Hi everyone, having a bit of an existential crisis here and have come to realize I really need to buckle down on improving my Chinese now that I am on the cusp of getting my APRC and being here for the long haul.
I already am around HSK/TOCFL band 2 (not much lol) in proficiency.
I am currently looking for a language center or school where I can learn Chinese but not how to write. Controversial theory, but I feel like the writing element takes too much bandwidth for me, which could be instead used for the other 3 skills, specifically speaking and listening. Plus most people type nowadays, and typing Chinese is infinitely easier!
Has anyone had any good experiences with language centers or schools that focus entirely on Speaking, Listening, and Reading skills?
I am considering taking a year or two sabbatical to really upgrade my Chinese, but I definitely need to find the right enviro first.
I can barely read and write, well i can’t really write. But I read well enough to understand what things are like signs or menu items. I also looked for this in the past to only work on speaking at a higher level.
All language centers to my knowledge teach writing as part of the core curriculum. If you want to excise writing then self-study with a tutor for correction and guidance would be your best fit for something semi-formal.
The books I’m currently using at school are:
Far East Everyday Chinese has also been recommended to me, but I haven’t used it before.
And of course the usual recommendation of going to language exchange groups and talking with people, or you can trade english tutoring for chinese tutoring with university students.
If you do choose a language school make sure they have free tutoring sessions available. With the amount of tuition paid out for the course you shouldn’t have to pay for the extra help if you need it.
Why would you want to spend all this time to learn Mandarin and still remain illiterate? By this I mean that learning to write is one path to learning how to read. Missing the latter seems . . . not advisable.
This teacher can really help. She’s excellent. She knows how to teach without characters because she is a highly trained Taiwanese language teacher. Taiwanese is typically taught to westerners with romanization only. She knows what she is doing.
I got a lot out of Pimsleur, which made time for when I had a commute. Also Chinesepod.com. Good luck! The latter has tons of content arranged by broad levels but lacks a clear progression system. I cant recall the name of it, but there is a plug-in that works with Netflix to provide pinyin English subtitles on your computer.
Online 1-on-1 Taiwanese tutors. No writing. All speaking, listening, and (optional) reading traditional characters.
In-person schools (NTNU, NTU, ShuoHao, LTL) spend almost half the time hand-writing characters, including time outside of class. Not worth it in the modern era. Sure, learn to hand-write your chinese name, but that’s just 2-4 characters.
Online group classes can be good, but prices are similar to 1-on-1.
Some 1-on-1 tutors (from NT$500/hr to NT$2400/hr):
As I think you probably know, I am a militant proponent of Chinese literacy for long-term foreign residents.
But I also have unorthodox ideas about the best way to achieve this. I think that speaking Mandarin well is actually the hardest part of learning Chinese. There are at least three major challenges: tones, usage, and an alien (for speakers of Indo-European languages) system of grammar.
Given these difficulties, it arguably makes sense not to distract or discourage the learner with the complex writing system at first. It is much easier to learn to read and write later if you can already speak Mandarin well or at least not with tons of fossilized errors.
I advocate that non-native speakers not even look at a charcater let alone read or write on for the first two years of study.
The second two years of serious study can be devoted to reading and a minimal but rigorous introduction to writing. In order to read, students should learn how to write about 500 characters well with ample practice identifying radicals and phonetic components. They should be able to name each radical and all of the strokes as well as be able to write out those 500 characters fluently by hand. The characters to be studied should be distributed evenly across the various classes of characters rathar than being the most common ones.
Most of their time in reading should be spent on learning to identify and read texts that they already know how to say.
Next they should spend a year or so going through all the Taiwanese Chinese and history textbooks from elementary school to high school and doing lots of extracurricular reading with Manga, young adult fiction, newspapers, and young adult fiction.
Finally, they can spend a year or so learning how to write in Chinese–not writing out characters by hand but composing their own emails, essays, stories, and reports.
So in six years they will be fully literate and speak Mandarin well.
The underlying concept is that if you are going to spend 10,000 hours or more to learn something highly complex, it makes sense to break that domain into separate sequenced components (and subdivide those further) rather than have everything thrown at you at once.
This is based on my own experience of learning the traditional way, being constantly overwhelmed, hitting the wall, feeling deeply frustrated and insecure, and almost giving up numerous times. In other words, the typically traumatic experience of learning Chinese.
Meaning you can use your phone to reference characters or the test sheet.
But u will probably only get so far before u fail a test, maybe 1 year.
If you go to a school that doesnt require tests to pass a semester then that would work too.
I agree with what you are saying. I have spent countless hours writing characters over and over but ultimately they just dont stick, too hard to remember how to write them off the top of your head. The effort in vs what you get out of it, at least with an adult brain does not add up.
Um, yeah, there is.
It’s called “cold character reading”. Horrible name but didn’t know it was going to become “a thing”. Somewhat like what you’re saying, but the missing piece is that students read language very early on, but ONLY language they can respond to/understand immediately and correctly when hearing it. So the ear informs the eye what the characters are. It’s only possible to have people read characters with absolutely no previous memorization because the possible pool of words is small. Waiting two years is a nightmare of memorization because it’s much more difficult to guess correctly from context when there’s so much possible language to be guessed.
I’ve been a professional in Chinese for decades and have only infrequently needed to write and NEVER by hand from memory. I don’t worry about writing and encourage my students to read, read, read instead. Time spent reading is much better. Also, after five months of instruction in a high school, with no one ever writing or being quizzed on characters, students were able to write anywhere from 10% to 67% of the characters corresponding to words they had acquired when given an unannounced test. (“Able” here meaning write correctly or with a minor error but still recognizable by a fluent reader.)
So all of my online classes are basically listening, speaking and reading only.
I think the idea is more not to spend hours memorizing stroke order and how to write characters by hand? Which, yeah, I can definitely see that being time spent unnecessarily.
In my too-infrequent and brief efforts with Chinese, I’ve cared about knowing how to type characters, but memorizing how to write by hand? Nah, not worth it for all the added time required.
I had faced this issue when I considered studying Chinese at National Chengchi University, but I didn’t want to waste my time writing characters from memory as it’s so time consuming and not something I’ll do in real life (I barely even write by hand in English anymore). So I asked the university if you have to write from memory to pass the course and was told “It’s up to the teacher”.
People should learn a language according to their needs and shouldnt be judged based on that. Unless you want to give a language exam, learning only spoken chinese is all well and good and thats what my goal is too.
All my time living here, i have gotten by well enough translating written chinese and never ever had the need to handwrite it but ability to speak and listen is the most highest necessity.
“Street Chinese” is the answer. Ditch the classroom and hire an articulate university student for 400 NT per hour to go out and about with you in the real world and discuss anything and everything you encounter. Only two rules: no English and no having your language teacher step in for you at any point and begin translating for you. Have the teacher video record you speaking so you can review what you’ve learned later. If you have upcoming business at the bank or at a government office have the teacher playact the interaction with you so you’ll be prepared with what you’ll have to say. The teacher will accompany you and coach you thru the encounter but without ever stepping in and speaking for you. Whatever needs to be said to the other person involved will have to come out of your own mouth one way or the other.
If I am not mistaken don’t university courses split writing and conversation into days of the week? Down in pingtung and kaohsiung that’s how I saw it done. Most of the Japanese students paid less and skipped the writing because they already had Kanji. This was for people not relying on a student visa of course. But it seems easy to just pay for the non writing courses…which are essentially like cram school memory drills anyway.
I agree with you. Time will go by so why not build the foundation along the way. I was here on a 6 month assignment in 2005 and took two semesters at NTNU starting out in an intermediate class.
They taught me how to study to build vocabulary for a strong foundation. If you have the luxury of attending NTNU for 8 months, you’ll be functional. At 3 years, you’re fluent. I recall they crank out about 1500 Chinese speakers a year, so they know what they’re doing.
I don’t think people would study French or Spanish and not practice your spelling words, so why is Chinese any different? I see writing without a computer as a way to take the vocabulary from short term to long term memory. So many words in Chinese are pronounced the same way so seeing a word will keep you in context. Native speakers will often clarify words because of this.
The method I used was flash cards, then I listened to the words to write the phonetic pronunciation and the character.
I use Chinese in a professional environment, so street Chinese would not be enough for me and could lead to some embarrassing situations.
At this point, it’s really up to me to set some vocabulary goals, read every day, speak every day. I own a small company, so reading is important.
It doesn’t matter if it’s NTNU or any other school.
