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How do they learn Hanzi? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| epingchris Triglot Senior Member Taiwan shih-chuan.blog.ntu. Joined 6815 days ago 273 posts - 284 votes  5 sounds Studies: Taiwanese, Mandarin*, English, FrenchB2 Studies: Japanese, German, Turkish | Message 9 of 15 05 March 2008 at 8:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Why is that list for Taiwanese students if it uses simplified characters and hanyu pinyin?
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| alfajuj Diglot Senior Member Taiwan Joined 5998 days ago 121 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Taiwanese, French | Message 10 of 15 10 March 2008 at 6:20am | IP Logged | ||
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Just to answer the original poster's question, since I have first hand experience watching my daughters learn Chinese writing in elementary school in Taiwan, I can tell you how the children learn writing. The kids start in kindergarden with learning phonetic symbols called "dzu yin fu hau" (meaning literally: "phonetic symbols") and are also known by the name of the first 4 letters: "bwo pwo mwo fwo" These symbols look something like Japanese katakana script. See this link for more info about it. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mandarin_pts.htm They then learn new characters progressively. They have a textbook which has a reading with pictures and emphasizing the new words on the bottom of the page. For lower grades, there are phonetic symbols next to all of the characters in the text. The (These disappear in higher levels) There is an accompanying workbook which has a chart showing the stroke order and squares with dotted line "crosshairs" to practice the new words for homework. There is always lots of writing homework. Starting in grade 3, they get lots of homework which requires looking the new characters up in the dictionary then listing its main radical, stroke count, and 2 pairs of compound words incorporating the word. This is the most tedious homework for the kids because it's quite slow looking words up in the dictionary.
The courses have a lot of built-in repetition and reinforcement. So by the end, even slower students can get all the words. Students also learn Taiwanese once a week. The Taiwanese writing is actually romanized. Ironically, most older native speakers cannot read or write this! There is no official written form of Taiwanese with Chinese characters, although it is partially possible to do so. What you see as subtitles on TV when the language is Taiwanese is actually mostly a Mandarin translation with Taiwaneseisms mixed in. Edited by alfajuj on 10 March 2008 at 6:41am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| epingchris Triglot Senior Member Taiwan shih-chuan.blog.ntu. Joined 6815 days ago 273 posts - 284 votes 5 sounds Studies: Taiwanese, Mandarin*, English, FrenchB2 Studies: Japanese, German, Turkish | Message 11 of 15 12 March 2008 at 7:08am | IP Logged | ||
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"Taiwaneseisms" ......lol I like that. :)
The Taiwanese textbook I now have at hand (from the kid of one of my parents' acquaintance) actually writes Taiwanese in three ways: hanzi, zhuyin (bopomofo), and romanization. Of course, all the systems are partially modified to suit the nature of the language. It is not surprising that most Taiwanese native speakers have been speaking it for all their life without ever writing it: Taiwanese language education at school is a recent and somewhat controversial program (ok I'll stop there before politics gets in). It's interesting to see if standardized Taiwanese writing will catch on: they definitely need a input system on computer for youngsters to want to use it. Okay, back to Mandarin I guess. Alfajuj above provided a pretty detailed explanation, and I would like to add that it's highly probable that most parents already started teaching their children writing some simple ones before they even went to kindergarten. It's not that hard to write "one", "two", "three", "big", "small"; moreover, Taiwan is a highly competitive society, especially so among the students. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6637 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 12 of 15 15 March 2008 at 2:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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The reason that list is in simplified Chinese is that the guy who posted it on that site was doing so for people at chinese-forums. They requested a simplified list, so he converted it. It's in pinyin because that's what most Chinese learners are accustomed to. Had it been posted by the Taiwanese government, it would be in fantizi and probably BoPoMoFo. Also, keep in mind that the Taiwanese education system focuses more heavily on 文言文 (Classical Chinese) than the mainland, so many characters will be taught that aren't really used in modern Chinese.
By the way, if you want the list in traditional, an easy way is to use an add-on for Firefox called TongWenTang. It allows you to convert whole pages to either character set, and you can even set it to automatically view every page in either simplified or traditional. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| wuyou Triglot Groupie Fiji Joined 6592 days ago 90 posts - 97 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, Japanese, English Studies: French | Message 13 of 15 15 March 2008 at 10:49pm | IP Logged | ||
I began to practise "shufa" at 4 or 3 years old, one character a day at the beginning :D. And my grandmother read some books for me everyday. When I went to primary school, I had already known many characters, and I had no any problem on reading and writing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6555 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 14 of 15 16 March 2008 at 4:06am | IP Logged | ||
I have observed that in Japan as well, kindergarten and preschool-aged children are already interested in kanji and will be learning and teaching characters to each other on their own. The average Japanese child already has a low degree of literacy going into grade 1. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| victor Tetraglot Moderator United States Joined 7105 days ago 1098 posts - 1056 votes 6 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, FrenchC1, Mandarin Studies: Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 15 of 15 16 March 2008 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | ||
I suppose it's a phenomenon in the education systems across Asia. I have to admit that I was surprised to find that there is a huge gap between children entering grade 1 from kindergarten and those who do not, when I first became familiar with the education system here in Canada. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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