speaking chinese without seeing the characters?

[JustSaying]

hey all im able to read alot of chinese characters but i not able to use those word to speak chinese because i can only remember them if i see them any tips with that??

thanks in advance!

[Gharial]

If I've understood you correctly, you can recognize the forms and possibly the pronunciations of a number (how many? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?) of characters, but have been learning them in a relatively decontextualized way. You thus know something of the orthography, but little or not enough of the language that the orthography merely represents in printed form. I'm also guessing that whatever reading ability you may claim to have is likely too disfluent (hesitating and slow) to really qualify as reading in any meaningful sense, and that it could be improved by learning more how to speak first and foremost (as the two skills are surely related). To put all that simply, the (individual) characters in themselves are not the language (even though they help form and inform certainly the written language).

 

I'd've thought the solution would be obvious - by all means learn the characters at some point, but only after mastering a good number of the contexts (words, phrases, sentences, situations, texts, what have you) essential to speech. And if it is indeed speech you're currently most interested or deficient in, then you can learn a lot from just Pinyin and don't necessarily need the characters at all or "quite yet" (I mean, people don't go around with literal characters rather than just sounds coming out of their mouths, do they! And for the foreign learner, Pinyin will be a surer guide to the sounds if not the meanings involved than the characters per se).

 

My main advice then would be to put aside whatever decontextualized character lists you may have been going through, get a more or less Pinyin-only course or materials e.g. the original Colloquial Chinese by T'ung & Pollard ( http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/46593-our-favourite-textbooks/?p=353297 ), and make that your primary focus. In short, don't let the characters distract you or become more than the icing on the cake (they certainly shouldn't be your eternal starting point, though that is an understandable and common-enough initial mistake among those attracted to learning Chinese, as the character-based orthography is an obvious and striking difference from most other languages). Wider listening beyond the course's audio, and thus developing even more of an ear for the language's sounds and rhythms, is also very important, and there is no end of authentic material (scripted films, TV shows, news; less scripted interviews, vlogs; etc etc) on YouTube etc that you can at least have playing in the background while you do other things in between studying course units.

 

A decent dictionary (cidian, not zidian) will also come in handy, maybe the basic Oxford one by Yuan & Church to start with (as that covers and explains a fair bit of essential grammar too, and has full Pinyin for all its examples), though be sure to also check out the Dover reprint of the venerable C-E dictionary by Fred Fangyu Wang, as it contains a lot of helpful usage information and will provide a bit of reading practice in handwritten traditional characters. If you have a smartphone then Pleco is a real no-brainer thanks to its easily-searchable electronic wealth of example sentences (all with full Pinyin, and audio too, at least of a sort), and the in-any-position compounds information. Lastly, the ABC ECCE dictionary is very useful for its indication of bound forms (i.e. those characters that must appear as compounds in at least certain senses), and for its sure treatment of traditional versus simplified forms (including where things don't quite overlap in certain meanings or usages).

 

Once and only once you have a reasonable spoken basis (but not before LOL) you can maybe start looking at character texts like the one accompanying the aforementioned Colloquial Chinese, and then perhaps later still at things like the phonetic components/series of characters (though a lot of these will be obvious enough in any Pinyin-ordered dictionary, or from the component breakdowns given in Pleco, and so on), and doing more extensive reading, (passive) vocab building, etc.

 

Tl:dr: Speaking Chinese without seeing the characters is perfectly possible, provided you learn to speak Chinese LOL. (And relatedly, reading isn't just "decoding" texts on a slow, character-by-character, fuzzy-meaning basis).

 

Bottom line is that you don't seem by your own admission to have acquired enough of the language (grammar etc) from your attempts at reading more or less random texts, so you likely need to build a linguistic base via a good basic course, with speech and the active production thereof the (remedially necessary) goal. You've been trying to run before you can walk.

[Luxi]

There are on-line podcasts like Slow Chinese that cater to several levels from beginner to advanced, and provide the text as well as the audio to listen to. That, or, if you're committed, something like ChinesePod (which isn't free),  may be a good place to start.

 

If your level of written Chinese is fairly advanced, you could try finding the audio book (有声书) for books you've read or are reading to listen to. There are thousands of audio books in Mandarin. Short stories or articles that you can play a few times may be best at first, understanding increases with repetition. Many Chinese textbooks come with sets of CDs or mp3 files to download, listen and listen again. 

 

Many Chinese TV programs have subtitles in simplified characters. Find easy ones with vocabulary you already know to begin with.  As with audio-books, repetition will definitely increase your understanding,

 

Don't get discouraged. Repeated and frequent listening is the key, and there are many resources you could use. Even passive listening in the background can help a lot.

 

I would try to keep the characters you already know firmly associated with their pronunciation, it would a crime to lose the characters in your memory while you learn pronunciation. Try to pronounce them yourself, read aloud, it will eventually sink in.  

 

If you want a good site with many excellent articles, links to resources, and tips, try Olle Linge's Hacking Chinese , it'll keep you busy for a very long time.

[889]

In short, you need to study Chinese as a language and imprint it in your mind as a language. Thinking you can memorize characters and then mechanically decode text or speak won't get you very far, as you're discovering. You've got the cart before the horse.

[Silent]

 

 

hey all im able to read alot of chinese characters but i not able to use those word to speak chinese because i can only remember them if i see them any tips with that??

I guess it's primarily a matter of imbalanced study. It's very normal that passive vocabulary (reading/listening) is much larger then active vocabulary (speaking/writing). In chinese this effect is possibly even stronger as the characters contains more info then the spoken word as many characters have the same pronunciation. The only way to improve this is to actively use the language. Start speaking, or if this is hard as you have no (native) speakers at hand at least start writing.  

[JustSaying]

kinda speechless what to say.. so i tell what my learning methodes are. (but methode with only learning from the pinyin feels so weird, but understandable). my main methode to try to learn Chinese were to memorise a lot of characters and sentence's. the sentence's i learn are usually a character(s) that i want to learn in different sentence's so i got the feel how to use it. and i use the back and forth technique. i usually translate songs and a few article's 

 still figuring which way is the best/fun for me and thanks for the many replies!! and can someone tell me how to quote people on this website?

[889]

"Someone tell me how to quote people on this website?"

I find old-fashioned cut-and-paste easiest.

[Flickserve]

"Someone tell me how to quote people on this website?"

I find old-fashioned cut-and-paste easiest.

use the mobile version of the website. Turn it on by clicking the icon near the bottom

[Gharial]

@Flickserve (or a mod): Is it possible to add the quoted person's name etc to the quote bubble's header, and thus have it say more than just 'Quote', in the desktop version of this site? I don't use the mobile version that much for replying.

[Gharial]

@ JustSaying: Yes, Pinyin-only is unusual, and most textbooks try to introduce characters from or near the start. However, the space that they then have to devote to printing hanzi (character) versions of each text, along possibly with stroke-order diagrams etc, generally leaves less space for further example sentences, grammar explanations and so on.

 

There is thus a world of difference (to me at least) between "hanzi-preoccupied" courses like the original PCR I & II (ultimately very thin, and prompting Chinese teachers at Berkeley to produce a very detailed 520-page companion volume eventually published as A Practical Chinese Grammar (Cheung [Zhang] et al, The Chinese University Press, Hong Kong 1994, review here: http://www.persee.fr/doc/clao_0153-3320_1998_num_27_1_1529 )) versus the excellent original Colloquial Chinese course that I recommended above, the latter of which will allow you to deduce things a lot quicker than the somewhat random or scattershot input you've been so far feeding yourself, and without the possible distractions and as I say space-wasting that detailing hanzi would entail (and as you know some already, with Pinyin-only you can maybe, but only maybe, have a bit of occasional fun guessing which hanzi are involved, yet without having to go to the trouble right away of quite learning them again).

 

Don't let hanzi become a crutch or indeed a burden in courses that are well designed enough, and contain ample-enough detail and explanation (and, need it be repeated, of language rather than orthography issues!), to have made the immediate use of hanzi in them quite unnecessary.

[Flickserve]

@Flickserve (or a mod): Is it possible to add the quoted person's name etc to the quote bubble's header, and thus have it say more than just 'Quote', in the desktop version of this site? I don't use the mobile version that much for replying.

not that I have found.

[imron]

Is it possible to add the quoted person's name etc to the quote bubble's header

Yes, but not automatically.  In the opening 'quote' tag just have a name="Quotee" field, e.g. something like: [ quote name=Gharial] Some Quote [ /quote] will produce

Some Quote

 

@JustSaying,  I think Silent has it right.  Your methods are probably geared towards passive recall (you recognise something when you see it) rather than active recall (you have to remember things without any prompt).

 

If you are memorising sentences one thing you can try is to memorise the sentence and then try to write out the entire sentence without looking at any of the characters or pinyin.  This will force you to use active recall.  If you have the audio for the sentences, it can also be useful to try dictation, e.g. you hear the sentence being spoken and then have to write it without looking at any transcripts (and preferably without re-listening to the audio).  Both of those things will train your active recall.

[Gharial]

Oh right so manually/typing-wise it's just like the BB codes that sites like eslcafe use.

 

 

meow

 

Ah yes, that's done the trick. Thanks, imron!

[Gharial]

If you are memorising sentences one thing you can try is to memorise the sentence and then try to write out the entire sentence without looking at any of the characters or pinyin.  This will force you to use active recall.  If you have the audio for the sentences, it can also be useful to try dictation, e.g. you hear the sentence being spoken and then have to write it without looking at any transcripts (and preferably without re-listening to the audio).  Both of those things will train your active recall.

 

Would it be better in this case to write it out in Pinyin or in characters? (Though one could of course do both were one so inclined or dedicated enough).

 

Speaking from personal experience, one general disadvantage of concentrating on the characters too much is that you start to forget the Pinyin, especially the tones (assuming you really mastered the tone involved for each character in the first place!).

[889]

The choice isn't exclusive of course; you can do both. But if you have to choose, then go with characters. Nothing locks them into your mind like writing them out, over and over. Pinyin has nowhere near the same effect: mǎ will never scream "horse" at you like 馬 will.

[Gharial]

Yeah but nothing screams third tone for 馬 (or 马) quite like the pinyin does LOL.

[imron]

@Gharial It is exactly like BB code, because it is BB code. All other BB code will work as well.

Regarding characters or pinyin, I would recommend characters because the purpose here is to train and improve your active recall and characters will do that more than pinyin. You can do separate exercises to make sure you know the pronunciation.

[Shelley]

and can someone tell me how to quote people on this website?

 

Copy - Paste - Highlight - Click the speech bubble in the reply box tool bar.

 

No one seem to tell the OP how to do it on the desktop

[Gharial]

@Shelley: It's probably better as imron kindly showed to manually type the necessary BB codes, as you can then add the name of the person that you're quoting rather than just having the quote header read 'Quote'. I did type up some (long-winded and party inaccurate) desktop guidelines, but then decided it would be better to simply ask how to improve (make more informative) the speech bubble headers.

[Shelley]

@Gharial I understand what you are saying, but I don't see the harm in giving the OP all options. I always use my method for speed.