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Mandarin - Pinyin Only | ||
Tags: Writing System | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6051 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 9 of 25 27 June 2011 at 8:31am | IP Logged | ||
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It's time to learn the characters, to walk the chosen path. The true Chinese awaits you at the end. And remember,
天道酬勤 = Heaven's path favors those that work hard Edited by irrationale on 27 June 2011 at 8:37am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Aquila123 Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mydeltapi.com Joined 5307 days ago 201 posts - 262 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: Finnish, Russian | Message 10 of 25 27 June 2011 at 3:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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I may be wrong, but I believe the thraditional Chinese writing system will soon bo out of use as an everyday tool.
Soon you will have software combined with scanning devices that effectively translates from those characters to PinYin and oppositely too if wanted. The software surely allready is there, but soon practical scanning devices come too. The chinese themselves will soon find out it is easier to get along that way that to learn in depth the traditional writing system. The technology will thus squeese the tradtional writing into obsolence automatically. And - if the discrepancy between writing and pronounciation i English and French gets even worse that it allready is, something similar will happen for there languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| galindo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5208 days ago 142 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Portuguese | Message 11 of 25 27 June 2011 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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Oh, I can totally see how you got frustrated with learning characters if you were using the "write them
over and over" method! Learning to read characters is a much simpler task than learning to write them, and since you can use pinyin to type on the computer, you don't need to place a big priority on learning to write by hand. It doesn't take much time to be able to passively recognize a character and connect it with a word you already know. Being able to actually see the pieces that compound words are made out of will be helpful. Like unityandoutside said, once you learn the simple components that make up all characters, learning new ones is simply a matter of learning a new pattern, not a completely new concept. @Aquila123 Haha, no. Not going to happen. People said that would happen with Japanese, too. But you know what actually happened as technology allowed people to easily input characters phonetically? MORE characters are being used than before! Because people can usually passively recognize more characters than they can physically remember how to write, they can use more characters when typing than they can when writing by hand. This leads to less common characters being used more frequently, and in turn raises the number of characters that readers need to know. Technology will actually expand character usage, not make it disappear. Sorry! Edited by galindo on 27 June 2011 at 3:46pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5192 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 12 of 25 27 June 2011 at 7:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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I feel that to learn Chinese without learning the characters would be like learning Spanish without ever saying a word of it. It would be incomplete. Furthermore, learning to write the characters will facilitate learning the other aspects of the language (speaking, listening, and reading).
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JWill Bilingual Triglot Newbie Australia Joined 4899 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: English*, Cantonese*, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 13 of 25 28 June 2011 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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The characters are probably part of the "fun", though initially it might be helpful to
stick to pinyin. @Aguila123 - I doubt that would happen. Chinese pinyin is hard to read for a native speaker - partly because there are many homophones. Written characters can be different for the same sound to convey different meanings, but reading the same pinyin which can mean 10-20 different things is not going to be simple. And as galindo has mentioned it is actually a lot easier to type characters with the use of computers. Btw - there is software available now which would convert characters into pinyin fairly accurately. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MikeN Diglot Newbie United States lookoutknockhead.com Joined 4919 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 14 of 25 29 June 2011 at 9:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think that what you should consider is your method, rather than the languages themselves. Slamming characters into your brain by writing them multiple times is not going to be effective or, more importantly, in the least bit fun.
Let's start by taking a look at your goal: You said that you want to be able to sit down and read a book or an article in Chinese with ease. Very doable. Now let's think of ways we can start you down the path towards that goal: 1. Reading: Check out some children's books. You can actually find Dr. Seuss books in Chinese. They don't have the same kind of rhyme as they do in English, but they still tell the story. The going will be slow in the beginning, but don't get too hung up on grammar and focus more on the characters and the general meaning of sentences and paragraphs. 2. Writing: You need to know how to write the characters. Every character has a stroke order, and once you internalize the rules for writing characters, I promise it will make writing any character, both old and new, much easier and faster to write. 3. Online Resources: Nciku (looooove this site), Chinese-Forums.com, Lang-8 and/or LingQ (which I've never used but I may play with for learning Japanese). Here's the bottom line: You have to learn characters. You just do. Once you establish a foothold, I promise you it will start to come easier. That much I can promise! Best of luck. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Aquila123 Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mydeltapi.com Joined 5307 days ago 201 posts - 262 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: Finnish, Russian | Message 15 of 25 29 June 2011 at 10:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well,I admit that the Chinese characters have some aesthetic and cultural values, but the writing can be conciderably simplified while preserving these values. By reshaping it to a cyllabic system, you need only around 500 charcters plus 4 diacritic signs for the tones. And to avoid problems of homonymes, you can in adition have a small set of helper signs that tell about the semantic cathegory to be used when ambiguities are highly probable.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| galindo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5208 days ago 142 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Portuguese | Message 16 of 25 30 June 2011 at 6:59am | IP Logged | ||
Er, that sounds way more complicated than the system they use now. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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