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Chinese characters hard to learn? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| 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 17 of 40 30 June 2006 at 1:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Now that I'm studying Greek, I realized I had forgotten how difficult Chinese and Japanese are. It's great to study a good Indoeuropean language from time to time! ;-)
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 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 18 of 40 08 July 2006 at 8:44am | IP Logged | |||||
4000-4500 characters you say?
3000 characters is really not enough? Are you sure? I have to raise some serious questions about the statements you two are making. After all, the HSK Chinese Proficiency test only covers 2063 Characters to my understanding. Do you know that 1966 characters makes up 97% of a corpus that had 193,504,018 characters. See the frequency list for yourself. So Cthulu, you are complaining about not knowing some rare characters or not knowing 3% of what you read. You are even telling people that 3000 characters won't get them very far when it would, in fact, cover 99% of what they can read! I think Chinese characters are NOT actually hard to learn. If you can learn one, you can learn as many as you want. The only hard thing is keeping up with it and working at it everyday. That is a problem with self-discipline, not with the material you are trying to learn. You may say that learning Chinese characters is tiresome, grueling, boring, tedious or that it just takes an awful long time. But please don't say that is hard, difficult or impossible. Edited by Keith on 08 July 2006 at 8:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6890 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 19 of 40 08 July 2006 at 9:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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Learning characters is far from impossible. After all, countless Chinese and Japanese learn how to read them, though, granted, they do learn many of them when they are young and are completely immersed in the language.
I do agree, though, that reading any literature in the Chinese language, original or translated, is not as easy as some claim. You will, without doubt, come across characters you have never seen and may never see again. This is a problem even for native speakers so it's certainly not laziness on the part of the foreign learner. One problem I find with learning Chinese characters is making sure that you don't forget them once you've learnt them. It's easy to forget the meaning of characters you come across only once in a blue moon. To retain so many characters in your head, you'd constantly have to be reading texts in Chinese. Personally, I find this method incompatible with learning other languages as you won't be able to find that much free time to maintain your Chinese *and* learn another language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| laxxy Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 7119 days ago 172 posts - 177 votes Speaks: Ukrainian, Russian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 20 of 40 08 July 2006 at 10:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the difficulty is overexaggerated, but you do really need a good systematic approach. It's OK to start with learning 25-50 most common characters first, but after that a better method would be needed.
I have no idea about how things are with Chinese, but for Japanese there are several such methods; I'm using Heisig myself and it works pretty well, but I believe there are other effective tools too. With Heisig, for example, I would normally learn meaning and writing (and sometimes reading also) of 25-30 characters per day with a pretty good retention (every day when I studied them every day, more like once a week or two now). It is definitely quite a bit easier than learning English words was back when I was learning English. And once you know the characters, there are _huge_ benefits to learning vocabulary. So the learning curve starts rather steep, but then flattens down. If your target is a vocabulary of say around 8 thousand words in the target language, the characters would at worst be a minor hurdle and possibly even an advantage, imo. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cthulhu Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7223 days ago 139 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English, Mandarin, Russian | Message 21 of 40 08 July 2006 at 1:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Picking up a pocket-sized copy of 圍城 by 錢鍾書 (Random 1940's Chinese novel), I find that each page has 18 lines with an average of 40 characters per line. That's 720 characters per page; so, knowing those 1966 characters that make up 97% of the corpus, that equals roughly 21 characters per page that you're simply not going to know at all. And that's not even counting all the actual vocabulary you're not going to recognize (Which, unless you know every single compound that the characters you do know are used in, is going to be an even higher number). If you know 2063 characters that the HSK apparantly tests, you might knock it down to about 20 characters/page. 3000 characters is enough to recognize 99% of a text, which sounds like a lot, but it still leaves out plenty of things that aren't exactly obscure. "Thumb", "shoulder", "throat", "phlegm", "scar", "rash", "rib", "feces", "urine", "pupil", "pus", "skeleton", "eyelash", "saliva", and a hundred others are all going to be beyond your reach because they don't happen to be in the top 3000, and those are just the ones that have to do with human physiology that I saw when I glanced though part of the list. You could pick any topic that a person might want to read about or that might get mentioned in passing and find the same problem. Heaven only knows what the geniuses who designed the HSK expect people to read with only 2063 characters; the first paragraph of 圍城 has at least 3 or 4 characters that wouldn't be in that group, and it's not a long paragraph. This is because frequency lists are terribly misleading. For example, 顶, number 1000 on that list, has a distribution of 0.016%. Or, roughly, the character is used once out of every 6,250 characters. 泡, number 2000 on the list, has a distribution of 0.0036%; it's used once out of every 27,000 characters. 忖, number 3000, 0.001%; once out of every 100,000 characters. 坂, number 4000, 0.0003%; once out of every 330,000 characters. And so on. They go down roughly by a factor of three every thousand, so you're still going to see Character #3789 about once for every three or four times you see Character #2789. That's not exactly an overwhelmingly huge difference; these are not rare characters. A 450 page book with 720 characters/page has 324,000 characters; might as well just round it to a nice, oh, let's say 330,000. So, if you try reading a full-sized book written for adults and you only know 3000 characters, you're still looking at (On average) something like a thousand individual characters that you haven't learnt, not counting repeats (The number would actually be slightly lower, but I don't have sufficient data to work it out on hand). And that's modern Chinese writing; trust me, the number of characters you wouldn't recognize in anything pre-twentieth century (Even the so-called vernacular books like A Dream of Red Mansions, where you'll find characrters like #9204 鸘, #7032 罽, and some not even on the list, with an uncomfortable frequency) would be MUCH higher. I don't know about you, but where I come from that's not literacy. So, uh, yeah, I am pretty sure that 3000 characters is not "enough". Don't get me wrong, it's a great accomplishment, and it's a large chunk of the journey, but it is not enough to be literate in Chinese. And I've already explained my thoughts on this whole "It's not hard, it's just time-consuming" business. It's not "hard" to memorize the digits of pi to a million decimal places, it's just time-consuming right? Anyone can do it if they just devote a few hours to it every day for a few decades. I don't see why people are so terrified of admitting that something might be difficult; sure the only hard part might be "keeping up with it and working at it everyday", but I thought that's what hard meant? "Difficult" doesn't always mean "complicated". You're right though, it certainly isn't impossible, and I would never say otherwise, but the difficulty is half the fun. Saying it's just time-consuming makes it sound like some kind of menial labour; if there's no difficulty, there's no challange, and if there's no challange there's no accomplishment. I'd have to say Tadeo's 4000-4500 is a much closer estimate than the HSK's 2063, and should be sufficient as long as you pretend that people only started writing Chinese in 1918. Edited by Cthulhu on 08 July 2006 at 1:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6894 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 23 of 40 09 July 2006 at 11:35am | IP Logged | |||||
You get those sort of experiences long before that point. It is even happening to me, at the modest level I am at, plodding along somewhere just past the 600 charcter mark at the moment, though I'll have to go back and repeat since I suspect I may have forgotten about a third or so of those I have already learned. From my very limited perspective everything you and Cthulhu say on the subject seems to be right on the mark and corresponds to what I am experiencing in practice. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| seldnar Senior Member United States Joined 7132 days ago 189 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, French, Greek | Message 24 of 40 11 July 2006 at 1:15am | IP Logged | |||||
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Cthulhu,
Was that the Taiwanese edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone? That was a poor translation--even my Taiwanese friends had to consult the English original to understand parts of it. The Mainland translation is better. As for characters, I learned a long time ago that its not characters that count but combinations of characters. I've often looked at a page of Chinese where I recognize every character but don't know half of the words, its difficult and frustrating, but wonderful in the end when you can finally read that page. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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