Steve mentioned repeatedly that you have to dedicate time to learn the characters. Apparently, he used paper flashcards back then. Others use Remembering the Hanzi, Anki’s word lists of 3000 characters or even other methods. I wonder if it is generally advisable to dedicate time to (first) study 3000-4000 characters or if it is equally effective to just pick them up as you encounter them (on Lingq)?
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Characters or not, it’s all just words. Learning characters doesn’t have to be separate from anything else.
My story:
At first I was not intending to learn characters at all because it seemed so daunting, so I just read in pinyin. However, there was always characters above the pinyin which I thought I ignored, but after a while I started recognizing some of them and could eventually read easier texts with characters.
At the time I was also doing flashcards showing both pinyin and characters, still mostly focusing on pinyin, and reached about 1000 words (not single characters) before finding LingQ.
I kept the pinyin on in LingQ for a while and eventually turned it off, and now I’m reading novels outside of LingQ.
Some views:
Maybe Steves method was the most effective in his time, interesting content with pinyin being hard to find and dictionaries being so inconvenient.
I’m not convinced that the way I did it was the more effective, but it was a lot easier than memorizing thousands of characters.
If you’re gonna memorize character then I would say the first 1000 is reasonable. More than that is just too much work, and a lot of characters are also too abstract or have too many meanings to be understandable by themselves.
I’ve also found that with a lot of characters you don’t actually have to understand them well, you just have to get the gist of them which then helps you understand and remember the actual words they appear in.
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I am still a beginner in Chinese. I have been studying for about a year. I started the first couple months with just pinyin. I found it difficult to find decent content so I decided to learn characters and soon after turned off pinyin. You gradually start to “figure out” characters just by reading. I have spent almost no time studying radicals or character construction but I have been increasingly able to derive meaning and/or pronunciation from unknown characters simply based on their construction. For me the patterns just start to make sense over time as I continue to read more. It also helps me to have a context associated with every new word I encounter. It is probably one of several effective learning methods but based on my limited experience and advice from others just reading (using lingQ) is a viable option to learn Chinese characters. I will say though if you ever want to be able to hand write Chinese its probably a good idea to spend dedicated time on it from the start (I think this might be where Steve is coming from) I am too lazy for that and typing is super easy if you are familiar with pinyin.
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Super interesting topic!
What I did was Assimil Chinese, focusing just on Pinyin and vocabulary. At the same time, I went through Remembering the Hanzi by Heisig and learned the radicals in the order they are laid out in that book. I also read through all 1500 character entries in the book but made no effort to use spaced repetition or flashcards. Then I jumped into reading graded readers at the 150 character level… Knowing the radicals already and having been exposed to the characters in Heisig makes it VERY easy to remember the characters as I learn them through context. I’m currently starting a 450 character graded reader and finding the whole process really enjoyable and quite painless.
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I don’t do flashcards at all, and my known words increases just fine.
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I think it may be useful at the beginning, just so you can sight-read (ie instantly read) the most common couple hundred characters. After that just learn them as they come. Yeah, you’ll forget a lot. But that’s part of the process. Right now I’m studying for the HSK, so I’ve shifted from my strategy of just reading and listening to actually studying the vocabulary that’s on the exam. But as soon as I take the test I’ll revert back.
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Consider Victor Mair’s views: Language Log » How to learn to read Chinese
This is, arguably, the quickest and easiest way to learn characters, and is backed by studies (rather than opinion).
Some quotes:
Victor Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, at the University of Pennsylvania:
“[pinyin over hanzi] was a godsend in that it enabled me to learn Chinese characters passively and painlessly. By assimilating massive amounts of publications [with pinyin with hanzi text], before long I was able to read texts without phonetic annotation.”
John S. Rohsenow, “The ‘Z.T.’ Experiment in the PRC,” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association. 31, 3 (1996): 33-44).
“Under this innovative pedagogical program, Chinese children [and adult illiterates] are taught to read and write standard Mandarin Chinese using [the] Hanyu Pinyin [alphabet] in addition to Chinese characters for the first two years of their education.
In contrast to the standard curriculum, under which [students] are only taught [the] Hanyu Pinyin [alphabet] for the first two months purely as a phonetic notational device for the pronunciation of Chinese characters, under the ``ZhuTi’’ experimental curriculum, children [and other beginning learners] are encouraged to develop their reading and writing skills in standard Mandarin Chinese using [the] Hanyu Pinyin [alphabet] for the first two years.
The [beginning learners] are thus not hampered in their reading and writing development by knowing only a limited number of Chinese characters; within a few weeks they are able to read and write (phonetically) anything that they can say. After more than [fifteen] years [and over 2 million students], results show that the majority of students taught using this [``Z.T.‘’] method learn to read and write using Chinese characters faster and at a higher level than most students who are taught by more traditional methods.”
This result is similar to many other studies (for example, in languages such as English): “whereby children were initially allowed to spell words exactly as they sound (i.e. ignoring the irregularities in English spelling), with the result that these children learned to read and write faster, with no appreciable harm to their later spelling ability.”
With regard to writing characters by hand, I would endorse these study recommendations:
"Our suggestion is abolishing the requirement for writing Chinese characters by hand at the beginning of Chinese language learning process, and utilizing [pinyin input] instead to help the students (1) bypass the difficulties entailed by character hand-writing, (2) achieve an early development of writing skill, and (3) reach a comprehensive improvement of their language competence…
The precious time devoted to character hand-writing by the students is obviously taken away from the more pressing business of learning to speak and read in the language. Moreover, the prolonged and slow-moving process of learning to write Chinese characters by hand often…slows down the entire process of learning Chinese language. "
Another word from Victor Mair: Language Log » How to learn Chinese and Japanese
"If I were the czar or god of Chinese and Japanese language pedagogy, I would not teach students a single Chinese character until they were relatively fluent — about two years. I’ve always said that we should learn languages the way babies do; they learn to speak long before they learn to write…Jerry Packard published a relevant study in 1990:
Jerome L. Packard, “Effects of Time Lag in the Introduction of Characters into the Chinese Language Curriculum,” The Modern Language Journal, 74.2 (1990), 167-175.
Packard found that the time lag of delayed character introduction improved students’ ability to discriminate Chinese sounds, and improved their fluency.
…I’ve been involved with Chinese language teaching long enough (well over forty years; I have taught 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th year Mandarin [I once taught 3rd and 4th year Mandarin simultaneously], and have been teaching Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese for thirty years) to realize that some students are attracted by the characters and that is one of the main reasons they opt to take Chinese language courses (this is especially true of so-called heritage learners). They think that the characters are beautiful or exotic, and sometimes their parents want them to learn the characters to maintain the culture. On the other hand, my experience, and the experience of my colleagues named above, abundantly attest to the wisdom and efficacy of learning the language first and the script later.
The advent of electronic devices for the computer assisted writing of characters has also brought about a sea change in the way they are learned and maintained.
BOTTOM LINES
If you delay introducing the characters, students’ mastery of pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and so forth, are all faster and more secure. Surprisingly, when later on they do start to study the characters (ideally in combination with large amounts of reading interesting texts with phonetic annotation), students acquire mastery of written Chinese much more quickly and painlessly than if writing is introduced at the same time as the spoken language."
Footnote 1: The future of Chinese learning is now: Language Log » The future of Chinese language learning is now
Footnote 2: Personally speaking, there is not much I can add that Victor Mair hasn’t thought about , except to point out that the failure rate of non-native adult learners seeking to learn Mandarin is absolutely atrocious. People who stronly advocate for inefficient learning methods, which suck the joy out of learning the language, add to this failure rate.
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"Our suggestion is abolishing the requirement for writing Chinese characters by hand at the beginning of Chinese language learning process, and utilizing [pinyin input] instead to help the students (1) bypass the difficulties entailed by character hand-writing, (2) achieve an early development of writing skill, and (3) reach a comprehensive improvement of their language competence…
The precious time devoted to character hand-writing by the students is obviously taken away from the more pressing business of learning to speak and read in the language. Moreover, the prolonged and slow-moving process of learning to write Chinese characters by hand often…slows down the entire process of learning Chinese language. "
I would definitely agree with that! There’s simply too little gained from an opportunity/cost perspective from writing characters early on in your Chinese journey.
" the failure rate of non-native adult learners seeking to learn Mandarin is absolutely atrocious. People who stronly advocate for inefficient learning methods, which suck the joy out of learning the language, add to this failure rate. "
it may be worse for Chinese, but it’s terrible for ALL languages. The boring methods that most textbooks and teachers use a prime reasons
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