will this be an ineffective strategy?

[jimmy]

Dear language learners;

assume please we know too many characters in chinese (assume please more than 2000) but do not know to pronunciate almost any of them ..

what will we have as a benefit,or otherwise
we ask (especially from experienced ones) whether this would be a void study.

many thanks for your advices ,ideas and recommendations

(some notations: we are multilingual. and we experienced that correct pronunciation was a very important and sensitive part in language learning)

[Axon]

their language learners;

assume please we know too many characters in chinese (assume please more than 2000) but do not know to pronunciate almost any of them ..

what will we have as a benefit,or otherwise
we ask (especially from experienced ones) whether this would be a void study.

many thanks for your advices ,ideas and recommendations

(some notations: we are multilingual. and we experienced that correct pronunciation was a very important and sensitive part in language learning)

A person who knows the meanings of 2000 Chinese characters (not words) without knowing how to pronounce them sounds an awful lot like a Japanese person traveling in China or vice versa. In China, that person would be able to read street signs, storefronts, and menus without much difficulty. They would probably understand a handful of the instructions on a written form. But without grammar, they wouldn't be able to understand more than the simplest written Chinese sentences.

I've never been to Japan, but I've heard from Chinese people that have traveled there that they too can understand things like direction signs in public places and occasionally understand the topic of a newspaper headline.

Grammar is very important in any language, even something as terse as classical Chinese poetry. Only knowing the meanings of characters doesn't help very much for understanding the messages communicated with them.

Edited to add:

That person, however, would be able to gain Chinese literacy quite quickly, in my opinion. They could parse 我感觉很累 as "I feeling to-feel very tiring/tired" and immediately grasp the meaning. Something like 不适合3岁以下儿童使用 "not appropriate join 3 year therefore below child child cause use" is more opaque, but once you learn the common words 适合 (appropriate, suitable), 以下 (and under), 儿童 (child), 使用 (to use) then the meaning becomes more clear.

[白田龍]

When I first started learning chinese I just learned characters and compound words. I learn the meaning and pin yin. In perhaps 2-3 years, I had nearly 4000 Characters and over 12.000 compound words on my deck. Other than that, I would just passively watch TV serials.

Then I abandoned Chinese because I wanted to focus on other languages that would personally be more useful. At that point, my listening comprehesion was very poor, and I still had trouble reading chinese texts.

I suppose it would be fixed if I had done reading practice. And I am surely on a great position to start trying practicing reading Chinese books, being able recognize and give the correct pin yin for a great nuber of words, I suppose my progress would be very very fast. However for the time being I'm focusing on other languages.

So, trying to extrapolate my experience to your question, I don't think it will be a void study, as being able to recognize the characters and recalling their core meaning will give you surely a good headstart when you actually begin learning Chinese. But, if your goal is to learn the Chinese language, it is probably not an eficient use of your time to do it this way, because many frequent words don't really make much sense in isolation, and being able to recall the gloss from a dictionary only gives you an illusion of knowing them, you need to see them in context many times to actually understand them.

[devilyoudont]

This type of method was developed for studying Japanese, and not Chinese.

There are many Japanese learners who have used this type of method and have become successful advanced speakers.

However, I feel like there would be a lot of drawbacks towards using this kind of method for Chinese...

1) Chinese pronunciation is much more difficult than Japanese pronunciation
2) Reading aids are ubiquitous in Japanese comic books and books for children and teens. Do reading aids exist like this for Chinese?
3) Characters typically only have 1 possible pronunciation in Chinese. In Japanese, characters typically have at least two possible pronunciations, and extreme cases may have up to around 20. This reality means that learning pronunciations alongside the meaning would hypothetically be much less burdensome to a Chinese learner
4) Phonetic information is often no longer functional in modern Japanese. My understanding is that this information still functions in modern Chinese, and so it would potentially be foolish to learn the characters without learning the phonetic hints that most characters contain.

[Saim]

1) Chinese pronunciation is much more difficult than Japanese pronunciation

Why would learning characters affect that? Would knowing characters make it harder to pick up Mandarin pronunciation?

If reading is hard, and listening is hard, then why not split them up and practice them seperately and then bring them back together when you can actually understand things rather than struggling through a language that is completely opaque?

Personally as a beginner I find it much easier to remember Chinese words when I know the characters in them and vice-versa. When I try and learn them both at once a lot of the time it just doesn't work, it's too much new information presented together I think.

2) Reading aids are ubiquitous in Japanese comic books and books for children and teens. Do reading aids exist like this for Chinese?

What about subtitled material? The Chinese seem to subtitle quite a lot.

You've also got Chrome addons that show you the pronunciation of Chinese characters when you mouse over them.

[devilyoudont]

Why would learning characters affect that? Would knowing characters make it harder to pick up Mandarin pronunciation?

To me, it's more that (at least in Japanese study), this is a characters-first style method--meaning a large number of proponents of this method learn all the characters children learn in school before learning any pronunciation, grammar rules, or vocabulary items. Japanese pronunciation is often treated in a kind of incidental way. Some argument exists about whether or not the complete non-emphasis on pronunciation by a large number of Japanese courses is actually an ok thing, but the situation remains that Japanese is completely understandable to Japanese people even if your pronunciation is really jank. I know it's possible to attain a high literacy level in a language thru reading only, and create permanent fossilized pronunciation issues that impair spoken communication, because I see it periodically with learners of English, my native language. On the other hand, I'm sure there are also ways to mitigate this with awareness.

If reading is hard, and listening is hard, then why not split them up and practice them seperately and then bring them back together when you can actually understand things rather than struggling through a language that is completely opaque?

Having attempted the Heisig method for Japanese in the past, and having had at that time higher spoken and listening competency than reading and writing competency, I disagree with the claim that this method results in text no longer being opaque. My personal experience with this type of method is that my handwriting and my understanding of other people's handwriting improved. However, when it came to actually dealing with text, I still often failed to recognized "known" characters, or I recognized the characters, remembered their keywords, and the meaning still wasn't guessable. In other words, knowing the keywords associated with the characters resulted in a different sort of opaqueness, when I connected the character I was seeing back to the keyword at all.

And I guess that it would generally be my belief that if we want to learn these things separately, we should learn the spoken form before the written form, as the written form is a representation of the spoken form, not the other way around.

Personally as a beginner I find it much easier to remember Chinese words when I know the characters in them and vice-versa. When I try and learn them both at once a lot of the time it just doesn't work, it's too much new information presented together I think.

This is probably an individual learning thing. The easiest case for characters for me is a word I already know completely in spoken Japanese that is written using phono-semantic compounds where the phonetic component is still functioning. When that's not possible, I find learning heisig keywords at the same time as I learn vocabulary items that illustrate the pronunciation of the characters to be a mutually reinforcing exercise.

What about subtitled material? The Chinese seem to subtitle quite a lot.

Subtitled material is great, but it is also the case that reading tends to expose the learner to a higher amount of different vocabulary. Reading and watching are both good exercises in my opinion.

You've also got Chrome addons that show you the pronunciation of Chinese characters when you mouse over them.

When dealing with native material, it's usually easier for me to find appropriate level physical books than appropriate level websites. These addons for Japanese are also typically paired with a Japanese/English dictionary, and I found that aspect of them counter productive for my own studies.

Anyway, this is all just my opinion, if you are a fan of this method, why not give the OP reasons why this method is working for you

[Saim]

Having attempted the Heisig method for Japanese in the past, and having had at that time higher spoken and listening competency than reading and writing competency, I disagree with the claim that this method results in text no longer being opaque.

I wasn't trying to say it'll give you any reading skills at all, just that it levels the learning curve once you do start reading because you can associate new knowledge with knowledge you already have rather than having to learn two somewhat unrelated things at once.

That said, it takes a while to go through the whole Heisig book so if Mandarin is your main focus it might not be worth the wait, especially if you're willing to put in a couple of hours into it every day. Probably the difficulty curve will level out just by spending a lot of time each day on reading.

I think in my case since Mandarin isn't my main focus and I'm fine with being a beginner for a while my priority should be on activities that will slowly level the difficulty curve so I find it much easier to jump straight in once I do feel like I want to make it a major focus in my studies. I also find beginner level textbooks even more boring than memorising characters so if memorising characters will help me ease into authentic content (not immediately understand native content) at a later date, then it seems like a good use of my time.

However, when it came to actually dealing with text, I still often failed to recognized "known" characters, or I recognized the characters, remembered their keywords, and the meaning still wasn't guessable. In other words, knowing the keywords associated with the characters resulted in a different sort of opaqueness, when I connected the character I was seeing back to the keyword at all.

Do you find that you more easily remember the meaning/pronunciation once you look it up, though?

Heisig doesn't teach you the language at all so I wouldn't expect you to get real reading skills only from Heisig, the only benefit I could imagine would be to make the in-context method more painless once you already have a vague sense of the most common characters.

And I guess that it would generally be my belief that if we want to learn these things separately, we should learn the spoken form before the written form, as the written form is a representation of the spoken form, not the other way around.

That's a fair point. The only thing that makes me thing that it might be easier to just sit and learn the characters is the fact that they're more of a natural closed list than vocabulary is, so it's easier to study from a list. The same could be said for phonemes, tones and legal syllables, but not for vocabulary.

Subtitled material is great, but it is also the case that reading tends to expose the learner to a higher amount of different vocabulary. Reading and watching are both good exercises in my opinion.

What I mean is subtitled material as a bridge into more "serious" reading activities. I've noticed that my reading speed and level of comfort in Turkish has drastically increased since I watched a dubbed TV show with subtitles (so the subtitles didn't even fully match what they were saying!). Of course I imagine that'll take longer to work for Mandarin than Turkish but I think it could be a good extensive reading activity once you already know lots of characters.

When dealing with native material, it's usually easier for me to find appropriate level physical books than appropriate level websites.

In that case isn't it also important to be able to handwrite characters to be able to look up words?

Anyway, this is all just my opinion, if you are a fan of this method, why not give the OP reasons why this method is working for you

As I said, I'm a total beginner, so my ideas might be totally off.

I started with the in-context method mainly using Assimil: Le chinois sans peine and found that lots of the characters wouldn't stick, I was constantly failing the same flaschards. When I tried making separate character cards, this was even more frustrating because I felt like I was at war with my own memory, and if I failed a card I got irritated with myself because it felt like a waste of time making two cards for something I'm not remembering anyway.

When I keep my character study and language study separate, whenever there's spillover I got more of those "aha!" moments that keep me motivated. For example, I remember learning 飞 in Heisig, and then I saw the word 飞 (fei1) in my illustrated Chinese lexicon; I don't think I would've remembered the reading just from the illustrated lexicon had I not learned the character in Heisig beforehand. So maybe this is more of what works psychologically given the amount of time I can put into this and my level of motivation than what would be the most efficient activities in an ideal world.

Anyway I'll have to get back to you in a couple of years to tell you whether this actually worked.

[Saim]

Anyway, this is all just my opinion, if you are a fan of this method, why not give the OP reasons why this method is working for you

As I said, I'm a total beginner, so my ideas might be totally off.

[...]

Anyway I'll have to get back to you in a couple of years to tell you whether this actually worked.

Well, that didn't take very long.

Unsurprisingly, I was wrong. I underestimated how much time and energy going through the Heisig book would take. I also didn't realise that because of the constant reviews, learning 400 cards is not like learning 200 cards + 200 cards, it gets progressively harder and harder. For that reason it can only work if you find some of the cards so easy you don't need endless reviews, which can only happen through natural contact with real writing (having seen some characters again and again in real contexts).

Now I am using Yabla, making audio flaschards out of "easy" sentences in the videos with Audacity and Anki. I'm enjoying it much more and I'm also learning the language rather than just the characters. Handwriting characters is important but it'll be easy to commit to memory once I've seen them lots of times.

Part of my problem with Assimil was that the sentences were too hard for an absolute beginner, although brute-forcing my way threw the first twenty or so lessons wasn't so bad in that I go to test whether I could actually do it. Yabla is fun in that sense since there is so much content, I've been watching the sitcom 爱情公寓 and although of course there are lots of hard sentences that I skip, I can still find several i+1 sentences in every video. So far this is the least exhausting and least boring way of studying Chinese as a beginner that I've found.

Heisig probably makes sense once you can already read as a way to work on your handwriting, rather than for learning characters from scratch. I still think even the couple hundred characters I did in Heisig helped me start seeing the components of characters (making it easier to learn them now in context), but memorising 1500 or 3000 through this method before learning the language at all is insanity. I mean, you probably could, but why would you want to?

[Sayonaroo]

Well you can get literate very fast if you know Japanese especially with the advancement of technology. Of course listening comprehension is something else

Reddit post titled I learnt 10,000+ words in Chinese (including how to read) in about 11 weeks of study
https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearni ... ng_how_to/

[MorkTheFiddle]

Reddit post titled I learnt 10,000+ words in Chinese (including how to read) in about 11 weeks of study
https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearni ... ng_how_to/

Interesting testimonial. If you read it, be sure to read the comment.