letters a couple dozen times per page.

 

I can't claim to have the best handwriting out there, but I did receive plenty of compliments on it, even for characters that I rarely write. It's because I pay attention to detail and don't rush myself. Similar to how I write when I'm writing English, I take my time to make sure that the writing is neat.

 

I've never really understood the mentality that you need to write characters hundreds of times when most characters conform to a relatively small number of possible arrangements of radicals and components.

[Koonder]

@hedwards

 

Well, my handwriting isn't bad in English, and I can draw pretty well, but when I'm writing hanzi, it looks bad. It just seems that I can't get down some of the radicals. To my relief, I am not the only one who's experiencing these difficulties, but full time college students majoring in Chinese are also struggling.

 

After one or two year of studying, their handwriting that I have witnessed still looks childish.