2 questions - translation and chinese progress relation

[赫杰]

1) If you HAD to choose one, what do you feel is overall better for your Chinese, translating from English to Chinese or translating from Chinese to English? Why?

2) Thought of another stupid question I wanted to ask everybody: imagine two people (Person A and Person B) learning Chinese; both have the same learning capacity for languages, same age, same intense effort, same everything (well accept for names ha-ha), just a different approach to learning Chinese.

Person A – Studies Chinese everyday for three hours a day for two years, 1 hour in a standardized comprehensive Chinese class, 2 hours studying a standardized comprehensive text book and doing exercises (during this time he is advancing through different Chinese courses and is indeed using different textbooks). On the days there are no classes, studies the text book for 3 hours (strict teacher ha-ha)

Person B – Translates between the two languages everyday for three hours for two years, starting off translating like Chinese/English kid stories/programs and then after one year, moves up to other things like TV Dramas and stuff like that, during this time has to take the time to learn the 部首 system to look up the characters he does not recognize (not to mention pinyin). He spends 1.5 hours a day translating from English to Chinese and 1.5 hours a day the other way.

For the heck of it, let’s say after year of study for each student, they spend one hour a week doing their best to talk the same native Chinese person.

After two years, who in your opinion would have the better Chinese? Why? And who would have the overall better translating ability? Why?

Many thanks

HJ

[gougou]

1) If you HAD to choose one, what do you feel is overall better for your Chinese, translating from English to Chinese or translating from Chinese to English? Why?

Depends on your level of Chinese. When you're still at a rather basic level, you'll be better off translating from Chinese to English, as you will be working with grammatically correct texts. The other way would be dangerous, you might end up learning your own mistakes. Once you have reached a level where you can assume that most of what you say is correct, you might want to consider the other way, too, to put what you learned into use. It does depend on learning styles, too; some people prefer passive learning (i.e., understanding Chinese texts), others need to learn actively (i.e., use everything they learned, and maybe a bit more than that). Oh, and look how I still managed not to choose...

After two years, who in your opinion would have the better Chinese? Why? And who would have the overall better translating ability? Why?

Person A will be advancing much faster in the beginning, it just is much more efficient to be told how a grammatical construct like complements works then having to extrapolate those rules by looking at many, many samples. I think it is quite possible that this would save him so much time that even in terms of translating ability, he is still ahead of person B.

[Koneko]

This can be very subjective but I think it's easier to translate English to Chinese than the other way round. Since there are quite a lot of golden sayings in Chinese, which are pretty hard to explain in English.

X X X

I personally think that Person B will progress quicker than Person A because his way of learning is more interactive. Person A might know a lot of theories but he might not be able to express better than Person B. In term of writing, Person A might do better than Person B... Well, the possibilities are endless, I am not very good at judging. Just based on some general assumptions, I think Person B will be better than Person A in overall.

K.

[wushijiao]

Like Koneko says, it depends on a lot of factors? Are A's teachers and textbooks good? Does B know what s/he is doing?

I think neither system is ideal, but A would probably learn faster. I think if you had, say, 10 people doing A's system and 10 doing B's, you might find that, at the end, the best results would belong to one or two B students, but the A's would do better overall.

The fact is, most people don't know how to learn on thier own. Also, good textbooks are written by experts who have studied these issues for decades and can feed the most stuff into the minds of newbies as quick as possible, in theory. Textbooks (in theory) teach the most important stuff, the foundation, right away, which would enable A to get better quickly.

Of course a good student of the B method would have a better natural use of the language and would pick up grammar naturally, but that is assuming that he or she could cope.