Hey, what's up?

I was going crazy learning the 3036 Hanzi that are given in RTH1 and RTH2 and now I'm finally finished! YAY! Anyways, I'm not really sure what to do now to gain vocab. I'm wondering if I should do that sentence method or just learn words straight-up or a combination of both. Also, I don't know if anyone would recommend any ways that have personally worked for them, but I would like to hear those as well because I'm super interested in how you guys learn.

I want to get really pronunciation and listening comprehension and I was also wondering how I could do that.

As of now, I know hardly any words and I don't know the pronunciations of the Hanzi from the books either so I was wondering how I should go about learning the pronunciations.

I pretty much just want to gain vocab, grammar, pronunciation, and listening ability. Any recommendations or links to important threads from the past would be appreciated.

Yeah... Thanks in advance.

The Pronunciation and Romanization Module from FSI's course is still the best thing I know of for learning good standard pronunciation. After that, with whatever audio you use, do a lot of shadowing and even memorizing of phrases.

If I were to design a plan to learn Chinese from scratch, I would probably start working through the FSI P&R Module first, then move on to something like Practical Audio-Video Chinese. Something with lots of audio, pinyin separate from Chinese characters and English separate from the rest. Memorize the dialogues by listening and repeating, writing down what you think the pinyin is and getting it corrected to improve your listening (not comprehension, but actual ability to hear the language correctly), etc. Don't look at the pinyin except to check yourself, and don't look at the English or the grammar explanations or anything until after you have the dialogue down cold. Then use the English translation and the explanations, etc. to find out what you've been saying, and practice reciting it while concentrating on meaning for each and every word you say. Then move on to the next chapter. I can't remember if Book 3 still has translations or not, but if not, some other material at a similar level could be used.

Only once you're fairly conversational should you go back and learn how to write everything you've been saying. You'll progress much more quickly this way. I do believe doing Heisig during this whole period could be useful though, so in your case I'd say keep reviewing using Anki or whatever until you get to a basic conversational level. Then go back through the dialogues you worked through and learn to read and write them.

This is fairly unorthodox I guess, even for this site (or maybe especially for this site, with such a heavy focus on reading), but I truly believe that learning reading and writing from the beginning hinders progress when learning a new language. I have a student who literally thinks about each letter when speaking or listening to English, and this is a really terrible habit to have. Learning the spoken language first and only later focusing on reading and writing is, I believe, the right way to go about it because you then have the correct association in your brain of the writing system being dependent on and referent to the spoken language. No matter what Heisig says (he's wrong there, btw).

At any rate, I would put a heavy focus on speech and working with audio intensively. Drill new sentence patterns until you can use them naturally in speech. Grammar is just sound patterns, so you want a heavy dose of correct sound patterns coming in, and you want to say them yourself until it feels wrong and sounds wrong to say it wrong. Muscle memory is something you can use to your advantage. Not to mention that there's something about learning from audio rather than text that is easier and quicker. Maybe it has to do with the fact that writing is such a recent development for humanity compared to speech, not to mention it's a external product of human creativity rather than an innate part of our brains, which are wired for speech. I don't know. Anyway, there's my opinion, maybe some of it will be helpful.

I'm going to buy the first textbook for Practical Audio-Video Chinese with the audio. Do you think the workbook is useful? or should I just get the textbook with audio on Amazon?

I think I'm going to go through the the first 4 books because I was reading some of your past posts on the 5th book not being as good.

I think I'm going to do what you said and focus just on hearing the tones and pronunciation first because everything you said makes sense and I just want to speak and understand as fast as possible. I'll also continue reviewing the Hanzi in Anki.

Thank you so much!

Hi Bryos,

Just a few words to congratulate you for your hard work!
What a relief to have finished those damn hanzi ^^
I know this is just the beginning of the journey but still!

I can't give you any advice now but I am very interested to follow this thread since I expect to finish RSH 1&2 in a couple of months.

Thank you bflatnine for your input.

I agree with you to focus on the ability to hear correctly the language before going to more advance levels.
But by the way, I am still puzzled about the relationship between the reading ability and the listening ability that you mentioned. I read the story somewhere about somebody who has developed a reading ability based on translation and not on the actual pronunciation of words. And as soon as he started to learn the actual pronunciation, then his reading speed dropped significantly.

@+,
Dunki

PS: Would you mind Bryos to post your Anki stats? I'm a bit curious to what it will looks like just after the two volumes of RTH...

Congratulations from my side as well!

bflatnine Wrote:Only once you're fairly conversational should you go back and learn how to write everything you've been saying.

Had you followed this method from the start your conversational Chinese would be more fluent maybe, but then you would suck at reading. So it’s probably a matter of priorities.

What about:
1. rth,
2. learn the vocab with mandarin readings,
3. follow bflat9’s advice and transcribe the audio, but use characters instead of pinyin.

This should help associating the characters with Mandarin syllables rather than English while training your ear at the same time.

Dunki Wrote:PS: Would you mind Bryos to post your Anki stats? I'm a bit curious to what it will looks like just after the two volumes of RTH...

Yeah, but you're going to need to tell me how to get the stats because I've never looked at those and I'm not really sure what you want me to show you.

I rushed through the last 500ish Hanzi so I haven't seen the last 336 Hanzi in my RTH2 deck because I have a technique where I review the Hanzi in the book before I add them to the deck so that I have a higher recall rate and it's less stressful.

Anyway, tell me what to do and I'll do it.

Dunki Wrote:Thank you bflatnine for your input.

I agree with you to focus on the ability to hear correctly the language before going to more advance levels.
But by the way, I am still puzzled about the relationship between the reading ability and the listening ability that you mentioned. I read the story somewhere about somebody who has developed a reading ability based on translation and not on the actual pronunciation of words. And as soon as he started to learn the actual pronunciation, then his reading speed dropped significantly.

I don't really understand what you're talking about. I'd be surprised if anyone could read Chinese without knowing pronunciation (which would mean they also can't speak the language). If so, I'd be very surprised if they could read well and actually have an accurate understanding of what they're reading.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "relationship between reading ability and listening ability". I don't remember saying anything like that. I did say that written Chinese is referential to spoken Chinese. And that's just basic level stuff: all writing systems make reference to a spoken language. Because of that, it makes more sense (to me) to learn the spoken language first, so you're not doing like my student and thinking characters in your head, or like some of my classmates and being driven crazy by learning a word without learning the characters.

Anyway, I do think it's certainly possible to learn all four skills simultaneously and effectively. It's just that, given a blank slate of a student and ideal circumstances, that's the method I'd personally choose. Some people may not be willing to hold off on learning to read and write until later, and I would likely be one of those people too (this is not how I learned).

transalpin Wrote:Had you followed this method from the start your conversational Chinese would be more fluent maybe, but then you would suck at reading. So it’s probably a matter of priorities.

Who says I would suck at reading? Do you suck at reading your native language? No, because you've learned it well enough. So it's a matter of when you're talking about. When you first start learning to read, then of course you'll suck. But it will come along really quickly because you've already internalized the grammar and vocabulary, and all you're doing is attaching characters to what you already know. It would go even more quickly if you had already learned how to write a bunch of characters using Heisig or something.

Anyway, it's a matter of putting the time in so that you don't suck at reading, and I'd put money on the whole thing going more quickly and efficiently, and on you ending up with better conversation skills to boot, if you split the two up. Again, in the real world many people won't be willing to do this, and that's perfectly OK too.

bflatnine Wrote:Who says I would suck at reading? Do you suck at reading your native language? No, because you've learned it well enough.

Over many many years.

Quote:So it's a matter of when you're talking about. When you first start learning to read, then of course you'll suck. But it will come along really quickly because you've already internalized the grammar and vocabulary, and all you're doing is attaching characters to what you already know. It would go even more quickly if you had already learned how to write a bunch of characters using Heisig or something.

Anyway, it's a matter of putting the time in so that you don't suck at reading, and I'd put money on the whole thing going more quickly and efficiently, and on you ending up with better conversation skills to boot, if you split the two up. Again, in the real world many people won't be willing to do this, and that's perfectly OK too.

If you spend the same amount of time with each approach, then your reading will be worse, it may not suck, but it will suck in comparison to your theoretical level had you focused more on reading.

I also doubt it would really be quicker. Attaching arbitrary sounds(words) to arbitrary characters(written) takes a bit of time.

Heisig is also another time investment.

Sure, over many years, but that was your first language. You were learning countless other things at the same time, so the two aren't comparable. You can learn a second language much more quickly than your first. The point here anyway is that speech is primary. That's what language is, first and foremost. Your brain is wired to pick up speech, and can do so more quickly than it can pick up speech and writing simultaneously.

I challenge you to supply me with any evidence that your reading will be worse using my method, given a reasonable amount of time. Absent that, what you're saying is just conjecture.

Sure, if you give learners A and B each 6 months, and A follows my approach while B learns both simultaneously, then of course A's reading will be worse than B's at the end of 6 months. But his conversational ability will be much higher. Give them both 3 years, and I'd be willing to bet that it would be a different story. I'd bet that A would have a much better command of the spoken language, and a similar, if not better command of the written language compared to B.

Again, this is just my opinion, though I do base it on conversations I've had with high-level language learners, including a few linguists. Let me reiterate, your post was only your opinion too, though you neglected to mention that.

Your advice is based on the assumption that much more can be learned through listening than through reading and therefore it’s not worth bothering at an early stage. While you might have a point about the efficiency of auditive learning, I don’t come to the same conclusion. Being able to read also comes in handy at times, especially if you don’t live in Taiwan and therefore interesting and useful material in the wild is more likely to be in the written than in the spoken form.

My main beef with your method is resorting to pinyin after having invested so much time and effort in rth. We’ve seen those who went pinyin only and kept postponing learning the characters “eventually, at some point” but never got around to doing so. Once you get accustomed to pinyin, the romanization will always feel more familiar and easier to read than the hanzi.

Learning how to pronounce the 3000 Heisig characters in Mandarin shouldn’t take too long and shouldn’t keep you from practicing your listening comprehension anyway.

I want to read and I want to speak, but I think I'm going to try out bflatnine's method for my first 500-1000 vocab words for 5 reasons:
1) I can acquire the pronunciation of vocab much faster.
2) I can associate the pronunciation with the word meaning so that when I do attach the Hanzi to the pronunciation, it will be much easier because I will have already known the meaning and use of the character in context.
3) I want to speak fast and think fast when listening in the language without thinking too much about the actual characters that I'm using so that I can respond faster and I don't sound like I'm a robot when I'm speaking.
4) I want to focus on getting the pronunciation right at the beginning.
5) I still need some time to instill the actual meanings of the hanzi in my head before I can associate them with pronunciations.

I think I'm going to use this method in the beginning because I want a strong base with a focus on pronunciation and listening (the 2 most important aspects of the language in my opinion).

In the intermediate/advanced stages, I plan on using my knowledge of characters and their pronunciations to help me gain more vocab (from what I've heard, Chinese words are logically constructed based on the meanings of the characters and therefore it makes sense that learning new words at a more advanced level will be done more easily through making the meaning distinct with the characters).

So yeah... I like the idea of learning to speak and listen faster in the beginner phase of learning Mandarin so I'll be a guinea pig... I guess we're all guinea pigs (to an extent) by doing the Remembering the Hanzi method in the first place.

transalpin, you're entitled to your opinion, of course. I simply disagree. I would also tend to think that reading comes in handier if you do live in Taiwan, by virtue of the fact that you constantly encounter things written in Chinese.

I'm not sure what you mean by "learning how to pronounce the 3000 Heisig characters in Mandarin". By that, it sounds like you mean simply cramming a bunch of pronunciations into your head. That's not how it works, I'm afraid, and it doesn't make much sense to me. Again, my own opinion. Feel free to differ.

bflatnine Wrote:Sure, over many years, but that was your first language. You were learning countless other things at the same time, so the two aren't comparable. You can learn a second language much more quickly than your first. The point here anyway is that speech is primary. That's what language is, first and foremost. Your brain is wired to pick up speech, and can do so more quickly than it can pick up speech and writing simultaneously.

Now your brain is wired to pick up speech in your native tongue. But when you start learning a second language it is just random sounds. No different than learning qwipqwop = shoe and being expected to remember it. You can eventually but it will take time.

Quote:I challenge you to supply me with any evidence that your reading will be worse using my method, given a reasonable amount of time. Absent that, what you're saying is just conjecture.

Sure, if you give learners A and B each 6 months, and A follows my approach while B learns both simultaneously, then of course A's reading will be worse than B's at the end of 6 months. But his conversational ability will be much higher. Give them both 3 years, and I'd be willing to bet that it would be a different story. I'd bet that A would have a much better command of the spoken language, and a similar, if not better command of the written language compared to B.

Again, this is just my opinion, though I do base it on conversations I've had with high-level language learners, including a few linguists. Let me reiterate, your post was only your opinion too, though you neglected to mention that.

After 3 years they'll probably more or less be quite similar. A will probably still have a slight edge in listening whereas B will probably still have a slight edge in reading. And assuming they both start speaking around the same time, probably very similar in spoken fluency.I also assume both of them are using Japanese when possible(watching and reading) when possible during this time.

Now assuming both did Heisig, B should be learning the meanings of words at least, quite quickly and maybe the reading more slowly. But over time he'll get a sense of what readings go with which characters(radicals giving hints). Where as A will already have a lot of readings and shouldn't have to learn so many meanings outright(ala Heisig) when learning which characters to associate with them. But he has no sense of what reading goes with which character so in essence he will still be a little slow on the uptake. Telling someone 我 = wǒ (I'm sorry I don't know very much Chinese) is still pretty arbitrary and they probably will have a hard time remembering that as well. Assuming he took 6 months with just listening, he'll be 6 months behind in getting this sense. After about a 1 to 1.5 years they'll both get a rough sense of what words go with which reading, by which time A will have exhausted his limited vocab that he learned listening only and will be on the same track as B. Also A will probably be 6 months behind on reading.


All Opinion

Bryos, as I said, it’s a trade-off, so go for it and let us know how long you can hold out without looking at the characters in the PAVC.

I do like bflatnine’s idea for listening drills a lot, and I can see how tone recognition will help your own pronunciation. Minus the pinyin part. Instead of recollecting character primitives you will find yourself thinking about letters, which is not much better. I’m always baffled when those pinyin victims ask me “Oh, do yo mean X, I, U, Z, H …?”

Taken really seriously, probably neither pinyin nor hanzi should serve as a crutch. As others have noted, recording and comparing your own voice after every sentence is the way to go. Too bad that Anki doesn’t provide support for that sort of thing.

@bflatnine

If you wanna take 4 years to be able to speak with the vocabulary of a 4 year old, then your method sounds great.

However If you wanna be able to understand chinese audio and text as quickly as possible, then listen and read. Read a lot from the start. I'm talking about understand radio, understand the news, understand movies, read novels level, not bar room chit-chat. I'm not talking about tourist level conversation.

Is it possible to learn say 1000 words a month without reading? If you know a way I'm all ears but I don't think it's possible. Unless you have some magical ability to rapidly guess the meaning of words when you understand less than 5% of what you're hearing, you pretty much have to rely on teachers, learning podcasts, or slow immersion learning.

Edit: I should add, that this may mean you have a bit of a crappy accent at first, but you'll soon be able to improve by a tonne of comprehensible listening input. It doesn't matter if your accent is a bit (or very) crappy when reading words in your internal voice. It still helps you pick out words from your audio and rapidly increase your audio comprehension.

I don't know what you're talking about. You're arguing against a bunch of stuff that nobody has said. Not to mention you're making some odd assumptions about how this stuff works. 4 years for the vocabulary of a 4 year old is absurd. A 4 year old is not only learning the words, but also the concepts and what things are. A 4 year old has no concept of what existentialism is, for instance, and won't for a long time to come. An adult just needs to be told "注意 means idea or -ism, and 存在 means to exist, so 存在主義 is existentialism". Now you're able to talk about existentialism. Sure, it doesn't usually stick that quickly, but you get the idea.

Who said anything about taking 4 years to do anything? I said "once you're fairly conversational" you should learn reading and writing. To be fair, I didn't define what I meant by "fairly conversational". By that I mean able to make chit chat and get around. Where are you from, why are you learning Chinese, how do you get to X, what does this dish have in it, etc. This hardly takes 4 years (a few months tops if you're working hard at it), and there's no reason you have to be able to read in order to reach this basic level.

I'm also not talking about "bar room chit chat, tourist level conversation" as an end goal either. Again, who are you talking to? My own immediate goal is to be able to study for an MA in Chinese history, here in Taiwan. That means being able to read and discuss large amounts of formal academic writing in Chinese with professors and other academics. I work under the assumption that anyone asking for advice about studying Chinese is shooting for a very high level of competence, unless they say otherwise.

Not really sure what you're talking about in your third paragraph either. If you're only understanding 5% of what you hear, you're using the wrong material to learn.

Anyway, if there's anything that I actually said that you'd like to discuss, I'm up for it. But there are more opinions about how to learn than there are learners, so I'm not too fussed about whether anyone agrees with me or not. What I'm doing is working very well for me.

bflatnine Wrote:What I'm doing is working very well for me.

It’s obviously not what you did, because you’re written chinese is actually pretty good, according to your own words.

I have heard from others that Pimsleur and comparable “audio only” systems can get you fluent and confident pretty soon, so yes, I’m intrigued how that works out. Probably the difference is the top-down approach, where you listen to the entire sentence first and only then you try to dissect single words, while the Heisig method is based on the minimum information principle: first the characters, then the words and eventually entire conversations.

It’s definitely worth a try, but what can it hurt to also have a look at the characters (which you already know anyway) at the end of every lesson? If you can read 牛肉 in the menu you don’t have to ask the waiter what the dish has in it.

Fair enough, after Heisig you might be able to guess that it means “cow” and “meat”, you can then start to think about what it means: “beef”, and eventually translate beef to pinyinized Chinese: niu rou. However, this is still not how it is pronounced, because for some reason the second syllable is spelled with an “o” in it while the first one isn’t. What harm is done if you just learn from the start that [niourou] is written 牛肉 and 牛肉 is read [niourou], and you do this for every new word after each dialogue, without the pinyin hassle in the first place.

nadiatims Wrote:read novels level, not bar room chit-chat

I think, you nailed it. 3000 characters are more than enough for whatever you like to read. And much is to be said about the choice of texts. Reading can be fun as soon as it goes beyond the “Māma is in the kitchen, Bàba is in the living room” level. I am currently reading a book by Yuen Ren Chao, for example. Interesting material can take you a long way.
This, of course, doesn’t exclude the possibility of pronunciation practice.

No, it's not what I did, and I'm having to go back and fix things that I don't think I'd be having to fix had I started off differently. And that "differently" is what I'm recommending, and what I'm currently doing, to the extent possible. My point in saying "what I'm doing is working very well for me" was not that this is how I studied, it was to say that I'm not really interested in arguments over which way is better because it makes no difference to me what other people think about what I do or recommend. I've put my opinion out there, feel free to agree or disagree. But if you're (figurative 'you') going to aim your disagreement at me, I'd prefer the disagreement to be over something I actually said.

There also seems to be some confusion regarding the role of reading in learning Chinese. Reading helps you to be able to read. Things tend to be phrased much differently in written Chinese than they are in spoken, conversational Chinese. To a much greater extent than in English. So reading a bunch of books, while outstanding for improving your reading ability and vocabulary, will not do much for your conversation.

I don't really get what your point is about the o not being written in niu. That's how the syllable is written in pinyin, so yes, that is how it's pronounced. It doesn't need an o, because anyone who has learned pinyin knows that niu is pronounced "niou", as you put it. It would have been just fine with the o in it, but it's also just fine without because it's been agreed upon that this syllable will be written in this way. Same deal with umlauts not being written over the u in yu, xu, ju, and qu. There's no need, and you learn this when you first learn pinyin (or you ought to).

My point is that pinyin also requires some learning first, so your time would be more wisely spent learning how to pronounce 牛 rather than “niu”, given that you already know what the character means.

And while you pretend not to care about my opinion, I was intrigued and serious about this question: Which kind of reasoning makes you believe that using hanzi rather than pinyin could have a hindering effect? Maybe you are right and I just fail to see how.

Only at first. I really don't see how this is a difficult concept to grasp. You can learn speech by itself much faster than you can learn speech and reading together. Once you have speech down at a basic level, having internalized the basic vocabulary and grammar, learning how to read will be fairly easy, especially if you've already learned the characters via Heisig. It makes sense to me to divide and conquer, that's all.

I believe I've expressed my opinion well enough on this matter. You can all take it or leave it, I have to get back to studying.

bflatnine Wrote:Once you have speech down at a basic level, having internalized the basic vocabulary and grammar

how do you internalize the basic vocabulary and grammar efficiently by by delaying reading. How do you get that first 1000 or whatever words efficiently if you have to spend time drilling things with a teacher or listening to bilingual podcasts etc. Person A who rapidly grows their vocabulary by reading in their study time, and listening to stuff in dead-time (commutes etc) is going to improve way faster (for pretty much all skills in the long run), than person B who insists on having audio for everything and getting basic conversation down via drills and things because person A's vocabulary will be way higher. After a month, person B will have maybe a couple of hundred words. Person A may have a couple of thousand. A year or two later, person A probably has well over 10,000 words and is understanding most of what he hears or reads and be able to speak reasonably well across a range of topics, while person B is stuck in some intermediate quagmire. Person A can get comprehensible input whenever they want. Person B is getting it spoon-served at some language class.

Lots of assumptions there. It's easy to set up a Person B who will not make good progress in order to try to "prove" your point. But if that's not how I would have Person B learning, your argument is moot.

Anyway, it's not important. I disagree with you. That's not the end of the world, and I have no compulsion to try to win anyone over to my "side", so let's just leave it at that.

simple question, how do you efficiently learn words at the very early stages without reading? To actually comprehend authentic materials across a broad range of topics especially audio (as you can't rely on a dictionary) requires a big vocabulary. None of the courses like pimsleur, teach yourself, presumedly FSI give you the vocabulary required. The bigger your vocabulary the more you are able to comprehend and benefit from input at any stage in the game.

Nobody will be "comprehend[ing] authentic materials across a broad range of topics" at the very early stages. Again, you're making a lot of assumptions here. I never said anyone should follow Pimsleur, Teach Yourself, or FSI (apart from the Pronunciation module), and I certainly never implied that one would be able to use authentic material after doing so if they did.

I think using a basic course that has translations into English, uses lots of audio, and introduces the basic grammatical structures is a good way to start a language. Something like the first few books of PAVC, like I suggested earlier, without looking at the Chinese. I also think such a course can be completed much more quickly than the publisher suggests if the student is motivated. After maybe 2-3 months of intensive drilling, chorusing, memorizing, and practicing output/speaking, a motivated student can move on to learning reading and writing, having a basic level of conversational ability.

Again, you're making a bunch of assumptions and arguing against those rather than against anything I've said. I don't think the goal in the first few months should be to learn thousands of words per month. I think it's more important to get a solid grasp of sentence structure in the beginning. So we're arguing from two differing philosophies of how language should be learned. I just ask that you try to see what I'm saying from my side rather than trying to analyze my methods within a different philosophical framework. It doesn't work that way. My goal here is to internalize the grammar of the language at an early level before moving on to learning lots of vocabulary and a more written style of language. That's an important point here: the written language and the everyday casual spoken language are two very different animals, and you can't really learn one from the other. Divide and conquer, as I said.

That's all I'm going to say on the topic, so bait me all you want. I've wasted way too much time here already. I knew my opinion wasn't going to be popular when I posted it, and I'm OK with that.

So after 3 months they begin learning writing as well with a small vocab. Then after they learn to write that small amount of vocab(which probably won't be any easier for them than student B), they will be in the same position as student A.

Except they'll be able to say a few hundred, possibly 1000 words "fluently" listening and maybe 500 "fluently" speaking, perhaps. And 3 years down the road they'll probably be at around the same place.

I think everyone is getting hung up on what a basic level of conversation is. I think we all have vastly different bars on what that is exactly.