I think there’s something about the nature of teaching a language too- if I’m having slow, stunted convos in English all day, the last thing I want to do is have a slow, stunted convo in Chinese at night. In fact, I’m not really a person who likes to ‘chat’ with strangers anyways. You know those people who like to sit down on an airplane and become best friends with their new neighbor? Not me. Earphones, book, sensory deprivation chamber- those are my best friends on a friendly flight. Small talk is an abysmal bore.
I’ve gone through the early language stage in Italian, having the same sort of conversations over and over and using the same 50 words and 10 sentence structures to express myself. It was fun then but now…
Okay okay, I did set up a language exchange today so I’ll start making progress, but only because I’m so ashamed to respond “san nien” in toneless chinese to people who ask me how long I’ve been here…
[quote=“Confuzius”]
So my wife is much more of the “absorber” type, me…my brain simply does not work that way. [/quote]
Then how did you acquire your native language? Did your parents send you to school at the age of 2 where teachers used written language to help you remember words?
This is all based on the traditional way of teaching Chinese. I know I sound like a broken record, but it truly hurts me to hear so many people (and it is practically everyone other than the linguistic hotshots) say “I just can’t learn Chinese.” What you think of as “drilling” in the traditional sense is really your brain crying out for repetition. It takes a certain number of repetitions – occasions on which you encounter a new word or part of a word in a unique and unexpected context AND can link it to its correct meaning – to acquire a word. You don’t usually get that in a pure immersion situation (which is why your street Hebrew isn’t what you want it to be – the input is random) and you almost never get that in a classroom situation (most textbooks will repeat any given new word four to five times in a unit, not the seventy to 100 times your brain needs as a beginner).
Every single estimate of “how long it takes” to learn Language X is based on rules-and-output teaching. Every single one. There are not enough Comprehensible Input-based teachers around to have data about how long it takes to reach proficiency using more reasonable methods. Even the national standards in the US for foreign language teaching are heavily slanted toward the outcomes everyone expects from rules-and-output teaching. They cite markers that are supposed to characterize speech at the Intermediate level, yet CI-taught students are using those after only a few hours of input. Clearly the standards, which claim to be proficiency based, are still at their heart grammar-based and assuming that things will be done in a certain way.
In fact, good students often make the worst teachers, as they assume (consciously or not) that everyone can get things as quickly and easily as they can. It is very difficult to just keep in mind how slowly you need to go and how much repetition is needed when you are one of the small group of people who “just gets it”. I experience this in music a lot. I can essentially pick up just about any instrument and get a recognizable tune out of it in 15 minutes or less – always have been able to do that. I’m teaching my mother in law to play the dulcimer now, and it has really pointed up to me just how much I take for granted. I’m maybe not as talented in languages, but I seem to have a better ability in foreign language than the average bear, so I have to be extremely careful to meet my students where they are in proficiency, and take a pace in class that is their pace, not mine.
[quote=“ironlady”][quote=“Confuzius”]
So my wife is much more of the “absorber” type, me…my brain simply does not work that way. [/quote]
Then how did you acquire your native language? Did your parents send you to school at the age of 2 where teachers used written language to help you remember words? [/quote]
Maybe its a tad bit of a newsflash, but people’s brains physically change over time (lets say, from being an infant and toddler to an adult). Not only that, but also the way their brains absorb information (I know, shocker).
[quote=“ironlady”]
This is all based on the traditional way of teaching Chinese. I know I sound like a broken record, but it truly hurts me to hear so many people (and it is practically everyone other than the linguistic hotshots) say “I just can’t learn Chinese.” [/quote]
Actually is is based on MY style of language learning. Did I do research into the “traditional ways” of learning? No, this is how I learn. So don’t make so many assumptions.
And for the record…never said I cannot learn. I am learning an average of 100-150 characters a week (getting tutored by an amazing tutor…for 3 hrs a week) so I think that’s pretty good. So my method is working quite well. Yes, it takes repetition and drills, but I am focusing equally on speaking, reading and listening (well, maybe a tad bit more on the reading…since that is what takes the most amount of repition), but my method is working just fine, thank you.
[quote=“ironlady”]
What you think of as “drilling” in the traditional sense is really your brain crying out for repetition. It takes a certain number of repetitions – occasions on which you encounter a new word or part of a word in a unique and unexpected context AND can link it to its correct meaning – to acquire a word. You don’t usually get that in a pure immersion situation (which is why your street Hebrew isn’t what you want it to be – the input is random)[/quote]
Honestly I think it has more to do with what I put my time and effort into. In a year and a half I learned biblical, medieval and rabbinic Hebrew, Babylonian Jewish Aramaic (of course not spoken…its a dead language) and Yiddish (which is the only language I am better at speaking than reading). I would translate, discuss and explain the semitic language texts into Yiddish. So really I just think it is a matter of focus and what I spent my time on. However, learning written languages and scripts just seems to come much more naturally to me than speaking…thats my brain :loco:
[quote=“ironlady”]
and you almost never get that in a classroom situation (most textbooks will repeat any given new word four to five times in a unit, not the seventy to 100 times your brain needs as a beginner).[/quote]
I agree with you on this point…I hate textbooks and do not use them. I hate all textbooks and university language courses.
[quote=“ironlady”]
Every single estimate of “how long it takes” to learn Language X is[/quote]
I think crap. (So we agree here). But, you must admit, it takes more time to learn to READ Chinese than it does to read English. (I think it is impossible to dispute this, if you do, however, I am all ears)
I have my own methods for learning language, and they seem to work. I do not do the classroom system either, though it seems you (no offence) are just as dogmatically married to your system as the wigs in the universities and buxibans are to theirs. I get that you do this for a living, believe in your system, have seen it work (and are of course promoting your product…I would be too!) But I just think there are many, (many many many many) methods for approaching language learning (all kinds of learning actually) and some work better than others for different people. Some people do better learning one way, some better another…thats it.
Native Chinese speakers like myself would disagree that it is faster to learn to read English. It might be easier to say the words but heck that do they mean? I think that if you have mastered spoken language, learning to read is not that much of a stretch, but I really don’t think it is easier to learn to read English, unless my idea of reading English is different to yours.
Really?
Lets say two people, who are adults, both speak the language (one speaks Chinese another speaks English) but neither can read.
You really think it will take the person who speaks English as long to learn 20 something symbols they need to sound out as the person who needs to learn a few thousand?
Really?
Lets say two people, who are adults, both speak the language (one speaks Chinese another speaks English) but neither can read.
You really think it will take the person who speaks English as long to learn 20 something symbols they need to sound out as the person who needs to learn a few thousand?[/quote]
26 symbols with 43 different sounds where different letters could be more than one sound. A few thousand? You can get by on a few hundred and understanding how the characters are put together while learning characters that appear often. Maybe.
Also, I did say native speakers meaning we learn to read early on and hell our comics are so much better that yours.
Really?
Lets say two people, who are adults, both speak the language (one speaks Chinese another speaks English) but neither can read.
You really think it will take the person who speaks English as long to learn 20 something symbols they need to sound out as the person who needs to learn a few thousand?[/quote]
26 symbols with 43 different sounds where different letters could be more than one sound. A few thousand? You can get by on a few hundred and understanding how the characters are put together while learning characters that appear often. Maybe.
Also, I did say native speakers meaning we learn to read early on and hell our comics are so much better that yours.[/quote]
“Getting on” is not the same as being literate (which is what I am talking about). With a few hundred, yeah, you can order chicken and not squid, but you can’t surf the internet.
I am not talking about acquiring your first language…but acquiring a language different than your mother tongue (hence the native aspect is irrelevant).
But do you think it is just as difficult, for someone say, 25-35, who is a native Chinese speaker, to learn to become literate in English…literate enough to surf the web or read a newspaper, as it is for a native English speaker to accomplish the same level of literacy in Chinese?
Maybe you do…but I cannot see how.
(btw, your comics are for sure better!)
I learned to speak and read English when I was 5 years old and within 2 years I was reading novels. My reading level quite early on exceeded my speaking ability and also led to an improvement in my speaking ability. There’s a fundamental difference between using a phonetic script and using ideograms for reading and writing. In cultures that use a phonetic script, a student can become an independent learner within a year or two. In cultures that use the Chinese script, students are still learning to read and write in upper elementary school and high school. So yes, it is easier to learn English and other languages that use a phonetic script by reading and supplementing that with listening. That is perhaps the main cause of the difference between western and Chinese/Japanese/Korean educational methods, systems, philosophies and ideas.
I learned to speak and read English when I was 5 years old and within 2 years I was reading novels. My reading level quite early on exceeded my speaking ability and also led to an improvement in my speaking ability. There’s a fundamental difference between using a phonetic script and using ideograms for reading and writing. In cultures that use a phonetic script, a student can become an independent learner within a year or two. In cultures that use the Chinese script, students are still learning to read and write in upper elementary school and high school. So yes, it is easier to learn English and other languages that use a phonetic script by reading and supplementing that with listening. That is perhaps the main cause of the difference between western and Chinese/Japanese/Korean educational methods, systems, philosophies and ideas.[/quote]
Then you’re not a “native speaker” and you shouldn’t be teaching here. 
My teacher is South African and he speaks 2 other languages one which he learnt first and his English is native so please don’t take offense. 
I still think to learn to read the language is as easy as English if not easier. Learning to write it might be a lot more difficult but we do have a different writing system when you use a computer. We have one word and another character or two to define happiness, happy, happily and for the same matter flex, flexible, flexibility etc. You have different words with letters on the end that makes it rather difficult to remember or recognize. If you are reading Chinese and you see happy and another character it doesn’t throw you of, but in English it is another word. I guess we can debate it for hours but I don’t think it is that much more difficult.
Why would you want to surf the web in Chinese if everything is already in English?
Yet if you have even the slightest understanding of English (even better if you’ve also studied another language such as Latin, French or ancient Greek), then you can look at happy, happily, and happiness and know they’re all related. You can also generalise from those and other examples to find a rule (without having to study that rule). I know that happily is the adverbial form of of happy because adverbs typically add -ly to a word. When the word ends in a y already, it is first changed into an i. Likewise, I also figured out (without having to memorise any rules) that words ending in -ness are nouns, so “happiness” is the noun form of happy.
My students, even the really good ones, are completely unable to have these kind of insights. They’re absolutely shocking at just “having a go” and trying to spell a word phonetically (despite being beaten around the head with phonics early in their English education). On the other hand, when I was learning French in school, I quickly figured out that -ment usually signifies an adverb. That the equivalent “good” students here struggle so much with this kind of lateral thinking is perhaps indicative of the general attitude to education here: that nothing is worth learning, and nothing can be learnt, independent of someone telling it to you.
It is absurd to claim that Chinese is easier to learn to read than English (or any other alphabet based script). I learnt to read the Cyrillic alphabet in an hour or two. I then used this to learn vocabulary that I didn’t know verbally, simply by reading it. An example was that when I was in Russia, I saw the sign “apteka” above pharmacies all the time. Because I could read phonetically, I quickly learnt the word for pharmacy (and I also infered that it’s probably distantly related to the English word, of ultimate Greek origin, apothecary). I also learnt that “remont” means repairs in much the same way. I could not do the same thing in Taiwan. Unless I get to the point where I have a very good understanding of how characters are put together (and even then, my understanding is that that doesn’t help entirely), I will always have to deal with each character on an individual basis. There will be no compounding effect.
This is a huge advantage of an alphabet over a character based system. I don’t believe there is any coincidence then that most languages in the world use an alphabet. It’s also why Chinese will never become a truly global language: the hurdle to literacy (and thus, effective communication) is far too high for anyone not learning it as their first language.
We are all biased from our own experience. To compare which is easier to learn, we really need to find someone who learned and use both languages native-like since birth. Otherwise, it is just to compare apples and oranges.
I have been in US for the last 30 years and much of my earlier years I had no exposure to Chinese books, newspaper, or Internet until recent years. But my Chinese reading ability never seemed to go away, though my usage might seem a bit old fashioned to young generation.
As Dr Ironlady said, in Chinese, there is no tense, no gender, no conjugation and no other attributes purely existed for grammatical purpose. So once I got those 800-1000 common words stored in my brain, I can form natural connections to understand new usage of new compound meaning. They have not invented new words for few hundreds years, so reading books from 2000 years ago is not too difficult. Except, China created simplified words, but that is different story.
So, Chinese words in my brain are like symbols and signs. When I see the word, “mountain”, a real image of mountain in my brain naturally formed. When I see the word, “water”, I see the image of a still water. Sun. Moon. Knife. Tiger, Elephant are just the easier examples. Many of them are becoming pneumonic forms in my brain, and once they reach to that level in your brain, they never go away and I instantly recognize them. Think in your experience of the signs you saw before: Stop Sign, pedestrian walking, McDonald’s big M, etc.
My ABC kids think completely differently. Chinese is too hard.
So, you say to-ma-to, I say to-mah-to. It is just different.
[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]Yet if you have even the slightest understanding of English (even better if you’ve also studied another language such as Latin, French or ancient Greek), then you can look at happy, happily, and happiness and know they’re all related. You can also generalise from those and other examples to find a rule (without having to study that rule). I know that happily is the adverbial form of of happy because adverbs typically add -ly to a word. When the word ends in a y already, it is first changed into an i. Likewise, I also figured out (without having to memorise any rules) that words ending in -ness are nouns, so “happiness” is the noun form of happy.
My students, even the really good ones, are completely unable to have these kind of insights. They’re absolutely shocking at just “having a go” and trying to spell a word phonetically (despite being beaten around the head with phonics early in their English education). On the other hand, when I was learning French in school, I quickly figured out that -ment usually signifies an adverb. That the equivalent “good” students here struggle so much with this kind of lateral thinking is perhaps indicative of the general attitude to education here: that nothing is worth learning, and nothing can be learnt, independent of someone telling it to you.
It is absurd to claim that Chinese is easier to learn to read than English (or any other alphabet based script). I learnt to read the Cyrillic alphabet in an hour or two. I then used this to learn vocabulary that I didn’t know verbally, simply by reading it. An example was that when I was in Russia, I saw the sign “apteka” above pharmacies all the time. Because I could read phonetically, I quickly learnt the word for pharmacy (and I also infered that it’s probably distantly related to the English word, of ultimate Greek origin, apothecary). I also learnt that “remont” means repairs in much the same way. I could not do the same thing in Taiwan. Unless I get to the point where I have a very good understanding of how characters are put together (and even then, my understanding is that that doesn’t help entirely), I will always have to deal with each character on an individual basis. There will be no compounding effect.
This is a huge advantage of an alphabet over a character based system. I don’t believe there is any coincidence then that most languages in the world use an alphabet. It’s also why Chinese will never become a truly global language: the hurdle to literacy (and thus, effective communication) is far too high for anyone not learning it as their first language.[/quote]
The problem firstly is that the rules have exceptions. I’m trying to be friendly (not an adverb) but you can hardly (is that the adverb of the adjective hard?) call yourself literate in Russian because you figured out a few words. It’s none of my business (a noun but it has nothing to do with adding ness to make a noun), but it’s like going to a fitness club (another ness and that one could be as confusing) and claiming to be an expert because you can figure out how the machines work.
It might be easy for you but it does take some work for us to master.
I also don’t think we are comparing the same things here. It might be easier to start reading English but once you have a few hundred words in Chinese and you actually make an effort to read, it is almost the same as learning to read in English. Maybe easier because it is easier to guess meaning based on characters than on English spelling. We’re not really talking about learning ten words.
The problem is linking the written Chinese word to it’s pronunciation and meaning. Every time you meet a new character you are not able to predict it’s sound or meaning accurately. It could be Lu, Wu, Mu, Ku , or something else entirely AND you do not know what tone it is in.
So Chinese is very difficult for native speakers reading wise because we do not have the verbal background that native speakers can reach into for context and can say Ah Hah, I know which word fits into this sentence. Even if you guess the meaning although you have never come across it before you cannot pronounce it.
That’s just the reading, writing is far more daunting.
[quote=“headhonchoII”]The problem is linking the written Chinese word to it’s pronunciation. Every time you meet a new character you are not able to predict it’s sound or meaning accurately. It could be Lu, Wu, Mu, Ku , or something else entirely AND you do not know what tone it is in.
So Chinese is very difficult for native speakers reading wise because we do not have the verbal background that native speakers can reach into for context and can say Ah Hah, I know which word fits into this sentence.[/quote]
I am assuming your first “native” should be non-native.
The same applies to English though in a way if you are a non-native speaker. Once you really have a solid amount of characters down and your spoken ability is high-intermediate then you will be able to figure things out by looking at phrases that you already know and by looking at the characters which precede and follow the character you don’t know. For the same reason, I think that people who say it is difficult to read simplified Chinese if you can read traditional are talking rubbish. You look at the preceding character and the character that follows what you don’t know and the recognition is instant. Characters never appear in isolation.
But how to do you get to higher-intermediate? When we learn a phonetic type language the reading part is important for getting past basic conversation ability, we need the input from reading. It’s a very difficult climb for non native speakers of Chinese because it is hard to get that input from reading. Instead reading can be tedious and slow. I’ve no doubt it’s difficult for non native speakers of English, but definitely not in the same ball park, especially if you are a person who is used to input from the written word.
To me learning to read Chinese takes quite a brute force approach and if you don’t reach a certain number of character recognitions after a while you will be very discouraged. I can read the newspaper but it literally took 2 and a half years to get to that stage along with the help of a Chinese teacher.
That’s excellent. Do you really think people in Taiwan can claim to read the newspaper after 2 and half years of studying even with a good teacher?
I didn’t say I read the newspaper very well, but I can read it slowly and understand most of it. I also lived in Taiwan five years before learning written Chinese. I guess it depends what you mean by reading!
I can contrast it to when I lived in Sweden for one summer. I could literally pick up the paper and guess the meaning of whole sentences within a few weeks of being there. With no language classes at all.
So I guess I could read the newspaper pretty well in Sweden after 3 months compared to 2.5 years in Taiwan!
Of course there are exceptions, and everyone has to learn them, including the native speakers. That’s why kids make all sorts of mistakes such as saying “catched” instead of caught. That is illustrative of the way in which people do generalise quite naturally to form a rule, and how they then have to learn that sometimes the rule is not appropriate. Anyway, we weren’t talking about the exceptions. We were talking about happy, happily and happiness. Those all follow fairly commonly encountered rules. The combination of letters h-a-p-p is actually not particularly common in English. The only other common occurence I can think of is happen and its derivations. That someone could not have a pretty good stab at happiness being related to happy seems a bit off. I can recognise that the words savvy and savoir faire are distantly related, for instance. It also doesn’t take a genius to notice that there are all sorts of cognates between Indo-European languages.
You’re wrong about the words “hardly” (though it is somewhat of a stretch) and “business”. Likewise, the word “fitness” in “fitness club” follows a very common rule in English.
Of course I am not fluent in Russian. I barely know any Russian. However, my point is that an alphabet very much allows a person to become an independent learner much faster than someone using a character based system. There are lots of times in any language when a word cannot be infered from the words around it, but in a situation without a visual aid, finding out the meaning by yourself is next to impossible in a language that doesn’t use an alphabet because you can’t even say it out loud to yourself. I think you’re deliberately being obtuse with my example about the word for pharmacy. At an extreme, a person could see the sign once in Russian and know both the meaning and the pronunciation. However, the same person could see the sign one million times in Chinese and know the meaning, but never the pronunciation. So, even with a visual aid, it can be completely impossible. In a country with an alphabet, a person can ask another person, “What does _____ mean?” They don’t have to point at it, write it down, or try to remember how it’s written (though this is also an easier task with an alphabet). You really don’t see a massive advantage in the former?
Guessing the meaning of English words is actually very easy for anyone who has a background in Latin or Greek, or even in French. However, people don’t even need to go and learn Latin, they just need to know all sorts of common components of words. For instance, the word submarine is composed of “below” + “sea”. The meaning can be inferred easily from that. This is a similar process to knowing the components of a character. All of this sort of stuff used to really be taught to kids in the West, prior to which they used to just learn Latin and Greek. From what I can tell, this kind of thing is not taught at all to English students here in Taiwan, or at least nowhere that I’ve seen. Again, the issue is that English is taught not as a language that is living, that is composed of a whole lot of inter-connected strands of a web. English is taught as a huge collection of completely unrelated stuff that you simply have to memorise. Seriously, if Taiwanese kids didn’t already speak Chinese a lot of the time (and those students I have who don’t speak it in the home clearly have a huge issue with it at school, as I see all the time), they’d probably never learn to read or write it.
The problem is that there are very, very few hard-copy reading materials that are truly suitable for non-native learners of Chinese. Children’s books aren’t, really. They’re better than adult books, but they’re not designed for people with limited adult-acquired vocabulary, which is what learners are before they hit that intermediate-to-advanced stretch where their structure is already solid and they start storing words like a squirrel storing nuts. Kids just are exposed to much different language than people taking a class, or even adults hanging around in Taiwan.
Devices like the iPad and Pleco make reading Chinese something totally different to what it was back when I had to learn to do it. Touch, touch, touch, look up anything you like practically instantaneously. It opens up a whole range of reading materials that can be made comprehensible or at least have the frustration level lowered substantially. (If the structure of the language isn’t in the head already, there will still be some difficulties interpreting what the string of word-level meanings means, but that’s another issue.) Totally different from my freshman year in college when there was about an 80% probability I would be able to even locate any given character in the dictionary in the first place.
If you manage to get readings in Chinese that are limited to language you know, you’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to read (recognize visual forms of the spoken language, that is – not wenyan and newspapers and stuff). If buxiban teachers would only thoroughly teach the spoken language for a unit before asking people to painfully decode it while reading out loud (or “prepare” at home by writing in all the pronunciations so as not to be embarrassed during class), things would be much better, though I still have little hope they would limit how much vocabulary we’re talking about in one session or lesson enough to allow it to really be absorbed before pressing on.
In their defense, I wouldn’t want to have the Ministry of Education on my back.