Characterless Sinitic
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Valerie Hansen is Director of Undergraduate Studies for East Asian Studies at Yale. Yesterday she was talking to a sophomore who had taken 1st and 2nd year Mandarin online and is about to start 3rd year. Valerie writes:
After a while, she told me that she did have one worry about taking 3rd year: she had never written a single character and she wondered if her teacher would expect her to know how to write characters.
This is terrifically interesting.
Penn, and a few other schools, do have special courses that teach Pinyin only classes for Mandarin, but here in the Yale situation we have mainstream courses where the students do not have to write characters by hand. The subject of letting students use computers to write characters for them has come up numerous times on Language Log, and David Moser has written several guest posts and comments addressing this matter in terms of pedagogical tools and practices, but it has never been broached so directly and dramatically as a matter of actual classroom procedures as in the case described by Valerie above.
Whenever possible (at Oberlin in Taiwan, Harvard, Penn, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford), my wife (Li-ching Chang) used to not only permit, but encourage students to emphasize language learning over character memorization, even for Mandarin, and the use of Romanization for learning Cantonese, Shanghainese, and other topolects is well-nigh universal. In fact, most of my colleagues do not consider Cantonese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, etc. to be full-fledged languages because they are taught without the use of characters. This always rankles me, but it seems now that the growth of language learning technology is moving characterless Sinitic language learning even into the primary Mandarin courses. In Singapore, students are permitted to use computers to write essays and exam papers. Increasingly, the dreaded tīngxiě 聽寫 / 听写 (look at the stark difference between the traditional versus the simplified forms of this term!), i.e., "dictation", for quizzes is increasingly coming to be seen as luòhòu 落後 / 落后 ("backward; retrograde"). If the program where she was teaching absolutely required dictation, Li-ching would often tell the students, and this was already 30, 40, and 50 years ago — so enlightened was she, to just write the words in Pinyin if they didn't know how to write them in characters.
Now that the lockdowns of the last year and a half, with the consequent online teaching, are winding down, I would very much like to hear what is happening at schools other than Yale.
Selected readings
- "Characterless future" (3/9/18)
- "A revolution in Sinitic language conceptualization and learning" (1/7/21)
- Pinyin memoirs" (8/13/16)
- "Learning languages is so much easier now" (8/18/17)
- "English and Mandarin juxtaposed" (9/6/13)
- "Pinyin literature contest" (6/30/16)
- "Aphantasia — absence of the mind's eye" (3/24/17)
- "Character Amnesia" (7/22/10)
- "Character amnesia revisited" (12/13/12)
- "Spelling bees and character amnesia" (8/7/13)
- "Character amnesia and the emergence of digraphia" (9/25/13)
- "Dumpling ingredients and character amnesia" (10/18/14)
- "Character amnesia in 1793-1794" (4/24/14)
- "Japanese survey on forgetting how to write kanji" (9/24/12)
- "Character amnesia redux" (4/22/16)
- "MuRIL" (12/19/20)
- "How to learn to read Chinese" (5/25/08)
- "Learning to read and write Chinese" (7/11/16)
- ""Ted Chiang uninvents Chinese characters" (5/13/16)" (5/23/16)
- "Backward Thinking about Orientalism and Chinese Characters" (5/16/16)
- "Firestorm over Chinese characters" (5/23/16)
- "How to learn Chinese and Japanese " (2/17/14)
- "The future of Chinese language learning is now " (4/5/14)
- "Pinyin memoirs" (8/13/16)
- "Pinyin literature contest" (6/30/16)
Jonathan Smith said,
September 1, 2021 @ 10:10 pm
Personally can't imagine requiring a student in Chinese classes at any level to write a single character by hand, ever, period. That would be so… I don't know. 1995?
Neil Kubler said,
September 1, 2021 @ 10:14 pm
In the first-year Chinese program at Williams, we require all students to be able to recognize Chinese characters AND to handwrite them from memory — and they do it well and without complaint. We have speaking/listening classes using audio/video and Pinyin (no characters) on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and reading/writing classes (with all materials in characters) on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with character practice sheets to fill out as homework and a 3-minute in-class tīngxiě each time! We start out with simplified in September and introduce traditional in April; from that point on, in their readings and on tests, students must be able to recognize both forms but may handwrite the one of their choice (preferably consistently within the same piece of writing). By the end of the course, the spoken vocabulary of the students is significantly larger than the written vocabulary, which is limited to what can be written with the approx. 550-600 characters they have by then learned. Why do we make students handwrite characters from memory? It's true that most students, most of the time, will write Chinese via computer or other digital device; but to have memorized the highest-frequency several hundred characters when beginning the study of this language is very helpful for understanding how the Chinese writing system works, for learning to recognize new characters, and for distinguishing look-alike characters when reading.
Karen Lofstrom said,
September 1, 2021 @ 10:58 pm
A quick google tells me that one needs to know two to three thousand characters to manage street signs, newspapers, etc. Necessary eventually, but probably not the best way to learn to SPEAK.
David Marjanović said,
September 2, 2021 @ 3:11 am
Learning to write a character certainly helps with remembering what exactly it looks like, meaning not to confuse it with very similar characters (of which there are often something like five).
…me, anyway. I don't know how representative I am. (And I definitely recognize a few characters I've never written.)
Ye Tian said,
September 2, 2021 @ 8:03 am
Very interesting topic. Many Chinese classes in elite schools require everyone to write by hand in the first year Chinese course, and then computer typing is gradually introduced in the second and third year level. Meanwhile, Chinese classes in many less resourceful universities have to let students use computers to type in the very beginning. Most of the time, instructors have to choose which is more important in a limited time, spend more time learning to write Chinese characters, or introduce more grammar and vocabulary. Ideally, students should learn how to write Chinese characters by hand, but teachers and students often do not have so much time now.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 2, 2021 @ 8:14 am
Obviously not the same, but now I'm wondering if students (especially in an online/distance-learning environment) learning e.g. ancient Greek or Russian are these days obligated to write by hand rather than type in the non-Latin script and if they can get away with typing whether they are obligated to use the sort of keyboard setup standard for that language/script or some sort of hack that automatically transliterates as you go.
Valerie Hansen said,
September 2, 2021 @ 8:34 am
Thank you, Victor, for writing about this topic, which I find fascinating. Let me add a little bit to what I originally wrote to you:
You better than anyone know how much I benefited from Li-ching's instruction as a 2nd year student at Harvard. I have no memory now of endlessly practicing characters; I'm sure that I did, but her emphasis on language set my own personal goals. I still think in pinyin, not characters.
Now I'm curious: do young Americans going to China have to write anything by hand at all? Are there any paper forms still being used?
That's one of my clearest memories (even in 2018, when I was joining the pool at XiaDa (Xiamen / Amoy University) I had to fill in a form, which attracted a whole audience of onlookers curious to see what the characters I wrote looked like.