When to learn to write?

Language Learning Chinese
1

Hey all a little bkgd info:

Been in the wan for about 6 months now, been learnin’ Chinese for about 7 months now… all self study I should add. I’m currently on book 3 of the PAVC series. Been listening to the Audio mp3 that comes with each text pretty religiously while following along in the book. . . Seems to work for oral comprehension. . . That said, I have been following the advice of many who have said focus on listening and reading first. I can read basically any character I can understand listening wise, but can only write a few by memory.

So, should I begin to tackle the writing aspect with full force yet? I feel my conversational ability has improved dramatically since upon my arrival 5-6 months ago, but still definitely struggle to hold a “big-kid” conversation. And if the local can speak English, I usually just revert to English.

2

Do you want to learn to write by hand (form characters from memory), or to write (compose) texts (sentences and paragraphs) using a computer or other input device?

What do you anticipate doing with your Chinese writing? Filling out forms? Writing articles or poems for pleasure? Calligraphy? Writing notes to people? Writing reports for work?

All these questions would determine how you should proceed. Just asking “how should I learn to write?” is too broad – and it’s not your fault; that is the approach the schools take, if they even ask that question. Usually they just say “you WILL learn to write and you will learn to write like this…”

3

Personally I’d say ‘just do it’. When you learn to say a word, learn how to write it too. It’s kind of fun, and I find it really helps to memorize both meanings and the form of the character (ie., improves my reading).

Do take the trouble to remember the correct stroke order. You might need a teacher to show you this.

Typing is easy. You can use pinyin input and the text prediction (auto character selection) is very good, at least on Microsoft Word. Seems like the machine knows what I want to write before I do. But that makes you lazy - learn to write with a pen.

4

[quote=“finley”]Personally I’d say ‘just do it’. When you learn to say a word, learn how to write it too. It’s kind of fun, and I find it really helps to memorize both meanings and the form of the character (ie., improves my reading).

Do take the trouble to remember the correct stroke order. You might need a teacher to show you this.

Typing is easy. You can use pinyin input and the text prediction (auto character selection) is very good, at least on Microsoft Word. Seems like the machine knows what I want to write before I do. But that makes you lazy - learn to write with a pen.[/quote]

i use some website called yellow bridge for stroke order… I find that writing definitely helps with reading speed, but I guess my initial concern is, which characters should i learn to write first?

5

[quote=“ironlady”]Do you want to learn to write by hand (form characters from memory), or to write (compose) texts (sentences and paragraphs) using a computer or other input device?

What do you anticipate doing with your Chinese writing? Filling out forms? Writing articles or poems for pleasure? Calligraphy? Writing notes to people? Writing reports for work?

All these questions would determine how you should proceed. Just asking “how should I learn to write?” is too broad – and it’s not your fault; that is the approach the schools take, if they even ask that question. Usually they just say “you WILL learn to write and you will learn to write like this…”[/quote]

Thanks ironlady,

hmm, I like i mentioned to the other poster, I guess writing is a way for me to retain the characters that I often read in everyday life on the streets. . . I don’t anticipate ever to have to write long notes by hand for work, but if I could I would.

Not to suck up, but I guess so far I have followed your advice and others who said focus on audio input first, that way you don’t have to think about how to say basic phrases like, “how much is that? I’d like 2 of those, and 3 of those” etc… The problem now I face with the audio aspect is other than the PAVC series I am running out of comprehensible input. Preferably something interesting!

6

Learn the basic radicals first. There is a very good book (it’s called something obvious like ‘reading and writing chinese’ … can’t find it on my bookshelf right now!) that takes you through exactly that process. It starts with one- or two-stroke characters and then builds up those pieces into more complicated characters. Once you realise that all the characters are constructed from basic building blocks (radicals … almost an alphabet) the whole thing gets much easier.

That particular book lists and describes about 1000 characters, but once you’ve learned those it’s easy to pick up more.

7

I went to the Taipei book-show yesterday and bought me the new Far east 3000 Chinese Character Dictionary.
It came with a software CD-Rom.
If interested, I made a short video demo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5uCe5fM2Mk

8

Sorry, but I totally disagree.

AFAIK it has not been proven anywhere that writing out characters by hand helps with recognition. Think about it: those are two totally separate skills. Having to “scroll through” a mental list of strokes to get to the difference before you can recognize the character is not going to help with reading per se.

There may be benefit from you attending to (paying more attention to) the character while writing it. But I do not believe that the benefit in RECOGNITION comes from repetition in WRITING it.

Likewise, with radicals: there’s nothing wrong with learning radicals as a key to recognizing characters, since they occur in so many characters. But I would not begin by memorizing the radicals. I would get a list of the most common ones, and the ones that are most likely to help you because they will be apparent in the highest-frequency characters.

You can get a frequency list of characters (which is unfortunately distinct from the frequency list of WORDS used in spoken Mandarin) if you want to start with the most common characters. You could also think about learning the characters for the most frequently used WORDS first, but then you’d probably want to discount the characters/words that would not appear in writing a lot. In terms of “writing as a representation of speech” that wouldn’t be a problem, but if your goal is to read “real Chinese writing”, the frequency tables diverge more.

Further expansion on these ideas is available on my blog: albanylanguagelearning.com/blog/

9

Well, I confess I’m not an educator, but I do have a degree in psychology, which I suppose at least proves I didn’t sleep through all my lectures, if nothing else…

Sure, from a purely functional point of view, you can say that when writing you’re using that bit of your brain and when reading you’re using this bit. They are mostly separate. And it’s certainly possible to do one without the other (my reading is much, much better than my writing). However you can’t say they’re unrelated. When writing a new character you should not be simply performing a pure motor task (as they did in ancient China). You should be practicing the sound to yourself and using it to form sentences. Yes, I know Taiwanese teachers still get kids writing single characters over and over again; that’s a complete waste of time.

When you read, your low-level visual processing occurs in large chunks. In English, that often means complete phrases acquired in a single recognition event. In Chinese, I suspect it means small groups of characters, perhaps three or four at a time (if I try to read individual characters, I stumble). So you should learn to read and write in the same manner - one reason why I heartily disagree with making kids learn phonics.

Besides, The act of doing something does often reinforce apparently unrelated cognitive tasks associated with that something. From simple practical experience in your own language, can you say that writing does not affect your ability to read quickly and efficiently, or that reading does not improve your writing skills? Our brains aren’t that simple.

I was not suggesting that one should study the radicals themselves; merely that one should start with one-radical characters and progress to compound characters which use those radicals. From my personal experience, I think it makes the acquisition task that much easier; more logical. I have simply never been able to learn to write some random new character - even when I know the meaning and pronunciation - unless somewhere buried previously in my motor memory are the radicals from which the character is composed. Maybe that’s just me.

Once you’ve got the basics nailed down, then I do agree that the frequency list is a very useful tool indeed.

10

Interesting perspectives. Thank you! I should mention, I studied Japanese for 3 years before, (in a high school classroom environment in America, so my Japanese sucks). But it did give me a basic familiarity with the Chinese Hanzi, (Kanji in Nihongo :wink:.

So I take it you would both agree, finley and ironlady, that writing characters over and over again by themselves does not help with reading. Hmm, I suppose all of my characters I can read without thinking on the street are from hearing them being read to me by an audio CD while I follow along with my index finger. . . Totally boring, but that’s another thread all together. :slight_smile:

11

But if you studied Japanese before, there should not be that much of an issue with the Hanzi, right? You should actually find it much easier to use them.

But: From my own experience, I can tell you that if you have learned Japanese before, try not to use Hanzi. I have fallen into that trap the first two years I learned Chinese, and I think it really stopped me being able to learn Chinese better. This is mainly to the point that if I see a Chinese text, I already know the words from Japanese and thus will not learn the pronounciation that intensively. I will just think “Ah, this word I already know, so no need to learn it”. But, the first time you actually talk with somebody, you will have no idea what he is saying because you did not learn the word/pronounciation.
Ok, this may not be the case for you anymore, because you are in Taiwan for that long, but I tend to make all my vocabulary learning only in Pinyin. Of course, I can all the characters, and am usually able to write them as well, but if I e.g. do vocabulary list, I will only write Pinyin and German on it. Characters will often distract you, because you tend to learn only how they are read, not the recognition of the pronounciation.

This is my personal experience.

But, learning to write characters is not much of a waste, I think. If you want to write some letters in Chinese, it is definitely good to be able to write them. Also, it makes fun.

12

It’s fine if you think it’s fun; that’s something you choose to do for pleasure. Calligraphy is, too. And many other activities.

Embarking on an endeavor like memorizing how to write thousands (literally) of characters by memory by hand based on the idea that you want to write some letters in Chinese? I’d use a word processor, personally. And by so doing, I’d be able to write using probably 60-70% more characters than I would be able to write if I made myself write everything by hand from memory.

There’s nothing wrong with handwriting from memory if it’s something you like, or something you can get respect from friends for, or admiration from Taiwanese, or whatever. If you want those things. If you want functional ability to get along in a Chinese-speaking (and reading and writing) society of the 21st century, handwriting is not the best way to go IMO. Mechanical literacy used to mean remembering the strokes to form the proper character. Today, it much more often means being able to pick the right character out of a lineup – and most often, this is a lineup that is optimized through use and which presents characters in at least word-length context. The functionality required to produce a text using written Chinese is simply not what it once was – even back when I began studying.

See my blog comments on manipulation of characters. Any benefits to character recognition that come from handwriting come, I believe, from attending to the characters through manipulation of them. That could be done in many easier ways than repeated writing.

13

[quote=“Hellstorm”]But if you studied Japanese before, there should not be that much of an issue with the Hanzi, right? You should actually find it much easier to use them.

But: From my own experience, I can tell you that if you have learned Japanese before, try not to use Hanzi. I have fallen into that trap the first two years I learned Chinese, and I think it really stopped me being able to learn Chinese better. This is mainly to the point that if I see a Chinese text, I already know the words from Japanese and thus will not learn the pronounciation that intensively. I will just think “Ah, this word I already know, so no need to learn it”. But, the first time you actually talk with somebody, you will have no idea what he is saying because you did not learn the word/pronounciation.
Ok, this may not be the case for you anymore, because you are in Taiwan for that long, but I tend to make all my vocabulary learning only in Pinyin. Of course, I can all the characters, and am usually able to write them as well, but if I e.g. do vocabulary list, I will only write Pinyin and German on it. Characters will often distract you, because you tend to learn only how they are read, not the recognition of the pronounciation.

This is my personal experience.

But, learning to write characters is not much of a waste, I think. If you want to write some letters in Chinese, it is definitely good to be able to write them. Also, it makes fun.[/quote]

You are absolutely right about it distracting me from the audio interpretation, at least my first 2 months here my reading was way better than my listening or speaking, (from nihongo).

But now, I have heard enough Chinese chatter to get past that, and have been outgoing in trying to make bilingual local friends who don’t mind if I throw in a few Chinese utterances here and there.

However, Book 3 from the PAVC series is good in that in the dialogues, it gives you the characters with tone marks above them. So if you remember the pinyin, (which is easy to do growing up with the latin alphabet) you can’t screw up the tone because it is right there.

I just wish magazines had tone marks over them. . . Because PAVC is really, DULL… Ha Ha…

14

That’s just my opinion, I think best would be to learn the bopomofo, and most importantly learn it by heart.
When we teach English to small children, we put up with the ABC quite a lot and it’s not even close to be as good as the bopomofo.
Why I think the (bo po mo fo) will be best is because it will be easier to disconnect from your native language.
Each character represents exactly the corresponding Chinese sound. BoPoMoFo spelling contests would be a joke. I did this with children here before. First an English spelling contest and then a Chinese with BoPoMoFo. They were just laughing.
Most Chinese teachers here do not think as I do though. And when I demanded them to review it every hour before starting class they literally laughed at me.

15

[quote=“danbinggui”]
However, Book 3 from the PAVC series is good in that in the dialogues, it gives you the characters with tone marks above them. So if you remember the pinyin, (which is easy to do growing up with the latin alphabet) you can’t screw up the tone because it is right there.

I just wish magazines had tone marks over them. . . Because PAVC is really, DULL… Ha Ha…[/quote]

But PAVC will drop the tone marks at lesson 3 or 4.

16

[quote=“Hellstorm”][quote=“danbinggui”]
However, Book 3 from the PAVC series is good in that in the dialogues, it gives you the characters with tone marks above them. So if you remember the pinyin, (which is easy to do growing up with the latin alphabet) you can’t screw up the tone because it is right there.

I just wish magazines had tone marks over them. . . Because PAVC is really, DULL… Ha Ha…[/quote]

But PAVC will drop the tone marks at lesson 3 or 4.[/quote]

Ahh, you’re right. Well lesson 8 of book 3 actually… but close enough.

Going to start a new thread about reading materials.