Opportunity Cost of FSI Category V languages

[kulaputra]

Choosing illiteracy means your vocabulary will likely be deficient and you won't be able to make use of a lot of learning materials, both those intended for L2 learners and things like subtitles.

[Denzagathist]

Then they suggested (as Graceffo also suggests) "forget about the writing for now. Learning to speak is not that hard. Learn to write later if you want." In other words, if you're willing to be illiterate you can cut Mandarin down from a Cat V to a Cat IV. But then, of course, you are illiterate. I guess there's audio books and TV and you can talk to people. It's not that bad.

I honestly believe that without learning the characters, Chinese and Japanese would be even harder to learn. There are just so many homophones in the languages that the characters become valuable tools when studying vocabulary. Of course you could theoretically do without, but knowing the meanings of the component characters makes words far more transparent than in a lot of Western languages where the etymology is less obvious, and certainly easier to learn than if you were just trying to memorize them by their sound.

My personal approach to learning these languages is that I only expect myself to be able to read the characters, not to be able to write them (by hand). As I so rarely write by hand in any language, and so much more effort is required to commit hundreds, if not thousands, of characters to your active memory as opposed to just your passive memory, it's simply not worth the effort for me. I can write a lot of the most common/important characters, but can read hundreds more. Being able to recognize the appropriate character is also all you need in order to type in the languages.

[Dylan95]

I've studied several languages, each to varying degrees, and I have to say that based on my own personal progress, I think that FSI underestimates the ratio. That is, I think Russian has taken much more than 2x as much time to reach the level I am at now, than if it were a Romance language. Studying Romance languages, I rarely struggled to remember vocabulary. Russian, has been a different story. Although it has gotten easier with time. After 2.5 years of college level Russian, my level was still noticeably lower than my Italian after having taken a 1 semester intensive course.

Of course, this could just be me. I don't know how it is for other native English speakers.

I definitely take into account the "difficulty" of a target language when choosing a language to study. Chinese has been a dream of mine for many years due to my interest in Chinese history and culture, but the sheer amount of time and effort it would take for me to achieve a desirable level has kept me at bay for now.

[Xenops]

1. Do you believe the relative FSI ratios are somewhat accurate? If not, why?

I am guessing they are: after all, I haven't seen a study widely spread that contests these values. I haven't seen anyone say that Japanese or any category V language being easier than they thought it would.

2. Did/Does this effect your choice of language to study or the order you study multiple languages in?

Yes: if I was completely ignorant of the FSI values, I would probably attempt to tackle Korean along with my Japanese; I find it such a shame that we have manga translated up the wazoo, but most of the manhwa is unexplored.

Conversely, I get a lot of my language learning enjoyment from languages that are different from English, or anything else I learned. Thus, I don't think I will learn the entire Romance family: if the grammar is too similar, then the fun is gone. So that's why category IV is often tempting me, because there are lots of weird languages that are harder than Spanish, but easier than Japanese.

I honestly believe that without learning the characters, Chinese and Japanese would be even harder to learn. There are just so many homophones in the languages that the characters become valuable tools when studying vocabulary. Of course you could theoretically do without, but knowing the meanings of the component characters makes words far more transparent than in a lot of Western languages where the etymology is less obvious, and certainly easier to learn than if you were just trying to memorize them by their sound.

I would agree: an example would be 花（はな）versus 鼻（はな), meaning flower and nose, respectfully.

[devilyoudont]

For Japanese, the homophone situation is not actually that bad on native words such as flower 花 and nose 鼻

They actually have a slightly different pitch pattern... I suppose it's similar to the difference between record (I bought a record) and record (I record with my band in studio on Tuesdays), except that English uses a stress accent rather than a pitch accent.

It is a nightmare on loan words from Chinese, which there are seemingly billions of, and since Japanese and Chinese phonology is so different, a lot of words that I imagine sound different in Chinese, wind up being identical in Japanese.

[kulaputra]

For Japanese, the homophone situation is not actually that bad on native words such as flower 花 and nose 鼻

They actually have a slightly different pitch pattern... I suppose it's similar to the difference between record (I bought a record) and record (I record with my band in studio on Tuesdays), except that English uses a stress accent rather than a pitch accent.

It is a nightmare on loan words from Chinese, which there are seemingly billions of, and since Japanese and Chinese phonology is so different, a lot of words that I imagine sound different in Chinese, wind up being identical in Japanese.

On the other hand, modern Mandarin has lost a lot of phonological distinctions since Middle Chinese and thus Korean, Japaneee, and other Chinese languages e.g. Cantonese often preserve distinctions which in Mandarin are homonymous or only differentiated by a single tone.

[ASEAN]

1. Do you believe the relative FSI ratios are somewhat accurate? If not, why?

Rumor has it that many of the FSI Category I students can not complete the course in 24 weeks, French in particular, and have to be given more time. In fact, the DLIFLC Category I courses (Spanish, French, and Indonesian) are 36 week courses. At DLIFLC, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin are 64 week courses. The man in the linked YouTube video met several DLIFLC graduates at a language school in China and he says that even they admit that they learned very little Chinese at DLIFLC. The ones that do speak Chinese at a high level learned on their own. The DLIFLC handbook says that one can not only graduate with a 1+ in speaking (equivalent to a B1), but graduate with honors!

https://www.dliflc.edu/home/about/languages-at-dliflc/
https://youtu.be/w7XfFbMBhJU?t=49
http://www.dliflc.edu/wp-content/upload ... 170104.pdf

2. Did/Does this effect your choice of language to study or the order you study multiple languages in?

No, it doesn't affect my choice of language to study because I am not trying to learn Korean, Japanese, or Arabic. I personally would save those three languages for last if I had them on my list.

I only use the FSI table as a very basic rule of thumb to see which languages might take longer than others. I am very aware that the teaching techniques at FSI/DLIFLC are antiquated and take too much time to produce too little results. With today's technology, Mandarin doesn't take anywhere as long to learn as Japanese, Korean, and Arabic.

When Steve Kaufmann was in the Canadian Foreign Service in 1968, he had the option of studying Mandarin in the US at the Monterey Language Institute or in Hong Kong. He decided to take classes in Hong Kong. He ended up mostly studying on his own with handmade flashcards and listening and reading a lot. It took him 10 months to complete the course, half the normal time.

https://youtu.be/JSfkJwmzat4

[ASEAN]

Then they suggested (as Graceffo also suggests) "forget about the writing for now. Learning to speak is not that hard. Learn to write later if you want." In other words, if you're willing to be illiterate you can cut Mandarin down from a Cat V to a Cat IV. But then, of course, you are illiterate. I guess there's audio books and TV and you can talk to people. It's not that bad.

I would not do a Cat V unless I were married to a Cat V speaker ... but "fluent/illiterate in Mandarin" is kind of intriguing ...

Both Mike Campbell (Glossika) and Vladimir Skultety, fluent Mandarin speakers, say don't bother learning to read Chinese until you are around B1/B2. Skultety says don't even worry about tones at the very beginning.

https://youtu.be/F8xj_zO3hu0?t=152

This Canadian on YouTube has been living in Taiwan for about 20 years I think. He speaks Mandarin but is illiterate, can't even read a menu.

https://youtu.be/usXUg2pULqc

[kulaputra]

Then they suggested (as Graceffo also suggests) "forget about the writing for now. Learning to speak is not that hard. Learn to write later if you want." In other words, if you're willing to be illiterate you can cut Mandarin down from a Cat V to a Cat IV. But then, of course, you are illiterate. I guess there's audio books and TV and you can talk to people. It's not that bad.

I would not do a Cat V unless I were married to a Cat V speaker ... but "fluent/illiterate in Mandarin" is kind of intriguing ...

Both Mike Campbell (Glossika) and Vladimir Skultety, fluent Mandarin speakers, say don't bother learning to read Chinese until you are around B1/B2. Skultety says don't even worry about tones at the very beginning.

https://youtu.be/F8xj_zO3hu0?t=152

This Canadian on YouTube has been living in Taiwan for about 20 years I think. He speaks Mandarin but is illiterate, can't even read a menu.

https://youtu.be/usXUg2pULqc

There may very well be a handful of people who think illiteracy is OK. With all due respect, why should we care? A cool half billion Chinese speakers will disagree with them, I'm sure, if not more.

Choosing illiteracy cannot simply be analyzed as "now I don't have to spend X hours learning to read and write, so if it would have taken me Y hours to learn the language, now it will take me Y - X hours." As I and others have pointed out, illiteracy will hamper vocabulary acquisition and the ability to use a wide variety of tools. How would you look up song lyrics or read subtitles? How will you even use a dictionary, for example, if you are illiterate? Pinyin dictionaries exist nowadays, but nonetheless, traditional dictionaries are much easier to come by. And forget about using a monolingual dictionary, as is recommended once you reach a high(er) level.

Regarding the guy who chose illiteracy in a country he's lived in for 20 years, a few points:

1. learning Chinese to a high level while remaining illiterate will certainly be easier in a fully immersive atmosphere
2. how proficient is his Chinese? There's not much of him speaking Chinese on his channel that I could find (granted, I didn't look that long).

In any case some of us enjoy the Chinese character system.

Oh and the suggestion to not worry about tones "at the very beginning" makes me wonder whether Skultetty has a very unusual definition of "at the very beginning." Unless "at the very beginning" means the first five minutes of language learning, telling a Chinese learner to disregard tones is like telling them to ignore vowels. There are 416 possible syllables with tones, or 1664 possible syllables with the four tones (2080 with the neutral tone). Chinese tones provide as much phonetic information as vowels do in your average language, and probably more phonetic information then vowels in particularly vowel-poor languages.

What's worse, generally L2 learners with poor vowel pronunciation will consistently mispronounce a given vowel in one or a few possible ways. On the other hand, in my experience, people who butcher tones have an extremely large number of possible realizations (because they just speak the language as they would their L1, where tone is a supresegmental feature and not a phonemic one), which makes it much more difficult to understand them as compared to someone who screws up the pronunciation of vowels (or consonants). It's the difference between going through a written document and consistently replacing one set of letters with another, vs. replacing the same set of letters with a completely random letter every time. Which document would be easier to decipher?

[Xmmm]

Then they suggested (as Graceffo also suggests) "forget about the writing for now. Learning to speak is not that hard. Learn to write later if you want." In other words, if you're willing to be illiterate you can cut Mandarin down from a Cat V to a Cat IV. But then, of course, you are illiterate. I guess there's audio books and TV and you can talk to people. It's not that bad.

I would not do a Cat V unless I were married to a Cat V speaker ... but "fluent/illiterate in Mandarin" is kind of intriguing ...

Both Mike Campbell (Glossika) and Vladimir Skultety, fluent Mandarin speakers, say don't bother learning to read Chinese until you are around B1/B2. Skultety says don't even worry about tones at the very beginning.

https://youtu.be/F8xj_zO3hu0?t=152

This Canadian on YouTube has been living in Taiwan for about 20 years I think. He speaks Mandarin but is illiterate, can't even read a menu.

https://youtu.be/usXUg2pULqc

There may very well be a handful of people who think illiteracy is OK. With all due respect, why should we care? A cool half billion Chinese speakers will disagree with them, I'm sure, if not more.

Choosing illiteracy cannot simply be analyzed as "now I don't have to spend X hours learning to read and write, so if it would have taken me Y hours to learn the language, now it will take me Y - X hours." As I and others have pointed out, illiteracy will hamper vocabulary acquisition and the ability to use a wide variety of tools. How would you look up song lyrics or read subtitles? How will you even use a dictionary, for example, if you are illiterate? Pinyin dictionaries exist nowadays, but nonetheless, traditional dictionaries are much easier to come by. And forget about using a monolingual dictionary, as is recommended once you reach a high(er) level.

Regarding the guy who chose illiteracy in a country he's lived in for 20 years, a few points:

1. learning Chinese to a high level while remaining illiterate will certainly be easier in a fully immersive atmosphere
2. how proficient is his Chinese? There's not much of him speaking Chinese on his channel that I could find (granted, I didn't look that long).

In any case some of us enjoy the Chinese character system.

Oh and the suggestion to not worry about tones "at the very beginning" makes me wonder whether Skultetty has a very unusual definition of "at the very beginning." Unless "at the very beginning" means the first five minutes of language learning, telling a Chinese learner to disregard tones is like telling them to ignore vowels. There are 416 possible syllables with tones, or 1664 possible syllables with the four tones (2080 with the neutral tone). Chinese tones provide as much phonetic information as vowels do in your average language, and probably more phonetic information then vowels in particularly vowel-poor languages.

What's worse, generally L2 learners with poor vowel pronunciation will consistently mispronounce a given vowel in one or a few possible ways. On the other hand, in my experience, people who butcher tones have an extremely large number of possible realizations (because they just speak the language as they would their L1, where tone is a supresegmental feature and not a phonemic one), which makes it much more difficult to understand them as compared to someone who screws up the pronunciation of vowels (or consonants). It's the difference between going through a written document and consistently replacing one set of letters with another, vs. replacing the same set of letters with a completely random letter every time. Which document would be easier to decipher?

I don't know have a dog in this fight, but you seem awfully opinionated on how to learn Mandarin for someone who's claiming A1 skills in the language. People who've actually learned the language and say that it's viable to skip characters indefinitely --- you dismiss what they say out of hand ...