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How do they learn Hanzi? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Batucada Diglot Newbie South Africa Joined 5999 days ago 17 posts - 18 votes Speaks: English, Afrikaans* Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 15 27 February 2008 at 2:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello everyone,
I’m wondering how Chinese children learn Hanzi; i.e. the Japanese school children work trough the Kyōiku and Jōyō kanji lists. Can someone please explain this to me? Thank you, Batucada. Edited by Batucada on 02 March 2008 at 8:37am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Batucada Diglot Newbie South Africa Joined 5999 days ago 17 posts - 18 votes Speaks: English, Afrikaans* Studies: Japanese | Message 2 of 15 04 March 2008 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Is this a stupid or ignorant question or does nobody know?
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| rob Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5961 days ago 287 posts - 288 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 3 of 15 04 March 2008 at 1:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know for a fact, but just so you have some sort of answer...
I found this page which is apparently the order in which school kids learn Hanzi in Taiwan. Though I'm not 100% on this, the number of Hanzi learned each year seems comparable to what Japanese school kids learn, but I've heard Chinese kids are expected to learn a lot more, a lot faster. A problem with a school-graded list is that it would presumably be split by difficulty level. I.e. characters with few strokes would be learned in 1st grade. Therefore, it may be more useful to learn characters in order of frequency, such as this list of the 3500 most common used characters (Xiàndài Hànyǔ Chángyòng Zìbiǎo) in order of frequency. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JokePro Groupie United States animalsites.com Joined 6196 days ago 58 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 4 of 15 04 March 2008 at 2:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't really much about it, but here is what I found:
Cojak Hanzi has charts showing the hanzi required by the Hong Kong School System by grade level (1-6). Grade level one shows 455 required Hanzi. Wow! That is a lot of characters for such young children. By comparison, this site indicates that Japanese students are required to learn 81 kanji in 1st grade. Volume 1 of Tuttle's Kanji Cards contains 448 kanji, which covers grades 1-3. However, at this age, Japanese students are concentrating on kana. Of course, Chinese students have to learn pinyin or zhuyin. Edited by JokePro on 04 March 2008 at 2:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lawrence Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5978 days ago 149 posts - 149 votes Speaks: Cantonese, English* Studies: German, French, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 5 of 15 04 March 2008 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm a bit skeptical about the authenticity of that list... Why are the words simplified if the list is talking about Taiwan?
Also, I'm not sure about the common usage in Taiwan, but some of the definitions are a bit weird. 吃 is listed as "to stammer", and 麗 (albeit in simplified form) is listed as Korea, most likely due to the term 高句麗 (I think) which if I'm not mistaken is the Hanja for Gogeuryeo. Another point, 五 is listed as a second-grade word, which sounds ridiculous. This destroys the 'simple characters first' idea, as first-grade words include loads of words that are more difficult. To my knowledge (I haven't actually received education in HK before), students are just taught words out of books, and then told to write any new words out a billion times for the next day. If you didn't know a word, you simply asked someone. Children usually start off learning words that are simply to write, usually, basic nouns/numbers, then maybe some verbs. The sorts of things that I learnt when I was a little kid were characters (often the ones that bear resemblance to their meaning) like 田﹐山﹐川﹐魚﹐火﹐土﹐木 etc. I'm not sure if there is a definitive list, but I don't think one exists for Chinese - you can't really have a list of 'commonly used characters' for the language when we have nothing else to fall back on, unlike Japanese with their kana. I mean, I don't think the governments that use English have a minimum vocabulary for you to learn in order to become literate do they? Hope that helps a little. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JokePro Groupie United States animalsites.com Joined 6196 days ago 58 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 15 04 March 2008 at 3:16pm | IP Logged | ||
OK. After taking a closer look at the list, it does seem a bit strange. Why is 二 not on the 1st grade list. Do they not think the number 2 is important? At first I thought maybe it wasn't included because it is ridiculously easy. However, they included 三. Also, it seems like many of the 1st grade hanzi are more complicated and less useful than those listed in other grades. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lawrence Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5978 days ago 149 posts - 149 votes Speaks: Cantonese, English* Studies: German, French, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 7 of 15 04 March 2008 at 4:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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二 is in there, about 7 characters down from 三.
I'm not too surprised about the number of characters children have to learn (based on the Hong Kong list), though the number that has to be crammed in the first grade seems to be a bit extreme.. I did a quick count and estimate the total number of characters in the first 6 grades to be a bit under 3000, and given the fact that numbers ranging from 3000-5000 are generally cited as being what a literate person knows, it seems fair. I'd generally expect someone in sixth grade (that's like 11/12 years old right? HK measures school years in grades?!) to be able to read a newspaper, albeit not understand all the words (as in the words made up of more than one character). But I guess, the amount of words have to be crammed in early, otherwise they'd be illiterate for a bit too long... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Andy_Liu Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong leibby.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6582 days ago 255 posts - 257 votes Speaks: Mandarin, Cantonese*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 8 of 15 05 March 2008 at 4:15am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know what exactly a grade is. I think I learnt ALL characters mentioned so far, probably except 麗, before I turned 6. When I turned 12, yes, I could read a very large part of an average newspaper except all kinds of vocabulary I couldn't figure out, which I acquired after entering high school.
I don't know anything about a list - yes, that list of Hong Kong does exist, but I didn't know this until I found it in a university library. Kids simply didn't even know what a list was or whether a particular character should be first-grade or second-grade. They just picked up EVERYTHING when prompted and needed. I think I learnt all the characters I needed for numbers even before I entered a kindergarten. For obvious reasons, I didn't even have the concept of pinyin or the English alphabet (both consisting of letters) until I was asked to learn English consciously since the ??fourth grade??. The Hong Kong list includes a lot of common characters with both Cantonese and Mandarin readings, but both were just absent in my elementary school textbooks. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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