Has your perspective changed since starting to learn Chinese?

[renzhe]

Recently, I've been thinking about how my perception has changed since I started learning Chinese. I found that many things turned out differently than I expected. I'm also looking at fixing up some weaknesses and thinking about how to structure my studying in the coming year. Perhaps others can share their experiences too (or disagree with my conclusions), here are mine.

At the moment, I am reading 水浒传 and it is difficult, but modern books are typically not a problem. I am watching 爱情公寓 without subtitles and typically try to squeeze in some

every day, which is not a problem in terms of listening. However, I don't consider myself fluent, as Chinese doesn't flow the way I'm expecting it to, and the way my other languages do. Anyway, there are some observations I've made along the way.

1) Characters are really not that hard.

The writing system is considered the most difficult aspect of Chinese by pretty much everyone who starts learning, and also by many people who have mastered Chinese. I used to dread learning them, and it was hard going, but looking back, I think that this aspect is overrated. In my experience, it takes about 2 years to cover the 3500 characters you need using an SRS program and reading as much as you can. After the two years, I kept reading and doing flashcards for another year, and then I dropped it. I found that as long as you keep reading, you don't forget them. So it's about 2 years of your life, and you're done.

I don't remember the last time when I found characters to be an impediment to enjoying Chinese like I used to at the very beginning. Yes, I have to look up a character (sometimes even common ones) from time to time, but not much more often than in other languages (I'm ignoring 水浒 here for obvious reasons). In a way, it's a litmus test for whether you are going to succeed, because it requires continuous effort over a long span of time, just like every other aspect of Chinese.

2) Pronunciation is trickier than I thought.

Chinese pronunciation is deceptively easy in the beginning -- even the tones, which are usually introduced in isolation. But they have a life of their own when mixed with sentence prosody, tone sandhi, and the neutral tone. I've been listening to slowed-down recordings of professional actors, and there are whole words which turn into some strange unclassifiable neutral-tone weirdness that makes the whole sentence sound natural. If I read it outloud, even if I hit all the tones right (that's a big if), it still comes out sounding decidedly foreign.

Tone sandhi gets me very often. I will start speaking, then make a tiny stop after 有 or 很 or 一 or some other typical sandhi culprit, and then say something that would have affected that character's tone sandhi. Happens all the time. I guess that I'm thinking about sentences in terms of words, whereas a more natural approach (for Chinese) would be to think in much larger blocks. I believe that the key is in learning longer phrases. There are phrases that come out naturally because I've heard and said them many times and I'm all proud, and then the next word sounds like it was spoken by a poorly trained gremlin. This must be the direction I should be moving in.

In general, I find it fascinating how you can pronounce everything right and still sound totally foreign, without being able to pinpoint it. I also find it fascinating how little it improves with time unless you target it specifically. I found other languages much easier in this regard. Of course, for many people this is not a major issue, but I have some kind of unhealthy obsession with sounding close to native.

3) Listening comprehension is also trickier than I thought.

In contrast to characters, most people out there seem to claim that understanding spoken Chinese is easy -- especially beginners. My experience has been the exact opposite, learning to understand Chinese is a tedious process. I blame two things for it:

The first on is the (relative) lack of stress. I find that most European languages "click" after a very basic vocabulary is obtained (1000 words or so) because each word is stressed exactly once, which is a very strong clue about where the words begin and end (many European languages have well-behaved stress falling on certain syllables with clear exceptions). This lack of stress makes figuring out where one word begins and the other one ends very difficult. Another issue is the lack of morphological clues (-ar is usually the ending of a verb in Spanish, -aste is the ending of a verb, etc). They make the grammar more complex, but they also help you when listening. Unless you have a decent vocabulary, a word could begin anywhere and end anywhere in a Chinese sentence, and it could be anything. I found it very difficult to get through this, but lots of listening and learning vocabulary slowly paid off.

Another related problem is the relative shortness of Chinese words. A typical European word is longer. Chinese disambiguates by using tones, but I found it difficult to perceive this information consciously at high speeds, I was ONLY listening to the initials and finals -- which are not reliable in everyday speech. Only lots of listening helped here.

4) I'm still not sure about the role of passive and active learning.

So far, most of my learning has been passive -- listening, reading, etc. I have found that it has improved my passive skills tremendously, but it doesn't really transfer to active knowledge, such as speaking or writing. This is pretty obvious, actually. But at the same time, I have avoided jumping in head-first and trying to do everything from the first day. I still think that this was the right decision, that you need to develop an ear for the language and a natural feeling for how to use it, before you shoot yourself in the leg with bad habits that take years to correct. Julien Gaudfroy wrote something similar, and who am I to disagree.

But, due to learning outside of China and not having stable conversation partners regularly, I have found that I have neglected the active part too much. I think that some of it's my fault, as I've become too proud to make mistakes over the years -- I should have gone where it hurts more often. But I'm trying to fix it, by instituting Chinese Saturdays and going back to Audacity for some pronunciation and langdu torture.

Still, I don't know what the best ratio is. It should be more active than what I have been doing, but more passive than some internet bloggers are preaching.

5) There are no shortcuts.

No, really. Everything I skipped came back to haunt me later. I still think that being selective about when to do what is very useful. For example, I have found that waiting with chengyu did not hurt me, as the vocab and character language made learning them easier. On the other hand, ignoring langdu didn't do me any good, and might have harmed my pronunciation for years.

One thing that I have found is that it is useful to work on several skills in parallel, and to move between them as weaknesses surface. Once again, I have found that this took more conscious planning than European languages, where things simply fell into place after a while. But I still don't know the best way to organise learning is. I guess that there is no perfect optimal programme.

Anyway, this is probably obvious to many people here, but I have found that my thinking has changed on all these points since starting to learn Chinese.

[icebear]

I agree on all points

I don't have anything groundbreaking to add, but still wanted to say I think its a great post. Point 1 especially so; it still stings to think how counterproductive my irrational reverence to/intimidation from characters was in the early days/years, and how slightly frustrating it is to hear new learners similarly insist they will "deal with characters later on".

[drungood]

Thanks, this is a good post. For some reason I just wrote a long response, but I hope everyone will take it with a grain of salt because unlike renzhe I have very limited experience with the Chinese language.

1) I definitely agree. For someone who knows little about the Chinese language, the characters are the most intimidating part and seem "ridiculous" - after all there are 150 times as many Chinese characters regularly used than English letters regularly used. However, learning the characters using an intelligent method is simple and straightforward. It's actually one of the easiest aspects of the language. I've learned 1500 characters in 8 months, and I haven't been close to as diligent as I could be (in those 8 months there was unfortunately a 2-month span where I did no Chinese at all and lost a ton of what I had already learned). I think using Heisig's Remembering the Hanzi book is very helpful, and I'm excited that the second book will be released in March. The key to learning these is consistency. 8 hanzi a day ~ 3000 in a year. I tried to learn too many at once which made it painful, leading to that 2-month dry spell.

2) I haven't been pronouncing anything at all - as a result I will probably look like a complete beginner when I move to China next week rather than someone who has been studying for 8 months. When I get there I plan to hire a tutor to practice using this method:

http://olle-kjellin....LP98_Pedag.html

which has received a lot of positive feedback from members of how-to-learn-any-language.com. But of course, Chinese is much harder to pronounce than European languages, so even if this method works well for those languages it will probably take a lot longer for Chinese.

3) In additions to everything you have said, there is also profound regional differences in accents and an almost complete lack of loanwords.

4) I think it's not good to be imbalanced between passive or active methods of learning. Mostly active learning is what a lot of language learners do, which I think is a problem because they become overly-inventive as they try to translate what they want to say from one language to another.

On the other hand, entirely passive learning is inefficient, because say you're reading a book and there's some word you don't know, so you look it up...if you don't put that in an SRS or anything, it could be a couple months before you see that word again, by which point you've forgotten that you ever came across it.

I think the SRS is the best way to transfer from passive to active knowledge, by taking what you've come across passively and require you to produce it. But it's best to not get too ambitious, spending hours and hours with the SRS per day. Adding an average of 10 sentences per day is very doable (for me) and comes out to 3650 sentences per year. And as I get better at Chinese, the number of unknown words per sentence may decrease to where I can do 20+ a day without it being a bother.

5) There are no shortcuts, but there are more efficient ways of learning...for example with the characters. Some Chinese classes present no logical order of learning these - teaching by frequency rather than primitives. It's so much easier learning systematically with primitives that I would be tempted to call this a "shortcut"

[jbradfor]

1) Not only are characters not as hard as people make them out to be, but they are a big part of what keeps me going. They are beautiful, fascinating, often surprising, and occasionally infuriating, and constantly challenging. [Humm, sounds like my wife....]

[Shelley]

A very interesting post. I agree 100% with your first point. Characters are not really that hard, in fact they help me with meaning and above all tone. It is much easier to recognise the difference betwen different characters than the pinyin and tones. the many variations of yi for example, there are some with the same tone but different meanings, the character for each one is completely diferent and therefore it is clearer which one is meant. There are of course exceptions to this, but not too many and context always helps.

I am a great believer in learning characters and pinyin together for this reason.

i have always looked at pinyin as stepping stone to aid and guide pronouciation.

And of course characters are beautiful, artisic, and I like the long history they have enjoyed.

Points 2 and 3 are my biggest challenge as I have no one to talk to and my listening skills are low because i don't put enough time and effort into really trying to find something interesting but simple enough to make it rewarding before i give up in disgust at my lack of ability to keep up.

Point 4 is interesting because as you say your situation can make a big difference as to what you can do. I am learning outside China and will probably never get to go to China so I do as much as I can here to be active, but I really enjoy my passive learning so i have to make myself take classes, speak to people and what ever else i can do to actually talk and listen in a real world situation. i am sure my ratio is not helpful to my learning.

Point 5 I agree with 100% it is not easy to struggle through some of the more boring repetitive exercises and keep plugging away with character practice, but it does pay off in the long run. I think this point is why there was such a response (dare i say it) to the fluent in 3 months thread. (I am now running for cover for mentioning it again )

I think one of the most helpfull things for me is enjoying what ever learning I am doing.

@drungood China next week - lucky you. Enjoy

[Ludens]

Not only are characters not as hard as people make them out to be, but they are a big part of what keeps me going. They are beautiful, fascinating, often surprising, and occasionally infuriating, and constantly challenging.

Constantly challenging sounds kind of hard... In my experience, characters are not too hard to learn to read and write, but it does take a lot of consistent effort for a long time.

[imron]

Characters are not so hard, but the problem is that there are so many of them that it gives the appearance of being hard. Take a long term approach and just learn a handful per day - but do it everyday. Before you know it 2-3 years will have passed and you'll be laughing.

Regarding pronunciation, actually there was something I noticed in the pronunciation sample thread and seeing as no-one else has offered you feedback on it yet, I'll go back shortly and give you some specific feedback there.

Edit: Done.

Edited February 8, 2012 at 06:48 AM by imron

[xiaoxiaocao]

I think the learning of characters takes on a kind of ''snowball'' effect. The first 500-1000 are extremely hard but then things just click, you are familiar with the components, and the process of learning them becomes much easier. I think it's important to settle into a routine that suits you as quickly as possible. I myself used a lot of time trying out different ways of learning characters before getting into a routine that worked for me (perhaps I was also looking for that non-existent ''silver bullet'' that would magically allow me to read newspapers overnight).

For me listening is the hardest aspect of Chinese. I always encourage people to do as much listening as possible right from the start. It seems people sometimes think ''I just need to SPEAK Chinese'' well, to have conversations you need to be able to listen and comprehend what they are saying to you as well. Does anyone else find it so much easier to understand people when talking in person as opposed to radio/recordings etc? Is non-verbal communication/gesture etc really that important?

[renshanrenhai]

This lack of stress makes figuring out where one word begins and the other one ends very difficult. Another issue is the lack of morphological clues (-ar is usually the ending of a verb in Spanish, -aste is the ending of a verb, etc). They make the grammar more complex, but they also help you when listening. Unless you have a decent vocabulary, a word could begin anywhere and end anywhere in a Chinese sentence, and it could be anything.

This is very intriguing . You can find the opposite symptoms of Chinese learning English, one the of most observable pronunciation problems is caused by being unable to "stress" word.

Some Chinese even argue Mandarin is so easy to grasp as any patterns of structure can make sense in mandarin while the syntax of European languages seems much more complex and annoying with so many grammar rules to restrict the utterance.

[character]

Does anyone else find it so much easier to understand people when talking in person as opposed to radio/recordings etc? Is non-verbal communication/gesture etc really that important?

The non-verbal is very important. The other factor is that scripted speech (news broadcasts, movies, etc) often has been stripped down to the bare number of words needed for native speakers.

---

WRT finding characters to be the easy part of learning Chinese, I suspect learning characters was much more challenging before computerized study tools.

[paike]

Renzhe, awesome post!

My Chinese seems to be at a similiar level as yours: I read books in Chinese for fun, usually western books translated into Chinese, like Ender's Game, 1984, 3 days to see (Helen Keller) and some Chinese books, like 《蛙》, Han Han's stuff, whatever, listening at similar level. I've lived in China for 7 years. Sadly, my Chinese still isn't "fluent". Is it really good? Sure, better than most people I've known, but all the time I find myself thinking, "that person said something very important, and it was the key to the talk, or paragraph or something, and I didn't get it."

Listening really is the hardest part of Chinese which seems crazy. Reading I can do at my own pace, but listening is something you either get right then, or its gone. I've gotten off planes before to some other part of the country, for example Chengdu or Qingdao, gotten into a taxi and understood less than 25% of what they've said because my brain can't decipher there z/zh, c/ch, s/sh, l, r, y, differences. So many Chinese have really bizzare accents that sound nothing like "standard mandarin" and education levels can be so up and down. So I agree, Listening is the real stickler. I listen to the radio all the time and just don't get what they are saying when I can read a book or the newspaper no problem, so I dont think its simply I dont know the words they are using.

Pronunciation: Also, to sound like a native, or near native, is just amazingly tricky! I mean, its alright, but to get it just right, is so nuanced. Not just with the words, but with the right pauses and the right 哼， 哇塞， 啊， 哪， these kinds of sounds don't come out right. English doesn't seem to use them the same way, as an integral part of the language. So sounding the same as a native speaker is really complex, not just with the right pronunciation with longer sentences, but with the right cadence with shorter ones, the right 啊 kind of sounds at the ends of sentences to express different feelings.

I guess I will end in saying: Chinese is WAY harder than I thought possible. I meet lots of people who have studied for 3-4-5 years and I find myself thinking their Chinese is still pretty bad. My is not very good too: I'm on break from work now and I meet a friend/tutor and we talk for 60-90 minutes every morning, sometime I record our talk, and my Chinese is still immediately recognizable as foreigner guy. Had I moved to Latin America 7 years ago, I would be nearly indistinguishable from native speakers. The flip side, I have friends who are Taiwanese who moved to America at 13ish and stayed til after university but are now here in China mainland, there are lots of things they won't get from English. Most of the time, their English seems flawless, the sound is right on, but some things just don't connect. I might say something important here: A language is a way to communicate, first, so the culture and cultural things (what is communicated, the message) are just as key to understanding the other person as the language, so even if I completely understand the words, I somehow don't understand the deeper meaning. I think this happens to me a lot. My friend and I talk about Family guy the TV show sometimes, I've seen maybe 15 episodes and I think its pretty funny (sometimes a little too many fart jokes) but one example was the Kool-Aid guy going through the wall and saying OOO-Yeah! How would someone understand that unless they were Western? Do Europeans even get that? I think I have all the time in Chinese. I just don't get the 西游记 joke or some pun on a poem. I may NEVER get that. I don't think German's learning French would have that problem. What's even more maddening, I think the Korean/Japanese/Chinese differences are much bigger than the English/French/Spanish differences. It seems like if you didn't grow up in China, or your parents aren't Chinese, there are things that only a few people who give up speaking their native language and live in China for 10+ years are going to get.

Anyways, great post Renzhe, right on!

[imron]

I suspect learning characters was much more challenging before computerized study tools.

A large chunk of my character learning (and at least up to the point of being productive in the language) was done without computerised study tools. The biggest difference I've found is that now I don't have to lug around a giant paper dictionary

[imron]

and some Chinese books, like 《蛙》

OT: That's on my reading list for this year. Any good?

[character]

A large chunk of my character learning (and at least up to the point of being productive in the language) was done without computerised study tools. The biggest difference I've found is that now I don't have to lug around a giant paper dictionary

I don't dispute it's that way for you, but for me the ease/speed of lookup (by pinyin or handwriting recognition or OCR) and being able to easily set up spaced-repetition flashcard decks are major improvements over how it would have to be done previously.

Now I'm looking at a reading workflow of scanning in some pages, reading them in Pleco, adding unknown words to flashcards on the fly, and reviewing those words before reading the next page.

All told it feels like an order of magnitude improvement over non-computer-based methods.

[renzhe]

Having tried the classic physical flashcard way, I agree that computers make it easier in many ways. But at the same time, Chinese children learn most of their 3000+ characters in about three years. So I'd agree with imron. Not using cool tools like Anki and electronic dictionaries is indeed a nuissance in terms of daily studying, but not something that will significantly prolong the time needed to get through the needed characters.

Actually, I am not a fan of flashcards. Before Chinese, I had never used flashcards for learning anything, ever. I also don't expect to ever use them for learning anything ever again -- I just don't find them useful. But I had to use them for learning Chinese characters and vocabulary. In many ways, I had to give up on my preferred way of learning things which had served me so well for so many years, and switch to learning things the way my Chinese friends learn them -- repetition, daily study, patience and perseverance. Chinese is odd like that.

One thing I thought of in the meantime, and which would fit under point 5 is simplified/traditional script. It's the biggest non-issue ever, at least if your goal is to read both, but only write one of them -- which is what most native speakers do.

[skylee]

renzhe, about active learning, have you tried writing? I don't recall seeing anything you wrote in Chinese. You don't need to write anything long. Something of a weibo length, or something like what's on your mind/status update. I think it will help you make use of your vocab and improve composition of sentences.

[renzhe]

No, writing is one of those things I have neglected. Other than occasional short emails, I don't remember writing much. I agree with you that it is very important, though.

I might start to look into the Chinese corner more often.

[David Wong]

Characters are not that hard? Hmm... from my perspective as a heritage learner, living in a place where I don't encounter Chinese characters very often, they're one of my bugbears.

I find it all too easy to "forget" characters. You almost have to be reading/writing or otherwise reviewing them constantly to retain them in memory.

What's even more bothersome is all the characters with multiple definitions and pronunciations, for example 差 or 重. As if 3500 characters aren't enough already, those with multiple personality will take the "true count" even higher.

Another aspect of Chinese I find maddening is the vocabulary. There seems to be a lot more words than necessary to describe the same thing, with almost no difference between them. E.g. 坑/洞，骗/蒙。I'm sure the same is true for English but I don' t know why it bothers me more when I encounter them in Chinese. Could it be that it was already such a struggle to learn the first way of saying something that one can't help but feel dejected when one finds out that there's (as is often the case) a different group of people who prefer to say it a different way? For me, it's almost a daily ritual of discovering that I don't know as much as I thought I did.

And to all that add another ocean of knowledge to be acquired: chengyu.

Oh, I mustn't forget the handwriting. Thank God for IME; my vocab would be truly tiny if I count only the words I am able to write by hand.

Okay, time to stop whining and start SRSing.

[renzhe]

Without knowing whether you grew up around Mandarin or another Chinese dialect, I'd wager that heritage learners often find pronunciation and listening comprehension easier than people without the cultural background, while characters are equally difficult for everyone.

[jkhsu]

Alright, here are my thoughts on learning Chinese...

Make your goals realistic and do them in phases

When I first started learning Chinese, my goal was to get as close to "native speaker" level as possible. While this is still an ideal long term goal to have, I have broken my goal into more realistic phases.

As someone who is learning Chinese outside of China, I find it unrealistic to expect my spoken Chinese to be as good as those who speak Chinese all day long. I'll worry about getting to that level if I ever move to China but before then, I'm not going to stress over it.

Therefore, I've decided to focus on reading as the first phase, listening as the second phase and writing as the third phase. Now, all these phases overlap. It's just that typically, I'll encounter new material in reading first, then I'll hear it on audio recordings / radio / TV etc (don't get me wrong, I do hear new words I don't know all the time but I normally don't immediately write them down and try to learn them at that time). Finally, I might be able to write what I've been reading and hearing for a while. BTW, when I say write, I don't mean the ability to write characters by hand. I'm talking about composing text in Chinese.

I do believe that one can master reading, listening and writing without being in a Chinese speaking environment. With technology (Skype, etc.), money (hire people to talk to you in Chinese) and luck (find a significant other who is willing to speak Chinese with you all the time or get a job that requires you to speak Chinese all day), you can theoretically create a Chinese speaking environment as well but for someone who has a full time job in an English only environment and other life responsibilities, that's "unrealistic" to me. Again, I mention this because it's important to "let some things go" so that you can focus on what you can do and be happy about reaching those goals.

Work on things that you will continue to do

I find this really important. Apart from the fact that some of the textbook readings are a bit dry, I know that I will continue reading Chinese books, newspapers (news sites), etc. (I'm not there yet though). I also enjoy watching Chinese TV shows / movies and listening to Chinese music. The fact that I do have time to do those things and don't find it a chore is a plus.

I don't believe in doing things that you don't enjoy just to reach a particular level; only to constantly worry about how to keep up your skills later. This is one of the reasons why I've decided not to write by hand. I don't want to get into a debate about this but it's consistent with my "letting some things go" concept.

Use multiple textbooks

If you are learning from textbooks, it's really important to use multiple textbooks from various publishers for each level. One textbook series never covers all the vocab or provides enough sample reading material. I noticed this when I was browsing the bookstore in China and realized that some of the phrasing in the texts were different from my US textbooks. I then just started laterally reading different textbooks for a certain level until I was comfortable reading all of them.

Flashcards are optional but the idea of spaced repetition is not

This is a touchy subject and I stepped on a few people's toes last year when I posted saying that I didn't use flashcards. I do have some paper flashcards that I made when I first started learning but I just hated using them.

When I started posting in the forums last year, I was introduced to SRS (thanks to jbradfor). However, after trying out Anki for about a week or so, I realized that I didn't like it either. But, the idea of spaced repetition stuck in my mind. One of the (crazy) things I do is re-read (the text portion) all of my textbooks. You might wonder, "doesn't that take a lot of time?" Well, a 15 chapter textbook (PCR in this case) that took me 3 months to finish takes me less than 2 hours to re-read once I've learned all the words in that book. By doing this periodically, I am sort of applying the space repetition principle to textbooks (I know it's not as scientific as using Anki where the words you get right are spaced out in longer intervals, etc.)

Don't get me wrong though, I do believe that SRS apps like Anki, etc. are great for learning a large number of vocab in the least amount of time and when used in combination with reading, it's probably an ideal way to learn. However, I just find it a chore (something that I would not continue forever) and so far, I've been able to avoid it (fingers crossed).

You can learn simplified and traditional characters together

I had asked this question in a post last year. Initially, I was planning to learn simplified first, then traditional later. However, I realized that most of the textbooks I had contained both character sets. Therefore, I tried just learning both and so far it's worked. However, what I've done is learn one first, then read the other text section. Sometimes, I'd alternate which ones I'd learn first. I always make sure I can read the text portions of both before moving on though.

Langdu (朗读) or reading out loud is important

I did this quite a bit when I first started learning but have recently done more "silent" reading. After reading some posts here, I was reminded of Langdu's importance, especially in the absense of Mandarin speaking opportunties. I'll make sure I do this more often now.