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

[Guest realmayo]

On 9/21/2024 at 2:16 AM, sanchuan said:

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

I genuinely had no idea that Mair was a central figure in current linguistic theory rather than 'just' Sinologist and a teacher but I am not up to date at all.

 

On 9/22/2024 at 3:30 PM, sanchuan said:

expanding vocabulary is a much more slow-going affair if you rely exclusively on Pinyin and comprehensible input.

I think this is an instance of where we are talking past each other. If by "expanding vocabulary" you mean going from, say, a knowledge of 2,000 words to a knowledge of 10,000 words, then I agree, indeed it's hard to imagine at the moment how that expansion could take place without memorising 3,000 or 4,000 characters.

 

But to re-emphasise: I'm talking about (a) the cognitive load of hours spent memorising characters as being something that impairs fast acquisition of basic/intermediate competencies in speaking & listening, and (b) the likely interference of character-fetishism (as you put it well) when it comes to acquiring those abilities.

 

Plus, given that without pinyin you can't read widely and quickly and particularly usefully until you know 2,000+ characters, I fail to see how memorising a mere 1,000 characters is going to help someone with their listening and speaking. That feedback loop won't happen until they know way more characters! Most of the undoubted benefits of reading that you get with (say) Spanish aren't going to be available to the Chinese learner until much later in their journey. So until you know enough characters to benefit from reading, why pay the high cost of memorising characters when you still need to do so much work on your speaking and listening abilities?

 

Or to put it another way: the bulk of any early/intermediate learner's exposure to Chinese grammar and vocabulary will come from listening and speaking. Won't it? I really feel this statement must be true.

 

I don't think reading a few written examples of grammar usage, or going through vocabulary lists (where pinyin is an OK alternative) count against this statement.

[Guest realmayo]

Reading up on this the last couple of days I am surprised to find so much literature going back so many years that supports the notion of delaying character memorisation, that says you have better oral skills if you start learning Chinese without studying characters. I guess most of it has been ignored.

 

Reading the much more recent literature it's clear that people won't waste all that time in the future learning to handwrite (perhaps just a few dozen hours only). Especially as it seems there's no link between time writing a character and the ability to read words. Which has been helpful to me because I was about to embark on a plan to get the number of characters I can handwrite up to 4000. Now I'm persuaded there's no benefit.

 

So I guess there will be more assaults on the citadel in the coming years, cutting the amount of character-time given to early learners, although there will probably be a lot of resistance still.

 

On 9/21/2024 at 2:16 AM, sanchuan said:

I can't resist quoting Keynes here

John Gray's advice on how to live more like a cat pounces to mind:

"Trying to persuade human beings to be rational is like trying to teach cats to be vegans. Human beings use reason to bolster whatever they want to believe, seldom to find out if what they believe is true. This may be unfortunate, but there is nothing you or anyone else can do about it."

 

 

[Apoc]

I kind of agree with OP and didn't start learning characters until after 1 year of focusing on oral communication, mainly using Pimsleur. Learning to read or write were never my goals.

 

Spoken languages have been around for 50,000+ years while written ones only for about 5,000, so reading and writing are clearly not essential for learning to communicate orally. The reason why I still eventually started to learn characters was to get access to written Chinese content such as books. Books are great for vocabulary acquisition, which is obviously helpful for oral communication as well.

[honglam]

On 9/22/2024 at 4:46 PM, realmayo said:

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.

Of course I understood. What I mean here is to use the original Latin phrase(and I found I've remembered that phrase wrong as well) in daily life. Maybe that's because English and Latin are totally different languages, and maybe the consistency of a semantic writing system makes modern Chinese not that unfamiliar when we are presented with ancient text. The history of this very writing system may have made Chinese(and maybe other East-Asian languages like Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese as well) quite distinct when compared with the languages of Europeans and our Sino-Tibetan relatives. So the attitude towards this writing system is quite important I think.

And I'm really pleasant to see foreign learners' idea of Chinese language and writing system. Sometimes our identity of native speakers restricts us to a special spot of observation towards our mother tongue.

[Guest realmayo]

On 9/22/2024 at 5:09 PM, Tomsima said:

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).

Hmmm, you can't use an absolute ("if you want to speak and listen") with a comparative ("spend more time practicing to speak and listen"), it's meaningless. Although it does imply that someone who only wants to speak fluent Chinese should never learn to read or write, which is intriguing.

 

Also poor Imron only ever pointed out the real trap of not practising the activity you want to be good at. Most people want to be good at reading/writing/speaking/listening. So they should avoid the trap of spending 100s of hours memorising characters before they're in a position to reap the benefits of reading Chinese. If there's an razor, it should be applied to those hours (is the proposition I'm exploring). And anyone who thinks handwriting words or sentences in Chinese will seriously help them read or communicate in Chinese, well they should probably be rummaging around Imron's toiletries bag too.

 

On 9/22/2024 at 5:09 PM, Tomsima said:

by the time you realised you wanted to focus more on speaking you were already being railroaded for classical texts

Actually it's kind of the opposite! I arrived in China to teach English without knowing even nihao. Sadly I never had any training in pronunciation during that time. Nor did I memorise any characters. So when I left two years later I could talk cheerfully enough at a modest level but with fossilised (and dialect) pronunciation problems. These days the only reason I want to develop a high reading ability is so I can read contemporary texts discussing old poems and the far older philosophical stuff.

[Tomsima]

On 9/22/2024 at 12:08 PM, realmayo said:

Nor did I memorise any characters. So when I left two years later I could talk cheerfully enough at a modest level but with fossilised (and dialect) pronunciation problems. These days the only reason I want to develop a high reading ability is so I can read contemporary texts discussing old poems and the far older philosophical stuff.

 

Well now I am confused. You started off not memorising characters, but learned to speak while living out in China for two years, and today you want to develop a high reading ability so are presumably benefitting from the hours you put in to learning characters after leaving China. What are your deep regrets? That Chinese books aren't published entirely in pinyin?

[Guest realmayo]

I didn't "study" Chinese during those two years. If overnight I could have magically memorised all the characters that matched the sounds I could produce, then I would still not have been able to, for instance, comfortably read the novel 《或者》.

 

My regret is about how I learned characters. Because when I got round to studying Chinese outside of China, and then later back in China, I spent lots of time memorising characters (and writing them - completely useless to me nowadays) alongside learning oral Chinese. My feeling is that this was detrimental because it delayed (and perhaps impaired) my acquisition of grammar and vocabulary and the pronunciation and the natural rhythms and flow of the language.

 

Clearly we disagree about timing:

 

1. You might say it doesn't matter when you learn a character, it can be before or it can be after a learner is good enough to derive significant benefit from reading Chinese texts, you just have to do it some time. If that's what you believe, then we won't reach agreement.

 

2. When I talk about acquiring and internalising grammar and vocabulary and the pronunciation and the natural rhythms and flow of the spoken language, you may believe there is no harm in this taking place over a longer period of time, and therefore there's no need to sacrifice character-learning time early on. Again, we won't reach agreement because my hunch so far remains that the quicker you can reach a really solid base in those oral areas, the better.

 

Why? Perhaps think about it in terms of a virtuous feedback loop:

 

If a Year 1 beginner learns great pronunciation within 3 months, then she will derive great benefit from all her spoken interactions with Chinese people over the remaining 9 months. But if she only manages great pronunciation in month 11 (she's been too busy writing characters), then she will have derived less benefit from those spoken interactions with Chinese people over the full 12 months.

 

Is there a virtuous feedback loop with reading? Yes of course, but probably only once you can read moderately extensively. And given that learners can't read character-based texts extensively until they're moderately advanced, perhaps delay the character memorisation business for a while?

[PerpetualChange]

On 9/22/2024 at 4:31 AM, realmayo said:

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.

 

Well, it's certainly not a fact about the language you are learning. 

[Tomsima]

On 9/22/2024 at 1:51 PM, realmayo said:

we won't reach agreement

I'm not trying to reach any agreement with you, I'm just trying to figure out what your deep regret is all about.

 

Conclusion

• spending time learning characters of course delayed your oral progress, because you were spending the time working on reading and writing instead
• Because oral language is more important to you, you wish you had not done that

Your first post in this thread could have just been 'my deep regret: I wish I had spent more time on practicing speaking and not on writing, because I want to speak better and don't need to write characters'.

 

However, your 'hunch' that characters actively and negatively affected your speaking ability is another question entirely. Higher registers of spoken Chinese feature incredible amounts of literary Chinese, and to learn these you must be literate. Of course learning characters can feel jarring at first as you speak and they seem to 'interrupt' your flow as you try to speak 'better', but this is just another part of the language learning process, its why advanced non-native speakers are so few and far between. Your comment in the opening post, "You would know fewer chengyu than your peers.... boo-hoo!" was of course tongue-in-cheek, but from my experience chengyu are the difference between you keeping up in high register, academic and/or professional conversations or not. This really is a boo-hoo moment, but not because you know fewer than your peers, rather that you may never find yourself in conversations where chengyu are being used abundantly. Your regret might therefore also be tied to the fact that you not only have no need to write characters, but the spoken Chinese you use does not demand a high register. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but perhaps it might help to clarify for any learners reading through this topic what sort of regrets they might also hope to avoid.

[imron]

On 9/22/2024 at 6:46 PM, realmayo said:

Actually I would use this but only if I thought the other person would understand,

Anyone who grew up on Asterix and Obelix will  That’s where I learnt the few Latin phrases I know. 

[PerpetualChange]

On 9/22/2024 at 3:40 PM, Tomsima said:

• spending time learning characters of course delayed your oral progress, because you were spending the time working on reading and writing instead
• Because oral language is more important to you, you wish you had not done that

Also, I'd argue based on the thread... spending time learning HSK vocabulary. Unfortunately I think many people mistake the HSK levels as trailheads on the path toward fluency. But they're more like a dipstick. The HSK6 is missing so many very, very basic words. If you are relying on the HSK materials to make you literate, you are going to have a very bad time when you open your first children's book and find that the HSK6 has not prepared you for either the vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, or grammar contained therein. Unfortunately, this is a very common problem and I understand why. It's very attractive to believe that the path toward fluency is all laid out in a neat, standard, guideposted way. Unfortunately nothing is that simple. 

[imron]

On 9/22/2024 at 7:09 PM, Tomsima said:

aka Imron's Razor)

I approve of this term!

[Guest realmayo]

 

On 9/23/2024 at 3:40 AM, Tomsima said:

Your first post in this thread could have just been 'my deep regret: I wish I had spent more time on practicing speaking and not on writing, because I want to speak better and don't need to write characters'.

 

@Tomsima You are wrong about my first post in this thread but it's my fault for making it too long. I wish I'd been able to delay memorising characters until I was solid at an intermediate level (say, done with HSK5, I dunno).

 

On 9/23/2024 at 3:40 AM, Tomsima said:

Higher registers of spoken Chinese feature incredible amounts of literary Chinese ... chengyu are the difference between you keeping up in high register ... fewer than your peers

 

Again, in my over-long first post, you will see that I suggested memorising c.4,000 characters over the course of a year. But only after a solid base at intermediate oral Chinese. With regard to chengyu, "peers" are fellow intermediate students!! I'm not sure why this proposition is so difficult to convey to you. Delay the character memorisation until students are ready to begin the long slow climb from intermediate to advanced Chinese, is my suggestion.

 

I absolutely loved reading 红楼梦, I use 三民 annotated texts to struggle through Classical Chinese, I couldn't do any of those things without having memorised characters. I even got into 说文 characters for a while which I thought were cool.

 

Let me repeat: the regret is not that I have memorised characters. I'm delighted I did that. The regret is that I did not delay memorising them a while, and also that I used handwriting as part of that memorising process.

 

It's only after writing that initial post that I've discovered that the delay of character memorisation is both a long-standing and also an extremely current issue within the world of CFL pedagogy. There's also some very interesting research out there on attitudes held by those many Chinese teachers who believe CFL learners should be memorising characters from day 1.

[Guest realmayo]

On 9/23/2024 at 7:28 AM, PerpetualChange said:

Unfortunately I think many people mistake the HSK levels as trailheads on the path toward fluency.

I completely agree. I worry in particular that people might use those HSK textbooks ("HSK Standard Course") as the basis for learning Chinese, rather than a basis for making sure they can pass the HSK exams.

[Guest realmayo]

On 9/22/2024 at 7:04 PM, honglam said:

And I'm really pleasant to see foreign learners' idea of Chinese language and writing system. Sometimes our identity of native speakers restricts us to a special spot of observation towards our mother tongue.

Definitely! Our misunderstanding about how we were using 字 helped me better understand those special observation spots. I do think Chinese people usually mean something quite different by the word "language", because I think that most Chinese people regard writing as something which is fundamental to language. But outside China it's easier to consider writing as an extra, an add-on, a power-up! After all, language without a writing system is still a perfect language, capable of precision and also of profound power or beauty, e.g. Homer, or the songs that were written down as the 诗经。There's a good reason why poems tend to rhyme!

 

You could also argue that modern English and Chinese texts are typically read the same way by their respective native speakers. That is, English and Chinese writing systems are both largely phonetic (and both very badly phonetic), and reading in both languages involves seeing words and chunks of words, rather than breaking words down into individual units (e.g. NOT tele + vision + series, NOT electric + seeing + play). I think that Chinese people tend to be less comfortable with the idea that modern written Chinese is primarily a phonetic system of writing.

 

These forums are probably not the place to discuss it, but: because lots of people who teach Chinese to foreign learners also buy into the idea that Chinese characters make the Chinese spoken language special or fundamentally "distinct", therefore foreign learners and beginner/intermediate levels may from time to time find themselves studying Chinese in a rather unnatural way. That is, they can't help but regard Chinese words almost as a logical puzzle rather than primarily a sound unit used to convey meaning.

 

As a consequence (but this is just my experience, I may be very peculiar), foreign learners may not put enough emphasis on their ability to hear and say new vocabulary in a natural way, but instead be overconfident that it's enough to recognise the written form ("ooh, 'electric' + 'seeing', how cool and logical!").

 

In this respect, there is a "distancing effect" from the word: after all, a word is primarily a commonly agreed way of producing sound to represent something. Native speakers don't have this problem because they already know how to say 电视 before they know that 见 is the "meaning element" in 视.

[Tomsima]

So @realmayos final suggestion for learners appears to be: try to reach intermediate level without learning characters, then learn 4000 in a year. 🤷

[Guest realmayo]

Ah! you read my first post!

[Guest realmayo]

Maybe 2,500 is more realistic. 10 per day, weekdays only.

[Tomsima]

One might even suggest learning the high frequency ones that have already appeared in your speech (which is now at an intermediate level) first due to greater ease from familiarity...perhaps the most common 1500 could even be learned before this 'character learning year', in an attempt to spread the load. Oh...

 

 

[Guest realmayo]

Yes well fulsome apologies for playing around with a new idea (well, new to me). There's a time and place for that kind of thing, I guess.

 

Seems the forums are now a teeny bit like what you read in sci-fi books where humans arrive on a mysterious new planet only to encounter guardian-mechanisms embedded with the accumulated and unvarying wisdom* of an advanced species which left them behind on their homeworld before subliming away eons earlier into another dimension.

 

The last couple of days I found lots of fun research not just into the benefits or otherwise of delaying character memorisation (certainly none quite as extreme as what I was wondering about), but about how technology is seriously shaking up traditional methods of learning Chinese. I was interested in a study which looked at how non-native Chinese learners "may tend to regard characters in terms of available pictorial clues", which mean they read slower and in a different way to native Chinese readers ... and that "the intense nature of the decoding process would demand the lion's share of cognitive attention, and thus militate against cognitive resources being relegated to the higher level processes of comprehension building".

 

Interesting podcast here https://www.jeremiahjenne.com/the-archives/2023/10/8/do-you-really-need-to-learn-to-write-characters-to-study-chinese on handwriting.

 

One of the participants, David Moser, has a piece here https://www.hackingchinese.com/the-new-paperless-revolution-in-chinese-reading/ which makes me realise how daft I was to think that looking up unknown words while reading a novel on an e-reader was 'cheating' or a 'crutch' detrimental to my acquisition of Chinese. Another source of regret! Of course I should have been looking up words if I wanted to enjoy the book more, rather than just 'getting the gist' of this or that phrase. 哎....

 

His interviewee on that podcast was an editor in a thought-provoking new book I've just finished: Transforming Hanzi Pedagogy in the Digital Age: Theory, Research, and Practice, which is worth a look.

 

All fun stuff! But a bit uncomfortable for someone like me who did it all the old-fashioned way. And was previously reluctant to sublimate!

 

* (& often armed with razor-sharp weaponry ).