Adopting methods in Gabriel Wyner's Fluent Forever to Chinese

[StephenFrug]

Hi everyone. Total newbie here.

 

I just read and was impressed by the brand-new book Fluent Forever (silly title, granted) by Gabriel Wyner.  He brings some interesting psychology research to the question of how to best learn foreign languages.

 

But I think his method seems tricky to adapt to Chinese.  More specifically: I think it'd work fine if one was just doing pinyin; I don't see how to add in Hanzi to it.  (He has some ideas, here:http://direct.fluent-forever.com/logograms/ — but he hasn't actually used them yet; he's going to start Japanese soon but hasn't yet.)

 

I'm not sure I'm right about this, of course.  I'm a newbie.  But my sense is that his "no translation" idea is hard to put into practice with characters.  Wyner says to learn a small number of basic words with pictures and similar things (various ideas on how to do grammar, etc), and then use those to build up monolingual definitions. (Simplifying from a book-length presentation here.)  I'd imagine that works for spoken langauge since the early elements are the simplest ones.  But for Hanzi, the characters for basic words are often very complex — and the basic characters are complex ideas.  There just seems a miss-match.  (I'm not explaining this well.)  The "natural" sequence of words (oral only) and the natural sequence of characters seem fairly disjunct.

 

My current thought is to work through Heisig's REMEMBERING THE HANZI, to learn the (as it were) "alphabet", using translations (as Heisig does), and then try Wyner's methods from there.  So build up actual words (two-hanzi combinations, etc) using Wyner's methods, but after knowing some characters.  Not sure it's a good idea, but it's what I've come up with.

 

Anyway, I was curious if anyone here had read or seen his book, and had any thoughts on this matter.

[Bad Cao Cao]

His methods are generally ok, but not optimal.

 

imo (only), the pronunciation advice is good, the no translation rule is suspect but worth thinking about, the rest is sub-optimal. Guys that good at a few other languages (mostly romance), and suddenly dispense advice on Chinese are a dime a dozen. If, and when, he gets C1+ in a Chinese language, I'll revisit. 

 

Julien Gaudfroy on translation: "Avoiding any translation is the only way to really feel a language and think it naturally. After one year of Chinese I basically refused to use anything else than a 100% Chinese dictionary. It's just a matter of time, at the beginning you'll be tired of not knowing the meaning of things, but that will force you to develop hearing abilities and a great feeling for the language. And you'll think naturally in the language because you have no choice. "

 

My own random comments; even Gaudfroy translated early on, he also worked as a translator later on which would have helped his (excellent) Chinese. L2-L2 dictionaries are a great tool, and under-utilised with Chinese students. Gaudfroy's focus was on pronunciation early on, as well. 

[Tatarik]

Hi BadCaoCao, could you share the Gaudfroy's interviews? That's very interesting

[StephenFrug]

Bad Cao Cao: Thanks!

[imron]

See here.  If you keep reading, he pops up in the comments too.

[Tatarik]

Thanks Imron! Great link, Julien Gaudfroy comes in at page 3