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2008.05.27 Snobbery 中文太难学了 / 0
I’m taking a day to catch up on some of my more neglected Google reader feeds, and that includes catching up on Language Log. Today I saw a post by Victor Mair that in strong language advocates for discarding character learning as a component of beginning Mandarin study.
Amen. Though my ponderous doodles of Chinese characters remain all that I’ve got of my four years (worth) of study of Mandarin in my teens, I strongly maintain that had the language been taught with less focus on writing, I would have learned more of it to have forgotten it less slowly. I think it’s indicative that I remember my Latin, of which I had less and longer ago, at stunningly high levels in comparison to Mandarin.
After finishing Chinese 400 in high school, I would remark to friends that I spoke like a baby but wrote like a kindergartner. That’s kind of a problem. After four years of high school study, my friends in French were reading literature and taking AP exams. I had no such luck, and I think that a huge problem was that our vocabulary acquisition was strung up by the fact that every new word we learned we learned to write, as well.
The added evidence of the ZT research further makes this point. It is completely stupid that I spent as much time in Chinese 101 learning how to write 你好 and the like. (Though in retrospect I have far more serious complaints about the way the language was taught, with no disrespect to either Han 老师 or Yang 老师.)
That said, our text (Practical Chinese Reader I and II) did have pinyin romanization along with the characters for, if I recall correctly, all of book I. Book II got rid of pinyin but kept the tones above the characters.
But ok. Why, then, is my Russian still so awful after two years? The Cyrillic alphabet one learns really quickly (and gets used to), and I’m pretty comfortable with reading and writing it with reasonable speed (not great, but…). Yet conversationally, I’m a mess. Yuck.
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