Many Chinese language classes in Taiwan use the Practical Audio-Visual Chinese series. Using these books, how many characters do the schools (Shi-Da, Tai-Da, TLI, etc.) teach in one year? Would a beginner student learn/be taught 1000 characters per year? Do the Chinese teachers teach 5/10/15 characters a day? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Anyone? :help:
It’s taken me about a year to finish the first ShiDa book. I was doing a chapter every two weeks (two one-hour classes per week and lots of self study). I think I counted about 800 characters + word compounds in the back of that book, more or less.
I would think that compared to a more ‘professional’ set up (I do private classes) one would progress a lot faster than I have.
I think most first year classes aim to teach you around 1000 characters for the first year, hoping that you will retain 500-600. I think you could learn 20-30/day. The more characters you know the faster you can learn new ones.
20-30/day? Wow! That’s around 4800 to 7200 a year, if you study two hours a day Monday to Friday. Are you sure these numbers are possible?
I’m sure someone with a photographic memory could do it… maybe…
I don’t think that 2 hours per day would give you 20-30 words, really. I thought I heard that at ShiDa you’re doing about two hours’ homework per one hour of classtime. Maybe if you were doing more like 4-6 hours per day you could do 20-30 words a day. I would wonder, though, just how many of those you would retain if you were pushing that hard?
I don’t think I could do it. However I will agree that the more you learn the easier it becomes to learn. You start to see patterns and meanings in the words (oh, there’s a person standing in front of food, has the meaning of ‘immediately’ etc.) as well as just looking up words becomes easier (a ‘ko’ with a ‘dao’ and a ‘mi’ instead of “a squiggle beside a square and a kind of spikey thing”).
Still, that is minimum 4800 characters per year. Has anyone been known to accomplish this? Most people I have met have told me that five new characters a day is good. This would give you around 1000 characters a year. This sounds much more reasonable to me. 
I would put retention in that 5-10 word per day range, based purely on my own experience, no matter how hard I’d study. Like I said, you could study 20-30 per day, but I’d doubt that you’d be able to keep that many in your head much longer past the next test.
But I may be a stupe.
There’s a difference between a word and a character, don’t forget; also between vocab for production and vocab for recognition.
I think you’d admit though that once you know two individual characters and can recognize them on sight, that it’s fairly simple to remember what they mean together, no?
As well, the OP didn’t specifiy what he was talking about, recognition or production (writing on demand). I’ve mostly been talking about recognition, as it takes a lot longer to write each character fifty times than it is to use a set of flashcards.
I’m using WenLin for a lot of my studying, which allows me to enter 12 new single characters per ‘cycle’ of study. I think I probably am studying between 40-60 new characters per week, and about that many ‘words’ (two or three character combinations) as well.
20-30 characters daily for recognition vocabulary is probably doable a couple hours a day if you’re using Supermemo. (www.supermemo.com) Keep in mind that means you’re spending 2-4 minutes with each character! That’s a long time to stare at something! Could you memorize a sentence from a newspaper (in your native language) in two minutes? Absolutely. I guarantee you can learn the little squiggles in that long, though it might take you a bit of learning before you reach that pace. I’ve been doing around 10 characters a day, but that’s revision of stuff I’ve totally forgotten from college; however it’s also in about 15 minutes of activity, with the rest of my time spent typing up old flashcards, looking up character compounds on zhongwen.com, falling asleep, etc…
Writing would probably take you longer. But do you really need to write everything you can read? Certainly not in the first Shida book (I think one of the character names in an early lesson is 澍放 or something, you don’t need to remember that 
In both cases, the trick is that you’re not doing that time continuously. Writing a character 50 times in a row from memory is really just exercise for your hand. (Trust me, I used to do this until 2 am every night when I was starting out, and it was a waste of time – and not something that I could keep up once I got past the first year). Though it is a good excuse to buy stationery supplies… What really forms memories isn’t repeating something that’s right in front of you, but something that you’ve almost forgotten. It’s the effort to remember that creates the memory, not the doing it by rote. That’s what Supermemo will do for you – figure out how long to let you set aside your characters for. You may be putting a lot of effort into something that isn’t increasing your retention very much.
Anyway, all this said – you don’t want to be memorizing a character and then “what it means,” unless you want your Chinese reading to be always about instantaneous translation rather than actually using the language. I’ve been trying to memorize a couple exemplary compounds (words) in addition to the pronunciation, but I’m not convinced this is a good idea… better than memorizing a translation though…?
[quote=“FearsomeOrange”]I would put retention in that 5-10 word per day range, based purely on my own experience, no matter how hard I’d study. Like I said, you could study 20-30 per day, but I’d doubt that you’d be able to keep that many in your head much longer past the next test.
But I may be a stupe.[/quote]
(Sorry for the second post.)
The trick is that you can’t expect to “learn” 20-30 characters in a day, and then the next day learn a new 20-30, etc. You’ve got to keep studying yesterday’s characters tomorrow and the next day. After that, you’ll be able to review them in maybe a week, and then in two weeks, etc. etc. Provided you didn’t forget them. That’s what Supermemo will pace out for you. So the load, altogether, will wind up being around 60-80 characters that you’re going through per day – but that’s the number of flashcards, and by day 3, you can probably go through them in about 15 seconds per. (15 seconds is a long time, if you don’t believe me, wait until the next time you’re stuck in line for the bathroom 
)
If you just ‘learn’ those 20-30 on day one, write them five hundred times, the whole deal, you’ll have forgotten them by day three, I don’t care how smart you are. If you review each day, then you’ll form memories that last much much longer. So you’re only a “stupe” if you don’t bother to reinforce what you’ve spent hours learning in the first place!
Oops. I was talking about production. I understand what you are saying now. 
Thanks for all the tips.
Exactly, so you get extra words for your money when you put certain characters together.
This partly explains why it’s possible to learn more words than we might at first glance expect (which is what the thread is basically saying).
In a way, you’re talking about two different things.
“Knowing” a character to manye means knowing how to read it (“what its reading is”), i.e., how to pronounce it, or perhaps knowing how to write it on demand (i.e., test situations, homework, etc.). Individual characters, while they have meaning, are not overwhelmingly used singly in modern Chinese. (Spare me the examples of single characters used so, please.) Most “words” are going to be compounds.
So, there are two challenges: 1. Learn to recognize the symbol(s), and 2. Remember what a combination of symbols means together.
A somewhat trite example often quoted in the West: “opportunity” (ji1hui4). You might recognize ji1 and hui4 separately, but there’s no way you would know the meaning of the combination UNLESS you know the WORD “jihui”.
So when learning Chinese, it’s just easier if you know the words first and then learn the characters – the written forms corresponding to them. But at the same time, it’s helpful to know the characters, so you can leverage your learning of words. Chicken and egg thing. 
One of the fun things for me recently is my study of Chinese medicine. I already have a degree in it, so the theory/information is not really new. What’s new though, is seeing the characters for the terms I learned (in PinYin) while in college.
It’s akin in some ways to having a friend tell you all about someone, and then finally meeting that person. It’s been quite enlightening in many cases.
So your suggestion to know the words before learning the characters has some merit for me in that regard.