Learn Chinese without writing letters

[Juliedang]

Hi all! My name is Julie and I am new to the forum. I really like Chinese and I've just started attending a Chinese class. My purpose is to communicate with Chinese people and watch dramas or movies without subtitles. Hence, do you think that I need to practice writing letters? 

[Hofmann]

No. Your goals don't include writing letters. Perhaps write emails instead. That's a more realistic medium.

[Shelley]

10 hours ago, Juliedang said:

do you think that I need to practice writing letters? 

 

Did you mean actual letters as in something to post or did you mean should I practice writing Chinese characters?

 

If so then the answer IMO is yes, you need to learn characters so that you can read Chinese and one good way of memorising characters is to practise writing. 

[NinjaTurtle]

Hi Julie,

 

Yes, I think you should try to learn Chinese characters. But I would like to give one piece of advice. You should spend time studying speaking/listening Chinese separately from time spent learning Chinese characters. When you sit down to do a speaking/listening lesson, concentrate on speaking/listening and do not study Chinese characters at the same time. Set up separate time to learn Chinese characters only. I have had a number of Chinese people try to teach me Chinese, only to find out they think learning Chinese mainly means learning Chinese characters -- I strongly disagree.

[DavyJonesLocker]

I presume Julie you  "write characters" and are confusing the term letter (as in alphabetic letter) with character (as Chinese character)

 

I think you can make good progress initially without needing to physically handwrite .
I actively avoided hand writing characters for 2 years as I thought I hardly ever hand write English now so writing Chinese is never going to happen

 

However there comes a point when many characters  start to look very similar thus causing confusion . Progess starts to slow right down to nearly a halt. In hindsight I wish I started writing from the early stages

 

I handwrite now only to aid character recognition. I personally have no interest in handwriting  so my characters  are sloppy with incorrect stroke order , stroke length etc. However it does help my reading progress.

 

You don't have to do a load. Half an hour a day building up to the first 1000 most common characters will cover 90% of most modern texts (in terms of being able to recognise the individual character ) . It's the physical act that will make you notice components of characters which will give some crude clue to its pronunciation and meaning.

[amytheorangutan]

I would definitely suggest characters recognition first which is a lot easier than writing. I know a few 2nd or 3rd generation Chinese immigrants who don't know how to read and write but speak fluently. However, I personally think this is due to language exposure from a very young age and the language being spoken at home.

 

If we approach the language as an adult and come from a native language that is very different from Chinese then you would definitely need at least characters recognition to move forward. The reason being that there are a lot and I mean a lot of Chinese words that sound similar or even the same and it doesn't take long for them to become very confusing, knowing the characters help in differentiating these words.

 

However, as a few people above already said you can learn this at a slower pace than your speaking/listening and writing does help characters memorisation. I'm no expert by any means as I only started learning last September myself so it's just newbie opinion