Are characters necessary to become fluent in Mandarin?

[imron]

Let's be honest: An alphabet or syllabary are easier to learn than +2000 Chinese characters.

I don't think anyone doubts this, however the reality of the situation is that if you want to learn Chinese as it is used today to any sort of decent level you need those 2000+ characters.  You can try to put it off for as long as possible, but if you are serious about learning Chinese you'll need to tackle them sooner or later, so might as well start sooner, with regular, small amounts.  5 a day over 2 years is 3650 characters - which is more than enough.  You're unlikely to achieve high-level proficiency earlier than 2 years, and 5 a day is an almost trivial amount.

 

 

 

Characters are a cultural relic that some do not want a part of.

I would argue that people who think that don't really understand the relevence and importance of characters, and are unlikely to ever achieve a high level of Chinese language ability.  What they are essentially saying is that they don't want to have a high level of Chinese.

 

Like the article mentioned, it all comes down to what you want and what your goals are.  If long-term proficiency in Chinese is your goal, you can't avoid characters, and the sooner you get them out of the way, the easier it will be.

 

Over the years I've seen a number of posters go from "I don't want anything to do with characters and just want to learn to speak", to hitting a wall, to making an effort to learn some characters, and then realising how they should have been learning them all along and how much easier it makes things.

Beginners might think they know what they want and what will work for them, but many are also coming from a position of ignorance where they don't necessarily have a full understanding of the issues involved and how it will impact their learning.

[realmayo]

I think most definitions of 'fluent' would include having a pretty broad vocabulary. If you know 5,000 words and want to increase that to 10,000 or 15,000, reading seems the most efficient way doesn't it? I'm struggling to think of any non-reading scenarios. I suppose if you're constantly watching TV or listening to radio, and have a native speaker next to you and happy to help all the time, then you could build vocabulary that way. But realistically, for a second-language learner it's got to be reading, and you can't read much if you only have pinyin. I'm thinking of practicalities such as being able to stop at a word you don't know, look it up, decide whether it's worth learning, and if it is add it to a vocabulary list and review it for a few times. 

 

However, getting to an intermediate stage without characters is perfectly possible. I was able to chatter away on basic and common topics without any characters. Weekly classes, chatting with an old guy, writing down the pinyin of any new words or grammar structures that I need to know to complete sentences I wanted say to him, knowing I'd be tested on them the next class, and practising on friends and taxi drivers in between. 

 

When it was time to take the language seriously, yes I had to take time memorising characters, but lots (maybe half?) were characters whose pronunciation and basic meaning I already knew. 

 

For someone learning in China, I'd advocate learning the basics of speaking/listening separately from reading/writing. Then the grind of memorising characters doesn't interfere with picking up the gist of the language.

[Lu]

And Chinese could function without characters

Not in any meaningful way. Just like in other countries, if you're illiterate you won't necessarily die, but you can't participate in society and almost everything in life is a lot more difficult.

 

Then the grind of memorising characters doesn't interfere with picking up the gist of the language.

I couldn't disagree more. Picking up the gist of a language is nice, but what really excited me (until the 生詞 lists got very long) was learning characters. Even cooler is when the squiggles start turning into words, and you can recognise some of the characters you encounter. This works especially well in China itself of course, but I remember my excitement when I could read one of the characters on a sign of a Chinese restaurant in my town. It's not necessary to start of with long lists of characters, but I'd definitely recommend starting of with some simple or frequent ones.

[realmayo]

I see your point. Actually I still vividly remember being in a taxi in 2000 and recognising 公司 on some billboards and feeling like I was the coolest person on the planet. I could probably recognise only about 50 at most until I decided to "do" characters properly -- those 50 were of no help to my learning how to communicate in Chinese.

 

But I still reckon there are good reasons to teach them separately. From Day 1, by all means, but separately. Currently, 我 is one of the first characters taught. Much better to start with, say, 目木水日月大小口一, and teach stroke order, radicals, combinations, point out how pronunciation is usually indicated, maybe whip out a brush and ink to show why certain stroke orders make sense. A quick comparison of printed characters versus everyday handwriting.

 

Once you know 'about' characters, recognise plenty of the components, and know basic Chinese, then it would seem a more suitable time to start learning the characters that correspond to your speaking/listening level.

 

But they're far from necessary to get to a basic conversational level, I think.

[Demonic_Duck]

 

And Chinese could function without characters

Not in any meaningful way. Just like in other countries, if you're illiterate you won't necessarily die, but you can't participate in society and almost everything in life is a lot more difficult.

 

 

I think he was talking about the Chinese language rather than Chinese people. Well, it's true that Chinese could function without characters, but I feel things like the original meanings of chengyu would quickly become much more obscure (can you imagine 成语故事 working very well in pinyin?) It'd also quickly become much harder to see the etymology of words.

But I still reckon there are good reasons to teach them separately. From Day 1, by all means, but separately. Currently, 我 is one of the first characters taught. Much better to start with, say, 目木水日月大小口一, and teach stroke order, radicals, combinations, point out how pronunciation is usually indicated, maybe whip out a brush and ink to show why certain stroke orders make sense. A quick comparison of printed characters versus everyday handwriting.

 

Once you know 'about' characters, recognise plenty of the components, and know basic Chinese, then it would seem a more suitable time to start learning the characters that correspond to your speaking/listening level.

I partly agree with this. If sometime in later life I were to write a beginner textbook (unlikely, but you never know), I'd probably put a quick "crash course" in characters at the beginning explaining stuff like this. However, I don't think this crash course would go beyond a very few radicals. After that, characters would simply be taught as they were encountered, perhaps with the occasional hint to draw out the connections between certain ones ("notice how the characters '说' and '话' both have the same radical? That's '言', a very common radical meaning 'speech'"... and so on).

[Lu]

Much better to start with, say, 目木水日月大小口一

I don't think this crash course would go beyond a very few radicals. After that, characters would simply be taught as they were encountered, perhaps with the occasional hint to draw out the connections between certain ones ("notice how the characters '说' and '话' both have the same radical? That's '言', a very common radical meaning 'speech'"... and so on).

This is pretty much how I was taught. The first few characters were 人 山 火 水 口 and such, and then you can right away learn words like 火山 and 山水 (which are pretty useless as words, but show you how characters can be combined). This was the DeFrancis textbook, I suppose nobody uses it anymore as it's rather outdated, but the method is sound. Suitable first words (ni hao, wo, ta, etc) are not made of suitable first characters (人 etc), but you can just slowly continue on with both and after a couple dozen characters, you get the idea and can learn things like 我 and 好.

[Ruben von Zwack]

I was trying to put myself in Zhuohaochen's situation. It's a bit of a double-edged sword. When you run a language school, and you have a potential student, you probably wouldn't argue with them too much, cause they may walk away. But at the same time, you need to present the problem to them, because if you don't, when they get to a more advanced stage later, they may fault you for not warning them.

So what I imagine I might do in Zhuohaochen's position is, I would present my arguments, but without pressure, and in the end just give them what they are asking for. But offer something like a Hanzi class, a comprehensive and structured one like Lu and Demonic Duck suggest, which the students can book when they realise the error of their ways ;)

[Demonic_Duck]

If I ran a language school I would beat the crap out of anyone that disagreed with my views on learning methodology and bill them extra for it as a lesson in humility. My language school probably wouldn't be very successful.

 

On a more serious note though, a potential middle ground between laissez-faire and violent tyrrany would be to explain the teaching methodology used and explain that all courses at 本校 are run like this. Of course, if the student signed up for a 1-on-1 course they'd be free to study only in pīnyīn, ㄓㄨˋ ㄧㄣ ㄈㄨˊ ㄏㄠˋ, gwoyeu romatzyh, Транскрипционная система Палладия or whatever the heck they felt like, as long as the teacher was willing and able to teach that way.

[Ruben von Zwack]

If I ran a language school I would beat the crap out of anyone that disagreed with my views on learning methodology and bill them extra for it as a lesson in humility. My language school probably wouldn't be very successful.

 

Who knows?   Isn't there a Japanese Zen school that actually works like that? I seem to recall how Janwillem van de Wetering described it in a semi fictional autobiography, but maybe he was exaggerating.

[sparrow]

@JustinJJ:

I think that's a strong argument for new students to learn characters—at least to recognize them. If even 5 minutes of characters per day makes a difference, then why not? And you can at least be able to read!

[sparrow]

@Lu:

Not in any meaningful way. Just like in other countries, if you're illiterate you won't necessarily die, but you can't participate in society and almost everything in life is a lot more difficult.

 

Er, to clarify, what I meant was that written Chinese could function entirely in Pinyin. After all, when you are listening to a person talk, all you are hearing is pronunciation and tones.

 

 目木水日月大小口一

 

Yeah, those are some of the first ones I learned. We did radicals for the first week or so as they were teaching us Pinyin and basic talking, then we started hitting more common characters like 我你他 and so on. We used Integrated Chinese, so we did whichever radicals were in the beginning of the character workbook—about 25 or so?

 

Radicals were much more important back then as well because the only way for us to look up characters was with a paper dictionary.

[querido]

Anyone interested in this topic would probably enjoy this related and very well written thread (especially the first page):
http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/30686-short-words-and-lack-of-context/

In this review of the LTL program, Andreas (the original poster?) says: "If you stay in a Home Stay family and you study hard, after seven, eight, or nine months, you are fluent."
http://www.digmandarin.com/live-in-china-live-the-language-sink-or-swim-education-experiment.html

I wonder how he would apportion the credit between the spoken immersion and the hanzi in class.
Andreas? Thank you. :-)

[alanmd]

As the original poster wrote, there are many homophones in Chinese, but I just wanted to show how many there are even among the relatively common characters of the HSK levels, here are lists: 1 character words, 2 character words. I agree that having knowledge of the hanzi characters helps to distinguish between these. I would imagine someone who was only learning pinyin would be OK early on but would hit a wall at some point where they find it hard to progress, and would have to go back and learn the hanzi.

[renzhe]

It's a bit like learning to play the piano without learning to read music. It's possible, but counter-productive and ultimately more difficult. If you only want to play "Twinkle twinkle little star" and accompany some simple songs, then you probably don't need it. If you want any versatility or want to reach a high level, you'll learn to read sheet music. That's how music is written. Chinese characters are how Chinese is written.

As for fluency, I always think of fluency in terms of what one can be reasonably expected to do in their mother tongue. Can I live MY normal, regular, everyday life in another language? Could I talk to my friends, colleagues, people I interact with, about topics I want to talk about, and do it fluently. So I think that it's a relative category, not some arbitrary definition.

When a highly eloquent, highly educated person starts speaking like an illiterate 5-year old in language B, then I don't consider them to be fluent in that language. If you can't discuss your work, your hobbies, your friends' hobbies, have general discussions about current events, etc. then you're not fluent. So boring people have it easier IMHO. If you're an aeronautical engineer, people will ask you about that. If you're a concert pianist, people will want to discuss the music Liszt and Chopin. You need that vocabulary, and it gets very difficult without being able to read.

[zhouhaochen]

wow, so I am on holiday and feel like writing something about Mandarin, make a post, forget about it, go skiing, come back and there are 32 replies. Thanks for the input anyone. To avoid boring everyone here to death and leave myself time to do something else today as well, I will only reply to the last few posts.

 

@Ruben von Zwack/Demonic_Duck: That is basically what we are doing. For individual classes of course a student can do what they want, but I find most people are open for suggestions and we can stop them from making mistakes at the beginning. For group classes, they have to follow the curriculum obviously - which for us is about 75% oral and 25% reading Mandarin for our standard course. There are other options, but that's what most people do and I find a good mix between the desire of learning to speak as quickly as possible (which is what most people want) and making sure they learn characters as necessary. Learning to read is also of course a lot of self study and students get homework for this. Most do it - most of the students who come to our school are quite serious about learning Mandarin. While we have a pretty active social community, "The lets get drunk and party" crowd seems to not sign up with us thank God. I think they are all up in Wudaokou

 

@Querido: If it was me studying, I would choose the 75% oral and 25% reading/writing mix we do for group classes, even if I studied 1-on-1 and would be able to choose a different setup. For the immersion part, there is no way how you control this mix. A student in a full immersion program in Chengde will speak and read Mandarin only all day - as long as he speaks and reads. Some people are more afraid to speak and might end up reading more. Others speak all day, but avoid looking at characters. The good thing with an immersion program is that to function in everyday life you have to speak and read, so you are forced to come out of your comfort zone and do what you might be a bit afraid to do. The good thing is that once a student feels that this actually works (yes, I in fact can do XXX task in Mandarin) they become comfortable doing it and will do it again. This of course always happens as you learn the language, just in an immerison environment it happens faster.

 

@alamnd: yes, that's basically what I wrote in the blog post.

 

@renzhe: agreed. The important part I find that, is that yes it is "ultimately more difficult" to learn Mandarin without learnig charaters from the beginning.

 

In general, I read some posts about natives and heritage speakers who speak Mandarin without knowing characters (obviously....), but does anyone know someone who started learning Mandarin from scratch as an adult and speaks it fluently without having learned to read? Maybe I missed a post there (it is a lot of them), but I couldn't see a clear reference to one. I would love to speak to that person.

[FadedStardust]

tooironic said:

 

Interesting, I was assuming that "knowing characters" included how to write them, at least in most cases. Especially for the first 500 or so most common ones - I would argue it would be harder to memorise them if you didn't learn how to write them. Surely they are simply too abstract to link to sound and meaning alone.

 

I disagree. There was this one guy in my advanced class when I was studying in Zhengzhou who had completely self-taught himself to speak and read and was one of the most eloquent speakers of the language in that class and could read quite fluently but he couldn't write characters to save his life. So it is quite possible to "learn" characters without learning how to write characters.

[Ania]

I disagree. There was this one guy in my advanced class when I was studying in Zhengzhou who had completely self-taught himself to speak and read and was one of the most eloquent speakers of the language in that class and could read quite fluently but he couldn't write characters to save his life. So it is quite possible to "learn" characters without learning how to write characters.

 

That's kind of how I operate. I can read probably around 300-400 characters, but I would probably be able to write maybe 50 or even less. I mean I practise them, I do lots of writing exercises and I even write short passages, but I always end up looking up some really basic characters, because I keep forgetting one tiny little detail, one stroke or something.... I'm not sure if I'll ever be writing anything in Chinese, so I try to learn a little bit, but I don't stress about it too much. My primary focus is understanding Chinese in spoken and written form, then speaking, and then writing. 

[li3wei1]

I think we can all agree that learning characters is eventually a desirable and worthwhile thing; the interesting question is for the first year or so of learning, should the emphasis be on oral or written language, and how much so (and at what point does that need to be changed)? Given that whole scholarly journals are devoted to the science of teaching Chinese to foreigners, I'm surprised no one has whipped out a reference to a study. This is not some dry academic question, but one that would have real financial relevance to a lot of people.

 

Just a few things to add to the discussion:

Children in any language are essentially fluent (though with limited vocabularies) before they learn to read. But as someone has pointed out, children are different from adults.

The Heisig book, which many people rave about, takes a completely opposite approach, looking just at the characters without any pronunciation at all (nor grammar, or even words, so you wouldn't be able to learn to read on Heisig alone). I've met people who have done this first (or the Tuttle book), and found it to be a good head start. Don't know how these approaches compare in total time spent.

If you know 5,000 words and want to increase that to 10,000 or 15,000, reading seems the most efficient way doesn't it?

 

I'm not sure. I think conversation and listening may be more efficient. I think we can hear and speak faster than we can read, so we'll simply get through more words. Also conversation gives you the chance to immediately practice production of newly acquired words, with feedback. Now, it may not always be possible to arrange 8 hours of conversation a day, but it's pretty easy to stay in with a book.

 

I spent 3 years learning in a university, then 4 years living in Taiwan, then about 20 years forgetting everything, and the last 3 years relearning it all (in simplified characters), mostly through reading. I'd say my most productive period was Taiwan, when I was doing about 80% conversation and 20% reading, maybe even more skewed towards conversation. I'm still running into words that I know by sound, but have probably never seen in print. I'm definitely starting to feel the limitations of a reading-only approach.

[realmayo]

it may not always be possible to arrange 8 hours of conversation a day, but it's pretty easy to stay in with a book.

 

Yes that's what I meant -- in an ideal world you'd have a team of fun interesting attractive native speakers talking to you all day every day, able to pitch their conversation level just a little higher than your comfort level and always able to explain grammar or usage questions. But if that's not an option, then I guess not being able to read would make learning the language slower, beyond a certain level. Certainly not saying a reading-only approach is ideal though.

[imron]

Children in any language are essentially fluent (though with limited vocabularies)

And there in lies the problem.  Maybe you can achieve fluency without characters, but it will only be for a limited vocabulary.

 

I'm not sure. I think conversation and listening may be more efficient. I think we can hear and speak faster than we can read, so we'll simply get through more words.

The problem is that the range of words used in conversation and listening is going to be smaller than what you would be exposed to with reading.  You might get more words, but they will be more of the same words (which is good for reinforcement, but not necessarily vocab).

 

I agree with realmayo that reading is a more efficient way at increasing vocabulary compared with speaking and listening.  You're just not going to be able to speak and listen on as broad a range of topics and be exposed to as broad a range of vocabulary.