Learn 800 Hanzi in your first year?

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Admin

(Administrator) 2008-02-23, 22:09 #1

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Subject: Learn 800 Hanzi in your first year?

According to http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?t=9097
the elementary school 1st grade students in China have to learn 795 Chinese characters.

It seems non-native learners have trouble or great difficulty in learning 100 in their first year.
So how is that 6 year-old children can accomplish such a feat?

My intuition tells me that they aren't learning nearly as many new words as a foreigner learner of the language would be. The kids may know 10,000 words already, whereas the foreign adult learner has to start from scratch with a vocabulary of 0 words, or maybe a few hundred if she has been studying Chinese for a few months already.

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doviende 2009-03-26, 04:44 #2

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I think there's definitely a big disadvantage if you don't already know the language. When reading a book, there are lots of words you can just guess based on context if you know the language, and if one of those words is written with characters that you don't yet know, then you just learned some new characters!

I notice this frequently when i try to read something written in traditional characters. I've done all my studying based on simplified characters, so there are plenty of traditional ones that i don't know, but i can frequently guess them from context because of the amount of chinese that i know.

The other problem with non-native learners having difficulties is that they keep getting told that 汉字 are difficult. Our textbooks start us off easy, and we're told that we can just learn more characters later. Also, we're frequently told that we should just write a character 50 times and we'll know it, which is total bunk. Once i discovered how SRS software works, and about using mnemonics, then i learned more than 800 characters in a single month.

In 2 or 3 months of moderate work, using proper techniques such as SRS and mnemonics, most people should be able to jump-start their reading skills enough to pick up a real book and recognize a large majority of the characters in it. Not everyone has to go this fast, of course, but it's quite possible.

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guest (Guest) 2009-08-27, 18:08 #3

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Unless your plan is to focus on speaking and worry about literacy later (which has its advantages, but once you're outside an immersive/lots of people to talk to environment, also mayn obstacles), 100 is a poor showing indeed--even people in an intensive first year Chinese class learn more than that.

I learned about 800 in just under a year, using antiquated and brute force methods, but I was living in Taiwan in a semi-immersive environment.

Small children are at a native-like fluency, they're just illiterate, with small vocabularies, and maybe can't use some more advanced rhetorical-flourishy type grammar. So, in school they learn characters, and more literary/written style of language, but on a foundation of already being able to listen and talk just fine.

As a disciplined adult learner, one can take the approach doviende mentioned (I was partway to literacy before I found out about SRS), and create a "chinese character background", i.e. give oneself the same advantage as Korean and Japanese students have in hanzi, by tying meaning to native language.

Remember not to confuse input and output. For these schoolkids, for us learners, and for natives, the number of characters recognized is always much greater than those one can produce. Read up on SRS, mnemonics, etc, maybe check out "Remembering the Hanzi", and don't sell yourself short!