Don't run off yet, this isn't just a post linking to a post linking to a post; I'm going to actually give my view on something here. But a warning: remember that this is my blog, not an academic journal, and I'm not really that good at Chinese, so you should probably listen to the links here more than me, even when I disagree with them- they are real Tongs.
So basically John talks about a post where Victor Mair basically says how he basically learned to read and write Chinese, more or less, is about the gist of it. And his method is pretty straightfoward: he reckons it's a good idea to "learn like a baby", and without beating around the bush, he goes on to say that insofar as literacy is concerned, this means reading a Chinese newspaper annotated with pinyin (or bopomopho, or whatever).
Having seen lots of Beijing babies chilling with a coffee and reading the newspaper, I can attest to the efficacy of this method.
No, really, I actually think it's a really good idea, and considering how much of a pain it is when you just want to sit down and chill with the Nanfang Zhoumo but find yourself pulling out the e-dictionary just to read an oddball character in a headline...it would be a nice addition to any newsagent, to say the least. I didn't start learning characters properly until I started university, by which time I'd done about 2 years of night classes coupled with a month in China studying at an intensive short course. In the night classes we just did pinyin really, so I think Mair probably has a good point about not killing the fun of learning a language by forcing the characters on too soon.
But there's this line, "Slowly, with practice, I also became capable of writing in characters as well." That's a lot like what various Chinese professors (ethnic Chinese and not) whom I've met have told me, and I'm sure it's correct, but it's horribly vague.
Well, I guess his article is about reading after all, and not writing. But still, I have lots of friends, especially overseas Chinese, who can read Chinese really well, but can't write more than a handful of characters, so I think Mair owes a bit of an explanation for that aside.
Anyway, my real complaint with the article (which is not, really, a complaint after all, but just somethin I'd like to add) is that he misses an opportunity to inform everyone about a modern alternative, which I think is actually better than an annotated paper text.
Annotated texts are nice to some extent, but all that pinyin can be distracting; I think pinyin works best on a fleeting, need-to-know basis, not an omnipresent sort of thing. Friends, I give you.....ADSOTRANS!
Paste in the text with the hard characters, wait a minute or so, and then...well, I won't spoil it for you, but I assure you the result is awesome. Awesome to the max.
The best thing about something like it (and there are retail alternatives like Wenlin and Clavis Sinica, but a mass collaborative project like Adsotrans is so much cooler and will dominate those products before long, mark my words!) is that you can read whatever you want. Well, anything on the internetz, anyway, and that's a lot of choice. Much better choice than whatever a newspaper chooses to handout, as far as I'm concerned.
Oh, and by coincidence, Mair does talk about the sneeze thing in there too. But I repeat, there's nothing 'devilishy difficult' about those two characters, if you have a mnemonic method in place.
I'm going to write another entry soon about what I would actually think of as a better way to learn to write, namely the mnemonic method of Matteo Ricii and Heisig, so check back soon(ish). It'll be fun, and I've just found an article by J. Marshall Unger which looks like good reading...
Some more related reading, and quick word on each, in the meantime.
David "Whiner" Moser - Why Chinese is So Damn Hard
This guy apparently has awesome Chinese, and it's not really meant to be taken seriously- it's pretty damn funny. But anyway, it's an article where he complains about characters being hard to learn, and textbooks being boring. Big, big agreement from me on the second point. Almost all textbooks I've used suck more arse than some experimental Japanese bidet. But that is why we have....ADSOTRANS! And mnemonics...
Victor Mair -Illiteracy in China
This is another article where I think characters get a harder time than they deserve. He hazards some pretty wild guesses, which he readily admits. Like this one, having a swipe at the statement "College graduates are tested on 7,000 characters or more."
"A pipedream!!! I doubt whether even a hundredth of one percent of the Chinese population can write 7,000 characters; probably no more than 2-3% could recognize that many."
Now, I'm not a mathematician, or a genius. Far from it, I can assure you. But according to the always reliable *cough* Baidu, the total amount of Chinese university students as a percentage of the total population is 5 percent, so, I dunno, it doesn't seem that unlikely. Interesting question though.
Victor Mair -Awkward Sneeze
Ok, so maybe I should have attributed the sneeze thing to Mr Mair instead of John B? Anyway, it's a good article, and it's interesting that Singapore is allowing e-dictionaries in their Chinese exams. Would be nice if the HSK had a similar slackening of the rules...
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