Learning to read Chinese

[nininininini]

Recently I got interested in learning Chinese. There's a whole web of resources and information. I can't really get a clear picture of it all. There's the traditional Hanzi, simplified Hanzi and then another pronunciation system Pinyin. I would very much like to be able to read Chinese. How would I go with this? I'm simply looking to read Chinese books, in Chinese. However, that's not all, ultimately I'd like to learn spoken Mandarin too. Would learning the characters be sufficient as a starter? If I learned the characters, pegging them to English words, would this hinder my learning to read them aloud later when I learn spoken Mandarin?

Simply said what I'm asking is "How do I learn to read?" Any suggestions, anyone?

[最爱狮子和熊]

As a native Chinese I can tell you,If you want to read and write Chinese,you need to learn Hanzi one by one,no short cut.

Don't want to remember it alone,you will forget it soon.You 'd better try to remember it in using it.You should read

Chinese article as more as you can.When you meet some Hanzi you can not read,then stop and consult the dictionary.And

go forward after you fix it.Day by day,when you learn enough Hanzi,you will read Chinese fluently.

That's my advise,hope it helpful and wish you to make progress.

[rob07]

I did this. It can certainly be done. If you successfully learn to read by pegging the characters to English words it is actually relatively easy to learn to speak after that, because China puts Chinese character subtitles on all of its TV, so you can just watch a lot of TV and read the subtitles. Do that a lot and then find some conversation partners and away you go.

The biggest difficulty in learning to read only is that you will be a long time studying stuff that you won't be able to use in the near future. If you live in China and learn to speak and read at the same time you would be able to get a lot of positive reinforcement right from the start by using beginner and intermediate level sentences in your daily life. However, if you are starting from scratch, count on it being a long time before you are able to read anything remotely worthwhile. So you need extremely high levels of motivation to be prepared to invest large amounts of time before seeing much return on it, and also to find the process of learning itself interesting.

In terms of actually how to do it, the first step is to find a book that explains what a Chinese character is and how the component parts work, for example, "Teach yourself beginners Chinese script" by Scurfield and Song. The first book should cover how to look a Chinese character up in a Chinese dictionary which is a real skill. Then, I would follow a series of textbooks, learning all the words/characters as you go. Chinese does not really have words the way English does, but as a simplified rule of thumb, simple words = 1 character, other words = two characters (your first book should explain this). I suggest that when you learn words/characters you learn not only how to recognise them but also what the component parts in each character are. The first lesson in the textbook will probably tell you that 谢谢 means thank you and leave it at that, but if your focus is on learning to read, try pulling out the dictionary and working out what different parts of the character mean in isolation. Learning to read only is hard, but if after the first lesson in the textbook you can write the Chinese character for "shoot" and have enjoyed the process of working it out, you may be on the right track.

Textbooks can be painful. I tried to shortcut the process by simply memorising a lot of characters, but this didn't really work, knowing a lot of characters is not enough to be able to read. I had to go back to a textbook series and read through the text of each lesson, but more particularly the three or four example sentences that were given for each new item of vocab introduced by the lesson.

Graded readers are good as soon as you have enough vocabulary for them.

I used cardboard flashcards which I made myself to learn characters, but you are probably better off looking into the dark arts of "SRS" (do a search). I didn't consciously study the pinyin for characters I learnt, but I wrote the pinyin for each character on my flashcards and I found I tended to remember it as I think it is natural for the brain to want to associate each character with its own sound. You don't need to know pinyin if you are only learning to read, but it does make it much easier to use the dictionary.

[renzhe]

There's the traditional Hanzi, simplified Hanzi and then another pronunciation system Pinyin.

Traditional hanzi and simplified hanzi are two ways to write the same thing. I find it useful to think about them like British and American English, or like old Portuguese and old Brazilian orthography (the two have been merged in the meantime). If you learn to read one of them, the other one will come easily, don't let that discourage you.

Pinyin is a system for writing the pronunciation of spoken Mandarin using the Latin alphabet. It will not help you read Chinese, but it's easy to learn and important for speaking and even listening.

[Shelley]

I have read the above replies but still find it hard to understand why or even how you could just learn to read. How can you just learn to read without picking up speaking on the way. I think learning speaking, reading and writing all together is a much better use of your time. When you start to learn to speak it will be almost like starting again.

IMHO I would do it all together.

Best of luck

[edelweis]

Even if I don't really make big efforts to learn to speak (as in, be able to have a conversation in Chinese), I wouldn't learn characters without learning their pronunciation at the same time (be able to read aloud in Chinese).

Pronouncing adds two other ways of remembering a character (hearing it and moving your mouth to make the sounds), and since a lot of characters have a phonetic component it also helps categorize them in your head. Even though my visual memory is much better than my auditory memory, there are so MANY characters that any kind of help is welcome.

Also sometimes when reading, I encounter a character that I have learnt but can't remember its meaning outright, then I remember how to say it (perhaps I have associated the tone with a certain stroke, like the little horn of 牛 which is a downwards stroke but still gives the character a rising aspect in my eyes, so I remember it's 2nd tone) and the meaning comes back with the sound because I have said aloud many times : niu2 = cow when learning and reviewing the character. (Of course in many cases this will involve pronouncing several characters which form a word, not just isolated characters).

(Other ways of remembering characters involve tracing (writing) them, and of course learning them as combinations of radicals and phonetic elements instead of a series of individual strokes).

Also it is true that you will need to learn 1500+ characters (and many many words) before you can start reading interesting stuff... and the first few hundreds will take a lot of effort as you struggle with strokes and components and characters that look alike but have a slight difference which changes the meaning. Like 千干，土士，牛午 (and these are still easy characters with few strokes). It gets somewhat easier later, but it's still a very long endeavour.

[raydpratt]

Learning Chinese Characters, by Alison Mathews & Laurence Matthews (Tuttle, 2007) gives mnemonic techniques for students of Chinese to remember the shape, meaning, and Mandarin sounds of the 800 characters of "HSK Level A" vocabulary list. I initially found that it was effective, but I became concerned about learning my self-anglicized pronunciation of the pinyin at a time when I had not correctly learned to pronounce pinyin. So, I am saving the book for later. In fact, I am saving the book until I have finished Pimsleur's pure audio instruction of Mandarin and until I am sure that I have mastered McGraw-Hill's Chinese Pronunciation book and audio-video CD.

While I was studying Learning Chinese Characters, I found that it was becoming increasingly difficult as my vocabulary grew because I was not just trying to learn characters one at a time, but also trying to remember many characters at the same time. It's not a natural way to learn. Native speakers naturally become fluent in core words and then add from there -- they don't learn more of the language without some core fluency ab initio. As such, I am going to finish Pimsleur's Mandarin audio lessons and then dig into the characters.

Learning Chinese Characters claims that it could be used for study by those who only want to learn to read Chinese, not to speak it. That seems improbable because the differences in grammar between Chinese and English are not easy to master without serious practice, and grammar is as much a part of the meaning of the combined words as the words themselves. Serious practice with all the grammatical forms of the language would be important to reading the language.

Nonetheless, the book's method for learning the shape, meaning, and approximate Mandarin sounds of the characters is effective. In fact, I bemoan the fact that the authors have not already produced subsequent volumes for the entire HSK test levels. An interesting thread on this forum has already discussed the issue of what books best teach Chinese characters: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/19969-heisig-vs-matthews/

[laurenth]

Also sometimes when reading, I encounter a character that I have learnt but can't remember its meaning outright, then I remember how to say it (...) and the meaning comes back with the sound because I have said aloud many times

Same experience here. However the opposite is even more frequent, i.e. there are so many characters whose meaning I know or have no difficulty learning, but I have a hard time learning their pronunciation and, worse, I keep forgetting it.