Learning to speak through memorizing transcription in the context

[Pall]

Hi,

 

I want to share my experience of learning to speak by memorizing  transcription in the context.

 

Due to enormous flexibility of Russian, it's possible literally to replace Chinese words in an original Chinese text for Russian ones, and the meaning remains quite understandable. In the enclosure see, please, how the superscript looks like. All in black I can easily say in Mandarin, new words are in red. The transcription for new words is given in mupin, Cyrillic based method, but it can be in pinyin. New words introduced in such a way are remembered easily, it's not necessary to make fleshcards or keep your own vocabulary.

 

 

[Moshen]

I learned to speak Chinese mostly from pinyin and oral practice for the first 6 months and only then began to learn any characters at all.

So it depends what your goals are with the language. If you want all-around mastery, that's one thing. But some people want/need more listening than reading and writing, or vice versa.

[Pall]

1 minute ago, Moshen said:

some people want/need more listening than reading and writing, or vice versa.

Sure, but characters are learnt easier if one knows already their meaning and pronuncation. Therefore even for those, who want only to be able to read (not to mention ones, who want to be able to write on their own, since it requires recollecting words in memory as in speaking) it's better firstly to learn only pronunciation of a new set of words, and only after that learn characters.

[Publius]

3 hours ago, Pall said:

but characters are learnt easier if one knows already their meaning and pronuncation

Based on what? Your gut feeling or scientific study?

At least one popular method, Remembering the Kanji, teaches students how to remember the meaning of characters and how to reproduce them, without even telling them the pronunciation (due to the peculiar complexity of kanji readings), and many swear by it.

The author, James Heisig, went to Japan in the 1970s. Waiting to enroll in a language school, he decided to begin studying on his own, first through a basic grammar, then the meaning and writing of some 1900 characters, all in less than two months. In the Introduction and Note to his book, he laid out the rationale behind his approach, no less convincing than yours. And he stood by his claim that studying full-time and following his method (which separates writing from reading) one can memorize 2000 characters in 4-6 weeks.

[Pall]

15 minutes ago, Publius said:

And he stood by his claim that studying full-time and following his method, which separates writing from reading, one can memorize 2000 characters in 4-6 weeks.

Its very interesting. Do you know anyone personally, who managed to do that in such limited time?

[Publius]

32 minutes ago, Pall said:

Do you know anyone personally, who managed to do that in such limited time?

No, I don't teach Chinese, or Japanese for that matter. Just pointing out that there are people out there whose beliefs are diagonally opposite to yours, and equally unsubstantiated by science.

[murrayjames]

16 hours ago, Publius said:

Just pointing out that there are people out there whose beliefs are diagonally opposite to yours, and equally unsubstantiated by science.

 

What does the science say on this? I suspect there is a lot of scholarly literature out there on the effectiveness of Heisig, and of other Chinese-language learning methods.

[Pall]

On 7/14/2019 at 6:30 AM, murrayjames said:

What does the science say on this? I suspect there is a lot of scholarly literature out there on the effectiveness of Heisig, and of other Chinese-language learning methods.

There are legends in this field, too. And scholarly literature may not be a proof.

[davoosh]

There is always the argument for the primacy of spoken language over written language, with the understanding that a character is a representation of a spoken 'living' word. I personally find that if you are able to understand the word in context in spoken language, it greatly helps with reading because it's no longer an abstract entity like with the Heisig method which seems to treat characters on a vaguely abstract semantic level.  While it may be helpful to gain a grounding, I think that this method doesn't reflect how native speakers learn to read and write – i.e. you learn to read/write words, many (if not most) of which you already know as 'words'. As far as I know, after the Heisig method you might be able to write a lot of characters and know the vague meaning behind them, but you won't be able to read a text or use words in context.

 

Anecdotally, I also found at one point I was relying too much on characters, to the extent that when listening I would sometimes have to think which character was being spoken which isn't really the best or most natural way to approach listening.

[Pall]

The post was deleted, as I found a more effective way to learn oral Mandarin and characters. I do not want to guide others along the wrong path.