If learning Chinese should you learn to read with only the characters or the characters and the Pinyin? At the moment im doing both with and without but it takes longer. Thanks

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If learning Chinese should you learn to read with only the characters or the characters and the Pinyin? At the moment im doing both with and without but it takes longer. Thanks

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I recommend to only read only the characters since although it would helped to link the pronounciation with the visual of the character with pinyin in place, it will distract you continuously in the long run. An approach is to use only the characters and everytime you don’t remember the pronounciation, you can click on the word and be exposed to the way that it is spelled.

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It’s hard to make the fallacy that you should “jump to characters as soon as possible” go away.

Some basic facts:

Everyone (and by everyone, I mean 99.9999% of all successful C2 mandarin learners) start off by reading the following way:

  • minimum 5,000 hours of beginning reading with pinyin over hanzi.

The most effective way to learn the characters, according to the largest research studies conducted**, is to read the characters together in conjunction with pinyin, for an extended period, from the beginning.

Also, consider Victor Mair’s views (pretty much the best advice I have ever seen on learning to read Chinese) : Language Log » The future of Chinese language learning is now ; Language Log » How to learn to read Chinese

**John S. Rohsenow, “The ‘Z.T.’ Experiment in the PRC,” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association. 31, 3 (1996): 33-44).

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Get your listening up to speed before you worry about memorizing characters. By that I mean can you easily understand all of the LingQ ministories? Rely on the pinyin as long as you like, but turn it off to see how much you can “really” read.
Listening is a more fundamental task than reading characters.

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I completely agree, I wish I would’ve started with only characters because after reaching a decent level I began having to basically relearn the characters without pinyin. Because I only learned them to a half/recognizable level. I then had to click on words I knew despite knowing the meaning of the pinyin. Bottom line is you get dependent on them. And characters like 准，难，谁 will look the same to you. I haven’t used the pinyin for the characters feature for a year now and it’s been great, best decision I ever made. I could care less what a “study” says it’s my personal experience.