Can I learn Oral Chinese without learning the characters?

[Shelley]

start with pinyin first and move to learning characters

 

Yes this is reasonable but I think the OP was trying to say can I learn to speak Chinese without learning characters and in essence this is possible.

 

In my first post on this topic I asked

Are you going to need to speak semi-fluent Chinese in 6 months for a short amount of time ( eg: a few weeks) and then never use Chinese again or is this the start of learning Chinese long term.

 

If someone  just wanted to learn enough Chinese to get by for a short duration for business or pleasure and then never use Chinese again I see no point in them wasting their time on something they will never use. Best spend the 6 months they have to learn, to listen, understand and speak Chinese, getting by with pinyin.

 

As OP has abandoned the topic for various reasons and we will never know the answer to my question in the quote but if we try to answer the original question I would say yes.

This is not something I advocate though.

 

[Lu]

So, it seems we all agree that characters need to be learned, and that starting to learn/study characters should be postponed no longer than 6 months. Personally I think you can, and often should, start with some character learning a lot earlier, but I think in the long run, 1 month or 6 months will not make that much difference.

 

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

True enough, all else being equal. But all else will in practice never be equal. For example, the more general knowledge you have, the less trouble you'll have reading newspapers. A primary school child who has just reached 3000 characters might not read the newspaper that much faster than a non-native speaker who just reached that same number.

 

All aspects (grammar, tones, characters, etc) help in learning all other aspects. If you already know a tonal language, you'll learn the tones more easily. Doesn't mean that you should sing mā-má-mǎ-mà until it's perfect before moving on to words. Knowing the language helps you learn characters; but knowing characters (for example, because you know Japanese) also helps in learning the rest of the language. A lot of passive input will help in learning grammar, but having some feeling for the grammar (for example, because you grew up speaking Cantonese) will help in getting more out of passive input. It's all connected, and I think there is no point in postponing one element too much. Even if it makes that element easier to learn later on, it makes the other elements harder in the meantime.

[anonymoose]

but knowing characters (for example, because you know Japanese) also helps in learning the rest of the language. A lot of passive input will help in learning grammar, but having some feeling for the grammar (for example, because you grew up speaking Cantonese) will help in getting more out of passive input. It's all connected, and I think there is no point in postponing one element too much.

 

I haven't bothered contributing much to this topic because there's so much dogmatic and nonsensical argumentation, that it is rather pointless.

 

I should say, though, that I agree with the point made by Lu, above.

 

I learned to read and write characters before I learned listening and speaking. I agree that if you are already proficient at speaking, learning to read will be easier, because you already know the structure of the language. But this works the other way also - I feel that I learned to speak relatively quickly, because I was already (reasonably) proficient at reading and writing.

[calibre2001]

Conversational fluency (however subjective that is ) is possible without being literate.

In fact, if I decide to learn a chinese dialect where its colloquial variant and written chinese are so far apart, I'm not sure how much characters can really help.

The only option would be to listen and speak then.

[realmayo]

Happened to come across this:

 

 

Victor Mair said,

April 6, 2014 @ 9:55 am

 

From Perry Link:

 

Yes, interesting. At the Princeton pedagogy conference last year, I asked the question publicly about whether we should simply stop teaching stroke order, since everybody writes on a keyboard now anyway. There was push-back, even though I had not made a statement, but had only asked a question. The sanctity of Chinese characters somehow undergirds not only cultural pride but people's senses of personal security.

[Lu]

even though I had not made a statement, but had only asked a question

Much as I respect Perry Link, that seems disingenious. If you have an opinion, just own it, and if you don't want to own it (because it's actually not your opinion, or because you don't want the pushback) then don't bring it up.

[realmayo]

No, I don't think censorship is a good thing, for a start it'd prevent people ever asking the question 'What if we....?'

[Lu]

What if we drown all puppies? Hey hey, what's with that pushback, I wasn't suggesting we do that, I was just asking the question.

 

I'm not in favour of censorship, but people disagreeing with you is not censorship, and saying 'I was just asking' sounds like backpedaling. Why ask if you don't think it's a good idea in the first place? Why not state your actual opinion instead? I think my main issue with 'question' -> 'pushback' is that if it really was just a question, he could just have said 'but a lot of people thought this was a bad idea/disagreed with this'. 'Pushback' makes it sound so personal that it's weird to then say (pretend?) it wasn't actually his opinion but 'just a question'.

 

Anyway, sorry for going offtopic.

[Demonic_Duck]

The "just asking" thing is only disingenuous when you're actually trying to push a specific agenda. I don't know anything about Perry Link or his views, but if he is genuinely neutral on the topic and open to arguments either way, I think it's a fair enough question to raise at a pedagogy conference (whereas "should we drown puppies" isn't).

 

As for whether stroke order should be specifically taught in a general Chinese class, in my view the basics are pretty much essential if the course is going to have any sort of written component which doesn't allow using computers (even if that's only for testing purposes). The basics also don't take long to grasp, so you don't lose much by doing so. Beyond that, it might be better just to introduce tools for self-study (skritter, online dictionaries/apps that have stroke order displaying functions, etc.) and allow students the choice as to how much they use them.

[realmayo]

Yes if someone is 100% convinced they're right and if they come from & speak to a culture which values assertive self-confident public statement-making over consensus-building collaborative groping towards an answer, then maybe they shouldn't phrase statements as a question. But perhaps even someone like Perry Link wasn't 100% sure that he knew 'the answer' on this occasion.

 

As for stroke order I'm with DD, it makes sense to learn it if you're ever going to write. But if you're thinking about a world where you never have to write, you can use computers the whole time and they are clever enough to work out your drawn character input even if the stroke order is wrong -- then is there any point? I still think there is but maybe that's because I've invested so many hours of my life on characters and I'd probably be curious about the left slant of 月's first stroke, or the little hook at the end of its second stroke. But maybe future fonts will do away with those.

[realmayo]

But this works the other way also - I feel that I learned to speak relatively quickly, because I was already (reasonably) proficient at reading and writing.

Anonymouse: if -- and I think it's a big if -- the advantanges of learning to read/write before learning to speak/listen are of the same magnitude as those advantages you get when starting to speak/listen first, the next question should be which is easier, to achieve competence in reading/writing or speaking/listening? I'd say it's the latter, in which case if you are going to split them it makes sense to start with speaking/listening. 

[querido]

I think it's disingenuous because "since everybody writes on a keyboard now anyway" is a push-forward.

 

And "sanctity" and "people's senses of personal security" sound contemptuous (and is also pushing).

 

It's whiny too, complaining about the push-back; if you can't stand the heat, get out of the conference.

[Lu]

I don't know anything about Perry Link or his views, but if he is genuinely neutral on the topic and open to arguments either way, I think it's a fair enough question to raise at a pedagogy conference

If you're open to arguments either way, you wouldn't call the arguments 'pushback', you'd just call them 'arguments against this idea' or 'disagreement'.

 

Either way, not teaching stroke order is a bad idea I think. Even if you don't end up fully literate in handwriting, stroke order is an important component of all kinds of computer input. Not to mention that you'll need it to read handwritten texts or calligraphy (both still exist). And the basics are not that complicated either.

[realmayo]

So Perry Link is disingenuous, contemptuous, whiny, and now not open to arguments! I'll wager his tones aren't great either 

 

Edit: I know no-one's saying that's what he's like really but there does seem to be a bit of of erm pushback?

[querido]

No, it's his stroke order!

[realmayo]

Forgive the necromancy: relevant discussion in the comments here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18825 about the wisdom or otherwise of delaying studying characters:

 

Brendan said,

May 1, 2015 @ 11:21 pm

Hi Xiao Shi — thanks for the compliment!
I think that Jessica and Prof. Mair and I probably have the same take on characters — which is that they're necessary for any serious student of Chinese, but will not be immediately helpful for speaking. In my ideal Chinese-teaching curriculum, I would probably put off characters for the first semester or so, in favor of working on pronunciation, tones and tone sandhi, and other things that tend to be given short shrift in most Chinese programs. The practical reason for this is that bad habits in these areas are very hard to break; the personal reason is that I did things the wrong way the first time around, and then had to go back and relearn my tones a few years into my study of Chinese, which was a massive bummer.

 

 

but I think there are major drawbacks to emphasizing characters at the beginning of one's study. It accustoms the student to the idea that Chinese is made of characters, which gets people into the habit of thinking of the language as being made up of dis-crete-syl-la-bles, each one meaningful. (This, combined with a generally inadequate focus on tone production, is a large part of why so many non-native speakers of Chinese sound robotic and unnatural when we talk.) It also saps away time and energy that would be better spent working on the less sexy but way more important 基本功 of speaking, listening, and tone reproduction. 

[realmayo]

Also interesting from those discussions that Yale & Connecticut universities used to delay character-memorisation for a year.

[Demonic_Duck]

Very good point, but for a comprehensive course (i.e. not a short-term course specifically focused on spoken Chinese and nothing else), I don't see the harm in introducing those characters very early on whilst at the same time spending lots of time focusing on pronunciation, stressing that Mandarin Chinese is not a syllable-timed language, and debunking other myths and preconceptions about characters that students may hold (and it's not very easy to debunk these if you're not teaching the characters at all).

 

Of course, all of this takes time away from other stuff that can be done in class, and may be somewhat overwhelming, so it would require a slightly slower pace. Honestly, I could be swayed either way on this. All I know is that for me, characters were one of the main draws of Chinese, and I would have been a little miffed if I hadn't been taught anything about them for a semester. Equally, for others, the characters are just off-putting.

 

Either way, teaching characters but neglecting tones or other aspects of pronunciation is borderline idiotic.