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DrZero -

"Perhaps the more interesting question is how many characters does it take to understand the radio
news in real time."

This is not to sound flip, but it actually doesn't take ANY characters. To back up your earlier
point, people don't speak in characters, they speak in words -- which is a drawback of a study
approach that is character-centric. Illiterate Chinese people can most likely understand radio
news. At the end of the day, Chinese is a language like any other, and should be studied as such.
It just happens to have a weird writing system.



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furyou_gaijin -



Quote:

Clearly, I had way, way over emphasized the role that individual character recognition plays in
the reading process. <...> On the other hand, I think that the solid foundation that I built in
characters did serve me well once I adjusted my learning strategy.

Very true. And I am very aware of this through my previous experience with Japanese. Hence I've
specifically mentioned that I pay a lot of attention to bisyllabics and chengyu, and do research
on the web into the actual usage. Reading is by far my biggest priority so the process is adjusted
to that. Listening and speaking are 'nice to have' and hence are subordinated to reading: I cannot
imagine saying something that I cannot read or write down. The same goes for listening: I am one
of those people that sort of 'visualise' characters as they hear the speech. This is just a matter
of personal preference, by the way.




Quote:

However, those 4 or 5 characters I can perfectly pronounce, and use in a variety of grammatical
situations. I just don't see any point in vacant, brute memorization. <...> I was under the
impression that you guys were actually LEARNING the characters. But you're just committing an
image to memory.

Let's see... the process I've outlined covers:

- 'perfectly pronouncing', i.e., the syllable and the correct tone
- visual recognition
- ability to write it from memory
- understanding the concept expressed by the character (I hate to use the word 'translation')
- awareness of its usage in most common words and chengyu - through the ample examples given in
the book (up to 60-80 examples in some cases) and additional research

So what aspect is still missing before the above can be qualified as 'Learning'? And which
situations exactly can be called 'grammatical'?










david1978 -

I looked up Stuart Jay Ray on Youtube. Nothing comes up.










furyou_gaijin -



Quote:

Illiterate Chinese people can most likely understand radio news.

Actually, it's a good question whether they can or not. I'm not so sure. Japanese news on
television rely on massive amounts of written text that appears on the screen together with the
speech: it would still be possible to understand the speech due to a lot of context yet the
written captions make understanding more 'comfortable', so to speak. But than again, that country
is highly litterate.

I believe that Chinese has an even greater issue with homonyms than Japanese: it would be
interesting to take a reasonably complicated broadcast that deals with politics or economy and
check how much of it is accessible to an under-educated native speaker of Chinese - on the purely
linguistic level, that is...

Moi, politically correct?!.. That'll be the day...










furyou_gaijin -



Quote:

I looked up Stuart Jay Ray on Youtube. Nothing comes up.

My typo, it should be Raj:

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=stujaystujay










david1978 -

Fascinating stuff. I'll checkout the book you mentioned and get back to you, but a preliminary
goggle search shows it's out of print.










JimmySeal -

As furyou_gaijin points out, there is probably a lot of radio that illiterate people can't
understand, because illiterate people tend to have small vocabularies. At some point it becomes
hard to pick up new words if you can't read.

David and wushijiao, I feel that both of you subscribe to old-fashioned attitudes on language
learning and that is why you feel that my approach will not work (I know wushijiao did not
specifically refer to me, but said that character-based learning is not enough).

It is my contention that with enough reading and listening practice, a person can learn a language
without ever touching a dictionary. However, since I cannot pronounce Chinese characters merely by
looking at them, the way I could in many other languages, I have no choice but to memorize their
pronunciations one at a time. This also allows me to read Chinese subtitles on DVDs with mandarin
audio tracks, so that I can more easily decipher my aural input (essentially like watching a movie
with a script in hand).

So what I am doing right now is really just the lengthy process of learning to pronounce an
"alphabet" with ~6000 "letters." If I were learning any language with a simple phonetic script, I
would be done with this part of the process in a week, and would from then on spend all my study
time reading, watching, and listening. And I am already reading, watching, and listening in
Chinese, and understanding a lot of it, but it will still be a while before I can pronounce most
of the characters, and understand most of what I encounter.

For more on the reason I believe this is possible, I refer you to the following page:
Vocabulary Learning 2
which refers back to the following page, yet can be read independently of it
Vocabulary Learning 1










Mugi -

furyou_gaijin, perhaps you could post here again the next time you use, or indeed ever read, any
of the following characters you have gone to the effort of memorizing: 騅, 雈, 隹, 醮, 蟭,
潐, 膲, 僬, 燋, 趭, 噍. If you speak 閩南語, you might come across 燋. And if you are
studying classical Chinese or some specialty subject (ornithology, Taoism), then I'm sure you'll
come across some of these characters, but other than that they're obsolete. I assume you also go
to the trouble of learning obscure, obsolete, archaic and highly specialized words in English
too...










furyou_gaijin -



Quote:

furyou_gaijin, perhaps you could post here again the next time you use, or indeed ever read, any
of the following characters you have gone to the effort of memorizing: 騅, 雈, 隹, 醮, 蟭,
潐, 膲, 僬, 燋, 趭, 噍. If you speak 閩南語, you might come across 燋. And if you are
studying classical Chinese or some specialty subject (ornithology, Taoism), then I'm sure you'll
come across some of these characters, but other than that they're obsolete. I assume you also go
to the trouble of learning obscure, obsolete, archaic and highly specialized words in English
too...

I'm truly touched that you have dug up this old post but I have to disappoint you - I haven't
learnt any of the above characters, they were examples chosen to illustrate the general approach,
chosen in haste and without consideration for their meaning/frequency.

En outre, I am more interested in classical Chinese than in modern-day speech, for reasons far too
irrelevant to this thread.

And I will gladly learn any obscure or obsolete word in English if I happen to encounter it... But
I'm unlikely to go to the trouble you've put yourself through by looking up whole lists of them...










heifeng -

here's the answer: when you can throw away your dictionary and you don't miss it...

are we there yet?












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