started mandarin - characters?

karen3212

Hi I've just started learning mandarin. I would just like to know if it is really necessary to learn the characters?

Also any advice on how to start learning characters would be great if people think it is necessary to learn them.

Thanks Kar

yangzhao

i think, charactor is really not the best place to start learning chinese. as its totally different system from english.

there is no point to learn a language without being able to speak it.

i recommend to start with Pinyin.
maybe try to remember a few common characters if thinking u r really good at pinyin already.:)

fricatus

At the end of the day, Chinese is written in Chinese characters, and knowing how to speak the language is great, but you'll be like an illiterate Chinese person if you don't know how to read and write it.

I'm in the process of learning Japanese, and while we Nihongo no gakusei (日本語の学生） "only" nead to learn 2,000 characters, as opposed to about 5,000 for Mandarin, I followed a very good method by a guy called James W. Heisig, which teaches you all 2,000.

Here's the link to the information page about his book:
http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/publications/miscPublications/Remembering_the_Kanji_1.htm

Here's the first couple of chapters:
http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/publications/miscPublications/pdf/RK4/RK%201_sample.pdf

And here's an excellent site that provides a review mechanism based on Heisig's book:
http://kanji.koohii.com/

You should work through the initial chapters of the book, if for nothing else other than to gain a feel for the characters.

The Japanese characters were basically copied straight from China back whenever (like hundreds of years ago, but that's all I know). The Chinese government simplified a lot of them after the war, but the older, traditional characters that Japanese uses are still in use in the likes of Taiwan and HK.

Of course the two languages are entirely different, so some of the characters have taken on slightly different meanings over the centuries (like how "responsable" and "assister" mean "liable/in charge" and "to attend" respectively in French). However the principles of writing (stroke order, how the characters are built), plus the meanings of the majority of characters are exactly the same between the two.

Heisig's book 2 deals with how to learn the pronunciation of the characters, since 80% are what's known as "pictophonetic compounds". See this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Formation_of_characters

Once again, Heisig's book deals with Japanese, but the good news is that the pictophonetic formation of characters is even more consistent in Chinese than Japanese! I often wonder just why books that teach Chinese don't highlight this, since it's the single biggest labour-saving device in learning the language.

Of course, if there's a similar method to Heisig's available specifically for Chinese, then go for that. Whatever you do though, don't be put off by Heisig's sometimes idiotic ways of getting you to remember things. The key is that the more ludicrous the idea, the better chance it has of sticking in your head!

Lastly, ganbatte kudasai! (you didn't think I knew how to say "good luck" in Chinese, did you?)

davros

Absolutely! Learn the characters right from the beginning and don't buy any textbook that does not show characters beside the pinyin.

You won't find any decent practice material in pinyin and you won't absorb any written information from your surroundings if you visit China.

By not studying characters you would also miss a rich layer of interconnections between characters and words that greatly assist with building vocabulary. For example, "beijing" and "nanjing" are just sounds to be learned individually but if you see the characters you realise they have one character in common (meaning "capital") and that "bei" is "north" and "nan" is "south".

I would definitely focus more on recognising characters than on writing characters. But learn to write a hundred or so just so you understand how they are built up. And buy a dictionary and figure out how to look up a Chinese character you don't recognise.

Like anything, it's not as hard as it first seems. There are many recurring patterns in Chinese characters so learning 5,000 different characters is not quite as bad as it sounds.

Even if you never learn that many, what you know will still be very useful in China. For example, if you learn just two characters, you can tell the difference between men's and women's toilets

karen3212

Thanks for the replies, much appreciated. I will try to learn the characters as I like how they look as well.
I also saw a flash cartoonish thing on them by sonic novel on the internet and I found that very interesting and entertaining too.