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I Hate Hanzi
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Myriam -

sthubbar, I understand your predicament .
I think time is worth saving, so I'm not against simplification per se, but I don't like the way
characters have been simplified (one can do better : whenever I think about it, 很烦恼). So I
think there is room for improvement (I'm thinking shorthand with phonetic radicals (priority given
to writing instead of reading) and characters with the same "spelling" but not the same meaning
depending on the context - a price to pay I guess - for everyday use).



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Ari 桑 -

Hm. Characters got easier for me the more I learned. Not that my retention rate is great if I
don't practice, but I wasn't ever really intimidated by the number of characters (and since I'm
learning simplified its not as terrifying of a task, if I lived in HK or taiwan I'd be scared).
What is hard is sometimes how chinese people break up words and mix them into things that don't
make sense to me. For example, lots of news article headlines, they can be tricky, even if the
article contect isn't so tricky.










JimmySeal -

I find hanzi intimidating (not so much for Japanese kanji anymore), but I love them. It's hard to
say whether Chinese and Japanese would be better or worse with or without them, but there's no way
around them.

Pronunciation and tone are the most important facets for me, but I still swear by the Heisig
method. It's easy to get distracted by the idea that it "only teaches meaning and writing," but to
think that way is to miss the big picture.
The most important aspect about RTK is that it gives the characters a specific, concrete place in
your brain and strips out everything but what is essential for remembering the character: one
unique keyword, and a mnemonic story to connect the keyword to the character itself. Trying to
learn to recognize the character, learn several meanings, and at least one pronunciation and tone,
all without any mnemonic to tie it to memory, you wind up with too many balls in the air. It's
easy to fall flat on your face.
Once the character is firmly tied to memory, adding additional information (pronunciation, other
meanings) becomes much easier, because you have an identity for the character and are just
learning more about an old friend. And that is the strength of the Heisig system.

Similar characters are probably a problem for everyone, but again, RTK helps here too. Trying to
distinguish 録, 緑 and 縁 simply on rote memory, you can go nuts but if you have three distinct
mnemonic stories tying their component parts to three different keywords, it's near impossible to
confuse them.

It's a shame that Remembering the Hanzi still hasn't been published, but it will be soon, and I
highly recommend giving it a try.










simonlaing -

Hey all,

I think to be able to write characters out, over and over for several years, requires a little of
a sado-mascochistic tendency, I have met those people who end class and say things "Oh boy 30 more
characters about old sung dynasty slang to learn I can't wait!. " Yes， they used to scare me too.
I found making flash cards and testing the ones that you don't know over and over helps as you
spend time on the hard words not the easy ones. Also break the charaters in to their radical parts
to help remember them. I found it helps with writing as well as reading.

But the one thing that can keep you going is that written and use of chinese characters separates
the beginners from the intermediates. The intermediates still have to spend long hours studying
characters but they're used to it more and have stopped making excuses and don't procrastinate
anymore about it.
I like to see the high drop out rate. People who come to the unversity and say I am going to only
speak chinese (though there is no requirement to do this) and go to every class every day for the
whole year. Then 3 months later you see them about once a week in class, and the other 6 days in
the bar, explaining the benefits of Bar Chinese and night street food to you.

In your head, you know it was writing the Hanzi for hours every night that drove him to the
bottle. That's when the hours of card making and hanzi writing pay off. You made it to
intermediate student, others didn't. You've put in the time, you've gone distance, you've rocked
the chinese. (there's still lots more Chinese to learn, but when you realize you've made it to
intermediate level, that is a good feeling).

And I don't think learning characters gets easier, you just get better at dealing with it later.

Have fun,
Simon
P.S. It is also cool when you are able to read soft porn short stories from the bus station or the
magazine duzhe 读者。 If you've done 2-3 years you can probably handle it.










pandagirl -

Hanzi-->汉字,right? don't hate her,love her,u will learn more chinese culture.ok?

i think it will more good affect if u create the friend feeling with 汉字. trust me.

if have any problem,u can contact.i am glad to help u.

this is my first time to come here,a new day.happy everyone.










atitarev -

Interesting that there are blogs about "I hate Kanji" (the Japanese version of Hanzi). The
frustration is sometimes for a different reason - inconsistency between reading and writing.
Although the Chinese use more characters, the readings are much more consistent an din 95% or more
- you learn a character, it stays with you!

Someone said - to learn Chinese characters - you have to love them - think about them, write them,
analyse them, compare them. Learning Chinese thoroughly if you do it part-time is sometimes
completely devastating on social life. It's a hard hobby, no doubt.










cdn_in_bj -



Quote:

It is also cool when you are able to read soft porn short stories from the bus station or the
magazine duzhe 读者

Now there's an incentive I hadn't thought of!










YuehanHao -

As a fellow student, I feel sympathy for the thread originator, and so I will phrase this question
in the first person (as I have asked myself more than once):

Why did I set my mind on learning Chinese, if I had first intended to avoid frustration, anger,
feelings of inadequacy, etc.? Obviously we all have our individual reasons to attempt the feat, or
we wouldn't be here (although, I don't know, perhaps not everyone else feels those same feelings I
mentioned!).

But nevertheless, it seems true that there are innumerable (to my small mind) languages and
cultures in the world, most of which languages are more readily apprehended by English speakers
than Chinese. For instance, despite an overwhelming imbalance in the hours of study I have devoted
to learning Chinese, I have grown comparatively much more proficient at reading Spanish simply by
regularly reading a weekly newspaper while eating meals! How embarrassing!

In a way, the lost opportunities for so little progress seem a tragic waste when I contemplate as
a dispassionate observer, but obviously, from back in my own skin, learning characters and tones
still seems worthwhile -- or else it is the feeling I would just waste time in some other worse
way instead...

约翰好！










DrZero -

In a sense I agree that to become an intermediate student/user of Chinese, one needs a strong
command of characters. I mean, if you can't read, then you aren't a good all-around user of
Chinese. But I don't necessarily agree that one needs to have a good command of characters in
order to speak and understand well (and perhaps even to an advanced degree). I just don't think
the relationship is that strong. Cases in point, illiterate people in China, and some ABCs in
America, who can't read but who can easily understand TV dramas, movies and probably even the news.
Conversely, many people develop proficiency in reading and writing but would still struggle in
everyday casual spoken interactions. (That goes not only for Mandarin learners but for English
learners as well; I've met many graduate students from China in the U.S. who can read novels and
newspapers in English, but have trouble understanding even basic English utterances when spoken at
native speed.)
So yes, to be an intermediate or advanced all-around user of Mandarin, it's necessary to know
characters well. But I would not overemphasize their usefulness in helping a person to speak and
understand well.










gato -

Another problem with not being able to read is that you'll have trouble using a dictionary,
whereas looking up words in a dictionary is probably the more effective way to learn new
vocabulary for intermediate/advanced learners. You are not be able to find someone to explain
every new vocab to you orally, so not being able to use a dictionary will become a bottleneck to
learning.


Quote:

Cases in point, illiterate people in China, and some ABCs in America, who can't read but who can
easily understand TV dramas, movies and probably even the news.

Period costume dramas using classical Chinese in dialogs probably will be hard to understand. News
will be hard to understand, too, because of the advanced vocabulary and the bookish
grammar/sentence structure.

Though there is a large gap between written and spoken Chinese, more educated speakers tend to use
more bookish grammatical elements and vocabulary (i.e. those derived from classical Chinese, like
chengyu's) when speaking. An illiterate person will probably find that kind of speech hard to
understand.












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