18 thoughts on “How to learn Mandarin Chinese characters

  1. Mao was considering replacing characters with pinyin writing in the Roman alphabet during the early days of the PRC but his advisers convinced him to simplify the characters instead. Characters are also why many anime fans end up stumbling when it comes to learning Japanese.Report

    1. I go back and forth on whether that could have worked. I actually tend to think it could have. After all, speech is intelligible to speakers, so stripping the extra information provided by characters ought to have workedReport

  2. I’m immersed in a project that goes at this in a totally different way. Not trying for fluency in reading but rather shooting for understanding nuance and possibility in “translating”. A problematic word if there ever was one. Specifically ancient Chnese poetry.

    Fluency in both the translated and tranlatee languages would seem a prerequisite for such an effort, but smarter and way more qualified people than me seem to largely agree this is very much less the case in translating Chinese poetry.

    One of my past efforts is The Emptiness of Wang Wei. I distinguish what I do there from translating to transducing the poem. I’ve much more research working on this post, so it’s been slow going. While not directly relevant to your effort, it might be an interesting diversion from it.

    I’m now working on an (I hope) improved version and auto-commentary.Report

  3. I swear I could rewrite this exact essay and replace ‘Mandarin Characters’ with ‘Mathematics’ and it would still work.Report

  4. A friend of mine’s girlfriend is an acclaimed Japanese writer and journalist, with several prizes under her kasa.

    We once discussed the mental images that were conveyed by writing. We sort of agreed that reading in English essentially created an aural sensation (you hear the words spoken in your mind), while reading kanji created a visual image (you see in your mind the thing described).

    I wonder if this is a conclusion that can be extrapolated.Report

        1. I asked our other Chris about it on Twitter:

          Ah, I know that study. Drawing conclusions from the bilingual data in it is difficult because bilingual proficiency is confounded. See: http://www.bu.edu/aphasiaresearch/files/2009/11/Sebastian-et-al.-20112.pdf

          The difference in unilingual individuals is likely do to the different ways in which Chinese vs English characters/letters are retrieved from memory.

          Basically, it looks like individuals who learn one or the other first tend to show some difference in the areas of activity during processing, but individuals who learn one then the other at a high proficiency tend to process them similarly.

          (Probably just means that when we first learn a language those areas become language areas, and subsequent languages are, when learned well, built on top of that original language.)

          https://twitter.com/MixingChris/status/942866361109409793Report

    1. This might explain why I’m so crap at kanji. The words behind them go through my aural processor and the characters don’t have a natural association.

      Doing my coursework when “teach americans using only hiragana and let them lean on romaji” was a thing doesn’t seemed to have worked out for the best.Report

  5. Mind you, that mess of scribbles above is “simplified” Chinese, which has fewer strokes in each character and was designed to help spread literacy by making Chinese easier to decipher.

    Was it? I find traditional slightly easier to read; the greater complexity allows for more significant differences between characters. The main advantage of simplified, it seems to me, is that it’s easier to write.

    And, more cynically, that peasants who have only learned simplified Chinese will find it hard to read pre-revolutionary writings.Report

    1. The *intention* of simplified characters was to increase literacy. People who know both seem to agree with you that it had the opposite effect.

      Brandon Berg: And, more cynically, that peasants who have only learned simplified Chinese will find it hard to read pre-revolutionary writings.

      I feel silly now for never having thought of that! It’s always been explained to me as a literacy thing and I guess I never questioned itReport

      1. Vikram and J-A
        Thanks so much for the compliments.

        On the issue of simplifies characters, I’d like more info about the alleged negative effects. Before the literacy campaigns, illiteracy was estimated at 80-85%. Now literacy is at least that. Of course it could be in spite of the simplified characters, but I’m not getting why they would be a liability. After all, the illiterate would not have the frame of reference of the traditional characters to adapt from.

        Also Singapore, Malaysia and Japan simplified their characters post WWII and these efforts seem to be successful.

        If the Maoists wanted to make it difficult to read pre-rev writings, going to western script would have been way more successful. My guess is that this was a most a minor consideration.Report

        1. This reminds me of the changes in Turkish language along the XX century, as loan words from Arab and Persian were dropped, and replaced, fir by words with obsolete Turkish roots, and, then, th3 latter dropped in favor of contemporary western loan words.

          The most famous case is the Seven Day Speech that Atatürk gave in 1927 (the Nutuk) in what was then still Ottoman Turkish, which sounded so alien to later listeners that it had to be “translated” three times into modern Turkish: first in 1963, again in 1986, and most recently in 1995. even the name Nutuk (The Speech) is now Söylev (again, The Speech)Report

        2. To be clear, I’m saying that I find traditional characters slightly easier to distinguish because the higher stroke counts allow for more meaningful differences between similar characters. The difference is pretty minor, though, and my main point is that simplified characters do not seem to me to confer any real advantage when it comes to learning to read. I do suspect that they make learning to write a fair bit easier.

          Singapore and Malaysia use the same simplifications as China, right? Japan’s simplifications were less radical (hah!) and as I understand it were mostly just a formalization of colloquial simplifications that were already in use to increase handwriting speed.Report

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