My Chinese Reading Experiance

Summary

My last post described my experience learning to read English this one extends this to my experience of learning to read Chinese so far. Let me say that I haven't completed this process yet and that this post may summarize some details and opinions that will be elaborated on in later posts. My approach has been more about acquiring characters than learning them and it has progressed far enough for me to think that it is successful.

First appraisal

Here is what I quickly found out when I started, Chinese is not phonetic, did you hear that Chinese is not phonetic. This means that Chinese as it sits on the page and unlike my mother tongue has no sound ... it is silent it has no sound except the sound that I give it and that sound may be completely different depending on the language/dialect that is applied. That is huge, that makes me instantly stop listening to anybody who is European and tries to justify approaches to reading based on European languages or how they used subtitles to learn Spanish etc. To be scientific it about it their conclusions may or may not be correct but they are completely unconnected to their reasoning. Everything changes, a Mandarin speaker may be able to read and understand the writing of a Cantonese speaker despite not being able to speak each others language he will have no idea what it is supposed to sound like, whereas an English speaker can quickly learn to "hear" the writing of a German speaker even if he has no idea what it means. At first glance the Chinese have the upper hand but consider that the Mandarin speaker cannot learn Cantonese from the writing but an English speaker could conceivable get most of the way to mastery of German entirely through the written form, and that the advantage of meaning over sound comes at the price of having to master a harder writing system.

Process (or lack of it)

I have long ago decided that dictionaries are unreliable, they are not even particularly good at defining a word in a language, in its own language, if I know the definition of a foreign word in my own language I have often barely started to learn it. If I started intensively learning to read Chinese when I started learning Chinese, I would be learning to read words I didn't know, learning to read English meanings for characters that have no sound. If I wait however I will be learning to read words I know, I will be hearing Chinese. I decided I AM NOT READING CHINESE UNLESS I AM HEARING IT.

Acquiring characters means that I have learned to write some but never really stressed about it, I have learned the stroke order rules by occasionally trying to write a character and then watching an animation, have learned reading a lot of characters by watching subtitles for Chinese when I can understand the audio (I understand a lot of learners work this the other way around), extended my learning by using Chinese subtitles on English audio and recently using Chinese subtitles to understand material were the audio is in a language I do not understand, have used a genuine zidian (Chinese character dictionary) to look up characters by radical and stroke count (only a little), have acquired familiarity with a number of radicals and character components and phonetic elements without really studying them etc etc. I have noticed characters by looking at them when looking up words but not learning them. I have run pop-up translators over text to read (but always strived to use them less because it slows me down), have modified pop-up translators to only give pinyin for characters (no definition). I hope that big mush of text above gives the impression that I have been attentive to characters but mostly concentrating on learning Chinese not Hanzi. I can almost exclusively only read or understand written Chinese I can already speak and when I read Chinese I hear Mandarin in my head (sometimes now the really familiar stuff goes straight to pictures and meaning).

This means that my handwritten Chinese is poor, I can use my finger to write things like 我是一个英国人正在学中文，下一步是什么？ on misty a bus window but not enough characters in my handwritten repertoire to make many sentences. I hardly ever need to handwrite Chinese though. When I read, I read the stuff I know well fast, and can quickly work out a whole bunch more, sometimes I can read a few paragraphs from a personal email with hardly a pause. I still have many problem areas and am particularly weak with news articles, I did worry about the news thing but discovered some Chinese people I met who had lived in England for years, worked in England and who I considered to have good English, still struggled with our news, so news is awaiting an assault later this year.

I read a lot, starting to read novels, but cutting my reading teeth on snippets from Twitter and bits I find in Google when searching for words and phrases. So I can read 上个月家里用了 1,000 kW•h 的电，怎么搞的，我还在想是不是什么漏电了。 and just need to look up 漏电. Or I can read 孩子不肯睡觉有许多原因：怕黑、担心自己不能醒来、害怕一个人睡觉等等。同睡觉相比，他们无疑更喜欢玩或看电视，而且他们愿意你总在他们身边关照他们。 Pushing it somewhat I can read 建工作正在进行中的奉节县城，迎来一男一女两个山西人。 　　男人韩三明（韩三明饰）来自汾阳，是名忠厚老实的煤矿工人，来奉节为寻十六年未见的前妻。前妻是他当年用钱买来的，生完孩子后跑回了奉节。寻找前妻的过程中波折不断，韩三明决定留下来做苦力一直等到前妻出现。女人赵红（赵涛饰）来自太原，是名沉默寡言的护士，为寻多日不曾与自己联系的丈夫而来奉节。丈夫与她的夫妻关系早已是有名无实，这点她虽然深知，仍想让丈夫当面给她个说法。赵红的找寻过程也不是一帆风顺，丈夫在有意无意地躲着她。韩三明和赵红虽不认识，却因为要做相对意义上的“拿起”与“舍弃”抉择，在冥冥之中有了某种神秘的联系。 　　本片荣获2006年第63届威尼斯国际电影节金狮奖。 © 豆瓣 with the aid of looking up a few words and having watched the film in question.

I still have far too many gaps and gaping caverns, my method of learning to read Chinese would be useless for passing tests in college (good job I don't need to pass tests) but now I am in a virtuous cycle, the more I read the better I get.

This post is a summary, it is hard to describe what is going on in the sub-concious, apologies it won't be of interest to most people, but I decided I didn't need to stress about learning Hanzi and it appears that in my case I was right, and when I read I hear Chinese, when I learn a new phrase from reading, I can say it if I wish, job done.

Heisig for Chinese part2 Knowing a character

Summary

Been busy and as always sparetime priority is learning Chinese rather than blogging, but got some time now. I think the series of Heisig related posts will continue for a fair while longer, the debate touches on some fundamental learning issues and besides the background reading (both directly related and less directly) is interesting. My schedule for these posts will be a little random and I will start mixing some more interesting posts back in, like how to get into Chinese conversations with real people for example.

So what does it mean to know or read a Chinese character.

Seemingly not very much, many of the posts I have read about using the Heisig approach talk about knowing X amount of characters or the advantage of being able to read Chinese now before you start the rest of the language.

My position would be that someone who starts with Heisig, even after they have completed the course actually knows diddlysquat (a relatively small amount ;)) about each individual character, or perhaps to put it another way they know the character in the same way that many of those friends in their Facebook or similar friends list are actually their friends.

Add to this the fact that in my experience the main thing that you do know about the character (how to handwrite it) I haven't found particularly useful yet...

Ultimatately you could say that discussing the meaning of "know" and "read" is pointless, those using these words know what they mean particularly if they have been studying Chinese for some time already. Unfortunately I remember what it was like to start from scratch and I would have been misled at that point, and based on some the Heisig related posts my expectations would have been much too high.

Reading

I don't want to go into too much depth here, but just consider the stages that you and others went through to learn to read English (I assume your mother tongue), painfully assembling each letter, reading out slowly aloud, sub-vocalizing ("hey that kid's lips are moving when he reads"), internal voice (many adults still stuck here), straight to meaning (you can read far faster than you could speak and receive pictures and ideas etc.).

The process with Chinese will have differences however I am saying that with Heisig alone you have barely (made the first step). Of course someone may post a comment below that shows I am wrong (I will be interested to read it).

Many Heisig related posts still refer to reading characters however, combined with other acquired Chinese knowledge this may be the case but in isolation ....

Knowing

I could leap into a lengthy discussion of various aspects of Chinese but I will just ask you imagine a hypothetical conversation with a new Chinese friend. She writes out a character on a piece of paper to try to illustrate something, you look at the character and although there are vaguely familiar aspects you come up blank, it looks kind of squiggly and squashed becasue she has handwritten it in a cursive style. Realizing your predicament she writes it out again slowly and kindergarten style (like a Child would learn it). Ahhh bingo "I know this character" you say with relief (you told her you have been learning Chinese for 4 months but so far you feel like a loon). "Ohhh you know how to pronounce it?" she asks, ohh dear, "well actually no, but I know it means XXXX in English". Your new found friend frowns a little and consults her electronic dictionary, "well kind of she replies, do you know it's other meanings and did you know we don't use it on it's own". No you didn't, "do you know any words it is used in" she asks helpfully, no you don't. You begin to wonder that if you had spent the Heisig time on learning more Chinese and listening etc. you may have been able to have some sort of conversation in Chinese by now.

Contrived I know, but I hope it illustrates my point, she could have asked you about a grammatical useage or many other things you wouldn't be able to answer, yet somewhere you have ticked a box that indicates that along with 1499 other characters you know this one.

Wrap up

I think that the clue-stick here is in one of the rationales that the Heisig system itself uses to justify learning the characters the Heisig way, the strong dislocation between the characters and the spoken language. If you learn the traditional characters for example much of what you have learned in isolation from the language would be equally applicable to Japanese and Chinese (two very different languages) and in the case of Chinese could be used to write in two mutually unintelligible dialects.

If you read carefully the introductions to the Heisig books this is made quite clear but many blog posts written about Heisig by people who already have a strong grasp of Chinese or Japanese do not address this at all (they are assuming that the reader has a similar domain knowledge, if that is they even take the time to think about it). The average westerner has no grasp of the Asian writing systems (why should they) and nothing really to base informed decisions about study method on. If you are a beginner then use Google by all means read the enthusiastic posts, but as I would always do make sure you read some opposing views before you make a decision about where and when to spend all those hours studying.

Heisig for Chinese Deconstructed Part 1

Introduction

The Heisig method for learning of Chinese Hanzi seems to be causing some controversy at the moment, the title of the first book for simplified Hanzi is "How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters". The intention of this post is not to discuss the detailed mechanics of the method but to simply state some facts about what the method claims to (and actually does achieve). Some information on the original method via. wikipedia describes learning the Kanji, it should be noted that the method was originally designed for learning the Japanese Kanji (which map approximately in meaning and form to a subset of traditional Chinese characters) this was back in the 1970's. I will focus heavily on what Heisig method gives to a beginner in Chinese (it appears to be recommended to a lot of beginners these days).

Heisig uses memorization techniques to allow you assign an English meaning and to learn to handwrite Chinese characters, you do not learn the pronunciation.

A good post to read alongside this one would be Keith's what the Heisig method is NOT post.

My next post will describe the method in more detail and provide more of a critique, in that post I will also describe at what stage I think Heisig method should be used (if at all) and start to introduce an alternative approach for consideration.

How dare I Deconstruct? .....

Someone is bound to question my right to deconstruct a method I haven't followed through, particularly as I am not an academic linguist etc. etc. My response is simply how could I not deconstruct any method that I may intend to use to help me learn language. Personal deconstruction to draw my own conclusion is faster than the effort needed to put together a blog post of course but in the final analysis a blog post is a blog post, not an academic paper. If you believe any of the facts are wrong then please comment. My next post will have more subjective elements than this one.

In case you feel I am over-analysing and "navel gazing" I should point out I am listening to Chinese content whilst writing this and one reason I don't post more frequently is simply that spare time is usually put towards learning Chinese. I am a strong believer in doing and getting stuck in but also believe that a self-learner of anything should constantly examine the learning method.

Reading

Upon completion of Heisig you will be able to assign an English meaning to the majority of Chinese characters you come across. The English meaning will be an approximation of one of the (sometimes many) meanings represented by an Chinese character. You will usually not be able to read even an approximate meaning of the mostly multi-character Chinese words and phrases and in many cases may completely misunderstand multi-character words. The inability to understand multi-character words is compounded by the fact that there is no word separation.

You will have no chance of understanding the many transliterations used in Chinese for names (countries, politicians, brand names, famous people etc.) because these are based on the phonetic (sound) represented by the character.

Your readings of the characters to approximate English meanings will still be based to some extent on analysis, not the fluid instant recognition required for real-time reading.

In summary you will be able to read meaning into simple short phrase and perhaps the odd very simple sentence, apart from that mentioned above the lack of knowledge of measure words and various characters that serve grammatical functions in the sentence will mess with your head.

A person using a combination of Google translate and a mouse-over pop-up dictionary will completely own you in generating an English summary of a Chinese web-page they will require a mere half-an hour of training to kick your butt. If you combine your Heisig derived skills with their tools you won't really perform any better than they can. Of course someone who can speak and write both languages will kick both your butts to the moon and back.

Writing

You will be able to hand-write a vast number of Chinese characters, if given the English keyword (often an English meaning if we are feeling generous). This is not to be under-estimated you have learned one of the significant elements of the character, at some point if you wish to be able to hand write Chinese you will have to cross this significant hurdle. You also have a great party trick...

Somewhat bizarrely you have absolutely no ability to write Chinese on a computer (assuming we discount a writing tablet and handwriting recognition for Chinese). You have gained no advantage in interacting with Chinese writing on a computer (none that I can see anyway).

Wrap up

I appreciate Heisig is not intended to be studied in isolation, however most seem to approach it pretty intensively and taking into account the time requirement for Heisig study and review a learner that starts with Heisig isn't realistically going to have progressed very far at this point (Heisig study time eating into other en-devours as well) unless they do Heisig really slowly (which doesn't appear to be the point).

Rooted in sound!

I will be posting more in the future about my experiences with Chinese characters but before I do this, I should make it clear that my own personal strategy for learning Chinese will always be firmly rooted in sound and not writing.

I know this is an area that causes much argument, and many people may prefer to base their learning on the writing system. Many others will have no choice because they are following formal courses of study. I do have my reasons for preferring sound, which I will now try to explain.

For starters I think many people are forced into a 'literature' centric mode of learning Chinese. As the saying goes "if you only have a hammer every problem looks like a nail". The most horrific example is a type of comment I have heard a few times now on different forums from people in the early stages of learning Chinese. The comment goes something like this "how do you visualize the characters, when listening to full speed Chinese, I find it hard to visualize the correct character especially with homonyms?".

I can't imagine the learning system that would allow someone to even phrase a question along those lines. Visualizing characters will not help you sort out homonyms and visualizing conversation as text strikes me as a particularly inefficient way to translate in real time. For starters most Chinese sounds are represented by many characters (to visualize the correct one you already need to have extracted some meaning from context so why bother with the character bit). Also many characters have two or more sounds associated with them, sometimes different tones, sometimes completely different. Both characters and sounds have their own confusions, I am aware that you are more likely to extract meaning from a character than a discrete sound however you should bear in mind that the same character may well have a similar or identical meaning in Japanese kanji and obviously Japanese and Chinese are two completely different languages.

I have a suspicion that learning to understand the meaning of Mandarin from the writing system is not exercising the correct pathways of the brain to aid eventual fluency in conversation. For me it seems pretty clear that learning to write what you can already hear and say is a more logical approach (and the approach taken by all those that speak Mandarin as a first language).

I can see that many people will have no choice but to learn the reading as soon as possible and it obviously has a lot more relevancy for anyone actually living in China etc. Also many years ago there simply wouldn't be enough sources of sound input available for somebody living in England (or elsewhere) and learning Mandarin in their spare time. For these reasons many techniques for learning Chinese had to be developed from a predominantly literature-centric view.

Today the Internet provides us with a huge sound resource. We have podcasts, streaming TV and radio and of course DVDs and music. Sound input can even occur in otherwise dead time for learning (times where it simply isn't practical to get out a book and start reading)

I believe that the writing system and Chinese literature can offer huge opportunities for study but as with English I expect to acquire the basic language through the medium of sound and move on from there.

Maybe the real question should be "Are you studying Mandarin mostly from books or mostly from the spoken language?"? Followed by "Which do you want first, to be able to read it or speak it?".