I’ve spent seven months living in Beijing. Since that started (October 2008) I’ve wanted to learn Chinese. I’ve tried many things. Now, finally, I think I’ve found a method that works for part of it (written vocabulary).
There are four aspects:
Content. I’m learning the basic 800-odd words covered in Learning Chinese Characters by Alison and Laurence Mathews, which are those required by a certain standard Chinese Language test (HSK Level A). I use their make-a-story method for each character.
Study Method. I use Anki. It’s like flashcards, but with a near-optimal mix of old and new cards. Comparison of Anki with similar software. When I used actual flashcards, I didn’t do a good job of mixing old and new cards. I found a Anki deck already made for the Mathews book. The Mathews will be glad to know that the (free) Anki deck plus (free) Anki software make their book more valuable. I constantly consult it for help.
Catalyst. I walk on a treadmill to make studying pleasant.
Minimalism. When I told a Chinese friend I was just learning the meaning of each character, not the pronunciation, she frowned. After that I tried to learn the pronunciation, too. But now, trying to learn the pronunciation at the same time, the whole thing goes too slowly. The pronunciation is much harder than the meaning and less useful. Learning just the meaning is much faster and makes the whole thing seem more doable.
More The origin of Anki-like programs. An approach similar to the Mathews’s.
The best language-learning experience I ever had was a summer course at age 20 at the U of C (the good one, in Illinois, called French for Reading Knowledge. We paid no attention at all to pronunciation, conversation – we just ground through the grammar as we read more and more. I was left with the memory of many sentences that worked which I picked up from Gide and Giono, and can still read it easily. When I met a Frenchman in the next few years, I would amuse him with my pronunication but amaze him with the complex ideas I could express – had I continued or lived in France for a few months, I would have been fluent. Alas, I didn’t.
On the other hand, in German classes from 3rd grade to Freshman in college, I learned it all – and now have very little (although I can sort of answer questions put to me in German in English). My “sense” of French after 6 weeks of study remains better than my sense of German after 10 years of study – 35 years later.
Let your Chinese friends frown. Pronunciation excellence avails you naught if you can’t find the words, or can only bore your hearers.
It seems you have independently discovered the philosophy of https://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com
(Which is also a very useful approach to learning Chinese!)
I would echo the advice to learn pronunciation as well as meaning, for two reasons. First, because as you learn more characters they become more regular, with useful keys to both pronunciation and meaning. The more cues you have to a character the less like you are to have retrieval failures. Second, since you spend time in Beijing, it makes to learn as much spoken Chinese as possible, and to do that it is important to integrate spoken and written language (particularly because Chinese has so many homophones at the level of characters, given that there are an order of magnitude fewer syllables than English has).
A really fascinating book, now out of print, that touches on these issues is David Kelley’s “Deciphering the Maya script.” It describes two attempts to decipher non-alphabetic scripts (Mayan and hieroglyphics) that only succeeded when they were able to connect them to the closest remaining spoken languages. I believe he also says that students at Harvard in the mid 1900s would try to learn classical Chinese using a meaning-based method (since we don’t really know how classical Chinese was pronounced) without great success.
I think you’re right that if you had to pick one thing to focus on, meaning over pronunciation would be the right thing to do with characters. We published a study a few years ago in JEP:LMC looking at how readers of English and Chinese responded to errors that are either visually similar to or phonologically similar to what should have been there (e.g., “Paul Revere rode/robe/road his white horse”). The basic finding was that Chinese readers used visual and phonological similarity as about equal cues, but English adult readers just used phonology beyond the very first fixation, so “road his white horse” is usually fine and “robe his white horse” never is. (Feng, G., Miller, K., Shu, H., & Zhang, H. (2001). Rowed to recovery: The use of phonological and orthographic information in reading Chinese and English. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 1079-1100.)
But the neat thing about the trek you’re on is that you can try different strategies and go back and relearn what you missed. Really a perfect field for self-experimentation, which has certainly been my experience.
This sounds familiar to James Heisig’s approach, where he also separates the meaning from the reading (pronunciation) of Chinese characters, and focuses on creating mnemonic clues based on the radicals. Scroll down to the bottom of this Wikipedia entry for links to free sample PDFs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji
Seth, don’t be scared off by the shallow learning curve at first when trying to learn pronunciation along with meaning. The learning curve is non-linear and will accelerate as you continue, for the reasons put forward above by Kevin.
I once had to learn enough Chinese to get by thanks to a quick unexpected trip (for a funeral of all things) to China. I heard from a military intelligence friend of mine that in his unit, he learned that when you need to learn a new language, if you engage in cross-dominant physical activities (crossing your legs and arms, doing things with both hands at the same time, etc, there is actually an exercise program called Brain Gym that they used), then you will learn at a significantly faster rate.
It worked for me, it worked so well, that I now use those Brain Gym exercises when I need to learn anything at all!
Funny how little we actually know about the best way to teach/learn/acquire a language in adulthood.
Bottom line: for the vast majority of us, learning to speak another language fluently, after the age of 13 or so, is really effin’ hard.