Is there any benefit to studying the pinyin of individual characters independent of meaning?

[Friday]

I am an intermediate-level student. I have many Anki decks for studying vocabulary and sentences (H->E, H->P, E->P). I've been careful to only study complete words, removing single characters from the decks that cannot be a word when in isolation.

 

I found some shared Anki deck with the front cards just showing a single character and the back side showing the possible pinyin for that character. It contained pretty much every character you will find in use. This deck focuses only on learning the pronunciations associated with the characters.

 

It would perhaps take me two years for me to go through the entire deck at a safe rate for good retention. Would there be any benefit at all to studying such a deck? Would this knowledge of the sounds for the characters aid in deciphering while reading or in comprehension while watching films?

[Silent]

It certainly has value, character knowledge helps in deciding on the meaning of new words and when to use different near synonyms etc. The real big question is whether it's a good time investment or that you're better of investing your time in another way.

 

Personally I think it's a very good idea to spend some time on learning individual characters. I'm not sure or systematically learning all the individual characters is the best way to do it,  but what would be a good way I'm not sure.

[Shelley]

IMHO and I am no expert, but personally I wouldn't study just the pinyin of individual characters. As each character can have more than one meaning and even more than one sound, I would study them as I encounter each variation in association with a word and meaning.

 

I think that one should learn characters, pinyin and meaning together for each word you want to learn, for me there is so much information in the character that helps with remembering and understanding.

 

When I first started we learnt a lot of characters in isolation but these were usually viable words on their own, but very soon starting learning the benefits of studying words made up of 2, 3 or sometimes 4 characters.

 

If I am learning a new word with say 2 new characters I would spend sometime learning about each character individually, but concentrate on the word.

[li3wei1]

Why not concentrate on those characters that you have trouble with when you're studying words? For instance, you have a word AB (A and B are characters) in your deck, and you keep getting the pronunciation of B wrong. Add B to your character deck. Or, you get AB mixed up with AC. Add B and C to your character deck. I suspect you already know a very large chunk of the 'pretty much every character deck' and it would be pointless to waste time on them, and another very large chunk you haven't encountered in context yet, so what's the point? Keep the deck small and focus effort where it's needed.

[roddy]

"character knowledge helps in deciding on the meaning of new words"

He has a deck with characters and pinyin only. He's not going to learn the meaning of the characters like that, unless you want to argue you can guess it from components, which is unreliable at best. So it's not going to help him much with the meaning of new words.

 

I'd say you're already on the right track, Friday. Unless you feel progress is far too slow, keep doing what you're doing. It sounds like this deck is part of a Heisig approach - a quick Google should provide you with all the information you could never want...

[Silent]

 

 

He has a deck with characters and pinyin only. 

 Sorry, my bad. Without learning the meaning of the individual characters it looks a bit pointless to me as imho the big advantage of character knowledge is the aid in meaning and use of words/expressions.

[tysond]

No point at all learning character + pinyin unless you already speak Chinese.

 

I learned character + meaning + kind of limited pinyin and I don't really recommend either.

 

I personally would recommend character / pinyin / meaning of character by itself (which is a bit approximate) / top few words using that character.

[XiaoXi]

There's no point in studying the pinyin of ANY characters. Find an Anki deck with audio. Read the characters, listen to the pronunciation. No need for any pinyin.

[Demonic_Duck]

There's no point in studying the pinyin of ANY characters. Find an Anki deck with audio. Read the characters, listen to the pronunciation. No need for any pinyin.

The only reasonable argument for not bothering with pinyin at all is if you're going to learn zhuyin instead. Pinyin (or zhuyin) should be studied systematically at or very near the start of beginning to learn Chinese and used extensively at the beginning (either alongside or in place of characters). You can gradually wean yourself off it until you only need it as an occasional reference.

 

Sound files for characters are great, and when you haven't yet fully learned the sounds of Mandarin they're indespensable, but they're not always an appropriate replacement for pinyin. There are situations where it's not possible or desirable to listen to audio. There also may be times when you can't hear which sound the speaker is producing - perhaps the audio wasn't recorded well, or your audio equipment is low quality, or your listening ability simply isn't good enough. Did he say qiao or xiao? Check the pinyin and it's 一目了然.

 

With all that said, I would strongly recommend against learning the mapping of characters to pinyin in isolation. Harvest words from your everyday learning, and after that do whatever you think helps you. Test yourself on their sounds, their meanings, the sounds and/or meanings of their individual constituent characters, how they collocate, their synonyms or antonyms, the example sentence in which you first saw them, etc. Pick and choose as appropriate for your own aims.

[Flickserve]

There's no point in studying the pinyin of ANY characters. Find an Anki deck with audio. Read the characters, listen to the pronunciation. No need for any pinyin.

do you mean no point in studying pinyin at all or the pinyin of the deck that the OP has?

I just got a bit confused because if the former, then millions of people and teachers of Chinese are doing something wrong.

[Lu]

Pinyin is a tool and an immensely useful one at that. I assume XiaoXi means that the end goal is not pinyin but actual pronunciation, and with that I agree, but it's rather silly to not learn pinyin.

 

That said, I agree with others that knowing all pinyin readings (pronunciations) of most characters would be useful, but learning all that would not be a good investment of your time. Just keep going with the decks you're using now.

[XiaoXi]

do you mean no point in studying pinyin at all or the pinyin of the deck that the OP has?

 

Yes learn it, or otherwise you won't be able to type. Spend all of 17 minutes it takes to learn Pinyin and then spend the rest of your learning experience avoiding it wherever possible.

 

I just got a bit confused because if the former, then millions of people and teachers of Chinese are doing something wrong. 

 

Teachers all over the world are doing things wrong, especially with languages. Youtube is full of people talking about the much more efficient methods for learning a language, especially self taught in comparison with the methods used in traditional schools. I really don't see why learning a second language as an adult has to be so different to learning a language as a kid.

 

Sound files for characters are great, and when you haven't yet fully learned the sounds of Mandarin they're indespensable, but they're not always an appropriate replacement for pinyin. There are situations where it's not possible or desirable to listen to audio. There also may be times when you can't hear which sound the speaker is producing - perhaps the audio wasn't recorded well, or your audio equipment is low quality, or your listening ability simply isn't good enough. Did he say qiao or xiao? Check the pinyin and it's 一目了然.

 

Then you have the opposite problem that natives have and are using if for completely the opposite use it was intended for. Chinese natives never wonder if 'he said qiao or xiao', they use pinyin to help them read characters in books that otherwise would have no audio. If you have quality learning material then it should be perfectly clear, if you still can't tell then you need to listen more as you're not yet used to the sounds.

 

My daughter learned Chinese as a kid and was able to understand almost anything and say just about anything (as far as a kid is concerned) by the age of 5-6 without ever reading and characters or pinyin. If I were to show a character and say what it was she would never have any problem with recognising whether 'he said qiao or xiao' so why should we?

 

Pens and paper were invented in a time when computers did not exist. Pinyin was invented in a time where we could not simply click on a sentence of text on our computer and have the audio read out to us, or have each individual word pronounced for us upon a mouse click.

[roddy]

Find an Anki deck with audio. Read the characters, listen to the pronunciation. No need for any pinyin.

Stage 2: Realise there's no one-to-one matching between the phonemes of Chinese and your native language and you've heard all the zhangs and changs as jangs. 

[renzhe]

Audio-only /could/ work, as long as it is exactly one person reading all the characters and words. If you mix different speakers, you will have hellish time sorting out what is a phoneme, and whether a soft chang and a hard chang and a jang and a zhang and a qiang are similar, or the same, or if it's a problem with the microphone, or if some speakers have a more southern accent and others a bit more northern accent, etc.

 

Still, pinyin helps by bringing in clarity and a visual aid in the early stages. We all agree that pinyin is a tool and should only ever be used as a tool, but it is a useful tool.

[Flickserve]

XiaoXi

I learnt Chinese Cantonese as an adult and I feel that romanisation of the sounds helped me a lot.

When I did first arrive in HK, I spent three months making no progress. Basically, there were sounds coming into my head but with no meaning attached to them. Then if somebody taught me a word, I would forget the sound within five minutes and unable to repeat the word. That's even with getting a pretty good approximation of pronunciation.

Three months later, after getting desperate at no progress, I took private lessons and learnt cantonese from a book. You see, the problem would be I couldn't remmber the sounds but when I asked people how to say something in Cantonese, they give different translations. So, it wasn't any reinforcement.

All the locals told me to watch cantonese soap operas and I can tell you they are excruciatingly boring.

After having the book, written cantonese and the romanisation, I made a lot of progress and I could self study.

Based on my own personal experience as an adult learner, I find pinyin very helpful. I couldn't learn the same way as a child as I have an extremely poor memory for sounds.

[Lu]

My daughter learned Chinese as a kid and was able to understand almost anything and say just about anything (as far as a kid is concerned) by the age of 5-6 without ever reading and characters or pinyin. If I were to show a character and say what it was she would never have any problem with recognising whether 'he said qiao or xiao' so why should we?

I really don't see why learning a second language as an adult has to be so different to learning a language as a kid.

Becuse 1) we're not children; 2) after learning for five years, most of us hope to have learned more than just kindergartner-level speaking and listening; 3) I suspect that your daughter had at least one parent who continually attended to all her needs and practiced speaking with her, while most of us don't have that luxury.

 

Seriously, when will people stop suggesting 'learning like a child' is something adults should emulate? Children have both different brains and different circumstances than adults. Until every language learner has a kind, infinitely patient teacher who keeps their house and cooks their food in addition to 24/7 on-demand language teaching, I think 'learning like a child' is not going to fly. Fortunately, adult brains can do things like learn pinyin and use Anki and have the patience to sit down with a textbook.

 

Then you have the opposite problem that natives have...

Well would could ever have expected that.

...and are using if for completely the opposite use it was intended for.

If I recall correctly, pinyin was invented with the goal of replacing characters. Native speakers are also using it wrong. But that's okay if you ask me, pinyin is a useful tool that, as it turns out, can be used by both native speakers and learners for different problems.

[Shelley]

As children our brains are ready for language acquisition and get imprinted with the first language they encounter and absorb it like a sponge.

 

We as adult learners have used up our child like language learning abilities on our mother tongue and now have to try and squeeze another language in to our not so sponge like brains.

 

Our brains become resilient to learning as we get older, its harder to just let it soak up knowledge, you have to get in there with the correct tools and time and hammer the new knowledge in to our heads.

 

Please can we put this learning like a child thing to bed and get on with hard work and practice needed to learn chinese.

[Demonic_Duck]

Agree with Lu (edit: and Shelley).

 

The "qiao or xiao" circumstance I had in my head was something like Pleco audio files for individual characters. You're a beginning learner, you encounter the word 消息, so you look it up. You've disabled pinyin, and you play the sound several times, but your beginner-listener's ears still hear it as qiāoxi (or maybe it's xiáoxi, xiāoxǐ etc.) Thereafter, every time you want to say 消息, you pronounce it qiāoxi. Your native friends just about understand what you're saying with appropriate context, so they never think to correct you, and so the mistake becomes ingrained and difficult to change. All that could have been avoided if you'd just glanced at the pinyin once or twice.

 

What do you actually gain by not using the pinyin in that situation? Adherence to some sort of ideological dislike of pinyin? Bragging rights that you're learning like a five year old instead of an adult?

[roddy]

Also, science. I've only read the abstracts and might be misinterpreting, but...

Our data document that native phonemic categories are powerful attractors in that they absorb the non-native stimulus, which is a considerable stumbling block on the path to the mastery of non-native contrasts.

A bigger stumbling block, I think we can assume, if the learner doesn't even know which phoneme they are hearing. 

And also: explicit instruction is the only way EFL learners will learn to perceive some non-native phonemes.

The need to present phonemes in contrast, to make them salient, and to present them with “high variability” was noted.

And a quote from the above one: 

These prototypes “tune” the child’s brain to the native language. Kuhl claims that language experience “warps” perception. “No speaker of any language perceives acoustic reality; in each case, perception is altered in the service of language” (2000, p. 11853).

 

There's an obvious counter-argument here that if you learn Chinese pronunciation properly and at first, this isn't such a problem. I think theoretically that's true, given an ideal teacher and an ideal student. In the real world I think it's much more likely to be an iterative process, getting a little bit better and a little bit better over the course of hundreds of hours of study. 

[XiaoXi]

Audio-only /could/ work, as long as it is exactly one person reading all the characters and words. If you mix different speakers, you will have hellish time sorting out what is a phoneme, and whether a soft chang and a hard chang and a jang and a zhang and a qiang are similar, or the same, or if it's a problem with the microphone, or if some speakers have a more southern accent and others a bit more northern accent, etc.

 

No you should certainly not have the same speaker if you can help it. Ideally each word should have multiple audio versions recorded by multiple speakers with possibly multiple accents. That way you'll certainly be able to get what the word is by listening to all of them. If you listen to five people (male and female) saying the same word and still feel you need to see some pinyin then you need to give up learning Chinese.

 

Becuse 1) we're not children; 2) after learning for five years, most of us hope to have learned more than just kindergartner-level speaking and listening; 3) I suspect that your daughter had at least one parent who continually attended to all her needs and practiced speaking with her, while most of us don't have that luxury.

 

So basically you agree that if you had enough listening input it would certainly work the way I said.

We as adult learners have used up our child like language learning abilities on our mother tongue and now have to try and squeeze another language in to our not so sponge like brains.

 

Our brains become resilient to learning as we get older, its harder to just let it soak up knowledge, you have to get in there with the correct tools and time and hammer the new knowledge in to our heads.

 

Sorry but that's simply not true. Its been proven that adults learn much faster than children - at almost anything. Kids learn languages fast simply because they use such an incredibly method to learn - ie a 24/7 mother speaking to them in the target language only. But they don't actually learn fast if you look at the time in hours...5 years of 8-10 hours a day every single day of listening. Compared with adults who really put their mind to it can learn in 3 years to comparable native level with about 8 hours a day. The final result is an adult who has far wider vocabulary and grammar level than the 5 year old kid.

 

The "qiao or xiao" circumstance I had in my head was something like Pleco audio files for individual characters. You're a beginning learner, you encounter the word 消息, so you look it up. You've disabled pinyin, and you play the sound several times, but your beginner-listener's ears still hear it as qiāoxi (or maybe it's xiáoxi, xiāoxǐ etc.) Thereafter, every time you want to say 消息, you pronounce it qiāoxi. Your native friends just about understand what you're saying with appropriate context, so they never think to correct you, and so the mistake becomes ingrained and difficult to change. All that could have been avoided if you'd just glanced at the pinyin once or twice.

 

How do you suppose kids get around this problem without pinyin?

 

What do you actually gain by not using the pinyin in that situation? Adherence to some sort of ideological dislike of pinyin? Bragging rights that you're learning like a five year old instead of an adult?

 

I'll tell you. Most Chinese can't really read pinyin very well. If you give them a list of words written in pinyin with tone marks to read out, apart from teachers they most probably won't be able to read it. If you give them a list of characters they'll read it right out. With foreigners its the opposite. If I show you a Chinese character with pinyin next to it, you'll read the pinyin first, with Chinese natives its the opposite. Its all about how it works in your mind.

 

When we speak and hear Chinese we see sounds and pinyin in our heads. Chinese see characters and sounds. I don't think I need to explain any further, you get the idea of why its important.

 

If you've ever used Pimsleur then you'll know how it is without pinyin. That was the first method I ever used to learn Chinese and it not only did not give you the pinyin but it did not give you the tones either. After finishing pimsleur I went onto other methods, attended school in China and discovered the world of pinyin. But I found the words that I learnt with pimsleur I pronounced the most accurately even though I didn't even know what tones or sounds they were supposed to be. That's how kids learn, they just hear the sound and imitate it. Because they have no preconceptions like we do. If we see the pinyin 'ping' for example we start thinking 'oh I know that sound!'. But it isn't the sound you think it is. None of the sounds are like you think they are. Kids simply listen and repeat what they actually head - totally free of any preconceptions.