学ぶ漢字を読み書く方法を
いくつかは一時は多数が50の000の漢字あったことを学ぶために追い払われるかもしれない(ある見積もりによって)。 幸いにも、この数は簡単だったコンピュータ壷(倍従来の壷のためのそれ)のための約6500に削られた。 それは今でも取り組むべきだれでものための大きい数である従って学ぶべきかどの特性を幾つに特性が学ぶ中国の学習者べきである、そしていかに知っているか質問はなるか。
この質問に答える共通の標準は中国大陸で典型的な新聞を使用することである。 調査は特性が印刷された媒体で最も一般的であるノートに規則的に行なわれる。 新聞で使用された特性の100%年の認識を達成するためには約3000の特性(台湾の従来の特性のための4000)を知る必要がある。 それはこの3000の特性にだけ焦点を合わせる発見辞書に共通である。 従って目的がであるもの確認したので、質問はそれらをいかにに学ぼうとするかなるか。 辞書のページに1公正回り、1日あたりの少数の特性を学び始めるか。 できたが、大いにより容易で、(より有効な)方法がある。
67%の認識のレベルに得るためにただ400の最も一般的な特性を学ぶ必要がある。 従ってそれはより少しへ進む前にこの400の特性を、最初に調査する意味を使用した物を成している。 あなたが再度知っている特性を見るたびに、あなたの心のその認識パターンを補強している。 さらに、プロセスは学習の過程において、またである学習あるので、より容易になる 基 複雑で、従って新しい特性はちょうどあなたが既に知っている含むそれらを全く最初から学ばなければならないよりもむしろ特性を、変更することを。 このマジック400印に得れば、88%の認識のレベルにずっと得る次の600の特性の学習にそれから取り組むことができる。
これが鳴ると容易、多数は材料をそこに使用しないこの概念を調査する。 教える幾つかの教科書の速い一見はドラゴン(659th共通の特性)、別の教授火(427th最も公有地)のための特性および別の教授のための特性を教える特性を1つを書く方法を使用中のための特性示した(672nd最も公有地)。 And this was the first lesson! It is easy to see why many students may give up learning how to read and write, when having to use methods like this.
August 30th, 2007 at 2:43 am
“You only need to learn the 400 most commonly used characters to get to the level of 67% recognition”
Does that mean you’ll be able to understand 67% of a Newspaper? No! You’ll be lucky if you can understand 3%.
This is just a little lie teachers and books and the like tell students to get them to study. It not only happens in Chinese, it happens in English and Russian and many other languages. They tell English students that 60% of a typical English Newspaper is made up of less than a hundred words used over and over again. But when you find out that these are function words,( the, or, but, a), you realize that these aren’t enough to gain an understanding of what’s going on.
With Chinese, it’s not how many characters you know, it’s how many combinations, how many compounds. It took me well over 2000 before I was able to read an article with out having to look something up. Well over 3000 before I was able to read a Newspaper from cover to cover. But just knowing those 3000+ characters wasn’t enough. I had to know the tens of thousands of compounds that they made up.
If you want to learn to read and write in Chinese, be prepared to work at it for a few years. And I do mean work at it. You can actually learn to recognize 3000 characters in just over a year, if you put your mind to it. Writing takes the longest time.
Learning to speak, which is really the main purpose of ChineseLearnOnline, can be done in as little as a year, if you’re able to hear it every day. You won’t be able to understand radio news broadcasts; that take another year or so. But you will be able to understand the people around you. Here’s the catch though, the longer you keep you mouth shut and just listen, the better your understanding will be and the better your pronunciation will be.
I know this goes against what many of these sites say. They say you should practice speaking at every opportunity. I disagree, here’s why. I speak Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese fluently. I studied Mandarin in the U.S. And China about 15 years ago. I did the usual. Memorized phrases, characters. Practiced speaking whenever and where ever I could. I was a true believer in the “learn a little use it a lot” method. But I still speak with a bit of an accent. And even though I’ve worked as a Mandarin/English translator in China and the U.S., there are still things that fly right by me.
Cantonese and Shanghainese are two languages that I have never studied. I’ve never cracked open a book in these languages. I have never asked anyone to translate something for me or for any help with these languages. Yet Cantonese and Shanghainese are languages that I speak and understand at Native level. Unlike Mandarin, I have never studied tones for Cantonese. They don’t even come to mind when I’m speaking Cantonese, they just come out right. I’m not Asian, but some people in Shanghai truly believe I was born there.
Well, why do I have a Native level of Shanghainese and Cantonese and not in the language that I studied? Because for these two languages, I didn’t study, I just listened. The languages grew in me like English did when I was a child. And the cool thing about it is that I absorbed both of them at the same time.
August 30th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Thanks Jemini. I really appreciate your insights (that is what this blog is all about!). You are right that recognition doesn’t equal understanding, but I still think there is value to being able to recognize characters even if the overall meaning isn’t clear. There are different levels of understanding, and to me getting to this level of recognition is a step up from staring at text and being completely clueless as to what it represents.
Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of my users on the new Premium Plus plan which has given me further insights on what their strengths and weaknesses are and what can be improved in this course. I really appreciate comments like yours that tell me what has worked and what hasn’t worked for you since that helps me set the direction on what areas this course should focus on in the future.
September 2nd, 2007 at 3:46 am
Who wrote those characters you have in the picture?
September 2nd, 2007 at 9:06 am
Actually, it was the handiwork of one of my users. I took it (with permission) from his posting elsewhere.