How/When to Learn Characters

I've been reading around a lot and have some questions on when and how to learn to read and write characters. On one hand, I've read that you should start learning characters from the beginning, so that you can write everything you can say. On the other, I've heard that it is easier and more natural to wait until you can speak comfortably a bit. Both sides make sense to me, so I can't decide whether to get serious about characters now or wait a few months until I can speak a bit better. I'm finishing Module I of FSI tomorrow, so I've got a long road ahead of me either way.

My second question is which resource to use for learning. I have the NPCR 1 and 2 textbooks, and don't really like the way they're laid out from the bit I've looked at them, but maybe that's because I don't have the workbooks (would that make a difference?). I also have the original PCR 1 and 2. However, Chinese Made Easier has caught my attention lately, and I'm wondering if I'd be better off getting the series once the new edition comes out. Then there's Heisig's "Remembering the Hanzi," which should be released later this year. I've heard nothing but good about Remembering the Kanji, but I'd be worried about the fact that it only teaches the English meaning, and not the Mandarin pronunciation (I believe). I have been using 250 Chinese Characters for Everyday Use, but just for getting my feet wet before I take the plunge in earnest.

Any insight or advice is welcome. Thank you.

I am a beginner and suggest to start with characters from day #1

Not that you need them for reading or writing (for now), but it's gives you one more association to the language. And you once you look a little closer, it's not thaaaat difficult.

For characters I suggest: Rapid Literacy in Chinese

http://www.sinolingua.com.cn/en/product.asp?id=1166

They teach 750 characters in lots of 30 each. 750 will allow to ready you about 70-80% of used characters. Beside that I am also searching for some easy to read material.

I believe (don't correct me if I'm wrong) that lot's of reading can really speed your learning process.

I'm with flameproof.

Learning characters from the beginning is important for a few obvious reasons that I've discovered.

1. If you don't learn the characters you're reliant solely on pinyin. This does you no good in 2 - 3 years down the road when you can speak but can't read. You'll be forced to pull conversation topics off the top of your head when you speak to strangers rather than being able to say, "Hey, what do you think about this morning's newspaper article on...."

2. Many advanced textbooks don't use pinyin, so you'll need to know the characters to be able to use these books and improve beyond an intermeidate level. (I'm not saying it's impossible, but that you'd have a wider selection of study materials to choose from if you weren't limited solely to pinyin.)

3. I'm on book three of NPCR and I love it. Though the character layout isn't great for memorization, I supplement the book with Chinesepod.com flashcards. I use Chinesepod's data base to pull up the new characters I've learned and put them into my personal data base.

4. It's part of the culture and fun.

Now, perhaps some contradictory advice:

Many people say to wait until you can speak to learn the characters because learning the characters does take much longer. If you keep your reading, writing and speaking level at the same speed you're likely to progress slower than you would if you only practiced speaking. With that said, though I am studying characters, I'm allowing my speaking to surpass my reading skills. In fact, I've done so to such an extent that if I put all of the words I know on paper I could probably on read about 45% of them.

when and how to learn to read and write characters

My guess is......

When? - start now! Every time I draw a character, or usually two or three characters together, I say the sounds in my head [or out loud] and think about what they mean individually and together. Also, for me I like to know the meaning of all the component parts of the character, not just the radical. I then try and make up a story (probably get the story wrong, but it can work for me) about why those components are together in that arrangement. Last point on characters is that I used to try to learn a new character by just drawing it a few times. On its own this doesn't work for me, I really have to work with a character long enough to get a grasp in my mind. I find I can't learn 30 characters in one go. Instead I do two or three at a time, usually representing a word in English. Or perhaps I try to learn different characters that share the same pinyin spelling, or characters with the same sound and different meanings – if that makes any sense! And then I put those characters into a sentence for context.

How? - use lots of different approaches and several different books, including a good dictionary and online resources. For me there is no single solution for learning languages: as far as I can tell.

When you are motivated. If from day one you are seeing characters and thinking 'wow, that looks fascinating' and teaching yourself how to do radical look-ups and starting to notice different components cropping up, then go ahead and learn them. If you just aren't interested wait until it starts to hold back your learning, and use that to spur you on.

yep I'd largely agree with Roddy, though I'd add that if you are thinking of holding off completely, consider instead using a spare 20+ minutes a week to write out a few times, say, 10 or more new characters that you've learned the meaning for that week ... as long as you can find the correct stroke order to write them .. and as long as you don't find it a massive chore.

although this is no substitute for properly learning the things, you'll find that using the right stroke order becomes automatic and you'll get more familiar with the more common parts or components of characters, so when it comes to studying them properly for the first time, they'll seen less of a random jumble.

like flameproof, I like the "Rapid Literacy" text book although I wonder if it isn't more helpful for people who can already speak a fair bit. another great book, which gives you the basics of reading/writing but doesn't bombard you with lots of new vocab (useful if you're following a structured course in another textbook) is:

"Fundamentals of Chinese Characters" by John Jing-hua Yin published by Yale University Press.

I'm not thinking of holding off completely, I'm just trying to decide when to start. I guess my dilemma is whether it would be better to do both, even if it slows me down some (maybe it would solidify the knowledge better?), or if I should wait until I can speak passably, and then I could devote most of my time to studying characters. I'm using FSI as the core of my studying for now, and it uses pinyin, so I don't think it will hold me back significantly for the time being if I can't read, but at the same time, it's frustrating to click on a link and find that the page is completely unintelligible to me (and I know it will take a significant amount of time before that changes, no matter which way I decide to go).

Right now I'm leaning towards just doing a unit or two per week from the 250 Chinese Characters book until I finish it, and then going from there. Maybe I'll start PCR or NPCR at that point, or maybe I'll check out Rapid Literacy in Chinese.

Thanks for the help.

I've just started learning to write 2 months ago after learning to listen and speak (still crap) for almost a year now. Because Mandarin is usually written as spoken, I find it better to let my comprehension exceed my reading and writing skills first. Once the foundation is in place, literacy will be much easier (with the hardwork needed). Yes being able to write in the begining would help, but the output to input ratio would be discouraging compared to the above strategy.

Ditto, writing slows down my learning but at least I get to pick up new words from those TV subtitles!

If your ultimate goal is to be able to read chinese newspapers/novels/any modern chinese text, then the sooner you start, the sooner you'll be able to achieve that goal.

You don't have to try and learn absolutely everything that you can say, but it's a good idea to begin familiarising yourself with characters and learn the ones that you find useful/important. Learning characters can also help with your understanding of chinese in general because it can help you differentiate between all the homonyms that Chinese has. There are enough 'de ' and 'shi' characters used at a beginner's level, that this can help quite a bit.

Putting off learning characters will also have an effect on you if for example you decide to come and study in China for a while. If your writing is well below your speaking, then you'll either be in a class that suits your spoken/listening level, but where the textbook has far too many new characters for you, or you'll be in a class where the amount of new characters in the textbook is about right, but where the content is far too simple and teacher has to speak........very..........slowly.........so............the..........other..........students............can............understand.

So, if your ultimate goal is to be able to read Chinese, then learning characters now isn't going to slow you down. It might seem that way at first, however you also need to realise that most of the interesting learning material (newspapers/novels/any text aimed at native chinese speakers), is going to be out of reach until you have a decent grasp of the characters. So the sooner you can read, the sooner these materials will be accessible to you as a language learner.

then learning characters now isn't going to slow you down.

Exactly. You see character learning and speaking as a separate issue (which does cross paths often). So I can't see why characters will slow you down. Quite in opposite, the additional graphical reference will help you to remember.

We all learn different and I don't know what others are experiencing, but the MAJOR issue for me is the "forgetting". With characters and speech you "attack" the brain from 2 different angles.

BTW, QQ chat is great for practicing writing with REAL people (writing by hand is difficult, but with a PC it's a piece of cake) - and FUN FUN FUN!

I think having characters in your learning material makes learning Chinese easier, even if the characters aren't actively studied, just passively absorbed.

1) It helps prevent thinking characters with the same pinyin are the same.

2) A number of characters are easy to recognize, which is encouraging to new learners.

In the old days, texts used to come in 2 tracks, the speaking track and the reading track. For example, the DeFrancis series did this if I am not mistaken. Also The Standard Chinese Series. Basically it pushes you as hard as possible in both, but recognizes that adult learners can learn spoken vocab faster than characters. So for the 1st 2 semesters, the written books vocab is a subset of the spoken books. The grammar and structures run in parallel. For the 3rd and 4th volume(of the written series), vocabulary and usage which is appropriate only for written Chinese is introduced and flagged as such along with more vocab and grammar applicable to both spoken and written Chinese. I'm not saying go out and order these books. I'm just pointing out what worked for me, and an approach that still seems to make a lot of sense.

I don't know how the current crop of texts deal with these issues. I used David and Helen to build up my listening comprehension. There are plenty of reading exercises there too, some of which seemed more formal than the spoken stuff, although if I recall correctly it was also available on the audio files. But that is a 2nd year book.

Bottom Line: Seems like doing both makes sense, but it may be optimal for most people to absorb spoken vocab faster.

Also, as for reading and writing, Heisig is coming out with a Hanzi version of his classic Remembering the Kanji. I am personally in no rush to review my Hanzi since I feel I will be able to do it about 5 times more efficiently when Remembering the Hanzi comes out.

Here is a goal. Two semesters of Standard Chinese will get you to about 300 characters, at which point you can read Lady in the Painting by Fred Wang. That should keep you busy. I am aware these references are dated, so think of it as advice for method, not necessarily recommendations to go out and study particular texts.

I guess I should have outlined my goals in the first post. I'm going to China next June or July, and by that time I would like to be able to get by without a translator. I would imagine that for this, my main priority should be speaking and listening, but I also know I'll have to read signs and such while there. This is my first goal. After that I plan on using a more normal or balanced approach, and I intend to keep studying until I can both speak fluently and read without too much trouble. But for now the important thing is that trip next summer.

If I can go on a tangent for a minute: part of my worry (I think) is that right now I'm uncomfortable learning to read or write a character I haven't yet learned to say or use in a sentence in FSI. I'm used to drilling a word or phrase until it is solid in my mind (used FSI for Spanish, and Pimsleur when I first started Mandarin), and since FSI is mainly an audio course (with pinyin, but the text isn't absolutely essential), I've come to rely on hearing it said and mimicking the audio rather than reading the pinyin for a character and applying it that way. When I try that, I'm not as confident that I'm saying it right. My pinyin is good, but I'm unsure of the intonation (not tone) and especially the rhythm with which I'm speaking. When I can hear a native say it, I have no trouble imitating pretty accurately. I'm a musician, so that may explain why I'm wired that way.

Still open to suggestions, and thanks very much to everyone who has responded so far.

I think given your music background and strength with aural memory it makes a lot of sense to learn only characters that you know how to use in speach first.

Given that, it is going to be very hard to impossible to read most signs by this summer. I am basing this on how hard it was for me when I got to Taiwan knowing about 3 semesters worth of Chinese (this was back in 1983).

I'd say you have 2 choices: 1. just live with it -- don't worry too much that you can't read the signs. 2. get some kind of travel book, and make flash cards for the 100-200 most useful characters for reading signs (I don't know of such a book, I don't know of such a list. Perhaps we could start a compilation on a separate thread. These would be characters that come in really useful for getting around reading signs, but which are not covered in say the first 2 semesters of typical US university Chinese course. It may be that 100-200 such characters don't actually help you that much when getting around. I just don't know.)

In any case, I would highly recommend getting plecodict. Then if you see a sign on the street that you can't read, and you really want to, you can scribble the character into the handwriting recognition function and get a dictionary lookup in about 10 seconds. With a hard copy dictionary, looking up radical, and remainder, this is just not practical on the street. My impression (I haven't wandered the streets of China with plecodict in my pocket) is that spur of the moment lookup becomes feasible, where it wasn't before. (any other pleco users want to comment?)

For reading signs, there is of course signese.com, the definitive site.

Given that, it is going to be very hard to impossible to read most signs by this summer.

That would be tough! It's actually next summer, 2008. I imagine it will still be difficult, but I will definitely look into PlecoDict and signese. Thank you.

I'm an old one like Kudra, also brought up in the DeFrancis days of written/spoken schizophrenia.

Having had the unusual experience of being fairly literate but having really poor audio comprehension when (finally) spending time in China last year I can only emphasize the importance of listening as much as possible, with a view (ear?) towards having the ability to understand what you hear. Speaking comes next in priority, reading and writing last. If you are going to be touring with any sort of guide, you always have the ability to ask people what something says. Without a guide, you have the opportunity to make friends everywhere. My experience tells me that no one on the street expects waiguoren to be able to read. If you spend time in the north, you will find most official signs are in pinyin as well anyway.

The deceptive thing about recognizing characters (I know this is addressed on another thread) is that even when you know 3,000 of them, the remaining 1% of the written material you don't recognize are the same characters which provide meaning to the sentence being read. So you end up asking anyway.

But I do agree with the advice that you start looking at characters now, because ultimately it brings the language together. After all Plecodict works much better when you have correct stroke order when you use handwriting recognition.

Hello. Since I a a long term beginner, please treat what I say with scepticism!

Comparing reading and writing the usefulness and difficulty are quite different.

Reading is most useful and writing is most difficult.

Learning chinese takes a lot of hours, so you need to spend them carefully. Learning to read is not very hard on your brain.

Reading chinese characters is like recognising a face in a crowd. Your brain does this easily without ever making you aware of the details of how it does it. You don't do it by analysing the strokes. Putting a name to a face is harder, for me anyway.

So I have learnt to read 1000+ characters (I have stopped counting) just by reading text on my PC with the help of a talking dictionary that also shows the pinyin.

I say the characters that I know and copy what the software says when I don't. It is important to associate what you hear with the pinyin because it is not possible to distinguish all of the chinese consonants e.g. que xue.

The aim is to pipe characters as fast as possible in your eyes and out of your mouth. It is not important to remember what they mean.

I find the scripts of TV programs from the CCTV website are the most useful. e.g. happychina. The happychina programs last 9 minutes on air. When I started it took me 45 minutes to read one, now it takes 15 minutes, because I know most of the characters. Also Sports English has some amusing scripts.

Once you can read the enough of the characters, chinese web pages become accessible. But spoken scripts have simpler sentences and more limited vocabulary. You need to avoid chinese on paper at all costs because looking up characters is so slow.

I agree with Lao Dawei - learning how to read Chinese characters is much easier, and much more useful, than knowing how to write them by hand. If you're in the early stages of learning Chinese I think it will be a better use of your time to concentrate on reading rather than writing, because the two skills are quite different. From a practical point of view it's not too hard to get away without being able to write characters by hand, because computers, phones etc can all use pinyin as their character input method.

Let me add again: I started looking at characters only a few weeks ago. By now I know maybe 300 or so. I rarely spend more then 10 Minutes a day doing "Chinese stuff".

I had some trouble to find online reading stuff that suits my level. http://clavisinica.com/CVP/voices.html has some interesting texts and audios. I translated this 3:

http://clavisinica.com/CVP/gugong.html

http://clavisinica.com/CVP/traffic.html

http://clavisinica.com/CVP/mqyy.html

I just look at the characters I don't know, and then at the meaning of multicharactered words. It is still very difficult for me to catch the actual meaning in most cases.

I usually don't read learning material for long. Text is usually too short, and too boring.

Not to lose interest I bought a short story book for primary schools, age level 9 or so (新語文読本-小学巻5 - ISBN 7543534088 ). http://www.haoplus.com/1-book/261411.html - I chose this book because it had NO primary theme on its cover.

Now that is fairly easy to read. The stories are not intellectually challenging, but still entertaining. Reading a story (translating a few characters on the way) and UNDERSTANDING it gives a great motivational boost.

It's also encouraging to notice yourself that you look up less and less frequent characters from page to page. The progress of learning characters this way is rapid fast. I will stay a while with primary books before I move on.