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Can I learn Oral Chinese without learning the characters?


Jing Xi

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Surely the key point is that, to speak "good Chinese" takes a few years. And most people you are likely to bump into who have spent years learning Chinese will want to be able to read. And those who have attended classes or used textbooks will have had to learn how to read because that's what those methods require.

How practical are methods where you don't learn to read? I'd say nearly all of the people with high level Chinese obtained much of their knowlege by reading to learn, and it would not be practical for the vast majority of second language learners to learn the same things without reading.

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My analogy is that if you want to dig a hole in order to plant a tree, it's easier to dig using a spade than to learn how to operate an excavator.

This doesn't mean that it's easier to dig the foundation of an office building using a spade. You don't NEED the excavator, you could use the spade for 7 months instead, but it's a better idea to spend 3 hours learning how to operate an excavator and 7 hours using it.

You can learn characters for their own sake, or you can simply look at them as a tool that will make learning easier in the long run. Either way, learning 20,000+ words by listening to audio books for 20 years is an exercise in masochism.

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OK, so it seems that in fact there isn't a logical reason why you can't attain good spoken Chinese without reading.

 

If you haven't seen anyone who has done it, that's just because (i) anyone most people who have studied for years to get to spoken fluency will likely not baulk at learning to read too and (ii) because after a while it becomes easier to progress if you can read.

 

learning 20,000+ words by listening to audio books for 20 years is an exercise in masochism

 

 

But what about 20 years (or 10 years) living in China with a Chinese spouse and in a Chinese family, selling stuff in a market every day, listening to the radio, watching telly. Yes, those would be an unusual set of circumstances and would be made even more unusual if at some point during those years the person didn't decide to learn how to read. But still more plausible than just listening to audio books.

 

 

In a sense this is arguing just for the sake of arguing, but I agree with Bad Cao Cao that it's right to challenge the idea that avoiding characters for any period of time is bad. Personally I think that for an initial period of at least six months, that time and effort is best spent learning how Chinese sounds and how sentences work.

 

Saying -- with nothing to back it up -- that you can't learn Chinese without reading, could force people into memorising characters earlier than they need to.

 

 

How practical are methods where you don't learn to read?

 

Sure, in most cases, not practical, which is why it's important for most people to learn how to read at some point. But whether those people need to start reading immediately, or after six months, or two years, or longer, is a different question.

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There is no logical reason why you couldn't dig the Suez canal with a spade, I agree :)

I just remain sceptical about encouraging people new to Chinese to not learn to read because it's supposedly "easier".

We probably need to split the legitimate discussion about the best time to begin learning characters (immediately, 6 months, 2 years, even later) from the discussion about more specific claims like "you don't need textbooks, teachers are bad for you, learn like a baby, learning to read will harm your progress" and the like.

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I had a friend (sadly no longer with us) who only wanted to learn to read characters. He wasn't at all concerned with learning to speak, conversations were not for him. His reason for learning was to be able to read the classics in Chinese. So he was learning Chinese alongside classic Chinese.

 

I always found this concept hard to understand. When I read English I know the sounds the words I read make, i cant image only recognising the meaning without knowing the associated sound. He did know the sounds he said and he could take part in a simple conversation but he wasn't interested in doing this.

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There is no logical reason why you couldn't dig the Suez canal with a spade, I agree  :) 

 

There are several logical reasons, the most obvious one being that it would take hundreds or thousands of years. And your spade would break. Someone with an engineering background could probably invoke seepage as a thing.

 

 

If you are serious equating the two difficulties I think you should explain why. Is it because people can't learn vocabulary easily without reading? And does this apply to, say, English, or is Chinese one of a number of special cases?

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Ah, a ninja-edit from our foremost ninja  :P

 

I just remain sceptical about encouraging people new to Chinese to not learn to read because it's supposedly "easier".

 

I agree with this: you would need an unusual set of circumstances to successfully learn Chinese these days while remaining illiterate. And indeed, why would anyone want to?

 

However I think there's a case for saying: this is how far you can get without characters before you start needing them. That might then encourage someone to give it a go, to get to an elementary level of conversational ability, before deciding if they wanted to start the slog of memorising 3000+ characters.... but without hiding from them that beyond that point, they're going to have to start.

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Sorry about the edit, but my original post came across as too stand-offish, so I figured I'd explain a bit better.

I'm not equating the two difficulties, it was a hyperbole.

I do think that teaching yourself Chinese as an adult is a rather difficult undertaking, and intentionally making it more difficult (by depriving yourself of most learning material) is not a good idea.

And like I said, delaying the onslaught of brute-forcing 3000 characters is definitely a legitimate point of discussion.

If you are serious equating the two difficulties I think you should explain why. Is it because people can't learn vocabulary easily without reading? And does this apply to, say, English, or is Chinese one of a number of special cases?

Relation between reading and vocabulary size is well established, in every language, at all ages. And don't forget that reading gives you access to all kinds of resources: textbooks, grammar books, graded readers, dictionaries, encyclopedias, internet forums, written communication, etc. In many subjects, specialist vocabulary (e.g. scientific vocabulary, literary vocabulary) is obtained almost exclusively through reading.

In most other languages, the use of textbooks, dictionaries and reading materials is well established in language learning circles. The opposite has been tried, but programmes like Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur and the like have not been shown to be as effective and are considered expensive rip-offs or, at best, supplementary materials to accompany proper learning. Even learners of Arabic and Russian don't have these discussions about learning the entire language through transliteration.

I would argue that not only is reading crucial for efficient vocabulary acquisition for native speakers, it is also an established part of virtually ALL second language learning, in all languages.

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I would argue that not only is reading crucial for efficient vocabulary acquisition for native speakers, it is also an established part of virtually ALL second language learning, in all languages.
I agree with the first part of that statement, but not with the second part. Some (many) languages don't have a writing system, or are rarely written (Chinese dialects come to mind). They can still be learned. The fact that many learners will start out with developing a writing system doesn't change that the native speakers often still don't write their language.
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Some (many) languages don't have a writing system, or are rarely written (Chinese dialects come to mind). They can still be learned.

I stand corrected on this point.

I was thinking mostly in terms of the volume of students, where European languages dominate. The languages you are referring to are legitimate target languages, but they attract far fewer students. The "all languages" part is incorrect. Sorry for the confusion.

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Relation between reading and vocabulary size is well established, in every language, at all ages

 

Trouble is that you'd be setting the bar for foreign language competency higher than that for literate native speakers who didn't read much as children and don't read much as adults.

 

 

I do think that teaching yourself Chinese as an adult is a rather difficult undertaking, and intentionally making it more difficult (by depriving yourself of most learning material) is not a good idea.

 

Absolutely agree. It's much much easier to put in the hard work learning how to read in order to then benefit from reading, rather than to devise a plan which keeps you illiterate but still gets you to spoken fluency.

 

I'm just saying that there's no essential reason why you couldn't learn the language by lots of talking and listening. Some version of pinyin would make the process faster. Reading characters even faster. But even without characters, if you had someone talking to you every day and helping you all the time, you could get there without characters and the penalty would not be of the order of magnitiude of, say, digging the Suez canal with a spade. 

 

Most languages don't have a writing system, of course.

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I think there are people for whom learning to read and write without sound makes sense (Shelley's friend, for example), and people for whom learning to converse without reading makes sense. Both are legitimate pursuits, and even necessary if you are visually or aurally challenged. Probably if you take either route, after some period of time dabbling in the other direction will become interesting, worthwhile, perhaps even necessary. I think this is more true of Chinese than many other languages, because there is so little connection between the script and the pronunciation. It is like learning two languages at the same time.

 

But there's another question here, which is, if your target is to learn both, is it worthwhile starting exclusively with one, and then catching up with the other? Heisig went characters-first, and I've met someone who had 1200 characters under his belt with Tuttle before speaking his first sentence. Mair and Bad Cao-cao's other references advocate speaking first, and I suspect there's some validity to that. Of course everyone is different, and people will learn in different ways, but there will be a statistical average. If you're in the business of designing educational materials, this is an extremely important question on which there is surprisingly little research. Similar questions include: at what point should you remove the crutch of pinyin for every line of text? At what point should flashcarding be made mandatory? At what point should writing be required, and how far behind reading should it lag? I think many of the textbook writers are either coming from a Chinese pedagogical background, and are used to teaching Chinese children, or they're using textbooks for other (alphabetic) languages as a model, and neither of these is really appropriate.

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Trouble is that you'd be setting the bar for foreign language competency higher than that for literate native speakers who didn't read much as children and don't read much as adults.

No, I'm saying that whatever the vocabulary level you are aiming for, you will reach it sooner if you read a lot. Even pretty common words are learned faster if you read a decent-sized novel where it keeps appearing, instead of waiting for somebody and the fruit market to explain it to you the first time you hear it.

The problem is that the Chinese writing system, we all agree on this, is rather convoluted, and learning it takes a lot of effort. But fact remains that if you can read, you will learn vocabulary faster.

If you want to reach the vocabulary of an average native 18-year old who doesn't read, then it will take you 18 years of full-time study in the target country to achieve this, or 36 years if you also have a job. That's terrible advice, in my opinion.

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if your target is to learn both, is it worthwhile starting exclusively with one, and then catching up with the other

 

Another way is to learn them at the same time but separately. So, do normal language stuff with pinyin. But also, separately, learn characters, with or without their pinyin, starting from the very simple ones and the most common compenents. So, learn 身 before 谢. In the main language course you'd know how to say 谢谢 and know its pinyin, but learning how to read or write it can come later, once you've grasped the basics of characters, and once you've got more time to start hard work of memorising.

 

This book, Fundamentals of Chinese Characters, teaches 200 characters that way.

http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Chinese-Characters-John-Jing-hua/dp/0300109458

 

Here's the preface where the author explains why: http://yalepress.yale.edu/languages/pdf/Yin_intro.pdf

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Even pretty common words are learned faster if you read a decent-sized novel where it keeps appearing, instead of waiting for somebody and the fruit market to explain it to you the first time you hear it.

 

Context is key to memory strength and I don't think you can say that seeing "bonnet" in a dullish book several times will help you remember it any better than asking a customer why he's got a massive great bandage on his head and him telling you his car broke and he opened it up and then the horn went off and he jumped up and hit his head on the ______ [mime, describe, explain, repeat, chuckle, tell someone else the story later, next time you see him say have you been headbutting bonnets again -> remember]. 

 

 

But fact remains that if you can read, you will learn vocabulary faster.

 

I don't see how that's a fact, it's a supposition. What if all my reading time was spent speaking Chinese, even noting down pinyin for a review later? I'd definitely learn slower? I don't know how anyone can know that.

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OP (assuming they're not fluent already) should spend several years of their life learning Chinese entirely without characters to atone for their crime of spamming message boards in order to post defamatory content. They can be our xiǎo bái shǔ.

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Let me join the "pretend I'm a linguist" game and throw some studies around:

- An average 3-year old kid has a vocabulary between 500 and 1000 words. [1] An average 6-year old can use around 2500. [7]

- Children who read even ten minutes a day outside of school experience substantially higher rates of vocabulary growth between second and fifth grade than children who do little or no reading [2]

- An average student in grades 3 through 12 is likely to learn approximately 3,000 new vocabulary words each year, assuming he or she reads between 500,000 and a million running words of text a school year [3]

- Reading is one of the most important vocabulary acquisition methods [4-6]

- There is a correlation between the amount of reading (or being read to) and vocabulary size in children [8]

- Studies link much of vocabulary learning of second-language learners to reading [9]

- Explicit vocabulary learning (somebody explaining a concept to you, the bonnet and vegetable seller example) accounts for less than 10% of all vocabulary learning during school. The rest is passive learning from listening and (mostly) reading [10]

So, yes, you can learn 1000 words in 3 years phonetically, and even 2500 words in 6 years, and understand even more. So if you are planning to delay learning characters for 6 months or a year (a reasonable timeframe for 1000 words), that's a legitimate argument. The legitimate counter-argument is that the sooner you get started with characters, the sooner you can start reading, which is an excellent way to expand vocabulary.

If you learn like a three-year-old, you will speak like a three-year-old.

[1] Hart and Risley (1995) Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes.

[2] Anderson, R. C. (1992). Research foundations for wide reading. Paper commissioned by the World Bank. Urbana, IL: Center for the Study of Reading.

[3] Nagy, W., & Anderson, R. C. (1984). How many words are there in printed school English? Reading Research Quarterly, 19, 304-330.

[4] Baker, S. K.; Simmons, D. C.; Kameenui, E. J. (1995). Vocabulary acquisition: Synthesis of the research. Technical Report No. 13. Eugene, OR.: National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators.

[5] Newton, E.; Padak, N. D.; Rasinski, T. V. (2008). Evidence-based instruction in reading: A professional development guide to vocabulary. Boston, MA: Pearson Education.

[6] Tabors, P. O.; Beals, D. E.; Weizman, Z. O. (2001). "'You know what oxygen is?': Learning new words at home". In Dickinson, D. K.; Tabor, P. O. Beginning literacy with language. Baltimore, ML: Paul H. Brookes. pp. 93–110.

[7] Lorraine, S. (2008). Vocabulary development: Super duper handouts number 149. Greenville, SC: Super Duper Publications. (not the best source, but at least it's a source)

[8] Collins, MF (2005) ESL preschoolers’ English vocabulary acquisition from storybook reading. Read. Res. Q. 40: pp. 406-408

[9] Laufer, B (2003) Vocabulary acquisition in a second language: do learners really acquire most vocabulary by reading? Some empirical evidence. Can. Mod. Lang. Rev. 59: pp. 567-587

[10] Nina Daskalovska (2014): READING AND VOCABULARY ACQUISITION, The International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching. pp. 2-8

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I will just add to this scientific debate that the most important study Bad Cao Cao lists agrees with me:

Also consider the largest study ever undertaken relevant to this question: John S. Rohsenow's, “The ‘Z.T.’ Experiment in the PRC,” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association. 31, 3 (1996): 33-44).

“Under this innovative pedagogical program, Chinese children [and adult illiterates] are taught to read and write standard Mandarin Chinese using [the] Hanyu Pinyin [alphabet] in addition to Chinese characters for the *first two years* of their education.

In addition to Chinese characters.

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Let me join the "pretend I'm a linguist" game

 

It's a fun game!  :lol: 

 

I think there's a colossal difference between a child learning its mother tongue and a foreign language student. Children are learning concepts as well as words. Foreign learners are normally just matching words from one language to another. Consider the title of Number 6 that you cite: "You know what oxygen is?" Most adult learners of Chinese know what it is, they just don't know how to say it in Chinese.

 

Plus, children learn languages differently from adults, that is well-attested. 

 

Unfortunately, almost all of your citations are about children learning their mother tongue.

 

The only one (number 9) which is about adult learners of a foreign language says: Results showed that more words were acquired through tasks than through reading which I think is interesting!  :mrgreen:

 

 

Number 8 doesn't involve reading, it involves repeated reading of same story together with rich explanations of target vocabulary words. The paper explains how extensive those explanations are. This paper would support a suggestion that having a native speaker on hand to explain what "bonnet" means is valuable (although again, it is for children not adults).

 

Number 10 doesn't make the point you think it does: instead it says that classroom instruction only provides 10% of the new words a child learns in its mother tongue. 

 

The rest of the citations are just about how children learn when reading.

 

As for Bad Cao Cao's reference, I can't see why we'd compare how Chinese children learn Chinese with how foreign learners learn Chinese.

 

 

 

From your reference number 9:

 

I challenge some basic assumptions underlying the claim that reading is the major source of vocabulary acquisition in L2: the ‘noticing’ assumption, the ‘guessing ability’ assumption, the ‘guessing-retention link’ assumption, and the ‘cumulative gain’ assumption. In the second part, I report on three experiments in which vocabulary gains from reading were compared with gains from word-focused tasks: completing given sentences, writing original sentences, and incorporating words in a composition. Results showed that more words were acquired through tasks than through reading.

 

 

 

 

(bleugh slow day in the office today, if only I could get study done in this place I'd have been fluent years ago!)

 

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You are a difficult customer aren't you? :D The references to L1 learning in children were in response to the opinions that children don't learn through reading.

But let's concentrate on L2 learners. Here is a reasonable literature review I ran into (http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume16/ej64/ej64a3/):

 

In the literature of foreign and second language, there is a general consensus that most vocabulary is learned through reading. Krashen (1989) emphasizes the importance of reading and claims that reading is comprehensible input, which provides an opportunity for the reader to comprehend language and develop more vocabulary. For this reason, it is important to investigate how L2 learners develop their vocabulary through reading, particularly with respect to the notions of vocabulary learning context and vocabulary learning task.

A vocabulary learning task can be approached from the cognitive perspective, which suggests that words are retained better if reading is supplemented with word-focused activities (Hill & Laufer, 2003; Hulstijn, 1992; Knight, 1994; Paribakht & Wesche, 1997). These activities can include using a dictionary, consulting a gloss, and performing text-based tasks. In each of these studies, one task is superior to others in terms of incidental vocabulary acquisition. Researchers (Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Craik & Tulving, 1975; as cited in Hulstijn & Laufer, 2001) believe that the superiority of the task is based on its depth of processing, degree of elaboration, quality of attention and awareness, and, in general, the nature of the information processing.

In other words: reading and then consulting a dictionary works better than reading alone. So Laufer claims precisely what I think she says.

But reading alone works also:

 

Regarding the notion of context, Nation and Coady (1988) define it as “context within a text” and “general context” (p.102). The authors define “context within a text” as the morphological, syntactic, and discourse information given in a text and “general context” as background knowledge of the subject matter. Several studies have emphasized the role of context and relevant strategies in guessing the meaning of unknown words while reading (e.g., Fraser, 1999; İstifçi, 2009; Skokouhi & Askari, 2010). Nagy (1997) also explains the importance of context in vocabulary learning from two different views: (a) what a word means in different occasions can be guessed from the contexts in which it is used; and (b) these contexts provide input of large amount of vocabulary that learners can pick up. Other studies have focused on incidental learning of vocabulary from the reading context (e.g., Brown, Waring, & Donkaewbua, 2008; Webb, 2008). According to Nation and Meara (2002), learning from meaning-focused input, which is learning incidentally through listening and reading, accounts for most first language vocabulary learning. For such learning to be effective for non-native speakers, there needs to be a low unknown vocabulary load, a large quantity of input, and some deliberate attention to vocabulary. It is believed that reading and exposure to context result in incidental vocabulary acquisition (Coady, 1997; Nagy, 1997). The extent to which this exposure leads to retention of the meaning of unknown words is based on the degree of attention that is paid to them. This attention can result from tasks which cause learners to focus on specific features of input. One essential question is whether instructional tasks can be classified based on their vocabulary-learning achievements.

Of course, you COULD pay somebody to read Lu Xun to you and then have them look up all the new words in a dictionary for you. And then write them in pinyin and use that for revision. Unfortunately, there are no studies about that particular approach :D

From what I can tell, reading is very important for L1 acquisition in practice (*), very important for L2 acquisition in practice, and everybody I've ever heard of who reached C2-level fluency in Mandarin could read really well. Da Shan, Julien, John Pasden (maybe he'll chip in now), Steve Kaufmann, Shapiro, DeFrancis, Victor Mair (yes, him too). When I see an illiterate foreigner who can participate comfortably in a conversation group of 20-something university students discussing a somewhat advanced topic, I'll start considering the effectiveness of such approaches.

(*) by L1 I mean language of elementary school instruction

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