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Writing Chinese by hand | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| maya_star17 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5915 days ago 269 posts - 291 votes  Speaks: English*, Russian*, French, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 17 of 30 11 May 2009 at 1:40am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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It sounds like the original poster has already made up his (her?) mind, so I doubt anything I say will be taken seriously, but just in case it does:
Copying out characters from a computer on the rare occasion that you DO need to write, is a) awkward/slow, and b) your handwriting will look like that of a 6 year old child. The point of learning a language isn't to show off, but I still find that awkward. Also, I wouldn't worry about natives forgeting the occasional character. How many native speakers of English (or any other phonetic language) can spell every word correctly, 100% of the time? It doesn't mean that somebody learning English shouldn't pay attention to spelling. Writing by hand is less useful than before because of technology, but it's still a handy skill to have. I wouldn't dismiss so quickly. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Gon-no-suke Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6434 days ago 156 posts - 191 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, EnglishC2 Studies: Korean, Malay, Swahili | Message 18 of 30 12 May 2009 at 7:08am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Let me add some support to leonidus. Most people replying to him seem to confound two issues, the first one is learning how to write Chinese characters and the second one is being able to produce a lot of characters from memory. I think leonidus is planning to do the first and avoid doing the second, and this is what I have done as well.
For Japanese, I have a passive understanding of some 3000 characters and with this I am able to read everything my fellow Japanese can. I haven't drilled writing characters from memory, but since I have been living here for ten years, I am able to write some characters. I have no idea how many though, but probably more than a few hundred but less than a thousand. I did practice writing a subset of characters though, mostly using a pen but I also did some calligraphy. I do think my handwriting is legible and looks like something an adult wrote although by no means pretty (neither is my handwriting in other scripts). The point I want to make is that being able to write well has nothing to do with how many characters you can write from memory, but more with knowing stroke direction and stroke order. You can achieve a very good written hand by just practicing on a limited subset of all characters. It might be that writing characters from memory is more important in China, but here in Japan you are perfectly able to live and work without focusing all your energy on this aspect of the language. If you do want to study anyway best of luck to you! It is just a matter of how you want to spend your time. If there are studies on how the amount of characters you can write from memory is correlated with reading speed, I would be very interested in a reference. If true, this could be a reason to practice more. P.s. If impressing natives really is you goal, why not learn a few uncommon characters (fishes, animals &c.) that you can pull out when you want to impress unsuspecting people around you... Edited by Gon-no-suke on 12 May 2009 at 7:17am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Sassiecat Newbie United States Joined 6034 days ago 7 posts - 7 votes | Message 19 of 30 12 May 2009 at 7:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Although the original poster has probably made up his mind, I do feel that I must add this:
Personally, I feel that it would take away from your understanding of the culture to not be able to read and write chinese. I'm learning Cantonese from my boyfriend's family, and since I dabbled in Japanese for forever in a day, I insisted they'd help me learn to write in simplified chinese because I don't want hours and hours of practice learning 750+ Kanji to go to waste. When my boyfriend's father shows me how to write a character, he tells me a little story with each one. When he teaches me how to write a word the contains more than one Hanzi, he turns those two or three stories into a whole other story in itself. I really think it's for his amusement, or maybe he's reciting his own childhood journey towards remembering the thousands of characters and then thousands of compound words after that, but I'm starting to feel that learning all those thousands of characters really rewarding in itself. Picking out the radicals in each character the way he does and making them tell a hilarious little story not only brings me closer to my boyfriend's father, who gets by on what little English he knows, but I feel that perhaps I'm getting in on a little insight into the logic behind what makes this culture tick. Maybe I'm out on a limb on this one, but this is just how I feel. Not only that, but if I ever was to go to China, I'd want to be able to impress my boyfriend's rarely seen relatives by being able to share their language. I'd hate walking down a busy street and not knowing what kind of business I'm passing or what the main story is on the newspapers I see. I hate not knowing what my boyfriend's mother is laughing about with the cooks at their restaurant at the dinner table.(she barely speaks English) I'm a very nosy and curious person. I want to know what's going on! Perhaps I'm learning the language for completely different reasons than Leonidus up above, but I don't want to have to depend on technology to get me by. What if technology is wrong? What if my iPhone dies? What if I get to china and since I don't want to use international roaming, I have to go without it? It's not going to help me decipher the quick handwriting the chinese write, or anything for that matter. Also, there are millions of americans out there who don't understand the difference between words like there, they're, and their. They don't understand the rules of punctuation and proper capitalization. There are so many words out there that I can't even spell correctly despite the fact that I try to be as literate as possible, especially on the internet. That doesn't make it so I can't read something and be able to decipher a new word I come across considering its context. When I read the newspaper here in the United States I often come across words I don't understand myself. They are words that we don't use every day. I'd expect the same from a chinese newspaper. Although there are millions of chinese who don't know enough characters read a newspaper, many of those people were unable to pay for school when they were younger, and even though they may not be able to read the paper, I'm quite sure they can read and write something. The characters they don't know are most likely quite rare, the kind that you run into in the newspaper. Anyways, I've written enough of a book over here, so I think I'm going to quit before I write more. My bottom line is that I truly feel you are missing out on a big cultural part of the chinese language by being apathetic about learning how to read and write it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Gon-no-suke Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6434 days ago 156 posts - 191 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, EnglishC2 Studies: Korean, Malay, Swahili | Message 20 of 30 12 May 2009 at 11:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Hi Sassiecat, welcome to the forum!
We are only talking about hand-writing. Noone here aims at staying an illiterate:
I have seen a lot of people who seem to get "stuck" on studying Japanese kanji, and this prevented them from learning the amount of vocabulary needed to speak (and read) fluently. Your story is perhaps different though so I hope I don't come across as condescending. There are people on this forum who seem to have mastered a couple of thousand characters in a few months, which is an impressive feat that I wish I could have managed when starting studying Chinese and Japanese. However, there is always a risk that such a project takes years and becomes a hinderance to you learning the language.
We all do! That is why we love studying languages. Edited by Gon-no-suke on 12 May 2009 at 11:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| !LH@N Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6821 days ago 487 posts - 531 votes Speaks: German, Turkish*, English Studies: Serbo-Croatian, Spanish | Message 21 of 30 12 May 2009 at 11:39pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Nah, I don't think fear of "getting stuck" is a good excuse here. It's just enough to read lots and lots of AJATT (for motivation) and going through Mr.Heisig's book. All you need to do, no need to fear getting stuck (I think).
Regards, Ilhan 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6034 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 22 of 30 13 May 2009 at 1:50am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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If I ever get to the point where I can start studying Chinese or Japanese, witting the characters by hand would be one of the most enjoyable aspects of it! It's good to know a lot of people agree it is important to do so :).
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5765 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 23 of 30 25 May 2009 at 2:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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If you learn semi-cursive, as every Chinese do, you can avoid the problem of memorizing the details altogether - when you forget something, you turn it into a mish-mash of curves and expect well to be understood.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 24 of 30 25 May 2009 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I love you. :o Such an easy solution! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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