How and When Should Beginners Study Chinese Characters?
(The following article was written by Zhang Pengpeng as the introduction to a Chinese textbook. It explains our opinion about teaching beginners much better than we could have done ourselves.)
The Chinese language has for too long been perceived as being beyond the grasp of the foreign learner. This misconception has been caused, unfortunately, for the most part by an improper teaching approach.
For several decades the spoken and written forms of Chinese have been taught simultaneously to beginners. There is nothing wrong with approach in teaching Western languages like French or English that employ a phonetic system or alphabet as an aid to learning pronunciation, but it is certainly not the best method for teaching the Chinese spoken language and Chinese characters. The reasons for this are threefold:
- Chinese characters cannot be read phonetically. Chinese characters developed from pictographs into ideographs. This means that there is no direct relationship between the form and structure of Chinese characters and their pronunciation. So the hotchpotch teaching of both the spoken language and Chinese characters in the beginning stage will not help foreign learners master pronunciation, and the characters will, if anything, only be a stumbling block to their acquisition of oral fluency.
- Each Chinese character is made up of components that follow a specific stroke order and rules of formation. So it is logical that the simple component be taught first, progressing to the more complicated component and whole characters. But in the approach of teaching speaking and writing simultaneously, whatever is learnt in the spoken language will be followed by a corresponding written character. Obviously, in this approach the characters are not chosen systematically according to their structural compositions, and so the rules that govern the writing of Chinese characters are not reflected, making the teaching and learning of characters only more chaotic and difficult.
- Chinese characters should form the basis of courses in reading texts. Single syllable characters can be combined to make various disyllabic or multi-syllabic words. There are unlimited combinations that can be made by adding characters to change or expand meanings. If you know how to pronounce some characters, it follows that you will be able to read the word they form. Knowing the meaning of certain characters will help you understand the meaning of the word they make. As you learn more characters, your ability to recognise more words increases. Learning words thus becomes easier. Since character recognition determines word recognition, the main objective in teaching Chinese characters should be to raise the learner's level of character recognition. However, this is not possible with the "writing following speaking" approach. When teaching colloquial Chinese we naturally use words instead of characters as the basis of teaching because the word is the smallest unit in making a sentence. When teaching the word "中国" for example, we will invariably explain its meaning with the English "China", but the two characters that make up the word, “中 (middle)” and “国 (kingdom)“ are not explained. Traditional Chinese language teaching has always used "character recognition" as the criterion in judging a learner's ability to read texts. The "writing following speaking" approach simply disregards the necessity of teaching the characters on their own and does not give the characters the place they deserve, thus greatly reducing the efficiency of teaching Chinese reading.
Our new approach may be summarised as follows:
- In the initial stages of learning, "spoken Chinese and "character recognition and writing" should be taught separately.
- Teaching materials for oral class use mainly a system of romanization called "Hanyu Pinyin". The students are not required to deal with the characters. There are obvious reasons for this. Learning to speak Chinese becomes a lot easier using a phonetic system of romanization.
- When teaching spoken Chinese we start to introduce systematically the form of Chinese characters: the strokes, radicals (radicals are the basic components of Chinese characters), and the structural components. These "stumbling blocks" become much friendlier in this way, and the students are given a key to the secret of Chinese characters which will help them greatly in their later reading stages.
- Then proceed to the reading stage by learning to read characters. Only when the learner is able to speak and has learned the form and structure of characters can we begin to teach him how to read. Texts should be specially designed, focusing on character recognition and word formations, with the aim of quickly enlarging vocabulary and acquiring reading ability.
- In the reading stage character learning should be combined with continuous spoken language training and reading aptitude training. The texts should be put in the form of dialogues and narrative prose pieces written with the characters learned in each lesson, so they are short, and easy to read and remember. The exercises should include comprehensive forms of listening, speaking, reading, and writing that are closely linked and complementary to each other.
Zhang Pengpeng. 2001. The Most Common Chinese Radicals: New Approaches to Learning Chinese. Beijing: Sinolingua
