Can I learn Oral Chinese without learning the characters?

[realmayo]

Why would anyone these days choose to get a high level of spoken Chinese without learning the reading too? Reading is a really good way learn the language. I'm all for it! You do it on your own, whenever you have time, you just need a book, and perhaps a dictionary. You can create vocab lists. There are loads of written resources to help you improve fast. Reading, for almost everyone, is a no-brainer.

 

But: why privilege reading-as-comprehensible-input over listening-as-comprehensible-input? (Apart from the practicalities, I mean.)

 

If someone was surrounded by such input, and by people happy to explain anything and everything, well -- I think one would develop good spoken Chinese. It's just that for almost everybody, that's an impractical approach.

 

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.

 

1. You've moved the goalposts quite a bit here, earlier you talked about "good spoken Chinese." Now you're talking about people in the top, what, 30% of the population?

 

2. No one's saying not-reading makes better sense than reading. It's an abstract idea: can you get to workaday fluency without reading? Plenty of scientists never lived long enough to see a Higgs boson particle but that didn't stop them thinking about it!

[renzhe]

But: why privilege reading-as-comprehensible-input over listening-as-comprehensible-input? (Apart from the practicalities, I mean.)

No reason whatsoever, you shoud take whatever is available, though I think that some sort of balance (not exclusively one over the other) is healthy in principle.

But the discussion is getting derailed. I believe that avoiding characters is a short-term boost for a beginner, but becomes a liability (and results in a significant slowdown) in the long term. So I wouldn't delay learning them for too long. That's all.

[querido]

Hey, one of you smart people should come over here and tell me what to do! Please?

[anonymoose]

why privilege reading-as-comprehensible-input over listening-as-comprehensible-input? (Apart from the practicalities, I mean.)

You can't just dismiss the practicalities, though. That is an important factor.

After all, what is the difference between digging the Suez Canal with a mechanical digger or a spade if not for the practicalities?

[simc]

I don't want to nitpick, but it occurred to me this morning that since the Suez canal was built in the 19th century it must have been dug using spades rather than excavators. 

[simc]

Actually they started off with shovels, but it was too hard so they moved to steam powered machinery :

 

Building the Suez Canal required massive manpower, and the Egyptian government initially supplied most of the labor by forcing the poor to work for nominal pay and under threat of violence. Beginning in late-1861, tens of thousands of peasants used picks and shovels to dig the early portions of the canal by hand. Progress was painfully slow, and the project hit a snag after Egyptian ruler Ismail Pasha abruptly banned the use of forced labor in 1863. Faced with a critical shortage of workers, Lesseps and the Suez Canal Company changed their strategy and began using several hundred custom-made steam- and coal-powered shovels and dredgers to dig the canal. The new technology gave the project the boost it needed, and the company went on to make rapid progress during the last two years of construction. Of the 75 million cubic meters of sand eventually moved during the construction of the main canal, some three-fourths of it was handled by heavy machinery.

 

http://www.history.com/news/9-fascinating-facts-about-the-suez-canal

 

 

A bit like how you can start off learning Chinese using Pinyin and later move to characters, I guess.

[Angelina]

How did Ismail Pasha end up here? It's a small world

[Bad Cao Cao]

"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), 

, 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."

 

The issue is what is the best way to read, for the first 6-24 months. Not if you should or not.

 

Pinyin over hanzi, for at least the first two years, is the best way according to the literature (on balance), and accords with my own experience - as well as others such as V Mair.

 

The issue then becomes what is the best software to facilitate this - which would be a great topic on its own.

 

Looking at your list - Jonathon Kos Read is typical of the guy who never learnt to read but is still C2 in conversation. The main problem with his approach is you have to live in country, be an actor, get your lines drilled to you each day with hired help, and marry a Beijing lass. Not easily duplicated.

[Demonic_Duck]

I don't think there's all that much point re-hashing whether characters are beneficial within the first six months - it seems to be fairly uncontroversial that if you only want to learn to speak, and only have six months of learning time, it's probably best to skip characters.
 
In light of that...
 
Here's another angle: if we assume that learning to read is, for all intents and purposes, essential to achieve a high level of spoken Chinese (i.e. renzhe's standard of being able to "participate comfortably in a conversation group of 20-something university students discussing a somewhat advanced topic"*), and we assume that Jonathon Kos Read is a fringe case, is it still best to skip learning characters for as long as two years? This would mean that every bit of reading practice you did within those two years was essentially wasted as far as developing your reading skill is concerned; sure, it improved your vocabulary and grammar, but it didn't improve your reading. So at two years in, you still can't read even the simplest sentence.

 

Given just how much practice is required to become a fast, fluent reader, it seems to me that neglecting the skill for an entire two years would be too much of a setback to make up for the increase in speed of introducing new content. In light of that, all other things being equal, who would have the better level of spoken Chinese after a full ten years - someone who learned characters from the start, or someone who delayed it for the first two? My feeling is that it would be the person who started with characters (with the caveat that the person who delayed for two years may speak more fluently, but would overall have a less well-developed vocabulary and lower ability to discuss advanced topics).
 
*I don't think this is too unrealistic of a standard to consider "high level". If the language under discussion was French or German as a second language for English speakers, I certainly wouldn't call anything below that standard "high-level"; just because it's more difficult for English speakers to attain an equivalent level in Chinese, that doesn't mean we should tweak the standard. If we assume that R'lyehian is a language almost impossible for humans to master, and the greatest human students of R'lyehian only manage to attain a vocabulary of a hundred words, that hardly implies that a 100-word R'lyehian vocabulary counts as "high-level" R'lyehian.

[Angelina]

Thumps up for #68! I downvoted you by mistake.

[realmayo]

DD: I think it's a really interesting question. For a start, I can't see any problem delaying for six months. Or rather, I can't imagine that five years later the person who delayed characters for six months will have a worse reading ability than someone who started on day one. 

 

I think there are two benefits to delaying for six months. 

 

1. After six months the student knows lots of words so when you are choosing what order to teach the characters in, you can select the simpler ones first. For instance, as mentioned above, you can teach 身 before 谢 and so on.

 

2. You don't suck the life out of the learning process right at the start. With no spoken language to hang the characters on, beginning learning them is a slow abstract exercise which is almost completely separate from everything else you're doing in the language. 

 

I think learning characters would be easier after six months.

Plus the slog of learning them would not interfere with the effort required in the initial stages of learning speaking/listening/grammar skills.

 

As mentioned above, though, and as described here, http://yalepress.yale.edu/languages/pdf/Yin_intro.pdf , an alternative is to learn the characters separately but at the same time as the spoken language for six months, before bringing them together. 

 

I think it's quite easy to make the case for a six month delay, or at least keeping characters and spoken language separate for six months.

 

Now as for two years .... my guess is this would be fine too. Because the benefits that come from reading must come from extensive reading, and I don't think anyone will be doing extensive reading in their first two years, because their overall knowlege of the language is too narrow. They won't be gleaning tonnes of extra vocabulary because they're not yet good enough to read extensively enough.

 

So our delayed reader hasn't missed out on much in his first two years. Instead he's been able to spend lots and lots of extra time improving his listening and speaking, which also means that he is now more assured using Chinese, probably has a wider vocabulary and a better grasp of sentence structure. 

 

Okay, then after two years he has to start on the characters. Six months of hard work, sure, but that's not all he's doing, he's still doing plenty of listening, watching TV, having conversations in Chinese where he's more easily understood because of all the extra work he put into pronunciation while his peers were learning how to write 柠檬. After six months of 10 characters per day he's at 1800 and able to do reading comprehension tests, that kind of thing. Six months later and he's at the 3000+ level.

 

In his fourth year he's reading lots, so I don't see how he'd be any worse at reading by year five.

 

 

Given just how much practice is required to become a fast, fluent reader, 

 

If we say that you learn by doing, then you learn how to read fast by reading fast. And you can't read fast when you're still a beginner in Chinese, because you don't know enough of the language, let alone the characters. Fast extensive reading only happens when you know enough of the language, so I suggest there's no penalty to delaying reading until your knowledge of the language is enough to support extensive reading.

[Lu]

I'm not a linguist or an expert, but although I think there is no harm in a six-month delay, I think it's also not a bad idea to start with at least some characters from the very beginning, just so the learner gets an idea of what a character actually is. It's a pretty important aspect of the language, but at the same time it's one of the most exotic and scary parts. No need to learn 谢 or 柠檬 right away, but there's no harm in learning 人 and 田 in your first month, and gradually build it up to 狗 and 边 and such.

 

A two-year delay would set you back a lot, I think. Of course it depends on the person, their schedule, their discipline etc, but it takes time to first, get the idea; second, actually learn a huge load of characters; and third, get used to them and develop some speed in reading and skimming. Being two years behind others on especially the latter two parts seriously sets you back. With a lot of hard work you can overcome that of course, but I don't know if that work is any easier than it would have been to just start at the beginning.

[roddy]

My issue is that surely anyone (the vast majority, at least) learning Chinese is going to have a natural curiosity about the written language. I don't remember thinking 'oh, I wish I could ignore these for six months' - I remember noticing all the cars in Beijing had a 京 on the license plate and trying to figure out why, or that there were a lot of 肉s and 面s on the menu, and all the shops had 店. I suspect taking a pinyin-only approach would have taken some of the fun out of it. 

 

I'm also a big fan of keeping your different skills at roughly similar levels. I don't want to be laughing and joking with colleagues and then flummoxed when they're passing around a funny text message or laughing at a newspaper cartoon.

 

The above is less relevant if you're outside China, of course. 

[imron]

Learning 3 characters a day for 2 years, would give you > 2,000 characters, which is a fine start towards literacy.

 

Even if you miss the first 6 months, it's still > 1,500 chars.

 

3 a day is pretty relaxed and easy pace.  I think the problem is not so much that people learn characters, just that people try to learn an overwhelming amount of characters in a short time period.  Slow down, pace yourself and before you know it you'll be reading.

 

If you wait 2 years before starting though, well, you've got a huge amount of things you need to cover before having access to literature

[renzhe]

The issue is what is the best way to read, for the first 6-24 months. Not if you should or not.

Pinyin over hanzi, for at least the first two years, is the best way according to the literature (on balance), and accords with my own experience - as well as others such as V Mair.

The issue then becomes what is the best software to facilitate this - which would be a great topic on its own.

I don't actually strongly disagree with anything in this post, except perhaps the 2 years timeframe (6 months is a very short delay in Chinese-learning timeframe, so that's fine, IMHO). I'd also agree that the carry-over from reading is less pronounced in Chinese than it is in more languages written more phonetically.

However, after 2 YEARS of learning a language, you should be able to read an easy book, IMHO, anything else leads to mystifying the Chinese language too much, and exactly the type of "magical" "ideographic" arguments about Chinese characters that Mair, DeFrancis and the others dislike so much. It's a writing system, if you roll up your sleeves, it can be learned like any other.

The problem with too much delay is that you can actually learn most of the characters you need in two years. That's a lot of reading opportunities, an incredible amount of real grammar, real collocations, real usage in context, stuff that simply does not exist in pinyin, and probably never will. So delaying it for too long is very much a double-edged sword.

Looking at your list - Jonathon Kos Read is typical of the guy who never learnt to read but is still C2 in conversation. The main problem with his approach is you have to live in country, be an actor, get your lines drilled to you each day with hired help, and marry a Beijing lass. Not easily duplicated.

I tried really hard to find sources for Jonathan Kos Read, but I couldn't find anything that clearly stated whether he can read or not. I listened to several of his interviews, but they didn't talk about that. I'd appreciate a pointer (I'd be surprised if he can't read now).

His Chinese is certainly excellent -- I remember watching him many years ago in some awful spy show, he was the only good thing in it.

[realmayo]

1. Benefits of reading come from regular, extensive reading.

2. You can't do regular, extensive reading until you already have decent Chinese.

3. Learning to read will be faster if you already have decent Chinese.

4. So, delay reading until you have decent Chinese.

 

 

3 a day is pretty relaxed and easy pace.  I think the problem is not so much that people learn characters, just that people try to learn an overwhelming amount of characters in a short time period.  Slow down, pace yourself and before you know it you'll be reading.

 

 

This is like saying: once I've learned 3000 characters I can read a newspaper. Obviously not true. You need to learn the language first.

 

 

Years back I had taxi-driver-chat Chinese and barely knew any characters. I bought a graded reader. Couldn't read it at all.

I learned some characters. Then I read the reader. Cover to cover in a few minutes. It was a waste of time, didn't help my Chinese at all, waste of money.

 

 

I'm with Victor Mair on this one (I'm sure he's delighted by my support): http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=189

 

The hardest part of learning Chinese is mastering the thousands of characters that are necessary for full literacy.  The spoken language, in contrast, is relatively easy to acquire.  A good teacher who employs benign pedagogical methods can have students conversing quite fluently within a year or two.  By “benign pedagogical methods” I mean focusing on pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and patterns (phrases, clauses, sentences – through build-up drills, substitution drills, etc.).  Unfortunately, all too many Chinese language teachers crush the enthusiasm and the confidence of beginning and intermediate students by requiring that – almost from the start – they arbitrarily learn dozens or scores of characters every month.

 

From the very beginning of my own Chinese language learning experience nearly forty years ago, I have staunchly opposed this over-emphasis on brute force memorization of characters.  Rather, I advocate what I call “learning like a baby” as much as possible.  Namely, let students naturally become familiar and comfortable with the basic expressions, structures, and intonations of the language.  After acquiring this solid foundation, then gradually introduce characters in a systematic fashion, one that is directly linked to words and expressions, not as isolated morphosyllables.

 

 

(The link also cites a study which shows Chinese schoolchildren who delayed learning characters and stuck with pinyin longer ended up better at reading and writing characters when they did eventually start.)

[realmayo]

I tried really hard to find sources for Jonathan Kos Read, but I couldn't find anything that clearly stated whether he can read or not

 

Yes, there's this interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hEMvsf9KhU#t=02m45s but I think the 刚才 refers back to when he first started acting (and couldn't read then) rather than now. 

[Lu]

My personal experience is the opposite of what Mair argues there. Learning characters was a treat. It only got really hard in the second year, when I had to learn lots of characters in what always felt like too little time. These days I still learn words and characters, but now I pace myself.

 

Mair might also want to note that babies don't learn pinyin or grammar and don't do substitution drills either. They also take a lot more than a year or two before they converse with any fluency. Either he doesn't know how babies learn, or he doesn't in fact mean people should 'learn like a baby'.

 

introduce characters in a systematic fashion, one that is directly linked to words and expressions, not as isolated morphosyllables.

I wonder what he means by that. Learn 谢谢 or even 你好 before 山 and 火? As far as I know you have to start with isolated characters, to get an idea of what characters actually are. See also: learn what radicals are early on, as that can help a lot as you progress.

 

once I've learned 3000 characters I can read a newspaper.

Nobody here says that, or ever has said that here. Of course you can't read the newspaper if all you know is 3000 characters. You need to know words and grammar and such. But you still need to learn some 3000 characters if you want to read the newspaper. Nobody is arguing that you should start with only characters.

[renzhe]

2. You can't do regular, extensive reading until you already have decent Chinese.

You can't do regular, extensive reading until you've done two years of extensive reading. Decent speaking skills don't help at all, your first book will be a painful mess.

If you try reading your first book 4 years into your Chinese learning adventure (two years pinyin-only, two years learning characters and unable to read a real book), you won't be doing regular, extensive reading until after you've been studying for 6 years or so. For the first 4, you will be relying almost exclusively on artificial transcriptions that have zero to do the Chinese language as written in the real world, painstakingly prepared for you by people who can read well, but believe that you are two dumb to do it yourself.

I can hardly think of a more demotivating thing to tell a beginning student. "Here's a very simple children's book. We will start reading it in 4 year's time. Until then, we'll be using a script nobody actually uses for reading in the real world. See, Chinese is easy"

 

My personal experience is the opposite of what Mair argues there.

I agree, with all due respect and well knowing that Mair's contributed more to the study of the Chinese language in one day than I will in my lifetime.

Spending years in the pinyinised bubble being convinced that characters are too hard for non-Chinese pretty much killed my motivation and any progress during the first few years. I acquired a vocabulary of about 300 words despite all the efforts to converse, and would have given up if I had not been as stubborn as I am. Perhaps it works on 6-year old native kids, but it was demotivating and counter-productive for me.

When I started learning characters and reading, a whole world opened up for me and I saw that the only "Chinese character myth" is that they are inhumanely difficult. I could watch TV shows (subtitles!), movies (subtitles!), look up unknown words (dictionaries!) and read actual materials (comics! books!) and it started being fun and addictive.

Either he doesn't know how babies learn, or he doesn't in fact mean people should 'learn like a baby'.

Or maybe different statements from different essays of his are grouped together and turned into slightly different arguments by other people, which may not accurately represent his views (with no intention to misled by anyone involved). That's always a problem with arguing by proxy.

[realmayo]

If you try reading your first book 4 years into your Chinese learning adventure (two years pinyin-only, two years learning characters and unable to read a real book), you won't be doing regular, extensive reading until after you've been studying for 6 years or so.

 

This is a straw man (straw maths?). If you already know Chinese and know how to read articles in pinyin then you'd learn character-reading quicker. Isn't that simple logic? And wasn't that your own experience?

 

Renzhe I think it's interesting that you spent years failing to make any progress with Chinese until you started characters. I was the opposite, I could chat about tricky stuff before I learned even 50 characters. I'm sure that speaks not to either of us as students but to the materials you were using. Here again you disagree with Mair:

 

A good teacher who employs benign pedagogical methods can have students conversing quite fluently within a year or two.

 

I'm not saying you should agree with the dude, for all I know he is an ivory tower academic who knows nothing about actual language learning or teaching. But I think you were just unlucky that you didn't have a good teacher employing the right methods.

 

Or maybe different statements from different essays of his are grouped together and turned into slightly different arguments

 

Unintentionally that comes across a bit patronising: I provided a link, you could read the essay, which is a single essay, the paragraphs I quote are contiguous (they are in fact the first two paras).

You gave me 10 links in another post. I give you one, which refers to a study showing that Chinese children learn to read faster if character learning is delayed, and you deign to follow it up   .