If one were to try to learn ONLY to read chinese, but not learn to speak it or listen to it,
how difficult would that be?
(yes I realize this is a stupid question, but I'm just looking for a rough idea of what to expect)
If my goal is just to be able to read random internet articles and such, would RTH + some basic grammar get me to that goal?

I don't see how learning to listen would hinder you in any way whatsoever when learning to read.

hereticalrants Wrote:I don't see how learning to listen would hinder you in any way whatsoever when learning to read.

That would require learning the readings and pronunciation of everything.
If I only learn to read, I could completely skip all of that.

The Japanese have been learning to read Classical Chinese without relying on (actual) Chinese character pronunciations for centuries, so it is theoretically possible. However, unlike Classical Chinese, Mandarin is a living spoken language, so I doubt that there are any resources for learning Mandarin that focus solely on reading. You could probably learn it using RTH and a grammar book, but frankly I don’t see much point in that. Sure, Mandarin phonetics is more difficult than Japanese, but at the same time there is no such thing as 訓読み, so all characters have either one reading or several readings that are etymologically related, and most characters actually contain hints to those readings.

I just started with Chinese. But I can imagine how knowledge in only Chinese reading would make it sound unnatural, as if it came from a scene in "Dancing with wolves":

Many many moons Katanka withered. Father sad. Now Katanka many. Now hunt...

As opposed to reading it in the native language, which sounds more natural.

I don't think it's possible to learn to read Chinese without learning the readings and pronunciations, if only because you won't find any learning resources that teach it that way.

How would you go about doing this anyway?

yudantaiteki Wrote:I don't think it's possible to learn to read Chinese without learning the readings and pronunciations, if only because you won't find any learning resources that teach it that way.

How would you go about doing this anyway?

Of course its possible to learn without readings and pronunciations.
Do you think its also impossible for a deaf person to learn to read? They can't hear the pronunciations, after all.


So far I'm getting that most of the learning resources wont be of much use.
Does this mean that most learning materials out there actually don't even use the Hanzi?
This sounds unbelievable.

I'm quite sure that doing this is possible using any learning resources that focus on hanzi. I suppose it would put you in the position of i.e. a Cantonese speaker learning to read Mandarin (or vice versa) without having any clue as to what it's supposed to sound like. But knowing at least the pinyin readings, even if it's without the tones, and even if you mispronounce every sound, is still useful if only for making dictionary lookups and writing on a computer faster and easier.

I did consider doing something like this myself at one time. Though my idea was more along the lines of approaching reading and speaking as completely separate things, hoping that in learning to read and understand, and learning to listen and speak, the skillsets would converge, and would in time automatically, or with a little practice, make me able to read aloud what I already knew how to say, even though I would still have no knowledge of the readings of characters and compounds, only their meanings. Sort of like "translating" from hanzi to Mandarin instead of reading it like a stream of sounds. But I never could work up the motivation to finish Heisig, and these days my interest in Japanese and Chinese is waning. Korean is starting to look quite interesting, though.

I think you could get a grammar book, something like the one designed for the NPCR, and just focus on the characters and grammar, and not worry much about the pronunciation. I think that learning the approximate pronunciation will be useful for remembering words, but that won't take much time, and I might be wrong.

After looking into this further, and seeing the HUGE amount of overlap with RTK (meaning I will have to learn far less than I originally thought), I think I might bother learning the basic pronunciation after all, or at least try to get started on it.