For my first post, I’m going to venture into familiar territory, so familiar, in fact, that my musings may seem trivial (I hope they aren’t!). It is part of a series of post on the subject. Because it deals with my own experience, it will contain less in-depth analysis of the issue.
To my mind, there’s a crucial difference between memorising a set of characters (Hanzi in Chinese, Kanji and Kana in Japanese) and learning a new alphabet (Arabic, Kyrillic). Well, duh!, you might say. But why do most people employ the same methods in both cases?
First of all, having to cram 2000+ or 10000+ seemingly random characters into one’s brain is a far more daunting task than dealing with 20-50 “placeholders” for certain consonants and, usually, a few vowels. Psychology aside, characters are typically more complex than letters, but the Japanese kana and the many forms of Arabic writing may be borderline cases.
Still, most books and classes dealing with languages whose writing is alphabetic devote at least a few weeks to learning the alphabet. Why is it then, that I (and the majority of Japanese/Chinese learners) are able to learn anywhere between 10 to 100 characters a day? In my third week of Chinese (my first actual exposure to the written language) , I learned approximately 500 Hanzi – at about 95% retention. On the other hand, I tried to memorize the 96 kana (this term refers to the “fluid”-looking Hiragana and the more “edgy” Katakana in Japanese) for over 6 months (on and off, of course). I even spent New Year’s Eve (admittedly, not the *whole* night) using my flashcards. In retrospect, maybe, if I hadn’t got a bit tipsy, my retention rate might have been better. As time passed by, I got creative – and increasingly desperate. Flashcards*, SRS, rote memorisation, mnemonics, sticking sheets of paper on my walls to draw the kana on when I felt like it – none of these varied approaches worked.
So I thought back to when I had just started learning to read Chinese a little less than 2 years ago. Surprisingly, apart from that first week of intense cramming, I couldn’t remember ever formally attempting to memorize the Hanzi until I stumbled upon SRSing in May 2009, a method that seems to agree well with me now I’ve got the basics down.
At the very beginning, I felt extremely lost, not even in translation because with all those odd characters, attempting to extract any meaning was far from my mind. I’m not going to say that everything eventually fell into place, mostly because it didn’t. It took me months to feel at ease when reading, but I didn’t want to devote any time specifically to memorizing the characters, even though that time was extremely frustrating. Like most beginners, I started out by learning pinyin – wait… I’ll be honest – at that time, I had no clue pinyin existed. I figured there had to be some kind of romanisation, but I wasn’t familiar with it and probably too lazy to do any research, given that I didn’t expect Chinese to take any root in my life. So I fiddled around a bit and made up my own, horribly, horribly inaccurate and wrong romanisation. This phase helped me remember some very basic phrases. Fed up with that DIY-pinyin, I didn’t even bother using the real version. Granted, someone with more linguistic insight must have come up with pinyin , but I had experienced the trouble with romanisation first-hand and wasn’t willing to make any sacrifices again. So I took a somewhat unusual path that included squinting at simple texts as if they were paintings instead of writing created to convey (limited) information. And things still didn’t fall into place, as they did with pronunciation. Yet, gradually, I began recognising a few characters, very fundamental ones like 我,你,的,他, 是,不,有 (I, you, [possessive particle], he, is, not, have), you get the picture. Context helped with the others, but . When encountering them in isolation any familiarity was gone. I remained at this stage for several months, until enough characters had crept into my brain to enable me to read without having to rely on context to fill the gaps.
Fast-forward half a year, and context wasn’t enough to make up for new characters in advanced texts, which forced me to start learning the characters in isolation. Ever since that, the rate of confusing characters has gone up, partly because now know more look-alike Hanzi, but also because they aren’t “tied” to a specific context anymore.
I am, in general, very happy with the study method I employed. It bears some semblance to the “Sight Word” method, but that would mean neglecting the influence of phonetic markers and other morphosyllabic elements and falling prey to the fallacy of Hanzi being (nothing but) ideograms. But acquisition speed comes at a price – while I recognize approximetely 5000 characters (meaning I can comfortably read newspapers), my writing ability is very limited**, to about 300 characters. That would change if I made an effort to actually learn how to write the other 4700, but I used the term “dauting task” above, didn’t I? Well, the writing part certainly is.
*Generally, working with flashcards is very convenient, so convenient in fact, that I do most of my reviewing in lectures. Admittedly, this does not further my understanding of the intracacies of flip-flops (also charmingly referred to as bistable multivibrator) or eigenvalue calculation. Reminiscent of Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel, I even took my cards along when I hit the bars with a few friends. Again, alcohol consumption is detrimental to linguistic progress, even though beer is said to loosen one’s tongue.
**As far as I can tell, most fellow learners of Chinese follow what in primary education is called the (integrated) synthetic approach (as opposed to more analytical methods), thus learning reading and writing at the same time, resulting a better ratio between the number of Hanzi they can write and those they recognize correctly. The total number of familiar characters tends to be much lower, though. But at least they won’t get laughed at for not knowing how to write 衣服 (clothes) at the 中国邮政 China Post office, I suppose.
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