I had a class in University, where we learned how to read this handwriting style. I observed that the letters from Taiwanese were way much easier to read than the ones from Chinese. The Chinese are really writing extremely different (my teacher said that the official forms are only for primary school), but the Taiwanese are writing almost like a computer font. They seem to use some simplified Chinese (对，会) etc, but if you know a little bit about that, it is not hard. Even those characters are written quite easily.
The Chinese, in contrast, seem to write every character with one stroke, and even connect multiple characters, so that 2 characters are also written with one stroke.
I wonder, if the Taiwanese school system has the objective to let the pupils write like a textbook? I know the Japanese system has this objective, but what about the Taiwanese one?
It seems younger people are writing more like computer fonts. My professors, who are all over 50 and have never taught Chinese as a second language, write in a cursive style that I often can’t read, though. (I’ll try to remember to take a picture and post it here.)
Short, illustrated (and fun) children’s books are great for learning characters. I’ve been teaching my bf how to read and write in Chinese. He often learns new characters easily because he has such vivid memories of the stories in which the new characters appeared.
It also helps to learn the radicals as they give hints on meanings.
[quote=“riceworm”]Short, illustrated (and fun) children’s books are great for learning characters. I’ve been teaching my bf how to read and write in Chinese. He often learns new characters easily because he has such vivid memories of the stories in which the new characters appeared.
It also helps to learn the radicals as they give hints on meanings.[/quote]
It’s a good idea, and I tried it before but got bored with the kids books. Are there mangas with bopomofo?
None that I’m aware of. Manga publishers don’t really target pre-school age children or foreign learners of Chinese.
You could try 國語日報, it’s a newspaper with bopomofo. The contents range from current events to comic strips. The newspaper can be found at certain 7-11 locations: mdnkids.com/Ego/7-11Sale/
[quote=“riceworm”]None that I’m aware of. Manga publishers don’t really target pre-school age children or foreign learners of Chinese.
You could try 國語日報, it’s a newspaper with bopomofo. The contents range from current events to comic strips. The newspaper can be found at certain 7-11 locations: mdnkids.com/Ego/7-11Sale/[/quote]
This is awesome. Thanks for the suggestion, I live pretty close to one of those 7-11s. Well… a bus ride away, but still. One issue can last me a week.
I always rode by their building with my bike, but I never went inside. I kinda had the impression it is some secret government agency trying to reconquer the mainland or something like that: Having a building, but not producing anything.
Board games are also great for improving character recognition and picking up new characters and phrases. Quite a few are available in Chinese: Magic the Gathering, Dominion, etc.
Hey I’m learning to read just through reading graded dialogues in my text book (PAVC). However I found that I wasn’t really memorising a lot of the new characters even if i could read the dialogue. I would just know that when I got to the point where I didn’t know the character I would have the flow of the dialogue stored up in my head and would say the word but seeing the words out of context I would often have problems with a character. I’ve started using online flashcards to remedy this problem. But what I think would be far more valuable in terms of reading is to learn new characters organised around the bushou and the phonetic. Doesn’t that seem like a quicker way to learn? Anyone have any idea where I can get materials based around characters with a similar phonetic or radical?
Um…reading is all about context in the real world. When would you ever want to read without any context, except for a test?
Maybe the best way to proceed would be to read your dialogues, with which you are familiar, and when you get to one of those “I can fill it in from the voice in my head” characters, just pause a little bit and notice something about it. Ideally, you would then have someone write you some parallel reading materials using the same set of characters, but with different content, so that you couldn’t fill in the words from your knowledge of what the passage says. Of course, in Taiwan they would probably think that was an unreasonable request to make of a teacher in a language school.
I do not believe that organizing one’s character study around radicals or phonetics is particularly helpful. I teach radicals and phonetics as they occur, within contextualized readings that are constructed using the words students have already acquired orally. But I don’t feel that doing some organized study starting from radical A and working your way through will be particularly useful for a foreigner learning Mandarin. It might have more application for someone who speaks fluently already and truly just needs to learn to read, rather than someone trying to learn the language and to be literate at the same time. But phonetics requires that there be phonetic forms of words linked strongly to their meanings already in your head. For most learners, this isn’t yet the case.
I meant that I can read the characters in my dialogues because I know what sound comes next. But seeing the characters outside the context of the dialogues I am used to seeing them in, not outside any context what so ever, causes me to often not recognise them.
Yes, that’s what I’m addressing.
You need to read in a certain order: first, things that are predictable, such as the things you are reading. Then, things that use a limited pool of vocabulary/characters, all of which you know (or are supposed to be learning). Then, the real world. That second step is what gets you from where you are to where you can recognize things in contexts that are unexpected. Right now, you’re relying on the too-limited practice materials provided by the textbook, because you have to. No one is taking the time to provide you with unexpected contexts for these characters in readings at your level.
