I’ve been studying Chinese for about 4 years. The first year and a half was the standard 10 hours a week at a Chinese school. The remaining period up until now has been a mixture of Chinesepod, flashcards, some 1 to 1 lessons, reading children’s books and watching TV.
My listening is much better than my reading. I need to improve my reading to study at university level next year. At the moment I am flying through kids books with Bopomofo. I try and read about anything and everything and this helps solidify the stuff that I have learned previously and at the same time increases my character recognition. I also watch the news as much as possible and occasionally translate news articles from Chinese to English (using software to help) for an environmental organization.
How can I make the big leap up to reading novels and newspapers? Ideally, I’d like to have audio books in Chinese. Listen to the CD and read the book at the same time, but they don’t seem to exist here. Do any Chinese masters have some good advice for a frustrated Chinese learner?
It sounds like you are doing most of the right things.
For newspapers, I’d get a subscription to the Mandarin Daily New (guoyuribao). It’s stultifying stuff but its news writing with Bopomofo.
If you aren’t already, start using a Chinese-Chinese dictionary to look unfamiliar terms up.
If you have an hour to read, spend 50 minutes reading for gist and then spend the last 10 minutes going through a selected passage with your dictionary. You need to spend more time learning to read Chinese, not decode it.
Once you jump to adult newspapers, focus on a story like the upcoming legislative bye-election in Taitung. Follow it every day in Google news so that you become familiar with the people. Read up on Taiwan’s political system in English–half the time you can’t understand because you don’t know enough about Taiwan.
Novels are a lot more difficult. The Stanford Center at Taida had a nice annotated reader of Taiwanese fiction from the 1970s and 1980s. A bit dated but well done if you can find it.
In my limited experience, you have to kill the big monster at the end of each level before you can progress to the next level. Sometimes, you can save your progress at this point, unless you are in Arcade mode.
Maybe he needs some powerups, like a Taiwanese GF that only wants to speak Chinese (+5 to Chinese, -1 to HP), or more time with local friends (+1 to chinese) or watching Things in Chinese instead of English (+1), or maybe less time on forumosa (+2 to Chinese, -1 to HP)
Don’t agree.
First of all, writing by hand is rarely required even in a Chinese-speaking environment these days (but that wasn’t your point.)
I am a firm believer that people who are going to read (not decode) using the strategies that they were (hopefully) taught when learning to read their first language (activation of prior knowledge, top-down processing for the “big picture”, intelligent guessing of unknowns, etc.) are going to do better in the reading department than someone who relies primarily on flashcards or rote writing to “memorize” the characters. If recognition, not production, is the goal, then it’s better to aim your limited learning time to things that build recognition specifically.
You could say, “But he will recognize those 10 characters he writes better than if he didn’t write them”. Maybe, but how many characters could he recognize pretty well if he hadn’t invested the time to copy out those 10, but rather spent the time reading? Probably 30 or 40. It’s incremental – which means traditional teachers won’t like it, as it’s not immediately “measurable” on a test or quiz – but holistically I believe it serves the learner better, esp. if writing by hand is not a big goal.
Yes, I agree with manualo to use that software or doctor eye, as well as a pda with character recognition software so you can draw a character on it to get the meaning. There is nothing more of a turnoff than a regular Chinese dictionary.
I started reading more online using software to get me past words I can’t recognize. It’s enjoyable which means I don’t dread doing it and am more likely to continue. I’ve also learned a few stock newspaper phrases this way, which means that when I see them now I get a nice kick.
I carry a PDA around so if I see a sign or notice somewhere I can translate it by writing the characters onto the pda pad. This is fun for learnign MRT signs, and warnigns, notices.
Ironlady, as always your advise is inspiring. I’ve been reading my own stuff but also working my way through the PAV books with flashcards. I find it so tedious to read the chapters, those dialogues are death-inducing, though I am happy studying characters with flashcards.
Do you think studying flashcards is worth it if I stop using the books and just read what I want to online or elsewhere? Or would I just be better off reading lots and picking up new characters that way? Or continuing the way I am: learing with flashcards, pracising that learning with PAV chapters, but also doing more reading outside?
The PAV flashcards won’t hurt – they should (mostly at least) be fairly high-frequency stuff, so you’ll see it no matter what you read.
You could also get ahold of a word frequency list and then cherry-pick the terms you think are interesting or of use to you. I mean a word frequency, not a character frequency list – there is one published in Taiwan, as I recall. No need to learn each and every one of them – some high-frequency words are frequent but not important, if that makes sense. Also, personalizing your learning by picking things that “speak” to you helps with your retention.
There is nothing magical about PAV or any other book. The idea that you need to have grammar “presented” to you is silly, IF (big “if” here) you can understand what you are reading or hearing. Textbooks are designed in part for the convenience of the teacher and school, and they’re modularized. Life and real language isn’t. You can “acquire” structure if you read things where you know what they mean, because that’s what your brain is wired to do. Unfortunately, because of the differences between written and spoken Chinese and the complications of characters versus sounds you already might know, reading for acquisition isn’t as easy as with a language like Spanish, which is phonetic and doesn’t have such big differences between the spoken and written forms.
Anything you do to improve your Chinese will help to some degree. Things that related directly to your life or what you want to know, things that are comprehensible to you, and things that give you that “cool!” feeling or allow you to spot the new items in real life will be the best for progress. But nothing is likely to hurt unless it makes you feel so discouraged that you give up Chinese entirely.
As for how to get to the next level, I recommend reading a bit of everything for breadth, but one of the problems is that the difficulty of making that jump and the amount of work required means it’s very important to stay motivated. So do anything that will keep you motivated. If newspaper stories on politics drive you batty then read the ones on something else. If nothing in the papers interests you, buy magazines in Chinese like fashion, National Geographic, Discover(y?), racy romances, comic books, whatever. Start with simpler things like comics, which have limited text and lots of pictures, or very short things. Books of short stories are better than whole novels. Very short things like the Little Prince, Pooh, etc. Then work up to short novels like the Hobbit or Harry Potter #1 rather than trying to move straight to something serious and huge.
Thanks for all the help.
Maybe I should expand on my experiences of learning Chinese.
Group classes - found them very useful in the early stages, but after 18 months I just wanted to study on my own terms. Even with 1 to 1 classes, I soon came to the conclusion that (as long as I’m in Taiwan) it’s better to study / experience without classes. Do advanced students take classes?
Books - went through PAV 1 to 4 using listening as my main input, reading lagging behind a bit. I’ve always found that listening is the best way to “get into” Chinese. I tend to go back and read through the texts when my “level” has gone above them. It’s at this point that I feel that it becomes concreted. Book 5 is a nightmare. Can’t stand it, hence the switch to other materials, mostly children’s books about science, nature etc.
Flashcards - I just find these depressing. I’ve used plec-dict’s flashcard program sporadically. Some of the words just will not enter my brain, no matter how many times I see them.
Writing characters - Never done it. Can’t write a single character. Please don’t suggest learning to write now. I can type most of what I want to say using pinyin input.
Speaking - Recently fallen into a lazy pattern where I speak English all the time and my wife speaks Chinese. Part of the reason for this was that I just don’t like the sound of my Chinese. I sound like an ass! I’m hoping that I’ll slowly re-learn to speak Chinese as our son grows up.
Anyway, I’ll be taking alot of your advice and I’ll let you all know how it goes.
Thanks again.
Ditto. That’s very natural; kids understand the spoken form of sentences before they start to read them. So, you may want to increase your time spent listening, specifically on the same topics as what you’re reading. LE and tutors are good for this, as you can provide copies of the news or magazine articles you plan to read to your partner or teacher, then try conversing on it, then read and ask questions, then converse again. You may have to first learn the vocab from the reading before you can try that first conversation, though. Sources which identify vocab facilitate this, of course. Many advanced readers (books) will do this.
Ok, I won’t suggest it, but have you ever considered a calligraphy course as a good, structured way to practice listening? My listening and vocab in Chinese made just as much practice in my calligraphy course as my writing ability did.
[quote=“Dragonbones”]
As for how to get to the next level, I recommend reading a bit of everything for breadth, but one of the problems is that the difficulty of making that jump and the amount of work required means it’s very important to stay motivated. So do anything that will keep you motivated. If newspaper stories on politics drive you batty then read the ones on something else. If nothing in the papers interests you, buy magazines in Chinese like fashion, National Geographic, Discover(y?), racy romances, comic books, whatever. Start with simpler things like comics, which have limited text and lots of pictures, or very short things. Books of short stories are better than whole novels. Very short things like the Little Prince, Pooh, etc. Then work up to short novels like the Hobbit or Harry Potter #1 rather than trying to move straight to something serious and huge.[/quote]
I agree with the suggestion that you should read things that interest you. But I think you should read text that were written by native speakers for other native speakers rather than translations like the Hobbit or Harry Potter. There are many good translations by Howard Goldblatt and others that can be helpful.
Writing characters - Never done it. Can’t write a single character. Please don’t suggest learning to write now. I can type most of what I want to say using pinyin input.
[/quote]
Writing helps you understand the structure and logic of characters. You need to be able to write a few hundred characters and know the radicals and sound components so that you can distinguish between characters accurately. I’m not saying that you have to learn to write by hand, but you need basic writing skills to get to the next level.
Writing characters - Never done it. Can’t write a single character. Please don’t suggest learning to write now. I can type most of what I want to say using pinyin input.
[/quote]
Writing helps you understand the structure and logic of characters. You need to be able to write a few hundred characters and know the radicals and sound components so that you can distinguish between characters accurately. I’m not saying that you have to learn to write by hand, but you need basic writing skills to get to the next level.[/quote]
Not only that, but writing is important for knowing how many strokes are in a character.
Without knowing that, using dictionaries become almost impossible to use. And without writing the character, it must be very difficult to recoginize the radical like feiren was saying.
Actually, learning to write also means greater depth of processing, which greatly enhances character retention. Otherwise you tend to more quickly forget the characters you’ve learned to recognize. But I won’t suggest learning to write now, alecinwonderland, since you don’t want to hear that.
Show me where it has been documented that being able to write by hand means greater retention for character recognition. It’s possible to read without being able to write. It’s possible to understand a language without being physically able to speak. And writing and reading are not stored in the same areas of the brain (I would have to go back to my grad school notes to be any more specific, though especially since the case for reading Chinese characters is more complicated – is it processing of the phonetic form corresponding to the character, or of the meaning, or both, or…?? See some of the recent MRI studies for interesting stuff.)
Also, of course, the burden of time to write needs to be balanced against the loss of broad repeated exposure to more characters in a meaningful context (thus useful for overall acquisition as well). A rote task on a limited subset vs. meaningful input on a broader range? No contest for me. Unless you enjoy calligraphy for its own sake, or find writing to be a Zen-like calming activity (both of which can be true, of course). But in that case, the main purpose is not “writing to recognize”.
Stroke order and/or number of strokes can be taught easily enough without forcing students to use a great deal of time to write by hand. Since the vast majority of Taiwanese do not write by hand except for greeting cards, shopping lists, phone messages and filling out forms, we’re talking about subjecting foreign students to a great time-waster for very little return. Yes, it’s a great trick at parties and makes the Chinese go “Oooohhhh! You can write characters!” So, if that’s important to you, great. But I do not support writing (mechanical writing, rote practice forming characters) as a means of improving character retention for reading.
I’m with DB on this one…reading things you already half “know” in the native language gives you a jump start on comprehension in a language with as pesky a writing system as Chinese.
The other issue with advising only texts written by native speakers is that they WERE written by native speakers for native speakers. The difficulty level increases a lot because of the chasm between the spoken and written forms, chengyu become a dime a dozen (yes, some are useful but too many are a blight) and generally speaking one tends to get away from the most frequent items into other things. As one progresses, I think yes, these texts are good to read, and are obviously the end goal for someone who wants to go all the way and become really proficient in Chinese. But for an intermediate level, I really believe the focus should be on the simultaneous acquisition of broader (but not unlimited) vocabulary and solidification of structure (grammar) in the brain, to make the production and reception of Chinese as automatic as possible.
Independent reading ideally presents only a fairly small proportion of unknown words – say 5% for a motivated individual. Any more than that, and it’s a dictionary-fest, not reading. Since the basis for acquisition of a language is comprehending what’s going in, leaving more blanks than that in a text means that the value of the text for one’s overall Chinese progress is reduced. Naturally that should be balanced against the value of the particular text for the person in question at the moment in time, and all that, but generally speaking, the most efficient path to higher levels of Chinese is to present yourself with things you understand and with things you can get to understand fairly easily.
One poster said to subscribe to the guo2yu3ri4bao4. Is there one available online … in addition to the paper version? Is there a similar thing for Mainland(simplified plus pinyin)?
[quote=“ironlady”]OK, I’m calling you on this one.
Show me where it has been documented that being able to write by hand means greater retention for character recognition. [/quote]
There’s nothing to call. I’m not claiming it’s been documented or scientifically proven, but I do recall seeing evidence that greater depth of processing (such as having to reproduce, as opposed to merely viewing information) leads to improved recall, and this is clearly consistent with my own experience in memorizing all kinds of things, including Chinese characters.
I wouldn’t dispute any of those points.
Now here you have a valid point. I would say that, for me, some writing of characters has helped me recognize them (and prevented loss of recognition over time). I found that valuable, but I agree that the time spent on that needs to be balanced with broader recognition-only exposure.
Actually I brought it up because taking a calligraphy class meant an increase in structured immersion during which I was not only writing but was also listening and speaking. Over the years I learned a lot of Chinese through taking classes like this (and language courses like Japanese, taught in Chinese; and pottery sessions, and many, many repeated museum tours in Chinese at the History and National Palace Museums, and so on).
(+2 to Chinese, -1 to HP)
My listening and vocab in Chinese made just as much practice in my calligraphy course as my writing ability did.
especially since the case for reading Chinese characters is more complicated – is it processing of the phonetic form corresponding to the character, or of the meaning, or both, or…?? See some of the recent MRI studies for interesting stuff.)