Are you aware of the 8105 simplified Chinese characters of the PRC?

[edelweis]

@dtcamero that's true, but the textbooks may have some inherent repetition/review if the lessons reuse vocabulary from previous lessons. It gets trickier for vocabulary books. Maybe gwr71 has an eidetic memory.

[gwr71]

1 hour ago, dtcamero said:

he's writing out all the chinese in around 10 textbooks longhand. 

 

without an srs 

without studying character composition

just copying... 

 

this is the issue

you still have not read all my post. you fail to remember the basic of characters which must be done before one get to the next stage.  Please read more carefully before making comments.

[dtcamero]

lol indeed i stand corrected.

maybe you're better off figuring out yourself, you'll reinvent a better wheel.

塞翁（您）失馬（我）焉知非福

 

[gwr71]

I just learned from others.  One of the problems I saw from post is that when persons go to Taiwan/China for the first time and are tested their ability to write characters by hand is not what they expected.  They know characters and can identify them and type it on the computer but when they are faced with the challenge of writing it free hand it posed a small challenge.  They had to go over writing characters by hand.  It is easily solved by them.  It is like a shock of having to write more than one sentence in Mandarin.  

 

[Flickserve]

5 hours ago, dtcamero said:

chinese children (who are already fluent) also write out characters a million times in school...

this is famously inefficient, and it takes them 10 years before they can read a newspaper.

but they live in china and speak the language.

if you are in nevis using the same method, then isn't it fair to say you'll need more than ten years just to learn how to read?

 

It is quite OK if you have time. 

5 hours ago, dtcamero said:

 

[Flickserve]

2 hours ago, gwr71 said:

One of the problems I saw from post is that when persons go to Taiwan/China for the first time and are tested their ability to write characters by hand is not what they expected.  They know characters and can identify them and type it on the computer but when they are faced with the challenge of writing it free hand it posed a small challenge.  

 

But you don't need to write 8000 characters to do this. Even native speakers living in China or Taiwan forget how to write low frequency characters but they normally can read it unless never having come across it before.  

[dtcamero]

18 minutes ago, Flickserve said:

 

It is quite OK if you have time. 

indeed. you could also swim from england to france, but people rarely do it anymore...

[gwr71]

I understand and agree but I will try.  As an adult it will take only 2 years compare to a child in China who may learn for 10 years.

[Flickserve]

3 hours ago, dtcamero said:

you could also swim from england to france, but people rarely do it anymore...

 

Although rare, some people still do it..... 

 

Not something I would put myself through though. My analogy here would be why run 10,000 metres a day for a four hundred metre race? You get the law of diminishing returns. I am only a low level learner so take what I write with a pinch of salt. 

 

However, I am quite curious about the OP's assertions on two aspects:

 

A) he pointed out this learning strategy was based on previous posts in the forum. So somebody must have had a successful strategy somewhere. I would like to read about those examples 

 

B) more interestingly, OP previously failed to learn Spanish. What happened there? Why the failure for someone who seems so committed to learning Chinese which should be even harder? What's different between his learning strategy for Spanish and Chinese? By all accounts, Spanish should be easier for an English speaker. 

[realmayo]

I really think the OP has been misled by his or her research. Learning the least frequent 4000 in that list of 8000 will delay fluency, not achieve it. Learn those characters after you're fluent, not before. We are all limited by time and by brainpower, and it is 10000 times more valuable for fluency to learn everyday words and phrases and idioms, than it is to learn some of the characters on that list (e.g. see the ones I've copied below).

 

It's true that the BBC says an "educated Chinese person will know about 8,000 characters" but you shouldn't be relying on the BBC for accurate information.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/real_chinese/mini_guides/characters/characters_howmany.shtml

 

@gwr71: just be aware that no one here is aware of anyone in the world who has ever used your method and been successful. You might be uniquely brilliant. But it would be a real shame if some misunderstanding you have about learning Chinese meant that you spent hours and hours of your life trying, and failing, at a task which everyone else in the world thinks is impractical and impossible.

 

I would also urge you to revisit the characters you learned 3 months ago and test yourself. Did you remember them? If not, you should change your method immediately.

 

 

Here are some characters pasted from that list of 8000, at around the 7000 mark:

 

鲪    jūn    
鲬    yǒng    a flathead (fish)
橥    zhū    wooden peg, post or stick
觭    jī    one turning up and one turning down
鹠    liú    the owl
鹡    jí    wagtail
糇    hóu    dried rice, dry provisions
糈    xǔ    sacrificial rice; rations; pay
翦    jiǎn    scissors; cut, clip; annhilate
鹢    yì    fishhawk bow or prow
鹣    jiān    fabulous mythical bird
熛    biāo    blaze
潖    pá    name of a certain river
潵    sǎ    
㵐    jué    name of a river in Hubei Province, name of a state in ancient times
澂    chéng    clear and still water

[edelweis]

@realmayo but what about those super intensive 3-lettered programs where they "learn" enormous amounts of characters and words everyday? Surely after two years of this, a student has "learned" 8000 characters? (whether they can recall them is another matter.)

 

Edit: What I mean is that maybe this "program" of learning 8000 characters is maybe not as uncommon as it seems at first sight.

[DavyJonesLocker]

When you start learning chinese you quickly find that is that plans change and frequently change. You need to adapt based on your learning experience and the results achieved. gwr71 is not unique by any means in formulating  a personal plan but unfortunately  I can't see under any circumstances it working effectively. This is not to discourage the chap but maybe he might consider some issues which will arise.

Actually i lot of what he is suggesting I have done myself at some point in the past.

 

Learning and writing characters: I too tried that, simply learning to hand right characters . Its seems fine at the start but eventually you find that you are spending all your time just remembering the ones covered. You simply have no time to add new characters. Furthermore you have no reference or context so you don't actually learn anything, you have simply recognised a hanzi the associated pinyin and maybe a vague english description. However you still have no clue how to use it. For example "to suit/match" can be 对，适合，合适，搭配，适应  and many more

 

Coping books: Again I tried that too, naively thinking I would remember hanzi through osmosis. The problem is that your brain starts to switch off and starts wandering. You can type it etc and actually learning it becomes a different story. Further, you see the character first so just copy it, that is not the same as trying to write it from memory.

 

You miss out on the synergy effect of bringing all 4 disciplines along together. This is quite important and indeed it's why books are written the way they are. If your proposed method was a viable one then many teaching modules would be designed  that way.

 

Finally, you often find in forums that people are "better than average". It seems to be that many here are quite gifted in learning languages and that is probably a reflection of why they are on here. In my experience the reality is that the average learner of Chinese is nowhere near fluent after two years. After two years full time study I found I still was nowhere near fluent. Lower intermediate I'd say. I have no  problem talking to people in Chinese, reading basic material etc but pick up a standard airport style novel and I will struggle. Similarly if a conversation turns towards a specific topic I fail to express myself properly

 

What I would say is that there is no one ideal learning method. When I was learning Chinese I was often in disagreements with teachers on "how to learn Chinese".  Schools in Beijing rarely go through grammar and bombard you with thousands of words in a short space of time. I tried their methods and it simply did not work for me so I eventually quit and found a language teacher who would teach me the way I wanted and it paid off.

 

Good luck in your studies OP!

 

[DavyJonesLocker]

9 minutes ago, edelweis said:

@realmayo but what about those super intensive 3-lettered programs where they "learn" enormous amounts of characters and words everyday? Surely after two years of this, a student has "learned" 8000 characters? (whether they can recall them is another matter.)

 

Edit: What I mean is that maybe this "program" of learning 8000 characters is maybe not as uncommon as it seems at first sight.

 

 

I just saw your post after I posted. This is my experience is of many language schools. You "cover" about 5000 words in a year but you by no means learn them. Many students feel that they achieved an intermediate level, but stick all those words and characters in a SRS system and you will be somewhat disappointed as to you recall rate

[realmayo]

@edelweis I'm sure you're mistaken, I can't believe any proper course asks students to learn 8000 characters in their first two years. In fact I'd be astonished to find any course that teaches any students 8000 characters over any timeframe. More realistic would be an expectation of 4000 within three years.

[edelweis]

I didn't mean to say that the teachers of those programs would purposefully ask the students to learn 8000 characters.

Rather that the textbooks and ad-hoc teaching materials are varied and dense enough, and the pace fast enough,

that the students could very well be exposed to 8000 characters and expected to learn them for the weekly test/use them in the weekly paper/whatever short term goal,

without there being a real expectation that the student will recall all of them long term,

and maybe without there being a real awareness of the actual figure of the total number of characters that the students have "learned" this way.

 

(But that's only my imagination. What we need is a student who has spent 2 full years in such a program AND took care afterwards to count the number of characters they had to "learn" - they might not have time to keep a tally while in the program?)

[Xiao Kui]

OP's study plan is so farfetched that I am almost convinced he/she is trolling us. If someone posted "I plan to learn Chinese by standing on my head as I watch CCTV 5", we would not dignify the post with a response, yet that person would probably achieve better results than OP can hope to with this plan. 

[gwr71]

2 minutes ago, Xiao Kui said:

OP's study plan is so farfetched that I am almost convinced he/she is trolling us. If someone posted "I plan to learn Chinese by standing on my head as I watch CCTV 5", we would not dignify the post with a response, yet that person would probably achieve better results than OP can hope to with this plan. 

please speak for yourself. If you could not learn that amount of characters in 2 years don't believe that someone else well motivated can do  what you failed to do.

I don't anyone to defend my plan.  I will continue regardless of what you post.

[Xiao Kui]

I thought your ultimate goal in learning 8000 characters was fluency. I only know 3200+ characters and I am completely fluent.  I own Longman's Visual Dictionary and it contains lots of very specific words you are extremely unlikely to use in conversation: There is a whole page dedicated to hinges opposite a page dedicated to screws. 

[realmayo]

1 hour ago, edelweis said:

that the students could very well be exposed to 8000 characters and expected to learn them for the weekly test/use them in the weekly paper/whatever short term goal

No, I think that scenario is impossible. No student of Chinese would be expected to learn 8000 characters in their first four years of studying, let alone their first two.

 

@edelweis, I can't help wondering if we're talking about the same thing. For me, and for the OP,  8000 characters is 8000 different characters. How many Chinese people know 8000 different characters? Perhaps only very highly-educated, very well-read, very scholarly people.

 

I'm happy to be the bearer of good news. Let's say you can recognise 1000 characters. Perhaps you think you're only one-eighth of the way there. No, you're at last a quarter of the way there!

[realmayo]

1 hour ago, Xiao Kui said:

If someone posted "I plan to learn Chinese by standing on my head as I watch CCTV 5", we would not dignify the post with a response

 

I don't know, I think "Is it easier to learn Chinese characters the right way up first and then switch to upside down, or vice versa?" would be welcome addition to the "is it easier to learn Traditional first and then switch to Simplified, or vice versa" debate.