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Chinese characters hard to learn? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
 Keith Diglot Moderator JapanRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6777 days ago 526 posts - 536 votes  1 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 40 10 June 2006 at 1:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I think learning to write 3000 Chinese characters is not any more difficult than learning to spell 3000 different words in English. Each character is not entirely unique. When spelling words in English you have to know which letters to put together. The same is true for Chinese characters. You have to know which elements to put together. For reading English, you cannot read properly if you are not familiar with the way the system works. You must learn compounds of letters that produce a different sound than it would be when a letter is seen by itself. Such as "tion" in vacation. There is quite a system to learn which is not intuitive for speakers from unrelated languages and the system has many irregularities which are hard to explain. Chinese also has a system and until you have studied it well, you cannot believe that is no harder to learn than English words. What everybody should realize is, that your level of exposure to the language will affect how difficult it is for you. If you study it just once a week for 10 years you might well think that is too difficult to learn. If you study everyday you will see progress very quickly. No language is "too difficult to learn." The "too difficult to learn" argument is completely unsound. But learning languages is not for everybody. Not everyone has a reason and motivation to learn another language. Not everyone has the time or self-discipline that it takes. Therefor, I believe that any normal person could learn Chinese. Results will vary but most likely in direct proportion to a number of factors including reasons, motivation, time, self-discipline, and methods but not including "difficulty of language." I think it's funny when a Japanese person makes the argument that because their writing system uses 3 different kinds of characters (hiragana, katakana, kanji) it must be more difficult to learn. By that standard, I could say that the alphabet has 2 different writing systems, Uppercase and Lowercase. 'A' and 'a' are not any more difficult to learn than learning "wa" in hiragana and then learning it katakana. In fact, the small 'a' you see on the computer or newspaper is not how I write a small 'a' by hand. We have the ability to learn many thousands of characters and the frequency at which we look at them will influence our ability to recognize them or not. I feel that reading should come first. Writing Chinese characters takes much more practice time and motivation. If you don't have the need to write everyday, then that skill comes at a high price with little, if any, benefit. I think one of the reasons that students fail to learn many characters is because they are studying reading, writing, and meaning all at once. You can probably read a sentence with 10 or 20 characters in the time it takes to write just one 10-stroke character neatly. Obviously it's easier to practice reading than writing. Obviously it's much more beneficial to be able to read 2,000 characters than to be able to read and write only 500. It's easier to get to the point of reading a character without thinking than to be able to write a character without thinking. If you want to learn writing at the same time, that's fine. It's up to you. If you want to learn writing before reading, that's fine too. There's not a single person of normal ability that couldn't study one new character a day. Each day add a new character to your knowledge and review your old characters. OK, one character is pretty slow as it would take you over 8 years to get to the 3,000 character mark. But with 2 characters a day, you would cut that down to 4 years. You can't review even 1,000 characters in one single day but I don't think you would need to keep reviewing the old characters that long. Once you've studied a character everyday for two months straight you won't need to review it every day. Anyway, I just wanted to make a point that it is not more difficult to learn Chinese than English just because you will want to learn a lot of characters. It just looks more daunting and you are aware of it from the beginning. Whereas for English, people probably don't know about or don't fully realize the difficulties and irregularities of spelling when they first start learning English. They just take it one word at a time. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Frisco Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6856 days ago 380 posts - 398 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Italian, Turkish, Mandarin | Message 2 of 40 10 June 2006 at 2:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Great post. Thank you for setting the record straight. It really annoys me to see people going on about how "hard" certain languages and aspects of languages are. It's such an empty simplification. Time is the real factor. Some things just require more time. Chinese characters is a perfect example. In 5 years time, I anticipate I'll know thousands of characters while a child born in China today will still be illiterate. I guess the Westerner isn't at such a disadvantage after all!
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| Fraktal Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 6743 days ago 13 posts - 13 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Mandarin | Message 3 of 40 10 June 2006 at 2:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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You certainly have a point here. However, I would like to add one thought. After having learnt the connection between pronounciation and writing system for a specific western language, I am able to write most words correctly knowing just their pronounciation. So, when learning the language I can use my audio memory efficiently. I can train my audio memory easily by active and passive listening.
For chinese dialects, the audio memory only helps for the spoken language. After having studied Mandarin for some time, I still can see no direct link between the spoken and the written language. So, for learning the charakters I have to use a different approach, where I have to link the meaning directly to the character(s) of the words instead of using the bypass via the sound. This is an additional step (,which can definitely be done: 1.3 billion chinese prove it). And finally, what is difficult? Frisco writes "Time is the real factor." Well, I would say if I can learn language A in half the time learning language B, then language A is easier for me. Furthermore, if I have to learn other unfamiliar aspects (like a yet unkown writing system), this language is more difficult for me. Of course, one could also say, it is only the path towards mastering the language being longer. It is rather a point of view. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| brumblebee Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6775 days ago 206 posts - 212 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese | Message 4 of 40 10 June 2006 at 9:53am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I'm glad to hear that! I possibly want to learn Chinese in High School, and I wondered if writing characters would be hard. I will be using pin-yin for the first two years though, so that may be a good thing!
-brumblebee 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7077 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French | Message 5 of 40 10 June 2006 at 10:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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That's a good post Keith and I agree that setting little goals such as 2 characters per day takes the edge off of the documented difficulty associated with Chinese characters.
Although I do have to say that when I was studying Mandarin I decided to put it on hold due to the characters. Something I couldn't escape anyway since I'm now learning them for Korean, hah. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6768 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 6 of 40 11 June 2006 at 2:36am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Excellent post, Keith!
Precisely true, I think. English spelling rules are very complicated, and only fairly educated speakers can correctly guess the pronunciation of difficult unknown words. On the other hand, I hear Chinese speakers are quite good at guessing the pronunciation of unknown characters because of how most complex ones have a phonetic component.
Indeed! Studying for an hour a week only gives you 52 hours of learning a year. At that rate, you'd need 20 years to get in the thousand hours necessary for fluency, and you'd quit long before then, thinking the language "too hard".
Also true, which is why I think language courses in grade schools should be more about languages and how they work, than pretending to actually teach a language (which rarely happens).
I too have pointed out that English has "two alphabets" to people who describe the Japanese kana that way. In fact, you basically have to learn a third way of writing each letter if you want to write proper cursive English. Some Japanese seem to have a certain sense of pride about their language being complicated, but then they tend to think all languages are hard.
Very true. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Guanche Hexaglot Senior Member Spain danielmarin.blogspot Joined 7046 days ago 168 posts - 178 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, GermanC1, RussianB1, French, Japanese Studies: Greek, Mandarin, Arabic (Written) | Message 7 of 40 11 June 2006 at 2:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I totally agree with you. When you learn a new alphabet, such as Cyrillic or Greek, you realize that there're indeed 3 different alphabets for each of them: upper case, lower case and the handwritten form. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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