Old Chinese Movies

I am going to make sure I regularly post Chinese learning resources on this blog, particularly resources that are less obvious or well known. When it comes to media resources, us internet users are truly spoilt for choice. I had a brief bout of enjoying old Chinese movies a while back and am going to revisit the genre again, now that my Chinese is a little better.

A good place to start is archive.org, I will give you a link to a search for mandarin in their movies category, a few strange ones in there but a whole bunch of older Chinese films you can download right now for free. My personal favourite so far is Street Angel there are plenty of reviews and information on the page I have linked to.

The dialogue in these movies can be quite accessible to learners, and not too dated (although the first time I heard a Chinese person say the infamous 马马虎虎 was in Street Angel) in fact a Chinese person told me that the dialogue in most of these movies that are contemporary to their time should be better for learners than watching a modern Chinese historical drama (that is set a few hundred years ago and often use slightly funky language to sound "authentic"). Obviously you will encounter some propaganda also.

Archive.org usually provides a number of downloads of differing quality, what are you waiting for?

Chinese vocabulary lists

Sometimes apparently a picture tells a thousand words, in this case I think a video does a much better job, first let me make it clear, I do not like vocabulary lists and I do not like language learning approaches that rely heavily on them. Recently I had a go at some Cantonese learning material I was given, it started with a lesson on a dialogue with a fruit seller, part of the lesson material is a long list of fruit to learn in Cantonese, part of the review and audio exercise is to test you on your knowledge of fruit in Cantonese when you barely have any other vocabulary. A lot of language learning material seems to take a similar approach, take a fictional situation and give you a whole bunch of supporting vocabulary around that situation, surely better by far would be to introduce two common items of fruit and extend the vocabulary around areas in the situation that can be applied elsewhere, more fundamental language learning areas.

If I need to learn a lot of fruit, then a good dictionary and/or Internet allow me to compile my own vocab list easily, a list relevant to me. I can cope with this kind of material, usually I would just learn one 'fruit' and substitute that but some learning material would make that approach hard. To extend this further I deliberately decide not to learn many words (whereever I find them), leave them until later. For the longest time I only knew 3 or 4 colors, could only count to 100 etc, I was aware of others but didn't feel the need to learn a long list of colors before I had enough vocab. to have meaningful conversations about colored objects. You can only learn so much a once so learn what seems most naturally relevant.

Once I attended an evening class for intermediate learners, the teacher approach seemed very similar to the trainer in this video (although obviously not for self-defence). It quickly became clear that although the teacher was very keen to try to put her students in a very good light in comparison to me (a self-learner) they had no real ability to range outside of the situations they had been taught (the 'pointed stick' situations). This didn't make the teacher change her mind about her approach however, the final conclusion was simply that I am the exception that proves the rule. I never bothered returning to the evening class after the experiment.

Increasingly I am studying linguistics related material that I can find, I think this article Vocabulary Size, Text Coverage And Word Lists - 1997 has some relevance to the topic and is an interesting read besides. The following section in particular.
We are now ready to answer the question "How much vocabulary does a second language learner need?" Clearly the learner needs to know the 3,000 or so high frequency words of the language. These are an immediate high priority and there is little sense in focusing on other vocabulary until these are well learned. Nation (1990) argues that after these high frequency words are learned, the next focus for the teacher is on helping the learners develop strategies to comprehend and learn the low frequency words of the language. Because of the very poor coverage that low frequency words give, it is not worth spending class time on actually teaching these words. It is more efficient to spend class time on the strategies of (1) guessing from context, (2) using word parts and mnemonic techniques to remember words, and (3) using vocabulary cards to remember foreign language - first language word pairs. Detailed description of these strategies can be found in Nation (1990). Notice that although the teacher's focus is on helping learners gain control of important strategies, a major function of these strategies is to help the learners to continue to learn new words and increase their vocabulary size.
Not everything in this paper agrees with my views, but then I will hardly learn and develop by only reading things I agree with will I?

I hope you enjoy the video and I hope you understand the message I am trying to convey, I can see the relevance of specialized vocabulary list of words to help you in a particular situation but would assume you already have a decent understanding of Chinese, vocabulary lists if used are a very personal thing in my opinion. However you may be learning Chinese, are you safe from the pointed sticks?

Slow Chinese Resource

Slow Chinese is a great learning resource. A blog provided by a native Chinese (Xinyu Weng). Currently there are 36 articles all with audio.

The Chinese is spoken slowly and clearly (some people have said too slowly but hey read the title, it does what it says on the tin) and the language used is accessible (it has been pointed out maybe slightly too accessible in places, but I think that is appropiate to the aim of the site).

I am using the site mainly at the moment to improve my reading, it is great to have the option to listen to audio, particularly as my approach to learning Chinese means that at the moment I can understand considerably more than I can sight read (being addressed right now though), still learning a bunch of new words from it also.

You can find the podcast in Itunes and text is included in the description (so you can read whilst listening). If you prefer the audio a little faster then my Ipod touch does a reasonable job playing at 2x speed (the pitch is held constant it is just the speed that is increased). If need you could probably do a reasonable job of increasing the speed using a tool like audacity.

Ok not entirely natural but that is the point, there are plenty of natural sources of native Chinese, Slow Chinese however can be a great help for learners looking for either listening or reading (with audio) practice or both.

If anybody knows of any similar resources with the same aim then let me know.

If you use this resoure, and like it then consider leaving a donation to the author, it will encourage more of the same I hope and perhaps some variations.

Motivation In Learning Chinese

Summary

Haven't blogged for a long time, been far too busy recently and frankly working too hard (more than is good for my health). Still learning Chinese though and moving into new areas, but then I am a well motivated learner, a highly motivated self-learner. Actually the previous sentence is rubbish who am I kidding? I am just having fun and relaxing, enjoying myself, challenging myself a little, nobody ever had to motivate me to do that.

Whilst motivation in teaching Children to learn in general is important, I don't understand the relevance of much of the motivation discussions for adult learners. What kind of crazy mess are we in that there is a problem with motivation of adult students. If they aren't motivated why are they there (simply get a job or study something else, it not complicated), how did they end up on the course in the first place? If your course isn't helping motivated learners why is your course there?

Motivation, is surely something that comes from the inside, not something that can be poured in from the outside (outside events can motivate you but you still have to spark it up yourself). It is simple, you want to do something or be something, you work out what you need to do, get some help if needed and do the things to make it happen. You measure your success by getting nearer to the thing you want to be or achieve. If you can't do the things that are needed either you are incapable (get realistic) or you don't want it enough (find something that else that is worthwhile to you). If you can't find anything worthwhile then by all means blame the world, order more fast food and spend as much free time as you have blobbing out munching grease (or even eating healthy organic food I suppose), in front of mind-numbing TV (even choosing to do nothing is a choice).

What motivates me

Many many many years ago, I worked out a system for being motivated and it has helped me to accomplish a few life changing events, I am human though and suffer from my fair share of human frailties and weaknesses so my system has not converted me in some kind of supreme, being that has perfected every aspect of his life prior to moving onto the next plane of existence. When I feel I need to apply it though it works. In summary it was provoked by light cones and the many worlds theory, but you don't need to understand these to understand how I apply it. for example assuming the sun is fine now then what ever catastrophe hits it I will remain unaffected for around 8 minutes (light or radiation, or the stoppage of light can't get to me for that long because of the distance). In the same way assuming I imagine (and I do take the time to imagine so I know what I am aiming at) a me that can speak Chinese fluently, then the first time I decide I want to be that me I cannot possibly achieve it by tomorrow, I don't know how long it will take but I can start to guess (unlike the speed of light in vacuum the speed of learning Chinese is not a constant, but at the moment until someone invents a brain knowledge download device I can make some guesses).

I have to do things to bring the imagined goal closer and I have make realistic guesses how much closer it is (rather than focusing on the effort I put into it or using non-related indicators to measure progress). Every action that I take may or may not effect the probability that I achieve the goal (the probability that I eventually occupy the world where I speak Chinese), you could be honest and step outside of yourself and ask if I was someone else would they be prepared to bet on my achieving that goal, what odds would they give/accept at this point in time.

I am motivated by wanting to do/be something enough that it overcomes the inertia of being lazy or wanting to work on something else. Other people have motivated me, but I never expect someone to or offload that responsibility.

I really dislike the current trend where you hear approaches like we are all "good looking (Americans seem obsessed with this) , smart, intelligent, young (old doods are fossils of course and can't do anything) etc.etc.) If you need your ego massaged to do something then ..... go somewhere where charisma counts more than results and where everybody smells of rainbows. Basically the me that I imagine that can speak fluent Chinese doesn't miraculously become good looking with flashy white teeth and doesn't actually need to be that smart. I am ugly, middle aged and maybe sometimes a bit smelly, that has nothing to do with learning Chinese (so long as I don't let it get to point where Chinese people can't bear talk with me of course ;)). I don't need to be pampered, pumped up, feeling happy etc. to learn, maybe I will be tired, sad, even a little depressed at some times doing the process, fair enough that is life. In fact if I can make it fun, then that would be a trick, if I can make it self-driven then that would be a trick.... I have posted about effortless learning in the past.

I don't need someone to sugar coat the problem or prod me by pretending it will be easy or quick or give me gold stars every time I cough up a Chinese word (maybe when I was five year old but not now). I am driven by a more English drive, I like to hear how hard it is, that makes the goal more sweet, or even provides two goals, I can both try to achieve the end result and try to find an easier way.

What motivates other people

I am in awe of the motivation and dedication I see in other people, people who play golf for example, will happily sacrifice huge chunks of their free time in the pursuit of improving their game. The strength of character required to put all that time into improving their golf game is phenomenal, I am sure that their none golfing partners are grateful and supportive to the hardworking self-motivated golfers. People who like beer for example I have known many who will selflessly sacrifice most of their evenings to the selfless pursuit of excellence in beer drinking, even to the extent of risking their health due to intoxicating effects. Those dedicated selfless souls who religiously quality control the modern music industry, listening with due diligence to hours and hours on their Ipods, on buses in cafes etc. whilst I selfishly use the same device to listen to Chinese (shame on me). Those dedicated fishermen who will set forth in the middle of the night to go somewhere in the cold and spend a freezing wet day on a riverbank fishing (I have to assume that they are keeping the skills alive for times when other foods may run out). The elevated souls that sit honing their brains on crossword puzzles, sudoko puzzles and Nintendo brain trainers, the best I can feebly manage in my lazyness it to hone mine on language learning. Last but not least, my own teenage sons, I never would have thought that young people could work so hard, risk so much damage to their thumbs, sacrifice so much of the free time in the pursuit of playstation game excellence. To all these amazing people I salute you, this humble soul has no concept of how you do it.

I know that are more deep issues at play for some people, what if you have to learn a language as the side effect of another goal for example. I will revisit this and other topics another time when I feel motivated enough.

Heisig for Chinese part 3 A Comforting Approach?

Not for me but maybe for you

Continuing my thoughts on the Heisig method for learning Chinese Characters, Ultimately it is not for me but maybe for you. Have a look at various posts on Mandarin Segments for reports from someone who is getting on well with it. As always make up your own mind.....

Comfortable Progress

It seems that people have an irrational expectation that processes are linear, that progress (or change) is directly proportional to input, this unreasonable expectation has adverse affects on many areas from financial analysis to education. It seems that when people study or teach they tend towards methods that appear linear, methods that appear to reward X amount of effort with a directly proportional Y result.

In reality many things are not linear, many language learners are familiar with the situation where they suddenly feel they made a huge gain in a very short period of time, then again they may also experience plateaus where progress seems slow or non-existent no matter what they do for a long period of time.

The Heisig approach to learning hanzi appeals to this desire for linearity. I put X effort in each day and I know Y more characters, it is therefore highly motivational (not always a bad thing). If you scratch beneath the surface however it is not so linear as it appears. if you have studied 1000 characters and it turns out the retention rate is actually 95% you know 950. The real problem of linearity is that the range of what it means to know a character extends far beyond a simple boolean known/unknown. Some characters you will know the sounds of some you will read without thinking and without even resorting to stories, some you may know the function of in a number of compound words or in a grammatical context. Therefore if two different people tell you they know 1500 from Heisig study you actually "know" very little about their comparative Chinese level.

Motivation is important, but I suspect that those who have been motivated by Heisig may have a tendency to oversell it, those that are already highly motivated may not actually need it.

Heisig has to market at beginners

One aspect that initially annoyed me when I read about Heisig in the introductory download, was the very weak argument for why a beginner should use it at the start of their learning, this argument is primarily based on the following sentence The truth is, written characters bring a high degree of clarity to the multiplicity of meanings carried by homophones in the spoken language. The argument that follows is fairly weak after all people don't speak with subtitles so you are going to have to deal with homophones. Besides modern technology offers a number of ways to working with hanzi without having to actually learn them.

The issue of course is that most language learners (in any language) give up fairly early, so if you are in the business of selling books then there is a very real pressure to make your sale at the earliest stage possible.

Dislocated from the language

What you get from Heisig is related to the language you are learning but also somewhat disconnected from it. There was an excellent post on the Global Maverick blog (I highly recommend reading this blog), that mostly agrees with the impression that I am forming about Heisig for Chinese.

Suppose for example that you were spending some time investigating whether to learn Chinese or Japanese (perhaps even both). Then during your investigations it may be beneficial to study the traditional Chinese characters with Heisig (will give you a huge boost on your kanji learning if you pick Japanese)

Unusual Chinese Learning Resource 1

I am starting to find that good Chinese learning resources are less and less conventional, sometimes I have mentioned them in forums or added them to lists of resources but from now on I think I will occasionally post a resource on this blog.

Today's resource is http://www.xianzai.cn/ This website has some resources for Chinese people learning English with a number of regular postings everyday English 每日英语 for example. The dialogues are written only and sometimes the English they teach feels a little unnatural but the Chinese translations and explanations can be very interesting. If you have time check out some of the dialogues and see if you find any of them interesting.

This is not the first time I have found that resources for Chinese people learning English are of interest, the Internet is a huge boost over anything language learners had previously....

Chinese Conversation Practice part 1

Summary

A brief respite from my Heisig related posts (although more to follow). For many language learners there comes a time when they want to practice conversation. If you don't have the benefit of Chinese speaking relatives etc. then this is not always easy to arrange even (apparently) if you are living in a Chinese speaking country. Even supposing you have a Chinese relative or friend or two then there is much benefit to be gained from practicing casual conversation with strangers, you can repeat subject matter and practice different ways of saying something or the different ways that someone may reply in the twists and turns of real conversation.

I am a computer programmer, casual conversation doesn't always come easily in any language ;) however I am happy to have discovered that in the UK there are plenty of Chinese speakers around and plenty of ways to get conversation practice if you need to. This post is just a quick introduction with on very specific example, I hope to follow up with a few more specifics and examples in further posts.

When to have conversations

There is some debate about when to try to start having conversations in your target language, I never attended classes so I try when I feel I want to, I think that is important. Some say that attempting to talk too early causes damage, I don't think so, so long as you are aware of what you are doing and treat what you say as unfixed experimentation (assume that the story is not over and at some stage you will have different/better ways to express the same thing).

Watching an expert in action

A long time ago when the first Asus netbooks came out I was in an electrical shop looking and playing with the display model. A guy in his 30's with an Eastern European accent came up beside me and started talking to me about it, we had an approximately five minute computer related conversation and then went our separate ways. I had a number of things to do in the same area of town and returned to the shop a little later, the same guy had engaged someone else in a conversation about the netbook, I was curious and returned a little later to see the same again, in fact my curiosity was roused even more and I returned a couple of more times in the next hour to see him engaged in conversation with three more people, I overheard a little of some and it seemed he was going over similar territory each time.

I am pretty sure this guy was practicing his computer related conversation, that little Linux netbook was a perfect focus as it was likely to attract people having a least some interest in computing. Even if he wasn't practicing English it is the type of thing I may have done.

One example of many

I think many aspects of getting a conversation in your target language have a lot in common with the advice for how to get into fruitful conversations with members of the opposite sex, in some circumstances the paths may converge, I am happily married however.

One particular technique I like at the moment is a variation on the classic "asking something you already know" method. There is an ancient Chinese character jiong 囧 that has gained new life in comments etc. on social networks because of its resemblance to a human face that can express embarrassment, surprised resignation etc. there is a nice article at the www.slow-chinese.com site (nice site with audio although it would be better if a faster version was included). When an opportunity arises (cafe, laundrette, tube train, whatever). I simply sketch the character and ask nicely if the person could explain the characters meaning for me (maybe adding that I guess it represents a face maybe not). I have used this five times so far and always got a great little conversation out of it, this particular approach ticks a lot of boxes.

• If you approach it correctly it is hard for the Chinese person to be dismissive, it should result in at least a brief conversation.
• Many Chinese find your choice of character amusing or interesting.
• There is enough ambiguity about its use that if you ask a group of two or more the conversation can get interesting.
• This question is level neutral, it gives nothing away about your Chinese level and could easily be asked by a very advanced learner (even some youngish Chinese don't know about it. In fact I am usually told it is a new character rather than an old one that has been reused (although as one Chinese guy pointed out to his friend after a little thought "then how do we type it?")

That is one of many ways I have, do you have any? More to follow on this subject in later posts. Of course the most important thing is to be open open and friendly, a smile works wonders, and as I am sure many have discovered Chinese health shops are usually better than restaurants for practice.

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).

When to learn Chinese Characters?

I believe that it is best to delay formal learning of Chinese characters until you know enough Chinese to be able to start learning to read words that you have already mastered (through listening and speaking), at some point in the future your reading ability will enable you to start learning new words and phrases from reading alone (just like it did in your mother tongue), but initially you should use the phonetic pinyin system to help you with your learning. If this post has a motto it is simply I don't want to learn to read Chinese characters, I want to learn to read Chinese. I think that informal learning about characters from the start won't do any harm and will probably help, including learning about stroke order, and some background about how they are used etc. Formal structured learning at any early stage is at best a distraction of time and energy with little payback in a language that in its written form can be read by mutually unintelligable dialects, at worst it presents an obstacle to actually learning Mandarin. This is my opinion, based on my experiances and research.

I have been too busy recently and am accumulating a whole bunch of things I want to post about, clearly my intention a while ago to attempt to summarize my Chinese learning experience to-date failed, the more I looked back on it the more I felt there was to say. At the moment I am going to develop small series of posts on themes like the previous on language learning not being a new thing, I am spending a little more time now doing background reading and research, eventually I will revisit the posts and go through another stage of refining and drawing conclusions. I want to write a few posts on learning Chinese characters this first one being an introduction. A while ago I posted that the worst thing I did when starting to learn Mandarin was to make any attempt to learn the characters. Many formal courses make their students learn characters (hanzi) right from the start, a traditional approach will involve countless repetition and writing to learn characters by rote. The new student is not in a position to challenge this and often has no choice as their progress is partially monitored by their ability to handwrite the characters they have been given.

To state my situation, I am a self-learner and am learning in a non-Mandarin speaking country with no Chinese relatives, a position similar to that of many English learners throughout the world and a situation that needs to be addressed as a baseline when considering the learning of any language imho. There has been a dominance of input and focus on people living in China, in full-time education and on second generation Chinese living in other countries who have had exposure to Chinese at home (material produced by the Chinese government appears to be particularly focused on this group). Insights from these groups are valuable but need to include the experiances of those learning Mandarin succesfully as a realistic hobby.

The first problem that can mislead the new learner is a statement that will go something like this "you need to know around three thousand characters to read a Chinese newspaper" unfortunately the opposite is not true, if you know three thousand characters that is no indication that you will be able to read anything significant. You will need to know many compound words and different readings first, you will need a reasonable level of Chinese. In fact if all you needed to do was learn a few thousand characters, Chinese would be a ridiculously simple language :) I don't think the realities of the Chinese writing system are usually made clear to the beginner. knowing the characters alone will not allow you read anything significant. Knowing lots of words is better, but will only get you so far. You'll need to learn the language like any other language.

Written Chinese is not phonetic, whilst European languages (and others) represent the sound elements of the spoken language in the written system, Chinese generally represents elements of meaning. This is a crucial difference, an adult learner of English coming to German has already mastered a written system and reading skills that with a little adaptation for language variation can be used straight away to hear German inside their head whilst reading it, even if they don't understand. Encountering a German word they know, they can either go straight to meaning or hop via internal translation (less ideal) either way they can "hear" the word internally. 出口 can be found on both Chinese and Japanese roads to represent an exit, the pronounciation is not similar but when I see 出口 on a sign in Japanese anime I know what it means even though I don't speak Japanese "did I read Japanese or did I read Kanji", in my head I heard chu1kou3 (Chinese), what if didn't know the Chinese but instead knew English meanings for the characters, so read "go out mouth" and guessed exit, then I read neither Japanese or Chinese, I simply read a sign. This non-phonetic system is a crucial aspect of Chinese for a Westerner, take the time to think about the implications, whatever you decide.

Are you a fan of natural approaches to language learning? Chinese children don't start formal character learning until the age of 7/8 (information may be slightly out of date) as is the case everywhere they learn to read their mother tongue with language they already know, it is quite unatural to learn a language from the written form. Arguements could be made that this is not a problem in second language aquisition for languages with a phonetic writing system, especially if the the reading skills you have picked via your mother tongue are directly applicable, but does this approach make sense for a language with a written system that is outside of your experiance? It is a recognised problem amongst Asian students coming to study in the UK that many have good to excellent reading and writing ability in English but poor speaking and understanding because they have spent a lot of their learning time on reading and writing. Why should we be any better if we place too much early emphasis on their written system?

Recently there has been quite a lot of buzz surrounding the Heisig method to master writing and remembering the meanings of Hanzi, this method doesn't teach pronouciation and provides keywords to associate with a character that may only represent a single and/or approximate meaning. I dont doubt that is relatively fast and agree that rote learning is a crazy way to solve the hanzi problem so Heisig method wins on that front. Unfortuanatly the method seems to be being picked up as a good thing to do for beginners. Is it sensible to learn via a written system in a language that is so decoupled from the spoken form? How exactly will be being able to sort of read simple Chinese sentances in English help the learner? The real deal breaker for me is that Heisig will teach you to handwrite the characters but without the pronounciations you cannot enter a single hanzi into a computer, almost all my written Chinese interaction is via a computer, I have met Chinese people who have lived in the UK for a few years who freely admit that their handwriting ability has badly degraded because all their Chinese interaction is via a computer, I have met a Japanese person who laments that the younger generation are losing Kanji handwriting ability because their interaction is increasingly via computer, where is the pressing need to handwrite from the early stages?

If you are on a fossilised course that rates handwritten Kanji or Hanzi in the early stages then Heisig may well be a godsend, if not ......? Obviously I don't 'get' Heisig, it is quite possible I have missed something I have no objection to and in-fact welcome having my stupidity pointed out in comments (so long as you remain reasonably polite ;)). My next post will probably be an attempt to deconstruct the Heisig method (bound to be contraversial) followed by a post describing how I am learning to read Chinese. Excuse spelling/grammatical errors, IT fail has left me without spellchecking and time constraints led me to just dump the post I composed in my head whilst decorating (although some prior web research did occur and I did get a chance to discuss some issues with a Chinese friend).