So your teachers are at fault…it’s their job to be up on “latest” developments, such as the use of mnemonics, kinesthetic memory, multiple intelligences, etc. in learning. There is more to teaching than just opening the book to the right page and saying, “OK, John, read number one.” Or at least there should be.
Any teacher who tells you “there’s no way to learn Chinese characters except writing them 1 million times each” is not earning his/her salary. (Although, to be fair, most language center salaries are so laughably small that probably the teacher earns it just showing up. )
Recognition (reading) and production (writing) are such different skills that it doesn’t stand to reason that writing is necessarily required for reading. It just doesn’t make sense. But since teachers here have no clue about how to tell you how to learn to recognize (if we’re assuming that writing with no “crutches” is not an issue for the time being), they can only fall back on how THEY were taught, which was the copy-1-million-times school of thought. And they were taught that way because that’s the way THEIR teachers learned…5000 glorious years of Chinese pedagogical history, which consists of 100 years repeated 50 times.
Terry: I’m with Gener here, and I studied Chinese, English and French in Germany with European teachers and Chinese teachers with European education. For me, it will always be easier to recognize Chinese characters after having written them myself. I don’t really practise much nowadays, and even during university, I didn’t exactly spend hours on practising Chinese characters. But an important step for me to recognize characters let alone being able to write them (and I wrote a lot of characters before German computers slowly started to accept software for inputting Chinese) would be writing them down myself on a flash card. I’m still hardly able to recognize a character without having written it myself or at least having counted the strokes, thus having written the character mentally.
I think different people have different ways of learning. My mind isn’t very visual, might be different if I had had more specific “training” in early childhood. But I’m no expert here. Still, I think at least for some people, there is a point in practising written Chinese for being able to read Chinese better.
I don’t handwrite Chinese. I’m definitely computer-dependent. For painless Chinese writing, get a computer is the best advice. However, deprived of computer, I’m a complete vegetable. I write no more words than basic pronouns and verbs.
Hope the Chinese Squabble thing will improve my retention and brush up my handwriting as well.
Ironlady,
You’re always saying that, but some people like learning to write Chinese y’know? I enjoy writing. I also find that I learn to read the characters best by writing. I mean you say you’re an educational expert. Surely you acknowledge the benefit of physically writing the charcters to aid recognition. I disagree with your claim that recognition and production are such diffewrent skills. They are different, but very closely linked.
I can also think of loads of circumstances where one would need to write Chinese by hand: writing addresses out for people, taking phone messages etc.
But that’s rather the problem with Chinese characters: reading and writing are not so closely linked, especially when compared with alphabetic languages. And then there’s the god-awful problem of how characters relate to Mandarin, the language itself.
Different people may find that different approaches work best for them. If writing characters over and over works for you, great. But pedagogical research in this area does tend to back up ironlady.
Well I can’t really slag my teachers since I only have time for one class a week for 2.5 hours(~NT300 equivalent in Cdn $s) which is strickly a pronounciation class. Maybe if I quit my job I can free up 10 hours a day and go back for more university to learn the language but then I wouldn’t be able to pay for tuition haha.
So teaching proper pronunciation is my teacher’s main job. Learning to read and write is something i’m doing on my own time and the best way i can do that right now is to sit at a desk, listen to some chinese pop and put pen to paper, this after a grueling day of work writing computer code all day (main reason i don’t even want to turn on my computer when i get home, sorry Ax).
I will go to the bookstore this weekend to check out any writing/phonetic/root word books that may help(but dang those books aren’t cheap!).
If you’re coding computer stuff all day, probably the “artsy” side of Chinese characters is relaxing. Maybe you should try calligraphy, too – it reinforces the correct stroke order and, if you can ignore the ugliness of your initial attempts (well, at least mine were completely awful!) it can be relaxing.
I wish it was relaxing writing chinese characters, if only my hand didn’t cramp up afterwards i’d probably enjoy it more!
I’ve just got this different goal thats all. I’m expecting myself to be dropped into the middle of Taipei later this year and want to be totally self sufficient asap. If it means torturing myself right now to learn to read and write c’est la vie.
I’m also with Ironlady on this one. I think that beginning students of Mandarin should not even look at a character until after a year of intensive training in the spoken language. Before you start memorizing characters, make sure you memorize the tone of each word that you know. In the long run, learning to read and write Chinese are the easy part. Speaking Chinese correctly is very difficult though.
I did want to ask Ironlady about dictation though. I think that Pinyin dictation is a very useful exercise–I’ve found helpful in learning Taiwanese as an integrated means of reinforcing tone shift rules and phonetic pairings (like the initial ‘b’ and ‘p’ that an be so hard to hear). Does your opposition to dictation include Pinyin dictation?
Since this topic has gone astray a bit, I’ll throw in my 2 cents.
After rethinking my goals a few weeks ago, I decided to almost totally stop my practice of writing characters. My main focus is listening, speaking and reading (in that order). I’ve found that since I cut out the writing element I’ve been able to learn many (many many) more new vocabulary words a day. And I have a feeling that once my reading gets to a certain level and I start to turn more energies towards writing, writing will be a much easier task.
If you think about how much you’re really going to write on a day to day basis, you’ll find that it’s almost unnecessary to write anything past very basic stuff (name, address, etc.) I really think putting to much focus on writing can kind of block up the whole learning process. I certainly feel better being able to learn 40+ new vocabulary words in a day, then how to write about 5.
Just so you know, in the end I’m very serious about the writing side too. I plan on attending a University here in about one year. In the beginning it’s much more satisfying to be able to read a whole lot of characters, then write some. And if your pronunciation is correct, plus you know how to read, you can type anything you can say on a computer that has pinyin input.
Yeah, guys, before you all get your duanku in a knot, please read what I said carefully.
It’s just fine and dandy to write characters till the cows come home if that’s your own particular form of pleasure. Certainly it’s cheaper and more legal than many pastimes out there.
My point is that there should be ALTERNATIVES offered based on current (or even nearly current, or even in-the-last-thirty-years!) pedagogical research. If the teachers don’t have time to do this kind of reading individually, schools should organize something. There should be MANY other methods offered students to assist them in learning how to write characters IF that is their goal. For many, it IS a goal, but I strongly deny that there is but one way to achieve it (ie., rote repetition writing out the characters).
As for Pinyin dictations, I’m all for ‘em, if we assume that Pinyin is a pretty phonetic form of writing. That would mean that after a student had mastered the sound-letter correspondence, there shouldn’t be any stumbling blocks to writing anything s/he wanted in Pinyin. What I don’t like is the poor pedagogical design of a test that doesn’t really know what it’s testing. Let’s say I give a dictation into Chinese characters to my students. Does Student X get the sentence wrong because: a. he didn’t know what I said; b. he knew but he didn’t remember how to write the characters; c. he didn’t have time to write it all out (wait time on questions, especially in beginners’ classes, is a MAJOR teacher problem in Taiwan!)…etc. In short, I don’t know what I’m measuring. However, as a teacher, it’s the easiest way to give a grade – only one correct answer, either you wrote it or you didn’t. And probably as a traditionally-trained teacher, I’ll take off full credit for “wrong” characters even if it’s one stroke off…
I personally was taught using Audio-Lingualism and the old blue DeFrancis book. But I wish I had been taught using a variety of methods that would have sped up the process and improved my overall retention. I particularly wish I had learned with tonal spelling, and with LOTS of level-appropriate extra reading, which builds not only character recognition but also grammar and usage. Well, I guess at least it was slightly better than “gubo and palanka”… :shock:
Ironlady, I agree with you in a way. I don’t really think the schools should teach characters. That’s up to students to learn for themselves. One problem, however, is that for a student like myslef, who likes to learn characters, I much prefer a textbook like the Shida one, which uses characters. Now if some of the students in a class can’t read then you can’t use this book.
As for dictation, as you said it’s probably not a good evaluation tool, but I like it for practice in writing ‘fluency’.
Wouldn’t writing fluency be better served with free timed writings, on a topic of the teacher’s or students’ choice? Dictations for me only serve to test whether you can recall each and every character, plus extra points for general verbal memory (to keep the whole sentence in the memory until it’s written down somehow).
I’ve now got the task of getting a guy up to speed in Chinese to take MBA classes by September starting from nearly but not quite zero…I’m hoping against hope I can convince his “regular” Chinese school to switch him into a “listening/speaking/reading” section rather than one that emphasizes writing so much. His regular classes are actually working against me (the other several hours of instruction he gets are mine) in that he has to spend so much time doing meaningless repetitive writing of characters just for a class that isn’t really moving him toward his particular goals, which (as outlined today in excruciating detail by the director of the MBA program) are to understand, speak, and read Chinese. Period. Any writing would be by computer if at all. But I covet those hours that he could be using to actually acquire the language and don’t want them spent in busywork. 'Course my posterior is on the line on this one, too…
I think you’re in a tough position on this one. My feeling is that people who are in a hurry to learn Mandarin based on some artificial deadline always have trouble. Learning Mandarin simply takes time and a reasonable amount of consistent effort. Generally this means about two years of full time study in Taiwan with enough time outside of class to actually talk to people.
Yes, but the system of tonal spelling used in this study is absurd…adding silent letters to indicate tone. In my opinion, it does NOT add either visual punch or memorable-ness to the syllables, and it loses the relationship between them (phonetic similarity within the different tones). I don’t think I could memorize the system in a year let alone improve my tones using it. (All right, I’m exaggerating but not much.)
When I say “tonal spelling” of course I’m talking about Tonally Orthographic Pinyin (referenced endlessly in other posts). I’d really like to see a study looking at TOP versus normal Pinyin, particularly if color-coding is added (I code my beginners’ files by tone whether in TOP or characters).
Somewhat true. Haha, going through university required alot of “artificial deadlines” too but I still learned most of the material. I must admit, there were many instances of “trouble” though.
[quote=“Feiren”]
Learning Mandarin simply takes time and a reasonable amount of consistent effort. Generally this means about two years of full time study in Taiwan with enough time outside of class to actually talk to people.[/quote]
sigh Unfortunately for me you’re 100% correct on this one. Too bad we can’t all be in the Matrix and just download the language straight into the brain…“Woah, I know Chinese” All I can do now is limit my character set and learn those ones well. I guess only time can increase it. Guess I’m just looking for the best short cuts to learn the language.
On the topic of pinyin: It’s a great starter for a total beginner in the pronunciation of the language, but it really doesn’t help after the initial start. And of course, it doesn’t even help you in the reading/writing character department at all.
Guess you don’t yet use dictionaries…? Many very good ones are referenced according to Pinyin, including my own personal (hardcopy) favorite the “21st Century”. Also very important for speedy character input on computers, unless you love bopomofo so much as to learn an un-ergonomic keyboard setup just for it…
Writing Chinese has always been fun as well as frustrating. I used to practice a lot. Daily that is. Then one day it dawned on me that if I was to continue to retain my written Chinese, it would have to be a life long goal. This was fine until I moved back to the states. My environment changed and my amount of time that could be used in the study of Chinese was shortened.
So this lead me to this thought. I use the computer all the time. Daily. Why not take the time I use in hand writing Chinese, and put it towards listening comprehension, spoken, as well as reading it. Since then I think that my time has been put to better use. Of course this is my own opinion and I am welcome to others that have different ones.
Many of my Chinese friends loose some of their character retention as they spend more time away from their native country. Written Chinese is definitely something that needs your constant attention. Good luck to those that pursue that goal.
)
(main reason i don’t even want to turn on my computer when i get home, sorry Ax).
All I can do now is limit my character set and learn those ones well. I guess only time can increase it. Guess I’m just looking for the best short cuts to learn the language.