maxb Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 7186 days ago 536 posts - 589 votes 7 sounds Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Mandarin
| Message 17 of 21 01 February 2006 at 8:41am | IP Logged |
administrator wrote:
How yes I could learn it all right, but the writing system is such a burden, I don't think I'd ever have enough time to master it enough to read a newspaper. But I love Chinese tea (Gong fu cha) and HK movies so there would be an incentive, but not enough unfortunately to cope with the characters. |
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Yeah the characters are somewhat of a burden, I still have a long way to go there as well, mostly because the spoken language is what attracted me to chinese in the first place. However if you use a flashcard based computer program learning them can be less of a burden. I don't believe in the old traditonal idea that you have to handwrite a character at least 10 times before you can remember it. I aim for recognition (i.e reading) only. When I am retired I have ample time to learn to handwrite characters :-)
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Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6897 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map
| Message 18 of 21 01 February 2006 at 9:33am | IP Logged |
maxb wrote:
I don't believe in the old traditonal idea that you have to handwrite a character at least 10 times before you can remember it. I aim for recognition (i.e reading) only. When I am retired I have ample time to learn to handwrite characters :-) |
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Everybody's mileage will vary I suppose, but 10 times sounds way too low to me. My experience is somewhere closer to 50-100. Maybe I am just a slow learner :o).
And that number is likely to come down when I learn more characters. Currently I know some 350 or so.
I enjoy writing them by hand actually. I guess it's the artistic qualities in them that I find appealing. And then, of course, it is not a burden but added enjoyment. It does slow down your progress though.
I think it would be very difficult for me (well, much more difficult than it already is) to get them properly committed to memory if I didn't write them by hand as well.
Edited by Hencke on 01 February 2006 at 9:36am
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krtek Groupie United States Joined 7113 days ago 46 posts - 50 votes Speaks: Mandarin* Studies: English, Italian, Cantonese
| Message 19 of 21 01 February 2006 at 2:20pm | IP Logged |
Hencke wrote:
I think it would be very difficult for me (well, much more difficult than it already is) to get them properly committed to memory if I didn't write them by hand as well. |
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Similar for native speakers. As I said before, with more use of computers to type characters using pinyin nowadays and therefore less chance to actually write them, from time to time we can't remember exactly how to write a certain character, although reading it is not a problem at all.
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victor Tetraglot Moderator United States Joined 7321 days ago 1098 posts - 1056 votes 6 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, FrenchC1, Mandarin Studies: Spanish Personal Language Map
| Message 20 of 21 01 February 2006 at 10:07pm | IP Logged |
I learned characters from writing over and over. I remember the days when I had to copy out one character on a 12 x 12 grid. But you're right, maxb, if you want to just recognize, it's actually really easy.
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maxb Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 7186 days ago 536 posts - 589 votes 7 sounds Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Mandarin
| Message 21 of 21 02 February 2006 at 3:08am | IP Logged |
victor wrote:
I learned characters from writing over and over. I remember the days when I had to copy out one character on a 12 x 12 grid. But you're right, maxb, if you want to just recognize, it's actually really easy. |
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At least it is easier. Anyway my handwriting is really bad even in Swedish so I don't want to subject the beautiful chinese characters to my poor handwriting :-).
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