Studying method

[Dan Bang]

When studying Chinese which method would people suggest? For instance one approach could be only to focus on the pinyin at the initial stage, and then later develop it to character recognition and then finally to character writing (or is character recognition and character writing an entity that cannot be seperated?).

And another related topic; what are peoples thoughts on the necessity of learning characters while learning Chinese? Is it possible to have a functional Chinese without any knowledge of Characters? Do such persons exist out there?

[skylee]

Is it possible to have a functional Chinese without any knowledge of Characters? Do such persons exist out there?

I think that it is not uncommon that illiterates exist in a society.

[wushijiao]

My opinion:

1) Just do masisve amounts of listening and speaking for the initial stage ( 2 weeks to 3 months, depending on progress, work ethic, experience as a language learner).

2) Learn the 20-30 most important radicals and their meanings (eventually learning all, of course)

3) Start to learn groupings of words that build together. Perhaps something like (these are just examples that came to mind): 电话(dian hua) "Electirc Speech" telephone; 电脑(dian nao) "Electric Brain" computer; 西安 (Xi'an (the city)"West Peace"; Xi'an; 西瓜(xi gua) "West Melon" Watermelon; 美国(mei guo) "Beautiful Country" USA; 美丽 (me li) "Beautiful Beautiful"; beautiful; 中国(Zhong guo) "central country" China.

In other words, not only learn how the two characters come together to form words, but also learn the rough idea of what a character means in isolation, noting that quite often a character has many meanings in isolation. Anyway, if you have a pile of flash cards that you make yourself that inculdes two or three repeats of each character in a stack, I think you'll find that you will be able to recognize the characters easily.

I think the most core vocabulary in Chinese, or any language for that matter, should be memorized as quickly as possible. For Chinese, I think this means the most frequently used 500 characters with word combinations totaling a few thousand words.

4) I would highly recommend spending quite a lot of time looking up characters in a dictionary by figuring out their radical. Look at any character you don't know. Then get a dictionary. Open it up to the radical page. Then see if you can figure it out. The more practice you have with this the better.

And another related topic; what are peoples thoughts on the necessity of learning characters while learning Chinese?

It's absolutely necessary to learn the characters. This may sound daunting at first, but when you break things down to small enough parts, the learning process isn't as hard as it first appears. I've heard of some foreign-born Chinese people that are fluent in speaking, yet recognize no characters. Also, clearly, in China itself there are millions of illiterates that can speak just fine. But, I've met dozens and dozens of non-Chinese foreigners learning Chinese, and I can think of no one that has achieved a high degree of spoken fluency without knowing characters. The reasons?

1) Characters in their written form contain a lot of important info that isn't there in just the pinyin. By learning characters, you will be able to remember other things easier. For example, maybe you've heard of Tiananmen square and the events that happened there (the festive celebrations upon learning of getting the Olympics, of course). In any case, the characters for Tian'anmen are 天安门, or 天"Sky/Heaven", 安"Peace" (like in Xi'an) and 门"Door/Gate". Anyway, what would you guess 天"Sky" + 气"Air" would be? Well, it's "weather" 天气 (tian qi)． Then, since you now know 门, you can add a "mouth" to the end of it to make 门口 (men kou), which means door, entrance, doorway. The combinations are limitless.

So, if you don't learn the characters, it will be hard to make these mental connections that serve as mnemonic devices. Look at a dictionary and see how many characters are "shi", for example.

2) If you don't know the characters, you'll be illiterate. In China, riding the bus, buying stuff, reading warning labels on medicines, reading death threats...etc. all very hard without reading.

3) If you can't read, eventually your limits of knowledge will suffocate because most academic, journalistic and political Chinese assumes readers are familiar with the written form and its massive amounts of abbreviations.

Those are just a few thoughts. Feel free to disagree.

[Altair]

I generally support Wushijiao's comments, but wanted to elaborate on the issue of character recognition vs. character writing. Since I think these are important questions for many beginners, I am going to elaborate at length.

Character recognition, reproducing stroke orders, and handwriting are best thought of as three different skills. The only way to learn to write characters that are pleasing to the eye is physically to write them out over and over after acquiring some basic instruction on the rudiments of calligraphy. If you do not do this, your characters may well be easily readable, but will look very childish and crude. You should also note that physically writing out characters over and over is the traditional Chinese way children learn their first few hundred or so in school.

I would guess that handwriting is a very marginal activity for foreign learners of Chinese. I would therefore recommend ignoring physical handwriting at the beginning of your study, unless writing things down is a normal part of your study method. The only two drawbacks might be as follows. Ugly handwriting is apparently a bigger sin in China than in the U.S. or Europe and traditionally is thought to reflect on one's character. Given all the challenges that language learners face, I think this is a minor concern. The other possible drawback is that physically writing out characters over and over does help get them not only into your head, but into your muscle memory.

The question of reproducing stroke orders concerns how exactly to form a character, for instance, at which points to begin drawing a line and when to lift your writing implement up and move it to another place. From my comments above, you might guess that I do not have a high opinion of this seccond skill, but I actually have the opposite opinion.

Knowing stroke counts and the components of characters is an essential part of using Chinese dictionaries. If you diligently learn stroke orders for the first 300-500 or so characters you learn, your ability to look up new words will be greatly simplified, since you will gain a very good knowledge of the components that make up characters. To do this, you should actually trace out characters with you fingertip to help with the issue of muscle memory and also to discipline yourself not to take shortcuts and assume you have learned shapes that in fact you have not. This skill will also outlive your ability to actually write the characters, since it is quite easy to figure out the stroke orders of most characters while looking at them if you have put in the necessary work to familiarize yourself with character components.

Another advantage of working on stroke order for the first 500 characters or so is that it greatly simplifies learning new characters. Probably over 90% of characters are analyzable into simpler components. If you have a direct knowledge of these components, it greatly breaks down their unfamiliarity and makes new characters easier to learn. I personally detest flash cards, but most such systems do so such stroke orders. There are also several cheap reference books that do. Grammar books tend to scrimp on what is necessary because of the issue of space.

My own ability to reproduce stroke orders has gone from adequate to embarassing to truly ridiculous, but I have almost no difficulty identifying strokes, character components, or even how to write a character by the way it looks. I would guess that I am quite typical in this for people at my level of general language skill.

One other advantage to concentrating somewhat on stroke order and character formation is that it is probably the best way to learn to recognize most handwritten Chinese for foreigners. The actual rules for writing most written Chinese (basically cursive) are somewhat different from the regular script, which you can think of as being the equivalent of block printing; neverthess, the cursive ligatures are much easier to fathom if you know exactly how the regular strokes are produced and in what order. Without such knowledge, it can be very hard for foreigners to make the connection between typical handwritten characters and what you will be used to seeing in books. Even with such knowledge, some special study will probably be required unless you actually live in a Chinese environment where you are exposed to lots of handwritten material.

If you put in the effort of practicing stroke orders for the first 500 characters or so, the issue of character recognition simply resolves itself. Most further characters you will encounter will contain components you already know or can readily figure out. The odd character for which this is not true will be readily apparent, and you can choose to spend more time learning its shape or use a reference book to figure out how to write it. At this point, there are any number of ways to continue learning more characters.

One issue I did not mention is computer writing. I would guess that most foreigners write computer Chinese through the use of Pinyin (or maybe Zhuyin Fuhao, if they have studied with Taiwanese materials). There might be some marginal utility to learning stroke orders well enough to use methods that better reinforce the traditional writing system than the transcription methods. Without this, I think most people's ability to write inevitable deteriorates to an embarassing level without some other opportunity to do a lot of handwriting.

As for the jist of your original question, here are my thoughts. I am going to set out what I would suggest is the default position for an English speaker learning Chinese through books and tapes who is unsure about details of the course to follow. I say "default" position, because individual circumstances and predilection will, of course, dictate other courses.

If your interest in Chinese is primarily to learn to engage in small talk, don't bother about the written language. If your interest is overwhelmingly to sample a bit of Chinese literature, don't bother about oral or aural skills. If your desire is to function at an intermediate or higher level in any kind of real Chinese setting, learn both spoken and written Chinese. Most people who do not learn both seem to regret it at some time, so learning only one type is probably the best option only if your time and ability to learn language is really limited. For most people, I think the best bet is really to treat learning Chinese more or less as you would treat learning Spanish, French, German, or Russian. Begin with the oral stuff, and assume that the spelling and writing system simply come along later as a regular part of the process of language acquisition.

In chosing study materials, take great care in choosing oral and aural materials. This is the most difficult part and also the hardest and most embarassing to correct or supplement later on. Next look at the quality of the grammar. Some explicitly grammatical material is essential for the best learning, whether or not you like grammar. Grammar-less approaches can work well for oral and aural material, but will likely you leave you high and dry after reaching a very basic beginner level.

Up to this point, choose your material on the basis of quality and its congeniality with your study style. Where you have roughly equal choices, choose material that uses a Pinyin transcription system; otherwise, choose the best.

Do not treat Pinyin as a passing crutch to be passed over as quickly as possible. Because of its use in dictionaries, computers, and indexing, it is actually a very useful tool that should be learned thoroughly. If you begin learning with other transcription and take your Chinese beyond an intermediate level, or have any academic interest in Chinese culture, you will have to learn Pinyin later on.

Once you reach competency with basic pronunciation, listening, rudimentary grammar, and a transcription system, look to begin study of the writing system. This study should be focused on the vocabulary you have acquired, rather than on character lists by themselves. If you are impatient to expand your reading ability beyond your speaking and listening ability, you may then consider using material that is exclusively focused on learning characters independently of a grammar course.

Where material is exactly equal in quality, go with simplified characters over traditional ones; otherwise, choose the best. If you already have a strong interest in classical Chinese culture and plan on sampling Classical Chinese, choose traditional characters when the material is roughly equal in quality. If you plan on quickly interacting with Mainland Chinese, choose simplified, unless the traditional material you can access is pretty bad. Do the opposite if you plan on early interaction with overseas, Taiwanese, or Hong Kong Chinese.

Plan on learning both traditional and simplified script if you expect to reach beyond the intermediate level. If your time and skills are up to it, concentrate on one, while giving some attention to the other at the same time. If this is inconvenient, put it off without hesitation, but realize that you will eventually experience some royal nuisance. The nuisance will not be likely to rise to the level of a real barrier, unless you are instantly forced to change from a traditional environment to a simplified one, or vice versa. For a foreigner, the simplified script is probably a slightly easier entry to basic reading and writing skills; however, the traditional script is probably an easier entry to the totality of Chinese written culture that a foreigner is likely to experience.

[necroflux]

Absolutely wonderful writeup Altair - Though I'm only about a year into my studies I think I've come far enough to have experienced most of everything you've discussed. And I have come to pretty much exactly the same conclusions you have. The only thing I would add is that in terms of traditional vs. simplified chinese I find that in the long run learning both is almost involuntary when taking in large amounts of text - in my experience the two are used on a close to 50/50 basis overall. Perhaps this impression is due to the fact that I am studying on my own rather than through a specific cirriculum.

But again, your post is awesome, and should be a required read for all beginning chinese learners.

[Igum]

I agree. Specially to wushijiao's comments.

I personally think it is better to have a deep knowledge of just a few words than to be able to say a lot of sounds with your mouth.

The way I see, we cannot forget that Pinyin system was created by your government to help foreign people to learn the language, NOT to be learnt instead of your language.

Anyway, what's the point of speak any language (say Chinese, English, Spanish...) without being able to read/write its characters?

[roddy]

Pinyin was created as an aid to learning Chinese, not just for foreigners. I'd guess the number of elementary school students using pinyin massively outweighs the number of foreigners using it.

As for 'what's the point of not learning the characters' - if you don't learn the characters you can speak to people you meet, order food, shop, listen to the radio, give a lecture - there's plenty you can do.

[Igum]

Fair enough, I see your point.

^___^

Believe me I didn't know Pinyin was useful for Chinese native speakers as well.

Thanks for replying.