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

[Guest realmayo]

On 9/19/2024 at 2:00 PM, sanchuan said:

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. 

I agree, but I think they should use pinyin for the first two or three years instead of characters. Maybe I have been too imprecise in my use of the word literate. Learners should aim to become literate in pinyin very early on, but delay literacy in characters until much later.

[Guest realmayo]

On 9/19/2024 at 7:28 PM, honglam said:

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.

Would this include natives speakers who are illiterate? 50 years ago that would have included a lot of Chinese people. Could they speak Chinese correctly, or did they speak like foreigners?

 

On 9/19/2024 at 2:01 PM, 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

In English we have vis-ual, vis-ion, tele-vision, tele-phone, homo-phone, homo-genous, gen-etic, ke-tone, ace-tone, and so on, words which you could break down and learn their shared component parts deriving from Greek or Latin. But most people learn these words without studying Greek or Latin first.

 

It may be the case that no Chinese people can speak advanced Chinese unless they can read it too, I have no idea. If so, that would make spoken Chinese a deficient language compared to (at least) European ones.

 

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

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

I think pinyin would achieve this just as well and at a tiny fraction of the cost.

[imron]

On 9/20/2024 at 1:33 PM, realmayo said:

It may be the case that no Chinese people can speak advanced Chinese unless they can read it too

I think this is likely the case for English too though.  The language usage of an illiterate native speaker will be considerably different from a literate one.

[honglam]

On 9/20/2024 at 11:33 AM, realmayo said:

Would this include natives speakers who are illiterate? 50 years ago that would have included a lot of Chinese people. Could they speak Chinese correctly, or did they speak like foreigners?

It is now for sure that the acquisition of mother tongue and foreign languages are different procedure. To compare them is meaningless. But I'm sure that the aim of language learning is to speak at least somehow as the natives do. In linguistics, especially modern linguistics we tend to hold a descriptivism point of view. To put it simple, native speakers are the only competent judges to tell whether a sequence of vocabulary entities is acceptable or not.

On 9/20/2024 at 11:33 AM, realmayo said:

In English we have vis-ual, vis-ion, tele-vision, tele-phone, homo-phone, homo-genous, gen-etic, ke-tone, ace-tone, and so on, words which you could break down and learn their shared component parts deriving from Greek or Latin. But most people learn these words without studying Greek or Latin first.

 

It may be the case that no Chinese people can speak advanced Chinese unless they can read it too, I have no idea. If so, that would make spoken Chinese a deficient language compared to (at least) European ones.

I'm not sure what do you mean by saying "advanced" here. Knowing names of entities of some abstruse fields of studies doesn't sound like "advanced" to me. I know that "grammaticalization" is grammatikalizatsiya and "case grammar" is padezhnaja grammatika in Russian, but I don't really have the competence to communicate in Russian. All I could do is to read some old Russian articles of my field of study.

Scaling the level of language has different meaning for foreign learners and native speakers. Assessing the language competence means to compare WITH native speakers for foreign learners, and BETWEEN native speakers for native speakers. A illiterate British man speaks English "more English-ly" than a well-educated Chinese for most of time(except for those great professors who have drilled into English language and culture for decades long) because the British man is on him/herself British.

And my comments above don't mean that words and terms in European languages could not be broken into word parts. Yet Modern Indo-European languages seldom break words into their component while using them. We say neither "tele-a-vision" nor "over-some-whelm" in English. We don't say "ob-un-fois-tenir" in French as well. But we do say "睡一觉"(The usage of "Innate object") or "演而不讲"(演讲 = giving lectures, 演而不讲 = demonstrating without really lecturing)(The usage of compound verb) in Chinese. We also have to explain the different between "我们不打开那扇门We didn't open that door" and "我们打不开那扇门We attempted to open that door but we cannot have it open", and the reason why we can't say "*我们修不理那扇门" instead. I think both 打开 and 修理 would not be separately given as "睡" and “觉” or "修" and "理" in textbooks. Of course these things are quite natural for native speakers but are they similarly easy for foreign learners? I think the latter statement is not the case. My point is not that European languages don't have similar possibility to disassembling words, but that the disassembling of words is related to there usage in Chinese.

---

As for characters, of course, no knowledge of characters has no conflict with fluent speaking. But no knowledge of characters does mean literally no competence of reading and write. It is fair to say that every full-pinyin books could be sorted as kindergarten reader. (And even kindergarten readers are written in character-pinyin comparison for most of the times.) It's okay if you only find learning Chinese a HOBBY. But for anyone who want to work or study in China, well, I'd say the majority of employers, colleagues, professors and students won't tolerate someone reading and writing completely in pinyin at all. They'll told you that you'd better read and write in English instead.

[sanchuan]

On 9/20/2024 at 7:20 AM, imron said:

this is likely the case for English too though.  The language usage of an illiterate native speaker will be considerably different from a literate one.

That's just it. I think the basic thrust of the argument in this thread derives from the canard in current linguistics that because spoken language comes (undisputedly) prior to the written one, then that means that the latter is best thought as merely serving the transcriptional needs of the former as faithfully and discreetly as possible. This is a logical fallacy: that it should be a servant in theory doesn't make it one in practice. And indeed it's not, because script does influence speech a lot, all the more so in a language like Chinese. Pretending otherwise, like some linguists do, and protesting that scripts and historical spellings are encumbrances of a feudal past that we should dismiss in a fit of phonetic cultural revolution is, frankly, dangerous talk. 

 

 

[sanchuan]

On 9/20/2024 at 5:33 AM, realmayo said:

 

On 9/19/2024 at 9:35 AM, sanchuan said:

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

I think pinyin would achieve this just as well and at a tiny fraction of the cost.

It may well do for the first few years of study! But if it were just as practical, if not more, I rather think the practice would have caught on by now. Hanzi literacy isn't just a monumental effort at scriptural cosmetics collectively undertaken by hundreds of million esthetes. It really is a convenient way of reflecting on paper the syntactic flexibility and semantic concision of the spoken language, and even augmenting that with abbreviations that often migrate back into speech. In short, it really is part of the language as spoken today. It's important to impress that at an early stage too, in my opinion. Sure, it's a devil to input or recall sometimes, but recognition isn't too much of a burden. 

 

Anyway, most people agree that pacing it out and not letting it overtake other aspects of learning, especially aural/oral ones, is preferable.

 

[lordsuso]

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

the idea is that you would be in the position of a heritage learner when you eventually started to study characters.

I think you are grossly underestimating the advantage heritage learners have. I am not even talking about the one that properly learnt the hanzi and then forgot in adulthood, but simply being around hanzi for a long time has to give you a huge advantage. And most importantly, their brain has been wired to understand spoken Chinese for decades, so yes I can see how "mapping written sound-symbols onto the sound-meanings that are already thoroughly internalised" might be easy for them, but we cannot compare that to a learner that has been speaking and reading pinyin for a couple of years. Also, heritage learners might also have a genetic predisposition to learning hanzi, but that's another story.

 

Also @honglam, I apologize for speaking in realmayo's place but I am also curious about what he asked, and I think you misunderstood him when he asked whether illiterative native Chinese speak like foreigners. Do illiterate native speakers say things like "打不开" or "睡一觉"? Do they understand Verb-Object compound verbs even if they don't know the hanzi? My guess is that they do speak correctly, but maybe simply because they learnt by imitating others (which is honestly the same way I learn as a foreigner so I don't think that hanzi are particularly helpful for this). 

[Guest realmayo]

On 9/20/2024 at 6:58 PM, lordsuso said:

and I think you misunderstood him when he asked whether illiterative native Chinese speak like foreigners.

Yes this was what I meant. If @honglam is claiming that you can't speak Chinese like a native without being able to disassemble words into characters, then illiterate Chinese don't speak like natives? Chinese people historically never said 睡一觉 unless they were able to write? Seems a surprising conclusion. Additionally, given that most non-Chinese learners learn characters at the same time as they learn vocabulary and therefore *do* from day 1 break words into characters ("ah, telephone is 'electricity' plus 'speak'"), surely you would expect them *not* to have any problems with 睡一觉?

 

On 9/20/2024 at 6:58 PM, lordsuso said:

simply being around hanzi for a long time has to give you a huge advantage

My proposal mentioned learning one character per week for the first two or three years, ideally those characters which constitute the components of more complex characters. There's actually a great book which basically does that, called "Fundamentals of Chinese Characters".

 

On 9/20/2024 at 1:20 PM, imron said:

The language usage of an illiterate native speaker will be considerably different from a literate one.

My mistake was not clarifying that by 'advanced' I basically meant the level of Chinese you'd be studying as a foreigner in an 'advanced' class so HSK 5 or 6. Most English people can read and write but if they use 'super-sophisticated' or indeed 'bookish' vocabulary or syntax in speech they will come off as weird. I enjoyed learning and using that kind of 'sophisticated' Chinese language at ICLP in Taiwan but they made the point that we absolutely must try it out on our native-speaking friends too: when they laughed at a word or phrase, then we'd know that native speakers wouldn't use that particular word or phrase in speech.

[Guest realmayo]

On 9/20/2024 at 4:33 PM, sanchuan said:

I think the basic thrust of the argument in this thread derives from the canard in current linguistics

Luckily I am free of any current linguistics canards! Written language of course takes on a life of its own. You only have to look at pre-1919 written Chinese to realise that!

The way the written language influences the spoken one is a very interesting topic. The very fact that we have the word 'bookish' to describe words being used inappropriately in speech shows that there is a degree of inbuilt resistance to this influence though, while reinforcing the notion that the written versus spoken language do indeed, as you say, operate independently to an extent. Writers are free to deploy a different vocabulary, grammar, sentence length, even bullet-points in order to express themselves in ways which are not available to them in speech.

 

This got me thinking about new vocabulary, when words need to be introduced to a language because the language lacks existing words to describe that concept. These would take the forms of either entirely new word, or loan words. Historically I believe English reached for Latin and Greek, and I guess these posed very little pronunciation problems.

 

However they would have influenced the 'nature' of the spoken English language slightly, I think, because such words tend to have more syllables. Therefore spoken English becomes a slightly longer-syllabled language.

 

How about Chinese? Generally there seems - I'm guessing - to be a real preference for loanwords to be two-character words. Sometimes that means inventing brand new characters. Othertimes resurrecting obsolete characters (for example, I think, the 酮 in ketone/acetone etc). These ways of making new words seems to me driven by the written language, and particularly by how characters are regarded as kind of sacrosanct. But it creates the problem of homophones, something that would be sidestepped with a different approach (I believe Japanese, for instance, avoids this problem quite neatly).

 

What's quite funny is how other loanwords come in to Chinese which undermine the premise of 'meaning', such as 沙拉 or 沙发。

[Guest realmayo]

On 9/20/2024 at 5:11 PM, sanchuan said:

On 9/20/2024 at 11:33 AM, realmayo said:

I think pinyin would achieve this just as well and at a tiny fraction of the cost.

It may well do for the first few years of study!

 

That's what I've been suggesting all along.

 

On 9/20/2024 at 5:11 PM, sanchuan said:

But if it were just as practical, if not more, I rather think the practice would have caught on by now.

 

I just went back through some of the Victor Mair posts on languagelog. I remember being very sceptical when I first read them.

 

Mair - like plenty of other people with careers teaching foreigners Chinese - believes that foreigners learn Chinese faster and better if they delay memorising characters until they are well on the way to spoken fluency. According to Mair (who teaches literary Chinese too, so of course wants his students to be super-super-literate by the end of their studies):
 

Quote

The hardest part of learning Chinese is mastering the thousands of characters that are necessary for full literacy.  The spoken language, in contrast, is relatively easy to acquire.  A good teacher who employs benign pedagogical methods can have students conversing quite fluently within a year or two.  By “benign pedagogical methods” I mean focusing on pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and patterns (phrases, clauses, sentences – through build-up drills, substitution drills, etc.). 

 

Quote

If you delay introducing the characters, students' mastery of pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and so forth, are all faster and more secure.  Surprisingly, when later on they do start to study the characters (ideally in combination with large amounts of reading interesting texts with phonetic annotation), students acquire mastery of written Chinese much more quickly and painlessly than if writing is introduced at the same time as the spoken language.

 

Also somewhere on that website, someone posed the rhetorical question: if a Chinese person who speaks Mandarin wants to learn Cantonese, do they dedicate 100s of hours of their initial study time on memorising the completely new characters that are used for specifically Cantonese words? Of course not! They just get stuck in.

[sanchuan]

On 9/20/2024 at 2:28 PM, realmayo said:

Luckily I am free of any current linguistics canards!

You say that... but then proceed to rehash the doctrine of the loudest linguist in the field.

 

I can't resist quoting Keynes here who, in a different context, said that "practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist". We're all variously influenced by the discourse of ideas out there. Every field has 'canards', opinion-setters, fads, etc and they do trickle down in one form or another, so it's good to be explicit about them if we mean to discuss them (as you have done by going through Victor Mair's writings).

 

I respect many of Mair's conclusions and ultimately believe we're all talking out of the same bandwagon here (learning words = good; hanzi fetish = bad), but there's many ways to skin a cat. Hence the wonderful nuances to our discussion.

[honglam]

On 9/20/2024 at 8:00 PM, realmayo said:

characters

Well, I've found something I've misunderstood here.(Maybe that's just the different between the thought of native and non-native speakers). I don't fancy the idea of using "morpheme" in general discussions since that sounds too professional, so I used a common term like "character" instead. In Chinese context, it is very common to call both the syllable and the written form “字”, since seldom could anybody see a 汉字 corresponding two syllables or more(Actually, the knowledges of those "multi-syllabic character" are thought to be trivia). My grandma could hardly read or write, but she is completely able to separate words and sentences into syllables. If I say something to her and ask her to tell me what's "the third 字" of this sentence, she won't make a mistake, even though she never knows how to write it down.(That's why many linguist regard 字 as the foundational part of Chinese instead of "词') So by saying "disassembling" words, I meant to break words into there component. It don't really ask anybody to know the very written form of it. It's just a native speaker's preset of calling those things "字", and a preset of translating "字" into character when using English.

I did agree the idea of delaying the introduction of Character. That's what I've mentioned in maybe my first or second comment, I'm not sure. I read the syllabus of HSK and find that HSK2 only asks for 300 words in candidates' vocabulary of Chinese. I do think it is nonsense to introducing too much written form then - It is quite useless.

On 9/20/2024 at 8:00 PM, realmayo said:

My proposal mentioned learning one character per week for the first two or three years, ideally those characters which constitute the components of more complex characters. There's actually a great book which basically does that, called "Fundamentals of Chinese Characters".

I do think that's good idea. Actually I'm already tired of correcting my students' homework. The majority(except Japanese and Korean students) hands in terrible things to me that I could hardly recognise(I'm asked to give them paperwork). A basic knowledge of calligraphy may sounds more useful than knowing the written form of every new word learnt.

And I would never say HSK is a perfect system for both education and assessment of Chinese language(actually I regard it as somehow terrible). Maybe that's what ours educators should focus on for the next step, to find a better way of language education and assessment.

On 9/20/2024 at 8:28 PM, realmayo said:

How about Chinese? Generally there seems - I'm guessing - to be a real preference for loanwords to be two-character words. Sometimes that means inventing brand new characters. Othertimes resurrecting obsolete characters (for example, I think, the 酮 in ketone/acetone etc). These ways of making new words seems to me driven by the written language, and particularly by how characters are regarded as kind of sacrosanct. But it creates the problem of homophones, something that would be sidestepped with a different approach (I believe Japanese, for instance, avoids this problem quite neatly).

It's quite common to form two-syllable, three-syllable combinations based on single-syllabic units of meaning for Sino-Tibetan languages actually. I'm a Tibetan learner, and I've got friends from Loloish ethnicity, Qiang ethnicity and Baipzix ethnicity and so on, and I've observed the same phenomenon in all those languages above - Tibetan, Lolo, Rma, Baip, etc. They are all Sino-Tibetan languages. None of them uses semanto-phonetic writing system - Tibetan uses alphabet, Lolo uses syllabic signs, and Rma and Baip didn't even have a widely used writing system in the history so they just use the same Latin alphabet as English. So maybe, as many linguists guess, it's just the nature of these languages. Perhaps because those combinations are more "rhythmic"? I'm not quite sure.

As for the problem of homophones I think that's to excessive to be elaborated in this thread since I think that would be too difficult for even the undergraduates majoring Chinese linguistics before becoming sophomores.

So in this clarification, what I'm expressing is, actually I don't oppose the idea of delaying the introduction 

-----

BTW about the "bookish" Chinese, it is for sure that Chinese is a typical example of spoken and written language affect on each other. This part may not be relevant to the main idea of this thread but I did find it interesting. I've learnt that for most of time in the history the majority of people in Europe had hardly any knowledge of those classical languages - Latin, biblical Greek, or even biblical Hebrew. These knowledge seemed to be the privilege of the priests. But that's not the case when it comes to ancient China. We Chinese had been using the same written form of Chinese for nearly 3000 years(not the very shape of characters, but the style of vocabulary and grammar) until the the New Culture Movement. The knowledge of the Classical written language is much more widespread than the knowledge of Latin and Greek in Europe. Classical works had, has, and will still have great influence on the living language today(We are to read classical works since the 6th grade of primary school). Completely using Classical Chinese while speaking is absolutely incurably bookish, but quotations, ancient-styled word and grammar(e.g. 之 as a substitute of 的) among spoken language is still common and natural today. I've never see anybody using sentences like "alea dicta est" when speaking English, but I do have seen many people using phrases like "有朋自远方来"(From 论语) when friends are visiting them. Even my illiterate grandma knows this phrase. After the movement, writing oral language down is promoted, but the changes left in the language of those well-educated scholars and statemen would not disappear. There works are honoured as "model works" and being mimicked by generations and generations. And as the coverage of K-12 education getting higher these days, the written form becomes leading the spoken language again, and the educateds have started to speak formally and "bookishly" in everyday Chinese instead. That's really an interesting cycle. If you live and work in China and contacting with Chinese people like me everyday, actually you'll find these expressions whose English correspondent is quite bookish is, actually, common and well accepted in daily life.

[PerpetualChange]

@realmayo I think this is a really bizarre post, full of strange statements that are just incorrect on many levels. 

Sounds like you are trying to find some justification for enjoying learning to speak and listen more than you enjoyed learning to read. 

 

But anyway, one thing does make sense to me. We learn language via acquisition. Ideally you should be practicing using the language 80% of the time, studying 20% of the time. These days you see people spending way too much time on SRS decks, quiz apps, etc. They are working very hard but they are failing because they are not practicing actually using the language. In most cases, it is much easier to practice speaking and listening than it is reading and writing, because another human can give you feedback, may start talking down to your level, etc.

For writing, this is much harder. You can journal but you won't necessarily know if what you are writing is comprehensible. You can read but it may be very hard to find books that are in that sweet spot of current literary level +1. 

 

Finally, I disagree that reading and writing is "niche" in most language, and that most languages never developed a writing system. But even if that statement was true, then it just means Chinese is the most niche language on the planet. It would be more defensible a situation to say that 中文 is purely a written language, first and foremost, with many competing verbal components that have only been standardized in recent history. 

 

[sanchuan]

On 9/22/2024 at 1:51 AM, PerpetualChange said:

It would be more defensible a situation to say that 中文 is purely a written language, first and foremost, with many competing verbal components that have only been standardized in recent history. 

This is an important point. Chinese, as it's written, can be potentially read and used in any one of the many Sinitic languages. This is a unique case among world languages and is entirely due to the writing system.

 

So one could argue this post is about regretting having learnt Chinese/中文/汉字 before Mandarin/普通话/拼音 and about recommending, as many do, that learners first focus on Mandarin (or other fangyan) and only later, slowly and/or optionally, on Chinese.

 

Arguably that's how all native speakers (and a few proficient learners) do it, but it is definitely not the only way, or even the most practical way, for all adult learners.

[sanchuan]

On 9/22/2024 at 1:51 AM, PerpetualChange said:

it is much easier to practice speaking and listening [with] another human [who] can give you feedback, may start talking down to your level, etc.

'Easier'... said than done, unfortunately! Certainly not easier than just cracking open a book or watching/reading content online.

 

So the recommendation below would be unrealistic for most learners, except advanced students who are already immersed in the language (and for whom it may be long obsolete).

On 9/22/2024 at 1:51 AM, PerpetualChange said:

Ideally you should be practicing using the language 80% of the time, studying 20% of the time.

 

[sanchuan]

On 9/20/2024 at 2:45 PM, realmayo said:

If you delay introducing the characters, students' mastery of pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and so forth, are all faster and more secure.  Surprisingly, when later on they do start to study the characters (ideally in combination with large amounts of reading interesting texts with phonetic annotation), students acquire mastery of written Chinese much more quickly and painlessly than if writing is introduced at the same time as the spoken language.

And, I'm sorry, but this quote from Mair is a bit of a sales pitch and doesn't hold a lot of water.

 

Will delaying character study mean that students' mastery of pronunciation (and general spoken fluency) is "faster and more secure"? Yes, that may demonstrably be the case. Fluency here refers to students' facility in actively using and reusing the few language features they already know, so focusing on listening, speaking and reading in Pinyin should help. But would it make their mastery of grammar and vocabulary just as "faster and more secure"? Very much not persuaded here. Pinyin obscures homophones and morphology. And expanding vocabulary is a much more slow-going affair if you rely exclusively on Pinyin and comprehensible input. I doubt that speed of grammar acquisition would be affected in any way, either (other than for the worse, as suggested in the discussion upthread about separable verbs making dangling monosyllables harder, not easier, to understand in context if one is still learning and only relying on Pinyin). I also challenge anyone to tell me the difference between grammar and syntax, which are both chucked in for good measure because why not.

 

As for it making character acquisition painless, that's also misleading. Will it make puzzling out, recognising and navigating characters easier? Of course. Is that equivalent to "acquiring mastery of written Chinese"? Eh. 

[Guest realmayo]

On 9/22/2024 at 7:51 AM, PerpetualChange said:

Sounds like you are trying to find some justification

Nope, just that now I'm fine at speaking and listening I realise that I could have got here way way faster (spoken Chinese isn't particularly difficult) if I'd spent far far less time trying to memorise characters until I was already say A2 or B1 competent at speaking/listening.

 

On 9/22/2024 at 7:51 AM, PerpetualChange said:

Finally, I disagree that reading and writing is "niche" in most language, and that most languages never developed a writing system.

This is a matter of both fact and common sense. Of course most languages never had a writing system. It's just colossally obvious and the fact that you assume otherwise suggests you have a warped idea about writing and its centrality to language.

[Guest realmayo]

On 9/21/2024 at 2:20 AM, honglam said:

Well, I've found something I've misunderstood here

Ha interesting! I'll have to remember this when chatting about writing with Chinese people. Yes in the context of a thread about the writing system, it didn't cross my mind that you were using 'character' for 'morpheme'. Happy we've cleared this up!

 

On 9/21/2024 at 2:20 AM, honglam said:

I've never see anybody using sentences like "alea [iacta] dicta est" when speaking English

Actually I would use this but only if I thought the other person would understand, however the English translation "the die is cast" and also "Crossing the Rubicon" are pretty common phrases in English.

I'd also point out that there are lots of common phrases in English which originate in the Bible and are used all the time, including ones which people don't realise have their origin in the Bible, for example: "there is no new thing under the sun"*.

It's interesting to consider UK education 50 or 100 years ago. People were expected to learn far more of these Latin phrases, kind of a mark of an educated man. This concept and feature of education has of course been wiped out in the ongoing 'cultural revolution' in the west, where reform of education has accompanied its expansion. It is interesting - and I think rather cool - that the expansion of education in China has preserved some of these features that have been eliminated in the UK.

 

*in fact I was a bit embarrassed with myself recently to realise I didn't know the origin of the slightly condensed phrase "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity" and had to look it up. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1%3A2-11&version=KJ21 Don't you think 老庄 would enjoy this Biblical poem?

[Tomsima]

TLDR if you want to speak and listen, then spend more time practicing to speak and listen, if you want to read and write then spend more time learning to read and write (aka Imron's Razor). The point being, at the beginning nobody really knows what they want when dipping their toes in the vast ocean of Chinese, so classes continue to offer all paths to all beginners. I feel like you may perhaps have just been unlucky with a few unaccommodating teachers along your journey, and by the time you realised you wanted to focus more on speaking you were already being railroaded for classical texts.

[Jan Finster]

On 9/22/2024 at 1:51 AM, PerpetualChange said:

Finally, I disagree that reading and writing is "niche" in most language, and that most languages never developed a writing system

 

Unless, you live in China, I believe being able to read, write and listen are vastly more important than speaking. 

English is not my mother tongue and I do not live in an English-speaking country. Outside of work, I consume information in English more than in my native language. Even for work, publications are in English. I watch Netflix in English. I write forum posts in English. Other than talking to myself, there is very little English oral communication in my life. 

 

Realistically, I will spend 4-6 weeks per year at max in China. Being able to speak is fine but not a major goal.