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From the moment I began learning Mandarin more than half a century ago, I had a strong, visceral opposition to learning the characters.  I wanted to learn the language — its phonology, grammar, lexicon, morphology, syntax, idioms.  My teachers forced me to learn some characters, but I figured out various ways to devote much more of my time focusing on the language rather than on the writing system.  Most of my secrets for learning Sinitic languages in pre-digital days are detailed in the "Readings" below.  But it is so much easier to learn Chinese in the current age of electronic resources than it was even a couple of decades ago.  Now there's no excuse for or reason to slave over character flash cards and dictation (tīngxiě 聽寫 /听写 [a striking example of the difference between traditional and simplified characters]).

Back in the bad old days, the hardest part of learning Mandarin for someone like me was finding enough materials written in a phonetic transcription (Romanization or bopomofo).  I managed to find some old missionary materials, and these were a godsend of which I devoured thousands of pages while my classmates were suffering over the characters.  But my salvation, my Bodhisattva, was the materials from Guóyǔ rìbào 國語日報 (Mandarin Daily News).  It is now but a pale reflection of what it was in the 50s-70s when I was fortunate enough to read it every day.

Another resource that I loved was T'ung and Pollard's Colloquial Chinese (by P.C. [Ping-Cheng] T'ung and D.E. [David] Pollard), which, insofar as I remember, didn't have a single Chinese character in it.

Anyway that is stage one — learning the language via phonetic transcription.  I would recommend serious students persist at this stage for at least one year and, if they cannot devote a considerable proportion of their time each week to the study of Mandarin, then perhaps two years.  After that, those who want to become literate in characters can move on to the next stage, but this is not for everyone (see the concluding two paragraphs of this post).

A wonderful electronic tool that provides abundant materials for making the transition from stage one to stage two is called Du Chinese (that means "read Chinese").

The second stage is starting to read character texts.  To make this process as painless and efficient as possible, I recommend reading massive amounts of phonetically annotated character texts.  When I was learning Chinese, it was very difficult to find such authentic materials that were originally written for native Chinese readers.  Now there are many software programs that will add Hanyu Pinyin as Ruby phonetic annotations.  One such sophisticated system is Peter Leimbigler's Chinese Key.  Language Log readers are welcome to tell us their own favorites in the comments.

The third, and final, stage is to wean oneself off of phonetically annotated texts and read the characters directly.  You will need to learn how to look up words in dictionaries, whether paper or digital.  But be prepared to spend a lifetime if you want to become fully literate, especially in Literary Sinitic (LS) / Classical Chinese (CC).

If you regularly read large volumes of interesting Chinese texts and faithfully look up all characters that you don't know (there will be many, especially with LS / CC texts or semi-LS / CC texts), gradually you will come to be able to write the characters — especially if you devote a period of a few months to learning the basic strokes, radicals, and components, and practice writing them during that period, plus spend an hour or so each week writing out passages from your favorite poems, essays, and so forth.  After all, writing Chinese characters is a heavily neuro-muscular activity, so you do have to actually write them — you can't just think about writing them.

There are plenty of people who know Mandarin (or Cantonese or Taiwanese, etc.) only through Romanization. Indeed, I started a Hanyu Pinyin only class at Penn about thirty years ago, and it is still thriving today. For the last twenty years or so, it has been taught by Dr. (of Chinese literature) Maiheng Shen Dietrich 沈迈衡.  She is the granddaughter of Mao Dun 茅盾 (real name Shen Yanbing 沈雁冰 [1896-1981]), one of the most famous Chinese writers of the 20th century.  I'm proud of this course at Penn, and I'm grateful to Maiheng for teaching it so expertly for all these years.

As I mentioned in a number of previous Language Log posts and comments, often it's the most brilliant and best students who refuse to have anything to do with characters, because they want to learn the language (its pronunciation, intonation, vocabulary, idiomatic usage [and I'm not talking about chengyu {set phrases} here], grammar, syntax…), and they learn Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, etc. extremely well — not caring a fig about the characters (not having time for them; too many other important things in life than sacrificing countless hours to the characters, which they instinctively, innately know they'll never master anyway).  (See the last comment to "Help through French puberty for sale" [7/24/19].)

 

Readings

"How to learn Mandarin" (7/17/18)

"How not to learn Chinese" (4/16/17)

"How to learn Chinese and Japanese" (2/17/14)

"Excessive quadrisyllabicism" (2/17/18) — I was reminded of this post by this tweet from the author of the following famous article

"Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" (8/27/91)

"Learning languages is so much easier now" (8/18/17)

"Beyond fluff" (3/19/17)

"Aphantasia — absence of the mind's eye"

"Sinological suffering" (3/31/17)

"How to learn to read Chinese" (5/25/08)

"Learning to read and write Chinese" (7/11/16)

"The future of Chinese language learning is now" (4/5/14)

"Paperless reading" (4/12/15)

"Chinese without a teacher" (2/6/16)

"Spelling mistakes in English and miswritten characters in Chinese" (12/18/12)

"Learn Nepali" (9/21/16)

[h.t. John McWhorter; thanks to Mark Swofford]

August 13, 2019 @ 8:24 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language teaching and learning, Transcription, Writing systems

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