Can I learn Oral Chinese without learning the characters?

[realmayo]

 Nobody is arguing that you should start with only characters. 

 

Lu, people are arguing that you should start characters from day one, and I'm suggesting instead that after three months of Chinese and spending valuable time learning 100 characters you're not going to be reading anything worthwhile because you don't know enough words and grammar -- so why not wait until you can read something worthwhile?

[renzhe]

Unintentionally that comes across a bit patronising

I don't know if it's something about the way I write, but it seems like you feel like I'm having a constant go at you, and it's really not the case -- I like your posts and try not to appear too aggressive. Unfortunately, it's a part of my personality and I do come across as confrontational, even when it's not intended.

I am well aware of the essay you posted, and many others by Mair. People other than you have posted links to other Victor Mair essays in this very thread. Then quotes from these essays get posted here, and taken out of the context of the individual essays, and this leads to confusion.

For example, Victor Mair explains in the third paragraph of the essay you posted that

Unfortunately, most of us are adults or teenagers (post-puberty, at any rate) before we embark on our Chinese language learning quest. Furthermore, we do not live in a Chinese language environment, so that makes it all the harder to “learn like a baby.”

So I'm not having a go at you, I'm just pointing out that we shouldn't jump to conclusions about what Victor Mair thinks based on a few isolated quotes, that's all.

Though I maintain that his statement that "The spoken language, in contrast, is relatively easy to acquire." is the most incorrect sentence in the history of Chinese language learning.

[realmayo]

-- I like your posts and try not to appear too aggressive. Unfortunately, it's a part of my personality and I do come across as confrontational, even when it's not intended.

Hehe every word there goes for (& from) me too.

 

I suppose the statement about relative ease refers to studying one largely separate from the other. So, listening is easier than reading; speaking easier than writing.  

[Demonic_Duck]

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.

 

Channeling OneEye now: better still, learn what radicals are and what they aren't early on, and more importantly learn what functional components are and how they work.

[Lu]

Lu, people are arguing that you should start characters from day one, and I'm suggesting instead that after three months of Chinese and spending valuable time learning 100 characters you're not going to be reading anything worthwhile because you don't know enough words and grammar -- so why not wait until you can read something worthwhile?

With 100 characters you can't read anything worthwhile, no matter what your level of Chinese is otherwise. After three months, most people can't speak all that well either.

What you can learn in three months, with those 100 characters, is that characters are not some mythical collection of scribbles, that there is logic to them, what that logic is, what radicals are, and that you can in fact learn to read and write characters. These things you need to learn at some point (if you're serious about Chinese). If you wait two years, you still need to learn that and it will still take the same amount of time. You then learn your first 100 characters and you still can't read anything worthwhile. In addition, you now have to learn to differentiate between the 20 different shì and yì that you so painstakingly learned in these two years.

[Shelley]

IMHO characters are what makes Chinese what it is. Without characters you are only learning some of the language.

 

I don't think anyone would suggest learning to speak English using only phonetics and not starting to use the English alphabet until you have been at it for 6 months or any amount of time later.

 

Learning only pinyin is learning an artificial creation designed to demonstrate the sounds of Chinese, and not inteded to replace characters. By all means use pinyin as it was meant to be used but not to rely solely on it, and to dispense with pinyin as soon as possible.

 

Characters embody so much more than just sounds and meaning they have been around for thousands of years, if you can read characters and put some effort into it you can read texts from hundreds or even thousands of years ago. It is a huge link to the past and the cultural history of a land full of interesting, educational, and fascinating things to share.

 

The concepts contained in characters are like a window into the Chinese mind, how Chinese people think, what they consider important and what they aspire to.

 

And not forgetting the simple beauty of characters and the art and skill in good calligraphy.

 

Bite the bullet people, learn characters from the beginning, gently to start with but get familiar with them and then you will really be learning the language.

 

 

 

[realmayo]

Lu, I completely agree. I don't think it's necessary to 'learn' characters for a long time, but if you've got some free time it probably makes sense to 'study' a few, perhaps completely separately from the speaking/listening work, so you get a feel for how characters work, what stroke order is and why it is important, how radicals are treated, how components carry sound and so on.

 

 

This book, Fundamentals of Chinese Characters, would be ideal

http://www.amazon.co...a/dp/0300109458

Here's the preface where the author explains why: http://yalepress.yal...f/Yin_intro.pdf

[Lu]

[double post due to computer issues]

[renzhe]

Learning only pinyin is learning an artificial creation designed to demonstrate the sounds of Chinese, and not inteded to replace characters.

It WAS intended to replace Chinese characters, that was its main purpose. And convincing arguments have been made by many sinologists and Chinese intellectuals (Lu Xun, for example) that a shift to some type of phonetic writing would have a great effect in fighting illiteracy and easing everyday life, if implemented and pulled off the way it was in Korea or Vietnam.

It's just that the REALITY of the situation is that the only thing pinyin is actually used for today is phonetic representation, dictionaries and computer input, and Chinese writing MEANS characters, for all intents and purposes.

So there is a legitimate linguistic argument that people like John DeFrancis make, that Chinese CAN be written phonetically, and that it would be a good idea to do so, which sometimes seeps into the discussion on whether or not to learn characters (or when to learn them) as an adult learner hoping to interact with natives and share in Chinese culture. I think that they are largely two separate arguments and two separate discussions.

[Lu]

I don't think it's necessary to 'learn' characters for a long time, but if you've got some free time it probably makes sense to 'study' a few, perhaps completely separately from the speaking/listening work, so you get a feel for how characters work, what stroke order is and why it is important, how radicals are treated, how components carry sound and so on.

So should some characters be learned/studied in the beginning or not? Because if you have some free time, you can also spend it on more studying or practicing of other aspects of Chinese; and if it makes sense to learn/study a few characters, it's probably better to do so in a systematic way, just as you're learning the rest of the language.

[Demonic_Duck]

IMHO characters are what makes Chinese what it is. Without characters you are only learning some of the language.

 

I don't think anyone would suggest learning to speak English using only phonetics and not starting to use the English alphabet until you have been at it for 6 months or any amount of time later.

 

I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. Yes, no-one serious about learning English would suggest the same thing regarding studying it, but the fact is, many people who are very serious about Chinese do suggest it. Why? Because the amount of time required to learn 5000+ glyphs, most of which have ten or more strokes, is vastly greater than the amount of time required to learn 26 glyphs with only around 2 strokes each, plus a few spelling rules and the exceptions to those rules. So the idea that delaying learning characters is beneficial is at the very least a notion that's worth taking seriously.

 

Edit: second half of what I had written was already covered by renzhe above.

[Pingfa]

Personally I don't think it makes a massive difference if you are just putting off characters for 3 months or so to focus on the spoken aspect. Your listening and speaking ability will improve faster, and you'll have a stronger foundation when you start learning to read.

Still, it can't hurt to learn a few simple characters at ones leisure.

 

I say this as someone that started learning characters from the get go. What I did was memorize some short stories and diary entries and read them over and over. I would commit them to memory so I could picture and recite them in my head at my leisure. It's just a matter of repetition.

[realmayo]

Lu:

 

Focus from the start on memorising characters seems to have two problems. One is that it takes valuable time away from the initial listening, pronunciation, vocab, basic sentence blocks.

 

The other more serious prolem is that character memorisation becomes tied into the other learning. That is to say, many textbooks require you to learn the characters for a word at the same time as you learn the word itself, its pronunciation and meaning and usage. I think that requirement holds people back, it delays language acquisition.

 

Between starting memorising characters, and being able to read meaningful texts, there is an inverval of time. During this time two things specific to reading-with-characters need to happen. Characters must be memorised. And intensive reading must be done.

 

I think the goal should be to get that interval as short as possible. You want to minimise the time between memorising characters and extensive(ish) reading.

 

 

I would say:

 

0-6 months:

no characters, just pinyin

 

6-12 months:

reading with pinyin

study 200 building-block characters

learn about stroke order

learn about radicals/sound component interplay

mess around with brush and ink 

learn about calligraphy, calligraphers

carve some bones

learn about character memorisation methods e.g. mnemonics, silly stories versus genuine character-histories etc.

 

12 months:

memorise those 200 initial characters

then start memorising the rest, 10 a day? Or 5-7 a day? Don't know what's feasible.

intensive reading

 

24 months:

extensive reading

 

 

 

However if there were lots of pinyin reading materials available I'd be tempted to delay the last stage until 18 or 24 months!

 

And of course, this won't work well for self-studiers who are far more reliant on written texts and conventional textbooks.

[Angelina]

So should some characters be learned/studied in the beginning or not? Because if you have some free time, you can also spend it on more studying or practicing of other aspects of Chinese; and if it makes sense to learn/study a few characters, it's probably better to do so in a systematic way, just as you're learning the rest of the language.

 

Stroke order should be learned at the beginning definitely. As well as how Chinese characters work, e.g. that not all (not even the majority of) Chinese characters are ideograms. 

 

However, it's much more important for beginners to learn how to pronounce all consonants and tones right, learn how to read and write pinyin, learn grammar, than to waste most of their time memorizing characters. This does not mean that characters should be avoided, on the contrary, focusing on pinyin can help students learn characters better. 

 

I will quote the talk about the ZT experiment again

 

 The well-documented results of the experiment demonstrate that students enrolled in the ZT curriculum actually learned to read and write characters better and faster than students enrolled in the standard curriculum.  John Rohsenow, an emeritus professor of Chinese linguistics at the University of Illinois – Chicago Circle has written a couple of good papers describing the ZT experiment (e.g. John S. Rohsenow, “The ‘Z.T.’ Experiment in the PRC,” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association. 31, 3 (1996): 33-44).

[Shelley]

It WAS intended to replace Chinese characters

 

Well I for one am very glad it didn't.

 

I was mistaken, thanks for the correction.

Just been reading about it and it seems there was some opposition from some linguists, stating that it wold be difficult to use for dialects and therefore everyone would have to learn Mandarin. Seems that it was intend to replace characters but the practicalities of implementing it proved difficult and the hybrid system we have today is the result. 

 

Still I think characters should be included in learning Chinese at a very early stage.

[renzhe]

A part of my problem is the implicit assumption that character learning becomes "easier" if you have some conversation skills under your belt. It doesn't. It's an intense block of three years that will take 3 years of continuous, concentrated effort, however you do it, whenever you do it, in whatever order you do it. There are some useful tips and software that might save you 20% of the requierd time at best, but it's going to take about 3 years of your life to memorise 3000+ written forms, develop fast recognition skills for them, and form long-term memories in your brain.

Chinese kids learn them (3000-odd characters) in 3 years. Many serious adult learners learn them in 3 years, starting in the beginning. And if you start learning characters after 10 years of successful and happy pinyin reading (I'm exaggerating to make a point), you will still need 3 years to learn them. It is a visual and motoric (if you learn writing) memorisation exercise, completely orthogonal to any traditional linguistic endeavour. And that's why many linguists hate it -- it's not language in traditional sense.

Vocabulary learning is a different issue, you can learn it in different ways. In the beginning, of course it's easier to acquire vocabulary through example sentences, simple conversation, etc. Later on, characters are a very useful memory aid -- it is much easier to guess the mearning of a compound word from characters than from the pinyin (which jie4? Which dao3?)

But learning characters does not become any easier if you first spend time with pinyin. Just like learning musical notation does not become easier if you first spend time with pinyin. They are visual memorisation exercises, they have nothing to do with pinyin. You'll spend your 3 years one way or the other, the only question is when you will be able to make use of all the written learning materials -- after 2-3 years of study, when your vocabulary should be at the needed level and when it's natural for a language learner to start reading real books, or after 6 years if studying because you, well, sabotaged your reading skills in order to develop other language skills using a tiny subset of available material.

Everybody in this thread is giving well-meaning advice, hoping to help new people avoid pitfalls. My personal peeve are so many people I've met who delayed learning characters until they were "fluent", like Victor Mair suggests. Because you need the right teacher (I've never met one of that calibre), and you need the right materials (I'm not aware of any) and the right programme (which one?) So they (surprise, surprise!) never got fluent that way. So they never learned to read OR to speak. Because all the teaching materials that would help them with the grammar, with sentence structures, with vocabulary learning, with subtitles, with transcripts, with chatting on the internet with real people, with wonderful sources on the internet in general, they couldn't use any of them, and kept relying on friendly random Chinese friends and their pinyin transcriptions. Then 10 years later, you are having the same basic conversations with them using the same basic 300 words, and they could have been literate 7 years ago. It always saddens me. I offer them my comics, my books, my textbooks, old dictionaries, recommend resources, and it's always "Oh, no, not yet. First I will get fluent and only then will I be ready to tackle something as incredibly difficult as Doraemon".

[realmayo]

Everybody in this thread is giving well-meaning advice, hoping to help new people avoid pitfalls

 

Oops, I'm not at all!   I should have written a disclaimer. I'm talking about learning under a set of circumstances which probably would not apply to any new people looking for advice. To anyone starting out, especially self-studying, I'd say that the safest way to make steady progress in Chinese is to be ready to hit the characters hard in say six months time or so. For exactly the reasons, Renzhe, that you give, about textbooks, subtitles, all of that. Unless someone really knows what they're doing already, or has a teacher who does, I completley agree.

 

 

However I'm seriously unconvinced that this 三年学/三千字 truly holds:

 

Person A: Intermediate learner, knows 2000 characters.

Person B: Chinese native, only knows 2000 characters.

 

A & B sit down and read the same newspaper.

 

Person B will read faster and easier than Person A. This is because he can:

 

- guess characters from the context of what is going on

- guess characters from the context plus the sound component

- never struggles over the meaning of a sentence because he already understands Chinese

- understand Chinese current affairs

 

In 20 minutes, B will have read much more than A. And the more times you read characters, the better you remember them.

 

 

Conclusion: the more Chinese you know the faster you'll memorise characters.

 

If there's a flaw in this logic, please point it out.

 

(I bet a self-taught musician who never learned to read music could learn it faster than someone completely new to music)

[Angelina]

Just been reading about it and it seems there was some opposition from some linguists, stating that it wold be difficult to use for dialects and therefore everyone would have to learn Mandarin.

 

What about Chinese characters? Different Sinitic languages (Cantonese, Wu) have different grammatical rules, do you know that even in Hong Kong people use a lot of Mandarin grammar when writing? It is a bit complicated. Just because they all use similar characters does not mean it's better to use characters in order to make sure these languages don't die out. And many are dying out. 

[Pingfa]

While I don't disagree with the idea of prioritizing the spoken aspect over the written, I feel 6 months is too long to put off characters altogether. It's worth learning a little here and there even if it's just a few lines of a short story. Just take a minute to re-read/recite it every now and then. 

I used to recite/picture short stories in my head while I was going about my daily business - having a bath, making tea, cleaning, etc, so learning characters doesn't have to take up your time slots normally reserved for spoken language acquisition.

 

Even if you focus on the spoken aspect at the cost of character acquisition, everyone has time to learn a few lines here and there.

[Angelina]

My personal peeve are so many people I've met who delayed learning characters until they were "fluent", like Victor Mair suggests.

 

Maybe you have met people who did not have the right approach. Did they really learn how to read pinyin immediately and learn the tones? 

 

 

Chinese kids learn them (3000-odd characters) in 3 years. Many serious adult learners learn them in 3 years, starting in the beginning. And if you start learning characters after 10 years of successful and happy pinyin reading (I'm exaggerating to make a point), you will still need 3 years to learn them. It is a visual and motoric (if you learn writing) memorisation exercise, completely orthogonal to any traditional linguistic endeavour. And that's why many linguists hate it -- it's not language in traditional sense.

 

Consider: Six months of preparation: consonants, tones, tone sandhi, pinyin, grammar (VERBAL ASPECT, modality, discourse markers- all written in pinyin or other languages), stroke order, character components, listening to Chinese music, maybe some random characters that happen to be there, like 水、中国. After six months the learner will be ready to have a simple conversation about the weather and be literate because she can write this simple conversation down using pinyin. 

 

After the initial six months characters are introduced, the learner learns how to write the simple conversation she was able to previously write only in pinyin in Chinese characters. Then the wealth of native material is open. The learner can now read and write Chinese. Motor skills are developed. Three years later the learner can be fluent in Chinese.

 

Basically, three and a half years later, you can speak and write decent Chinese. 

 

 

Or she can start with the labor-intensive characters immediately and juggle between flash carding, Chinese language partners (who don't know how to explain the grammar questions she asks them), and looking for the special magic potion that can help her learn Chinese faster. How many people who started memorizing characters from the very start managed to learn fluent Chinese in less than 3.5 years? 

 

It depends on whether you live in China or not, and how much time you have, but it's much better to start with pinyin first and move to learning characters after you know some basic stuff.