Shun
状元
Hi,
I’m going to write down why I feel a mixed word- and character-driven approach is more efficient than a purely word-driven approach for learning Chinese. I think the question shouldn’t be whether to use one or the other approach exclusively, but rather when to study words and when to study characters.
I think it's obvious that the word-driven approach is how one should start learning the language, for maybe the first 1'000-2'000 words (which corresponds to about half a year of studies), to get a feeling for how sentences are constructed. But after that, I think taking the character-based approach complemented with learning words made of these characters is clearly superior for building one’s vocabulary. (based on my experience)
By focusing on the characters only, one gets closer to the root of the language and gets more of a sense for how words are formed from characters. This can also be taken advantage of directly while using the language, for example when trying to construct words out of characters that one didn't know existed, but actually do exist. Or when remembering a word, you first think of one component character, then you or the Chinese-speaking listener will quickly complete it to form the actual word. In the brain, it is all just more associatively linked, rather than remembering individual words that are more easily forgotten.
One condition being that for every Chinese character learned, one also studies 2-3 words along with each character. (by checking the WORDS tab for each character)
Of course, one also needs to study all important meanings a character can have. These are often linked together in an interesting and sometimes miraculous way, making them easier to learn, so that isn't a big obstacle.
If one has learned to work like that, it’s clear that learning 4’000 different characters leads to language competence in >50’000 words, and quickly growing, if words are learned along with them. It’s much easier to extend one’s vocabulary and tell nuances of meaning between words with similar meaning this way, just because the word’s compound meaning results from characters whose individual meanings are well-known in a pattern that is also well-known.
Naturally, this isn’t scientific all, it’s just the impression I got from taking this approach. I just find that scientific studies are often too concerned with one another to really include all of the effects encountered by the language learner comprehensively.
Cheers,
Shun
I’m going to write down why I feel a mixed word- and character-driven approach is more efficient than a purely word-driven approach for learning Chinese. I think the question shouldn’t be whether to use one or the other approach exclusively, but rather when to study words and when to study characters.
I think it's obvious that the word-driven approach is how one should start learning the language, for maybe the first 1'000-2'000 words (which corresponds to about half a year of studies), to get a feeling for how sentences are constructed. But after that, I think taking the character-based approach complemented with learning words made of these characters is clearly superior for building one’s vocabulary. (based on my experience)
By focusing on the characters only, one gets closer to the root of the language and gets more of a sense for how words are formed from characters. This can also be taken advantage of directly while using the language, for example when trying to construct words out of characters that one didn't know existed, but actually do exist. Or when remembering a word, you first think of one component character, then you or the Chinese-speaking listener will quickly complete it to form the actual word. In the brain, it is all just more associatively linked, rather than remembering individual words that are more easily forgotten.
One condition being that for every Chinese character learned, one also studies 2-3 words along with each character. (by checking the WORDS tab for each character)
Of course, one also needs to study all important meanings a character can have. These are often linked together in an interesting and sometimes miraculous way, making them easier to learn, so that isn't a big obstacle.
If one has learned to work like that, it’s clear that learning 4’000 different characters leads to language competence in >50’000 words, and quickly growing, if words are learned along with them. It’s much easier to extend one’s vocabulary and tell nuances of meaning between words with similar meaning this way, just because the word’s compound meaning results from characters whose individual meanings are well-known in a pattern that is also well-known.
Naturally, this isn’t scientific all, it’s just the impression I got from taking this approach. I just find that scientific studies are often too concerned with one another to really include all of the effects encountered by the language learner comprehensively.
Cheers,
Shun
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