I’m now getting towards the end of PAVC, having self-taught at home, but I’m finding that while I’m good at reading the characters in the book, I find it really hard to recognise them outside of that context.
For example, I’ve done the chapter on vocabulary to do with housing, so I know the characters for rooms, floor, etc. etc. but when I look at Taiwanese ads for housing, I really struggle to recognise the characters I know. They are there because after several minutes of painful effort and checking back with my book I do eventually identify them, but I can’t pick them out without a seemingly big effort.
Also, I have a set of flashcards that I look at regularly (they sit next to the toilet) and I experience the same phenomenon. Characters that I know immediately in my book are much more difficult to recognise.
I’m wondering if my brain is working out another way to memorise characters - i.e. almost entirely from the context of the book. It seems like any change of typeface completely throws me. It’s quite demoralising, having done all that work to get through the book, only to find I can’t read the same characters outside of it.
Has anyone else encountered this and how did you work your way around it?
Petrichor: That’s how we learn to read in any language, including our first language. It’s contextual and unless something is immediately very meaningful/memorable, you will forget it. Then you’ll need to encounter it again somewhere else. You’ll forget that too. After enough encounters like that, you’ll eventually be able to recognise it at will.
(I haven’t done what I’m about to tell you a great deal in Chinese, but I’ve/we’ve all done it in English.)
You perhaps need to do intensive reading, rather than extensive reading. Basically, there are (at least) two ways to do that. One, which is probably less effective, is by author. People tend to have particular ways of saying or writing things, so you’ll encounter certain vocabulary, idioms or sentence constructions over and over in their work. More effective though is probably to do intensive reading by topic. If you want to get good at recognising terms relating to housing, then you probably need to do lots of reading about housing. I gather you’re trying to concentrate on those terms and also look at ads because you want to be able to find a place by yourself when you come here. Might I suggest that instead of rental ads (which would be boring in anyone’s L1), that you try to find yourself some magazines about interior decorating, home and living and all that jazz? They might be more complex, but the material would probably be a lot more interesting (which is half the battle) and you would actually pick up all sorts of other vocabulary along the way. Actually, by the sounds of it, that’s probably out of your range for now, so maybe you should pick up some simple children’s stories about homes/houses. Unless you’re an accountant or an engineer, you’ll probably get more from a narrative than a list of information.
Have patience, Petrichor – it will come with time and practice!
Keep working on the flashcards and you’ll soon recognize the characters better out of context. But keep working on using them with context too, and in different contexts, with different typefaces. Consider writing them too (at least a little bit), and learning the constituent components which convey meaning and/or sound (the semantic and phonetic elements in them). That helped me, but may not work for everyone.
I had this problem too and I think its a matter of learning what the dialogues say and then using the characters as prompts. So you don’t really focus on the characters just use them to inform your brain which part of the dialogue comes next rather than actually reading them.
I guess there are two solutions, somehow find a wider range of reading material that is about the topic you are learning which can be easy to find but frustrating to read when it isn’t graded for your level. Or use flash cards to make sure you understand the new characters when seeing them out of context. But I mysef also have this problem.
This is the main reason I like the John DeFrancis reader series. You learn 10 characters per chapter, and 30 combinations of those characters, then you see them in around 30 standalone illustrative sentences, then in a multitude of interesting dialogues and narratives. Far, far more effective than flashcards, in my opinion.
I think the real problem here is that there’s no context in housing ads. They are very compact and concise, and some of them use abbreviations that aren’t common characters anyway (like the notation for “cooking allowed” – I can recognize it for reading ads but it’s not something I ever see anywhere else, for the most part.
Reading in textbooks at the PAVC level is intended to be recognition of characters that are representing spoken language, which has more “meat” to it. Written Chinese is often much more concise and “shrunken”, with less context and more Classical or newspaper-like grammar elements. So don’t be too hard on yourself.
If you can get a tutor to practice this, why not get some ads and get the tutor to ask you content questions about them? See if you can get the information out of the ad. After all, for ads at least, you’re reading for information, not pleasure (I hope). This may also help you to make the relationship between spoken Chinese and written forms – you can talk about the information and compare how it’s written with how you would express the same information in everyday speech.
Thanks guys. I’m glad to hear I’m not abnormal in this. Just one of those things I didn’t predict about learning Chinese, probably one of many to come.
Guy - my skills are unfortunately nowhere near book or magazine level yet. I think if I saw the characters written identically elsewhere I would recognise them. It’s true that once I recognise the characters I do then sometimes have to have a think to remember the meaning, but it’s the initial recognition that’s failing me most of all, when the typeface has changed and especially when it’s surrounded by other characters that I don’t know. It’s difficult to distinguish individual differences between them sometimes.
DB - my husband also said that he knows them by components too, so that’s something I’m going to try. That’s one area PAVC fails in. It only teaches them as whole characters. It’s a bit like whole word recognition rather than phonics for learning English. I’ve got a new dictionary: amazon.co.uk/Chinese-Charact … 405&sr=8-1 which lists the characters according to their radicals, so I started using that last night and I think that will really help. I already write each new character about ten times too. I think that helps me to recognise them in PAVC but not elsewhere. It’s good to know it’s just a stage that I can progress through.
Speeves, yes I think you’re right that part of the problem is that you inadvertently memorise the text and the characters just remind you of what you already know. I try to get round this by reading the example sentences in the vocabulary sections (covering up the pinyin) but even so I think you end up memorising those sentences too.
Gao - I’m going to try to see if I can get hold of the reader series you mention (are they simplified or traditional characters, do you know?).
Ironlady - thanks for the explanation of the differences in texts. I hadn’t thought of that but of course that’s the case in English too and from the sound of it even more so in Chinese. I’m not expecting to be able to fully understand the ads, it’s just I thought it would be a good opportunity to practise reading outside of the coursebook and I found it a struggle. At first I thought that none of the characters I’d learned were in the ads at all! Then I thought, well, that one looks a little bit like… and realised they were there but I wasn’t seeing them. (I would like to have you as a tutor but my pms never seem to get through to you. )
[quote=“Petrichor”]I’ve got a new dictionary: amazon.co.uk/Chinese-Charact … 405&sr=8-1 which lists the characters according to their radicals, so I started using that last night and I think that will really help.[/quote] Actually it lists them according to their component elements, which are not necessarily ‘radicals’ regardless of whether you use the common definition of radical as the bushou (section headers of a dictionary) or the etymological radix (root) of the character. You’ll just get confused if you start calling them all radicals, and I recommend avoiding this word entirely. BTW, that book is good for finding characters by their component elements regardless of whether the element is a bushou or not. That’s one of its strengths. Do please note that much of the etymological info in the book is wrong. Use it for mnemonics, but with a grain of salt.
If I were you I’d hire some struggling college students, give them the list of characters you’re currently working on (pick maybe 10 - 15 at a time) and ask them to write a couple of paragraphs and a few dialogues that include those characters. Then read through them. That way, you’re getting unpredictable context (hopefully!) but you are pretty sure of what characters you’ll be encountering. You should be able to get struggling college students to do that kind of thing pretty cheaply. It’s called “getting the supplemental extensive readings that the textbook ought to give you but doesn’t.”
This is really a matter of fonts. It’s hard for students learning English to recognize the characters when you change the font. It’s only after learning to write ABCs, and the stroke order, that they really get good at it.
The same holds true for Chinese. I had this problem at first, but then went the painful route of learning to write the characters, and suddenly, I could recognize them in many different fonts. I especially like the way they break the characters up and get artsy with them sometimes in Chinese. It shows there’s a lot of room for creativity here.
Learning to write will slow down your overall progress with the language. You won’t be fluent for a long long time, because you’ll spend half your time writing over and over again, instead of learning and speaking new words. But if you are really interested in reading Chinese, it’s the best way to go. If you only want to speak Chinese, learn to read/write later.
I learn faster by reading. It was the same way for English, when I was a kid. Who knows, maybe I’m strange. There are a million plus parents in Taiwan who want their kids to learn English only by conversation, but that’s not the way most of us learned. Ever meet someone from the US who didn’t go to school? Yeah, they can speak the language, but their English is crap. By learning to read and write and spell, we improved the quality of our English above the level of uneducated people.
So I spend most of my time reading Chinese. Yeah, it’s safer, because no one laughs at my accent. And when reading, I don’t have to worry about tones. I’ve even started writing short stories in Chinese. Of course they suck. But that’s what learning is all about. Sucking a little less each time!
Ironlady - thanks for the suggestion but it isn’t possible at the moment. Where I am in the UK there are no Taiwanese college students, and I don’t want to start confusing myself by learning to read simplified characters (not that even mainland students would be accessible either I don’t think.)
Asiaeast - thanks for the insight. I’m really reluctant to learn to write in Chinese, at least for the time being. I’d have very little practical use for the skill, even though I’m sure you’re quite right that it would help with reading. If only writing in characters were as easy as learning the ABC! I want to focus on speaking and listening predominantly for pure communication when we get to Taiwan. I do already write the characters about ten times, which gives me a little familiarity with components and stroke order, but the act of writing them many times would put me off learning Chinese altogether. Maybe not at first, but it will be a case of putting off study periods again and again because I can’t face the prospect of boring repetition, until I end up giving up completely. So I guess I’m just going to have to continue to struggle with recognising characters in different typefaces. :s
OK, then – second-best option, send ME the lists and I’ll see what I can do for you. Not always 100% native but you should be able to get the idea of what the story means.
Hmmm…actually a supplement for the PAVC series making it, well, learnable, isn’t a bad idea. Let me run this past my R&D department! (I’ve just finished the level 1 Chinese learning game and we’re waiting to take it to press, so we have to look for the next great Mandarin-teaching material idea! )
The DeFrancis books are written in traditional characters. Every new character is written in extremely large font so you can see how to write it, but even the illustrative sentences, dialogues, and narratives are written in large, easy to read characters.
Heimuoshu, I will answer your question here in case anyone else is curious. I am referring to the Chinese Reader series. When I started reading them, I already had a firm grasp of Chinese grammar, so I didn’t need the primary textbook. But if you are doing self-study, they would need to be used together. For example:
asiaeast: I’m sceptical about your idea that output (writing) is the way to go. There are lots and lots of words that I can speak, read and write that I may have only ever actually written once or twice in my entire life, or maybe not even at all. I think this is perhaps the very first time I’ve written the word “angina”, for instance, yet I know how to spell it and I know what it means. This is because I’ve encountered such words enough times either through listening or reading. I don’t think there’s anywhere near enough output to say that output is the reason I can actually write those words.
Are you sure you can write them perfectly? Reading Chinese, in my limited experience is much more forgiving. Something like 冰 (ice/cold,) for example, I read it for a long time not quite noticing that it was two strokes on the left not three (water). It was only after I had to remember and practice writing ice cream (冰淇淋) as vocab word, that I noticed that it only had two. I think if you don’t practice enough output, you get in a situation like this.
Chinese characters are worse for this because you can’t really reconstruct the written form from the sound. So while your brain is logging 70% of the character’s distinctive traits and recognizing based on that, that last 30% and subtly different but similar looking radicals can kill you, was it 又 or 女 in the bottom left? 貝 or 月 on the bottom right? Sometimes the meaning helps but like in 冰 above, someone might only know a 20 common radicals and never learn that two strokes means ice and instead use water, because it does make sense meaning wise and it looks very close.
Are you sure you can write them perfectly? Reading Chinese, in my limited experience is much more forgiving. Something like 冰 (ice/cold,) for example, I read it for a long time not quite noticing that it was two strokes on the left not three (water). It was only after I had to remember and practice writing ice cream (冰淇淋) as vocab word, that I noticed that it only had two. I think if you don’t practice enough output, you get in a situation like this.
Chinese characters are worse for this because you can’t really reconstruct the written form from the sound. So while your brain is logging 70% of the character’s distinctive traits and recognizing based on that, that last 30% and subtly different but similar looking radicals can kill you, was it 又 or 女 in the bottom left? 貝 or 月 on the bottom right? Sometimes the meaning helps but like in 冰 above, someone might only know a 20 common radicals and never learn that two strokes means ice and instead use water, because it does make sense meaning wise and it looks very close.[/quote]
There is a huge difference between writing English and writing Chinese and in that sense I agree with you and but also to a lesser extent with Guyintaiwan. I disagree with the idea though that you have to write the character over and over and over until you can write it. Remembering by noticing is a very effective way of learning and remembering to write (at least in my experience) once you know and understand how Chinese characters “work”
That is not the reason I posted.
Your quote is rubbish. There was never such research done anywhere and the idea is rubbish.
Bblaaeslkt pryleas pnmrrioefg sllaimy aeoulltsby dvrseee clbrpmaaoe tteenmrat.
Sorry, I should have mentioned that the paragraph is a meme that’s been floating around the internet for a while and not real. I brought it up because I think it’s a good illustration of how our brains are better at pattern recognition than production. But the idea is the same. Alot of Chinese you can read without knowing the whole thing. 聲音 and 声音 are the same, but I feel like the simplified is a little easier to remember how to write because the only thing in it is the unique part. 。 We remember the distinctive part and forget the rest.
Basketball players performing (this one stumped me I’m thinking there’s supposed to be an “r” and it’s similarly) absolutely deserve comparable treatment.
I really oppose repetition writing of the kind you see often in classes, where you write one character 10 times in a row. That’s a waste of time, because after the second or third one, it’s all visual, the brain doesn’t need to make a connection between the meaning, sound and character while your hands repeat the motions. The written equivalent of saying “Hello” 20 times in a row.
It’s much more effective if you do something like make 50 flashcards, meaning on one side character and pinyin on the back (or an electronic program with audio) and go through those twice with a random order. Shuffle and repeat with the ones you get wrong. Your brain can’t run on autopilot and every time you see or hear the one part you have to bring back the other two and connect them to it.
)
BTW, that book is good for finding characters by their component elements regardless of whether the element is a bushou or not. That’s one of its strengths. Do please note that much of the etymological info in the book is wrong. Use it for mnemonics, but with a grain of salt.
(I’ve just finished the level 1 Chinese learning game and we’re waiting to take it to press, so we have to look for the next great Mandarin-teaching material idea!