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Deep regret about how I became literate (changed the title a bit!)


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Posted

I started this as a reply to a current thread about an Imron post dealing with literacy and where an HSK pass would take you along that road. But since my focus is on the (imagined) joys of illiteracy, I'll make a new topic.

 

Reading and writing are kind of niche when it comes to language. Very few languages have ever had writing systems. Literacy is not a natural ability that humans have.

 

Speaking and listening are of course natural human abilities. And for most Chinese language learners, they are 10x, 50x, 100x more life-changing (those numbers are a guess). Think of the benefits that come from talking easily with people in Chinese: those advantages are probably a big part of what drives lots of people who end up in China to keep studying Chinese. My proposition is that time spent on literacy before (say) HSK6 level is time grossly mismanaged: it would be so much better spending all that time on listening and speaking. Fluency would surely be achieved faster.

 

So I deeply regret bothering with characters all that time ago. I could have prioritised fluency in listening and speaking, and attained that more quickly and less painfully, before finally biting the bullet and becoming literate. One year for literacy maybe? Which of us non-heritage learners hasn't felt a pang of envy when we read a heritage learner on these forums say something like 'what's the fastest way for me to learn how to read, I can already speak Chinese'?

 

Doing it that way would surely be more effective when it comes to learning characters, because you'd be matching words (word-sounds) to characters, rather than - as is often the case - studying the word and how it's written both at the same time. Or even worse, learning how to read a word well before you are fully comfortable and competent with how to understand and use it.

 

Some practical thoughts:

 

-     The voice message function on Wechat would solve most problems regarding text messaging - as it does for illiterate Chinese people currently.

 

-     You'd need a remarkably open-minded teacher, and also need to spend some time converting textbooks to pinyin, although digital texts and mouse-over dictionaries and so on would make that fairly painless?

 

-     A while back when I started learning or refreshing new vocabulary by testing myself only on 'English <-> Pinyin', I seemed to get a big boost to the range of words I was able to use in conversation - though I admit this is a purely subjective feeling and may be nonsense.

 

-     I strongly strongly suspect that until you are at an advanced level, a huge impediment to acquiring Chinese vocabulary is the inevitable insistence on breaking words into their characters, rather than putting 100% focus onto how they sound and are sounded (which is what normal humans do).

 

-     You would know fewer chengyu than your peers.... boo-hoo!

 

-     There's a case for learning 100-ish basic characters (so, one a week maximum?) such a 目木女日月 blah blah so you arrive at your 'let's-learn-literacy year' pre-armed with the majority of the key components and also knowledge of stroke order.

 

-     Then 10 characters per day for a year. Seems manageable.

 

-     Perhaps there's a chunk of vocabulary that is only written and you wouldn't come across much of it until you started studying characters. So much the better! More time spent on deepening your listening and speaking abilities. You'd still be exposed to formal Chinese through news broadcasts, certain TV shows etc.

 

-     I used to think that those pinyin.info folks were kind of cranks, either I was a little unfair, or I'm now a crank, or perhaps both.

 

-     Smash the 汉字霸权!!汉字 should be the last step, not the first.

Posted
On 9/18/2024 at 2:41 PM, realmayo said:

a huge impediment to acquiring Chinese vocabulary is the inevitable insistence on breaking words into their characters

I see this is as a benefit, not an impediment. Chinese is incredibly scalable precisely because of the nature of the characters, it's like learning to put together new pieces of lego (e.g. once you learn 电话, you pretty much know 电视).

Here are a couple of words that I don't know in English (not my native language but I use it for work and have been learning it for decades) but I recently saw in Chinese and could infer the meaning from the characters:

露水: dew

麻疹: measles

曲轴: crankshaft

 

On 9/18/2024 at 2:41 PM, realmayo said:

Fluency would surely be achieved faster

I agree with this, but I am not so sure about this:

On 9/18/2024 at 2:41 PM, realmayo said:

One year for literacy maybe?

If you are a heritage learner and you grew up around hanzi sure, for foreign learners though? If the end goal is to learn every aspect of Chinese, is it really faster to learn in series rather than in parallel?

Posted
On 9/18/2024 at 9:57 PM, lordsuso said:

Chinese is incredibly scalable

 

I get what you're saying but I'm not sure it's actually that big of a deal (couldn't 麻疹 be any kind of rash?) and more importantly: I think 电话 & 电视 are actually forcing a beginner's brain to go:

 

Quote

OK look I've got "电话" again, the first character's "electricity", easy to remember ... but OMG I never get these two right, what is "话" , is it the one that kind of means "speech" but definitely isn't "to say" because that's got two dots at the top, and also means "language" ... or is this damned "话" the one that is kind of connected with "seeing" but isn't the normal character for "see" (because I remember that one's got those three horizontal lines at the top) but is the one used in "television", hmm, now actually I remember there's a different character for "see" and I remember that that character is included on the right side of the character that's in "television", and I don't think it's the one on the right side of "话" so, yes, I'm getting there, by a process of elimination, this can't be "TV" so it must be "telephone".... Now if only I could remember how to say "telephone" in Chinese....

 

Much better not to spend all that time memorising 电、视、见、看、话、说, and spending your early exposure to language "deciphering code"! But instead spend that time learning how to recognise and pronounce the sounds represented in pinyin by "dianhua" and "dianshi".

 

On 9/18/2024 at 9:57 PM, lordsuso said:

If you are a heritage learner and you grew up around hanzi sure, for foreign learners though?

 

Obviously I'm kind of speaking off the top of my head with all this, but the idea is that you would be in the position of a heritage learner when you eventually started to study characters.

 

On 9/18/2024 at 9:57 PM, lordsuso said:

If the end goal is to learn every aspect of Chinese, is it really faster to learn in series rather than in parallel?

 

My guess (!) is, yes. You'd be using language *as a language*, that is, a collection of sounds used to communicate meaning, rather than some visual code to decipher. When the time comes to learn characters, you'd be mapping them on to pre-existing language in your brain, words that you are already very comfortable with and which you've used lots of times already. You won't be saying "OK so 烫 means 'scalding' and that makes sense because it contains 汤 and I know 汤 means soup and soup is hot, but, I must remember that it's not the same tone as 汤". No, you'll already know the word for 'scalding' and how it's pronounced. Learning characters will be about 'fitting things into place' rather than 'deciphering'. In theory :mrgreen:....

Posted

Perhaps the tl;dr is: humans evolved to learn how to understand speech and reproduce it, not write it. Writing can be a huge help for an adult learning a new language, as long as it does not come at a high cost. Pinyin and e.g. the German or Korean or English writing systems have a low cost for a beginner. Written Chinese has a colossal cost for a beginner/intermediate learner.

 

Anyway this has been said all much better by i think Victor Mair etc but this is the first time I'm feeling real regret! Hence the outpouring! Also I can't find anything I fancy reading in Chinese so, even more regret.

 

Also just went to read that other thread for the first time about English becoming a Chinese dialect and it appears lots of this ground was covered there too....

Posted
On 9/18/2024 at 4:55 PM, realmayo said:

couldn't 麻疹 be any kind of rash?

You are right, what I should have said is that I can at least know a ballpark definition (or a couple of possibilities and pick the one that makes most sense from the context), which is still a nice feature.

 

I get what you say about 电话 & 电视, learning the hanzi is definitely a double-edged sword. To mimic your inner monologue, here is what a pro-hanzi one could look like:

I learn the word 电话, it's one of the first words I know so I don't think much of it. Then I learn 电视, 电脑, etc and I go "hm that's interesting I think I've seen this character before... that's right I see the pattern know! that's so clever I wonder what other appliencies start with 电" and then you go look-up 电梯 etc and all of a sudden you have this connection that helps you remember all these words.

 

And here is another aspect to consider: the freaking homonyms. You could listen dianshi and go "ok I know 电 maybe that's the one? I know 电话... what 'shi' do I know that would make sense... 电视!" (I'm pretty sure this happens to some extent unconsciously while you listen)

 

But in the end I have to agree with you, this scalability aspect is not worth the overhead cost of learning hanzi, if humans needed >200k daily words to communicate maybe Chinese would be even easier to learn than English!

 

On 9/18/2024 at 4:55 PM, realmayo said:

is it really faster to learn in series rather than in parallel?

My guess for this question is the opposite as yours, but in the end it probably depends on the person and the learning environment. But from a practical standpoint, if you completely ignore one aspect of Chinese, you are going to miss out on a ton of opportunities that naturally arise and can get you some easy practice (e.g. if you live in China, you won't be able to read menus, subway stops, billboards, etc). Another practical argument, is that it's probably easier to stay motivated if your study routine is more varied (e.g. I'd rather watch a movie then read a book than watch two movies back to back).

Posted

I sympathise with @realmayo ...but never got to the point of regret!

 

Would delaying literacy work? Yes, but not for everyone. If you're a young or young adult learner intent on becoming proficient, you cannot afford years of illiteracy. Plus, I'm sure there's a critical period, different for every one of us, within which you can realistically expect to be able to learn hanzi proficiently. So there's definitely an argument for getting your hanzis in the bag earlier rather than later.

 

However, it would definitely work with children (to get them to 'heritage speaker level' first, as you say) or with learners (older ones, perhaps) interested in the spoken language only. 

 

Not everyone needs to be literate by any means but, for the many that do, early exposure often makes most sense. The consensus nowadays is to push for passive literacy anyway, which isn't as onerous. 

 

I believe your pangs of regret rather come from a discrepancy felt between the written and the spoken language. This is a gap best filled with better audiolingual or conversational training early on, rather than by doing away with literacy. An approach that trains you, from the very get go, to really appreciate the beauty of the sounds and phonosemantics of the spoken language will increase - not diminish - your appetite to read and write (and hence to 'listen' to the eloquence silently embedded in those written signs, which aren't there for deciphering purposes only).

 

So I disagree with arguments that view written vs spoken as a zero-sum game, where one side has got to give: it's a question of finding the right approach that boosts all four language skills together, more or less at the same time if not exactly at the same pace.

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Posted
On 9/18/2024 at 10:55 PM, realmayo said:

couldn't 麻疹 be any kind of rash?

That's just what the term stipulates. 足球 couldn't be other kinds of ball, then similarly 麻疹 couldn't be other kinds of rash. English speakers wouldn't confuse cupboard with blackboard as well, I think.

---

I agree the Idea of @lordsuso that Chinese is incredibly scalable. That's for sure. But still, according to my observation of native speakers I think it is still possible to understand the difference between characters with the same sound without knowing the very writing form of it. My grandma is illiterate - She could barely recognise about 100 characters. Yet it is still okay for her to understand that the syllable “diàn" in 电话 and 垫子 means different things. My only question is would it still work for foreign speakers.

Meanwhile, for some certain syllables there are to many possible meaning for it. Take "yì" as an example. 异 = different/abnormal/special/peculiar, 亿 = hundred million, 易 = easy/exchange, 义 = meaning/loyalty, 益 = good/more, 译 = translate, ... I'm just listing some of those frequently seen version of this syllable. I think it would be a quite time killing work to separate them from each other without knowing the corresponding character. So the knowledge of characters would help when facing such situations.

And in fact illiteracy is getting more and more fewer these days actually. Many people use sound message not because they are illiterate, but because their knowledge of pinyin is poor, maybe due to their accent.(I bet few foreign speakers would like the idea of handling with several different accents of Mandarin everyday).

Yet I do agree with the idea that the learning of characters could be somehow slower than the basic skills of listening and speaking. Maybe a properly small step behind is okay. Learners don't really need to grasp the writing of every new word of each lesson, but only those essential ones, just like the textbooks of primary school for native speakers do. The writing of those complicated words could be postponed to the next revision part.

On 9/18/2024 at 8:41 PM, realmayo said:

-     I strongly strongly suspect that until you are at an advanced level, a huge impediment to acquiring Chinese vocabulary is the inevitable insistence on breaking words into their characters, rather than putting 100% focus onto how they sound and are sounded (which is what normal humans do).

 

-     You would know fewer chengyu than your peers.... boo-hoo!

People all have inertia of doing things as they have been doing. If learners aren't exposed to the idea of separating words into separately meaningful characters, then I believe they won't do that at the advanced level without the same amount of(maybe more) efforts on doing those word-disassembly practices than the ordinary path. But I do think teachers could draw a range of vocabulary in which are words that every leaner should understand their structure, and kick many meaningless hard task out.  E.g. 推敲 and 吃醋. I think learning the stories behind these words are really cumbersome tasks. 

And As for chengyu, not using slangs in English speaking wouldn't be strange but not using chengyu in Chinese speaking sound quite "foreign" since using chengyu is a commonly seen phenomena in the native context. Illiterates use many chengyu as well. It is very possible that a foreign learner at an advanced level knowing less chengyu than a native pupil. The outline of HSK has reduce the amount of chengyu to a possibly low number so I think mastering these chengyu is still essential if someone really want to touch the border of advanced level.

In fact I really feel that, for many times, native speakers are accommodating themselves to foreign speakers. We know that foreign speakers may not use those "culture-ful" expression as well as us so we simplify our expression, making sure they are all comprehensible for foreign speakers. Yet Chinese(and as well as other East-Asian languages like Korean and Japanese) is quite a high-contextual language so it makes the difference between the language of "culture-ful" and "culture-less" quite big. So these cultural things are quite important for those who want to master "real Chinese" and join into the life of China just as native speakers would do. I have been giving tutorials to the foreign students in the School of Medicine of my university for their course of Medical Chinese Communication for several years, and what I've summarised from my experience is that, the truth that all the students in the classroom passed HSK6 with high scores doesn't mean they could understand native-styled spoken Chinese at all(And, maybe, because of the historical cultural communication, Japanese students and Korean students preform levels-better than students from other country. All Malaysian students are ethnically Chinese so they are not taken into account.). When I started for the first time I tried to give instructions in Chinese but after that semester I changed my lecturing language into English. My doctoral tutor once said, "getting an upper-intermediate or advanced certificate of a certain language only means that you've get to a much much basic level as the native speakers." I think her sentence is quite meaningful.

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Posted

I am definitely one of those who learns Chinese mainly for the fun of the writing, think I would get bored pretty quickly without the intrigue of new characters!  

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Posted
On 9/19/2024 at 12:13 AM, sanchuan said:

If you're a young or young adult learner intent on becoming proficient, you cannot afford years of illiteracy.

I'm curious why not?

 

On 9/19/2024 at 12:13 AM, sanchuan said:

This is a gap best filled with better audiolingual or conversational training early on, rather than by doing away with literacy.

Yes! I completely agree!! Use those those 100s or 1000s of hours when other people are memorising characters to do more audiolingual and conversational training. Then, with that deeper knowledge of the language, after getting to a very very solid, say, B1 level (HSK5?), memorise 4000 characters and start reading. That way you'd start reading like Chinese people do and like all other human beings do, mapping written sound-symbols onto the sound-meanings that are already thoroughly internalised.

 

On 9/19/2024 at 12:13 AM, sanchuan said:

So I disagree with arguments that view written vs spoken as a zero-sum game

Imagine a beginner/intermediate student learning the pronunciation and meaning and usage of a new word. Not easy! Now imagine that she is told she has to memorise the character too.... I think it is a zero-sum game because she is sacrificing time and brainpower that could be spent better internalising the pronunciation/meaning/usage of the language.

 

1. Learning characters simultaneously with language delays language acquisition.

2. Learning how to read once you already know how to speak is easier than learning how to read when you don't really know how to speak.

.... is what I'm thinking.

Posted
Quote

Literacy opens up a world of self-directed study that simply isn't available if you go the speaking and listening route first because you'll quickly hit a wall of lack of suitable content

 

Definitely agree. But I don't think those benefits seriously kick in until after, say, B1 level.

Posted
On 9/19/2024 at 1:51 AM, honglam said:

That's just what the term stipulates

What I meant was, seeing the characters 麻疹 doesn't tell a non-Chinese speaker that the word means "measles", because unlike Chinese people, non-Chinese people don't already know that measles in Chinese is "mazhen".

 

On 9/19/2024 at 1:51 AM, honglam said:

So these cultural things are quite important for those who want to master "real Chinese" and join into the life of China just as native speakers would do.

I completely agree, I just think that there are more important words and phrases to master in the first two or three years of studying Chinese.

 

On 9/19/2024 at 1:51 AM, honglam said:

If learners aren't exposed to the idea of separating words into separately meaningful characters, then I believe they won't do that at the advanced level without the same amount of(maybe more) efforts on doing those word-disassembly practices than the ordinary path.

If you're right about it taking more effort, then I agree there may be a big flaw in my proposition, but I don't see why it would take more effort. (I'm also not convinced it's a particularly useful skill anyway.)

 

Conversely, if you already know what the sounds mázhěn mázi mádiǎn máfēngbìng all refer to, then when you learn the character 麻 for the first time it will be super-meaningful for you: aha! this is the way to write the "má" in all the "má-" words that I already know.

 

This is the crucial point: typically, when a foreign learner comes across a new character for the first time, he doesn't know any words that use that character - except for the one that he is learning at that moment. For me, that is a deeply suboptimal way to learn characters.

Posted

Learning to write after learning to speak is the natural thing to do when you're young enough and still in the critical period. Adults don't have the same advantage. But! Studies suggest that adults have the cognitive maturity and discipline to pick up a language (even if with an accent) much faster then children can. And I presume that's only true if they are allowed to rely on all the cognitive accoutrements and superpowers they've already come to rely on in their everyday life, chief among them literacy. 

 

Learning a language just by sound to even a B2 level can take more than five years of babbling, incoherence and massive amounts of comprehensible input - and that's for freshly minted children with no other other care in the world than learning to speak!

 

On the specific point of whether it would lessen the pain of learning characters, there is no question that having an auditory crutch presents a material advantage, but it also has its drawbacks (eg, you can cheat your way through by inference) and it doesn't make the actual slog of learning to recall and distinguish characters terribly easier. The truth is that this script needs years of practice no matter your age or starting point. 

 

I did suggest training everything at the same time but, as I said, not at the same pace: it's perfectly acceptable for a learner to learn words like mázhěn by sound alone even as they're still working on their basic hanzi components and going through graded readers.

 

What I would agree on is that there's value in learning at different speeds: simply slowing down the pace of character acquisition and allowing some of the language to also be acquired by ear/pinyin only. Yes, greater emphasis on the latter may take away from the former in terms of absolute time values, but I see it less as a zero-sum game than a win-win: it's about finding a balance that ends up strengthening both skillsets because working them in parallel, rather than in isolation/sequence, strengthens them both.

 

So, should beginners and intermediates read? Yes. Should they go through novel after novel before they are even able to hear the text in their head with reasonable fluency? Maybe not. That's where I would perhaps put more emphasis.

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Posted
On 9/19/2024 at 11:24 AM, realmayo said:

What I meant was, seeing the characters 麻疹 doesn't tell a non-Chinese speaker that the word means "measles", because unlike Chinese people, non-Chinese people don't already know that measles in Chinese is "mazhen".

I think this is a particular example in which you have to convert a professional term into another language. Many people know measles because that is a common fatal pandemic for children. What about schizophrenia, psoriasis, atherosclerosis or cataract? I think it'll be somehow different from general everyday words according to the modern linguistics.

Besides, I've already mentioned that learners don't really need to have the ability of analysing words like 推敲 or 琢磨. That's the principle of economy of learning language, Because the usages of characters in these words are not productive. 推, 敲, 琢 and 磨 means nothing about thinking or pondering, but together they make up two words meaning "deeply thinking, pondering". It's the allusions and metaphors behind them that have stipulate their meaning. But for general words like 足球, 手表 or 你好, people can simply get their meaning by combining the meaning of characters together. I do think asking beginners to disassembling every new words is an excessive demands. That's why I think we should started with simple ones.

And Infixes are common phenomena in Sino-Tibetan languages and for many such expressions the ability of analysing the structure of words is needed. Even trying to understand those expressions said by others need at least some degree of the competence. Although these expressions are quite "upper-intermediate" or "advanced", it doesn't seems to be a good idea to postpone the acquisition of the analysing skill until the advanced level. Re-regarding all the words learnt before at the advanced level doesn't seems to be a pleasant work. I think it's completely okay to put it away until later stage of HSK2 or HSK3 - Doing those things at HSK1 is too excessive, while starting at HSK6 seems to be too late. (And I don't find breaking words into characters in Chinese as difficult as European languages. We don't change the form when compounding words. We just put them together, one by one.)

<PS. breaking word into characters or even into part of characters are commonly seen among the educated native speakers when using some rhetoric devices. Last time my tutor scold someone as "你这样的文章也想在学界掀起波澜?掀起破烂还差不多。"(Such articles of yours are aimed to bring tidal wave to the academic society? [I think] bringing rags and junk [to the academic society] is a more proper description). 波瀾 and 破爛 have similar pronunciation and written form, but the meaning is completely opposite in the given context. Native speakers (like us in the office then) don't really hesitate and think twice to get the humour of those expressions. Of course such example may be too advanced, but there are more common samples in everyday Chinese.>

That's the same thing with characters as I've mentioned above in my former comment - for HSK1 and even basic HSK2 levelled Chinese, characters don't seems to be essential. But characters should be taught during the procedure of approaching higher levels, not at the last of everything, I think.

Maybe we should think twice on our current system of learning and teaching Chinese, that's for sure. Foreign speakers write bad-structured characters and create sentences that sound really strange, while native speakers accommodate themselves to fit the need of communication. The fact that similar situations are frequently seen indicates that our system of Chinese learning is not as successful as we've imagined. But delaying the acquisition of some essential skills and technique still seems to be controversial, I think.

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Posted
On 9/19/2024 at 8:01 AM, honglam said:

Infixes are common phenomena in Sino-Tibetan languages and for many such expressions the ability of analysing the structure of words is needed.

I agree. It's important to learn the morphology of Chinese early on. If a learner is persuaded that, say, "sleep"="shuìjiào" or "because"="yīnwèi", it's going to be hard to keep up with content where those syllables (shui, jiao, yin, wei, etc) are kept apart, used on their own, or modified in between. It's going to be hard to accept that a lexical unit, which was memorised as a unit, suddenly isn't one. It's befuddling, it's demoralising. Far better to learn words (from the very very get go) just as they are structured in Chinese - not as they're best translated in English.

 

You don't necessarily need literacy in Chinese characters to do that but, yes, characters make it so much easier. 

Posted

I think because Chinese is so broad, students are inevitably going to have some weaknesses, and they're inevitably going to lament not working more on those weaknesses earlier.  There's something like seven balls (reading, writing, listening, speaking, vocabulary, grammar, culture [and maybe even translation and interpretation, handwriting, ...]), and you can only juggle one or two at a time.

 

I'm a big fan of pairing vocabulary and reading, because vocabulary improves your reading and reading improves your vocabulary, giving a positive feedback loop.  I'm also a big fan of getting a well-rounded education and it making many mental connections while learning.  I certainly do not recommend cutting a major aspect of Chinese (like reading) from one's study plan; maybe downplay it, if you consider it less important.

 

When I reflect on how much of my time I usually spend reading, writing, listening, and speaking (in English or Chinese), reading is by far the clear winner in both languages.  In English, I spend a lot of time writing, and trying to express myself clearly (like right now); it'd be nice to write at a similar level of clarity in Chinese, but that's going to take time.  Almost none of my time is spent talking with people in English or Chinese (I'm a bit of an introvert), so speaking is very low priority for me.  And I'd be more interested in giving lectures (when there's plenty of prep time) than having conversations.

 

Listening is now my weakness in Chinese (but I have noticed some improvement as I've been prepping for the HSK6 recently [I think this is partly due to spending too much time on Genshin Impact; I pulled Raiden Shogun on the new banner and I'm so excited!]); I spend many hours watching YouTube in English, so it'd be nice to be able to do the same in Chinese.  But what I'd be interested in listening to (or watching) generally requires fairly advanced vocabulary, so vocabulary comes first, and I find vocabulary pairs well with reading.

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Posted
On 9/19/2024 at 3:35 PM, sanchuan said:

"sleep"="shuìjiào"

This seems to be a good example since I have the example of hearing foreign students saying "睡觉一会"(he aimed to express "sleep for a while"). But every native speaker, I bet, would break this word into two characters and put a number "一" in between to make it "睡一觉" to mean the same thing. This is because "睡觉" is a Verb-Object compound verb. It is very often that will break them into the original "verb part" and "object part" and put some words in between in order to modify the whole compound verb. Every different sort of compound words have its grammatical uniqueness so understanding the structure behind them is essential to use them correctly. And unfortunately the majority of multi-character words are compound words.

Posted
On 9/19/2024 at 11:32 AM, becky82 said:

Listening is now my weakness in Chinese (but I have noticed some improvement as I've been prepping for the HSK6 recently

 

I think this is key. There is no way OP could get fluent defined as having conversations with natives on a wide range of topics within a year. Mainly because you will not get to that level of listening comprehension within a year. Not fun having conversations when you can spwleak but not understand your interlocutor

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Posted
On 9/18/2024 at 2:07 PM, Moshen said:

  I just want to point out that different people have different purposes for learning Chinese.  Some want to converse with Chinese people in their native language while traveling or working.  Others want to read and understand Zhuangzi or Mao's poetry in the original. 

@Moshen

For me, I highly agree with Moshen.  I haven't read through this whole thread yet.  But for me, I spend most of my time on the internet working, reading and writing .  And we're building software for audiences that speak french, spanish, chinese etc... I can read french somewhat well, and just a litle bit of spanish, and my chiense is improving.  I have a hard time undersatnding frech/spanish when it is spoken because they speak too fast or maybe their pronunciation is just not what I'm expecting as an anglophone. And for chinese, I only know cantonese, and there's far too many chinese dialects so I wouldn't be able to comprehend speakers of mandarin, 潮州, 台山, etc... anyway.

For the sake of "getting work done", it's just easier to "read/write" characters on my computer screen.  It is also faster to skim through written text than listen to lengthy audio or video lectures/presentations (especially when speakers have accents that take time for my brain to compute).   For my purposes, literacy takes precedence over ability speak or comprehend the language via listening.

Anyway, yup, i agree with the sentiment that it depends on your objective.

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