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I Hate Hanzi
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atitarev -

Theoretically, you are right, DrZero but people who go for the trouble and learn Chinese are not
satisfied just to be able to understand and speak. You must create or get into a special
environment for this - it's not easy to learn and pick up words without reading - a number of
books, audio recordings, teachers who are going to explain the words to you without writing them
down. Overseas born Chinese are a good example of this but many of them are unhappy about not
being able to read and write.

There's not enough material WITHOUT characters and not very useful or interesting. This was
discussed in this forum - learning Chinese without learning to read is not practically possible. I
would emphasize that learning to read and/or to write characters seriously slows down your
understanding and speaking, although they are different skills.



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gato -

Just to add, most overseas-born Chinese have their mom and dad to explain new words to them, but
that's not really as effective as being able to look up words yourself in a dictionary. Most of
them have trouble carrying on a conversation in Chinese beyond simple topics.










hamihaha -

Sthubbar, do you on purpose say things contrary to the norm?



Quote:

They are not beautiful and if they are that's a bad thing.

Chinese language is interresting because of the characters. It's not as melodic than Italian or
French, more something like Dutch...



Quote:

Learning them is a painful processes of rote memorization

Like every language or every skills. Ask a musician, ask a painter...



Quote:

The more one learns the harder it becomes.

The more characters you learn, the easier it gets of course! You get familiar with all component.
And the biggest part of chinese characters are not ideogram, but phonetics signs... then as easy
to remember than any alphabet.

Susansu


Quote:

It is said that Chinese is one of those most difficult languages to learn all over the world.

Try to learn German! The grammar is impossible... even for German!
Chinese is not a difficult language, but the first step is higher for European.










sthubbar -

Thanks everyone for not jumping all over me. Some of you even have similar frustrations.

DrZero, I am convinced that I must learn to read because I have never met an advanced level
non-native speaker that can't read. I have also, never met a foreign born Chinese that learned
Chinese by speaking to their family that is an advanced speaker. Those people are about at the
level I am at right now. They can fool you into thinking they can speak Chinese though there are
huge gaps in their knowledge.

Ari,

Quote:

Characters got easier for me the more I learned.

I'm just curious, how many have you learned. I used to sorta feel that way. I am now hitting about
2300 and as I mentioned in the original post, the new characters are interfering with previous
learned ones.

hamihama,

Quote:

do you on purpose say things contrary to the norm?

Yes. The first comment about the beauty stems from my frustrations and also from the fact that
most times people refer to the beauty of the characters it is to Chinese calligraphy. As most
people on this board know, 90% of what is considered beautiful Chinese calligraphy is
unintelligible to the vast majority of present day Chinese. Case in point, was out for a dinner
with one of my highly educated Chinese teachers. There was a beautiful painting on the wall with
tons of beautiful Hanzi calligraphy. I already knew the answer, but asked anyway, "What does that
mean?" Her response, "Hahha, you have to be joking, I can recognize some of the characters, though
have no idea what it means."



Quote:

The more characters you learn, the easier it gets of course!

Are you native born Chinese learner? If not, how many characters have you learned?



Quote:

...as easy to remember than any alphabet

I'm putting my money on native born Chinese or an extreme beginner. I could never imagine a second
language learner of Chinese making such a statement.










imron -



Quote:

the new characters are interfering with previous learned ones.

How is that you are learning new characters? Are you learning them from word lists, or are you
learning them from the context of written material?

Personally I find it really difficult to just go through word lists to learn characters, and this
is especially so if I come across similar looking characters during the same learning session (I
run into the same interference problems you mention). As a result I try to pick up all new vocab
from reading native materials. I find this helps a great deal as the context surrounding the
word/character learnt helps me keep it separate it from similar characters (even when I encounter
those characters during the same learning session).










atitarev -

Hamihaha, you are wrong

Phonetics seldom help to guess the correct pronunciation, when you know both the reading and which
part IS the phonetic, then you can say, oh yes we know how to read it

German is easy, no problem with the grammar. Do you need help? And Chinese is hard even for
Chinese, it's easy if you grow up with Chinese characters. Having said this, I know how to learn
characters, only it's a long way for me before I become fluent... I learned German by reading
simple books first, then more complex ones, like any European language can be learned.










DrZero -



Quote:

DrZero, I am convinced that I must learn to read because I have never met an advanced level
non-native speaker that can't read. I have also, never met a foreign born Chinese that learned
Chinese by speaking to their family that is an advanced speaker. Those people are about at the
level I am at right now. They can fool you into thinking they can speak Chinese though there are
huge gaps in their knowledge.

This may be true. I'm not quite convinced. I study with pinyin only and I can communicate in a lot
of situations. I feel that if I continue studying hard, then by the time I go back to China one
year from now, I will be able to converse very readily about a broad range of topics. Will I be
fluent? Well, there's no agreed-upon definition. Will I be discussing literature? Of course not.
But I don't discuss literature too terribly much in English, anyway. And attempting to learn
thousands of characters and reading literature would, I believe, slow me down in achieving my goal
of sitting around and talking fluidly about whatever comes to mind next time I go to China. I hope
I will be understanding approximately 80 to 85 percent of your average Chinese TV drama.
It is true, I believe that to become a truly advanced user of Chinese, one needs to read fluently.
One is unlikely to have an advanced discussion of current events or technical topics until one
learns to do that. What I am interested in doing is first achieving my goal of what I would call
"practical fluency," and then, when I see that I've hit a wall, moving on to intensive character
study and getting to that next level of being a truly sophisticated speaker (hopefully I will
start on that goal next year.) I cannot see the point of bogging myself down until I have
practical fluency, though. I guess I would call it putting the cart before the horse.
Bear in kind, I know many students of Chinese origin in the U.S. who have extremely sophisticated
vocabularies because they've had to pass the TOEFL and, more importantly, the GRE to enter
graduate school here, but they still lack practical fluency in English!
In the interest of full disclosure, I am married to a Chinese woman who happens to have many
Chinese friends who come to our place often, so I get a lot of exposure to the spoken language,
including idioms, vulgarities, etc. When I hear them, I ask what they mean and write them down on
a flashcard. We also travel to China periodically and stay with her non-English-speaking
relatives, so that helps too. It is in this environment that I think my approach works, and
probably if I did not have these conditions, I would find pinyin study a little boring and focus
instead on characters.










gato -



Quote:

Bear in kind, I know many students of Chinese origin in the U.S. who have extremely sophisticated
vocabularies because they've had to pass the TOEFL and, more importantly, the GRE to enter
graduate school here, but they still lack practical fluency in English!

The Chinese system may provide a good example of how not to learn a foreign language, but doing
exactly opposite of what they do is not really optimal, either. Consider many Europeans who learn
English as a second language who can readily read, write, and speak English.










hamihaha -

Sthubbar,

I did not say chinese characters where beautiful neither where talking about calligraphy. I said
interresting. I now start to like Chinese calligraphy (after 5 years), but I still consider arabic
calligraphy as the top of the top, followed by french cursive.

I'm not a native Chinese speaker, and after 5 years, 2 years of hard work and 3 years of soft
daily reading I can read fluently Chinese. I don't know how many chinese characters or chinese
words I know, but when I read a magazine for example, I understand more than 95% characters, and
guess the meaning of the 5% others.










sthubbar -

imron, I am still using this method. I think their website is currently down. We are reading
stories and learning the new characters in the stories.

DrZero, I agree with your wish for fluency and not wanting to waste time on characters. When I
first started studying I refused to even listen to anyone trying to teach me characters. I kept
that philosophy for just about 2 years of studying. I can now see the "wall" you mentioned and
that is why I started aggressively studying characters around the end of last year.

hamihaha, wow, so I 羡慕你.

Since DrZero added some full disclosure, I can add a little more to enlighten what contributes to
my frustration. Outside of surfing the web, I seldom read for pleasure. There was a period many
years ago when I thought it was necessary to read so I went for about a year reading something
like 5 magazines cover to cover and at least one classic literature book every month. That
experience did not convince me that reading was something I like, I just learned that many of the
"classics" are really bad, see "The Magic Mountain" by "Thomas Mann".












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