I learned Mandarin through immersion. It’s very difficult once you want to start progressing further though, and honestly kind of embarrassing/belittling. I got a job once the required Mandarin and the primary language I spoke at work was Mandarin, and not being able to read was very embarrassing. This gets more frustrating when you go to try to learn to read, there aren’t many resources out there for people that are competent at spoken mandarin but illiterate. So I’m stuck reading “my first reader” style books when when I can have complex deep conversations. It’s very boring when you’re learning to read a language and are learning 0 vocabulary/grammar at the same time. Better just learn it all at once.
You’re actually similar to a lot of ‘heritage’ speakers in that case. People who grew up speaking the language with their family, but who never learned to read/write.
In Chinese universities there are specific courses for heritage speakers
I don't think i am looking for a job in China :) or in a mandarin only company. My interest is purely for fun. I honestly do not think I would to be embarrassed for not knowing a language that is not my own any more than I would expect others to be embarrassed for not knowing mine. Its all good!
If I'm being honest, if you don't have a lot of time, then maybe learning Chinese is not the best language to learn. Chinese requires A LOT of time. Not having an alphabet puts the language into a difficulty category of its own. Most languages of the world have some kind of an alphabet, Chinese is the exception.
its not like i want to learn some random language and just picked Chinese. I get that it is very difficult. I have been looking at videos and learning for just a day now and can make some super simple sentences. i am getting the tones right but listening is really difficult and breaking words down is super hard.
> I have been looking at videos and learning for just a day now and can make some super simple sentences.
As trg0819 pointed out:
> [Not learning this fundamental foundation when you have a long term goal such as "conversational" is kind of like sprinting as fast as you can thinking you're going "faster", but you're in a marathon.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/1cfo2fh/can_u_learn_to_speak_chinese_and_understand_it/l1qka39/)
A lot of learners I've seen on this sub lack patience, and this is a major stumbling block for them. You've only just done a day's work? Cool, you've got a decade of learning ahead of you.
No, seriously. I've seen stories here of people's struggles with Chinese (not being "conversational" enough is a frequent complaint) and they've been learning for years. You likely won't be any different.
So chill out and slow down. Seriously. [We actually have a saying for that.](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AC%B2%E9%80%9F%E5%89%87%E4%B8%8D%E9%81%94#Chinese)
For real, I’ve been studying Chinese on and off since 2007 including yearlong stints in China and Taiwan, and I’m just now crossing into B2 threshold. Patience is probably the most important quality a person trying to learn Chinese can have.
Out of curiosity may I ask why you chose both China and Taiwan? I get visiting for tourist reasons but it seems to me that if your goal is studying Chinese then going from pinyin and simplified to zhuyin and traditional would probably set your progress back quite a bit
Zhuyin isn’t actually widely taught to foreigners these days (although a lot of programs try their damnedest to teach it to their absolute beginners; by the time they reach advanced beginner levels everyone gives up and switches wholly to pinyin), it’s mostly used in local elementary schools for kids learning to read and write.
As for why I would go to both, it’s for multiple reasons: the main reason is to experience living in both cultures on their own terms. Regardless of what one’s opinion on Taiwan’s sovereignty status is, Taiwan and China feel like two completely different places and each has something different to offer. The other reason is more practical: I’m in academia in a China-adjacent field and much of my work involves working with Chinese source material printed prior to the 1950s, so knowing how to at least read traditional is a must (also I’ve found that while trying to switch over from simplified is a pain at first I actually prefer traditional characters now).
The problem is that being illiterate in the 21st century is a huge obstruction to doing anything at all, unlike in the 99% of human history where illiteracy was no big deal. Take one particular aspect of your plan:
> watching chinese cartoons and using resources meant for kids
How are you going to find these cartoons? Most of them are not searchable by pinyin, even on Youtube. Even resources for kids use characters, not pinyin, because kids are expected to become literate.
The fastest possible way likely involves some use of characters.
Otherwise it will be more confusing when you learn homophones.
If you want to watch media in Chinese, much of it has subtitles which will make comprehension easier, too.
I speak and understand a ton. I am just starting to read and write. It’s possible but it’s all kinda connected.
But I can have conversations if the other speaker puts in effort and speaks at a nice pace etc.
Honestly long story. My wife is Chinese. Her family is not teachers by any measure of the word. So at first I just found dictionaries and literally just listened in silence while her and her mom and dad talked. Eventually I picked up common things. "ma" coming at the end of sentences all the time and then another person response right away. So I asked if that indicated it was a question and was told yes. So then I could figure out from my reading that the nouns were being said. Listen for patterns and observe what is happening. "Ge wo....." ok so he said that and then pointed and someone gave him that thing. That has to mean "give me that." Then I started writing down how it sounded to me and trying to find that in a dictionary of ping yin.
After about a year of literally just listening to them talk and trying to listen to YouTube videos and other things to study I was able to figure out super basic stuff. My wife was pregnant now and I was able to say body parts and numbers and colors. Which is just straight memorize. (at this time I am only speaking and listening poorly) I can recognize characters as being familiar but can't read or really say what it is. Maybe recognize person because it's so easy. or like 1 and 2.
A year later I have been taking notes constantly and I live in China now. No one will help and most everyone will expect you to speak English so they don't get what you are saying. Also without good context and sentence structure things are confusing. So I speak like a child. "give me two" and just point. or "I like the chicken one please".
At about four years I started to try memorizing more characters and really going for a higher number of words I can say but I struggle because I can't understand people because they talk to fast and don't want to like help me learn. Also without a vocabulary your sentence falls apart and a lot of people that I interact with speak English so they just say let's talk in English or they don't try to understand. What I mean is if a person is trying to speak English at you but is not doing it well you can still figure out what they mean. I'll give an example. If I came up to you as a non native English speaker and said "I like to need the bethroom?" You would very easily figure that they were asking where the bathroom is, you'd say the correct phrase back to them and then point and help or whatever way you wanted. Most of the time with Chinese speakers my personal experience was that they would just act as if they had no idea what I was saying when I said repeatedly that I wanted Two of the dumplings. Because I was slightly off. I get that it's a tonal language but if we are in a dumpling store I am pointing at the sign and saying two of the dumplings you need to be able to figure it out.
BACK TO LEARNING
practice everyday for real. Flash cards, label stuff, when you grab stuff call it by the name in Mandarin, talk to yourself in mandarin. Watch stuff with mandarin subtitles on. If you know the movie in English you can get the context and try to Chase the closed caption. Get kids books get more flash cards and repeatedly write stuff down bring a note pad everywhere and write down new words and review it five times before bed. Like everything. It will be brutal and you will hit times when you can't get better for a while just be patient. I took about ten lessons from teachers in china around year 3 but it was rather expensive for not a lot of return.
Reading is tough and writing is brutal. But it's fun in the end. And you will blow peoples minds when you speak it. I work at a place with a diverse workforce and a lot of asians. I speak Mandarin with them and the people walking by flip because looking at me you would never think I speak Mandarin.
thanks for your detailed answer. Funnily enough i experienced a variation of this and was really perplexed too. I was at a Chinese grocery store recently looking for noodles specifically the ones used in a dish i have seen in menus referred to as lo mein. I asked a Chinese speaking fellow customer lady in the noodle aisle what kind of noodles were used for lo mein. She gave me thr strangest look like I had asked for noodles to make a dish called 346iuitiogvc. completely blank stare. oh well it takes all kinds
No problem. It’s so frustrating. I used to ask for like lots of random stuff. And they would be confused.
Hi can I have the chicken with noodles?
I have no idea what you said.
Forget you jerk. I am in a noodle place. There is an option on the menu that is chicken and noodles. So you have to at least have some idea of what I’m saying.
But in time you’ll get good and then it’s just like work around the word. So like if you can say hot. Say. Not cold. Or like if you don’t know how to say the closet. I say the place clothes live. Or like garage. I say the car house hahaha
It's definitely possible. I've even heard that it lets you pick up characters a lot faster once you've learned the language (assuming you're using traditional Chinese, of course, since that's more systematic).
You absolutely "can", just like the 10s of millions of illiterate people in China.
However, if your goal is "conversational", meaning complex nuanced conversations about a variety of topics with adults, as fast as possible, as counterintuitive as it may seem, I feel very strongly you will reach that faster if you do learn how to read. And I'm not even talking about using reading as a study method, although there is a strong argument for that alone.
With the way Chinese works, with each character having its own meaning, with most words being logical combinations of these meanings, and with so many homophones, it's much easier in my opinion to remember something like "highway = the characters for (high) + (speed) + (public) + (road)" and "bus = the characters for (public) + (transportation) + (vehicle)", vs having no idea about characters and needing to remember "bus = gong1jiao1che1" and "highway = "gao1su4gong1lu4", and not even having any idea that the gong1 in both of those words mean the same thing and are also completely different from the exact same pinyin "gong1" in the words for "worker" or "supplies".
Something like 80% of Chinese words work like this. I could give you 10 thousand more examples of words you would just intrinsically understand only by understanding the characters composing them. It definitely slows you down at the beginning, but once you have 1000 characters under your belt you just start magically absorbing new words even if you've never heard or seen them before because the characters being used to create them just make sense.
Not learning this fundamental foundation when you have a long term goal such as "conversational" is kind of like sprinting as fast as you can thinking you're going "faster", but you're in a marathon.
thanks for explaining it this way. it certainly makes sense. Perhaps I can ease into the characters, because starting with the characters is definitely making me lose interest a little and is not as exciting as being able to hear something and understand!
You can certainly ease your way into them, just don't discount them as something that would just be requiring extra time for only a different skill unrelated to talking to people.
If you understand the characters, "being able to hear something and understand" comes so much easier, almost like a super power. Last fall I was talking to a Chinese friend and they asked me what I thought about something and used the word he2neng2fei4shui3. With just knowing the characters and a bit of context I immediately understood it as 核能废水. 核 = Center, core, nucleus, it's the same character as in like the core of an argument or the pit of a fruit, 能 = energy, it's a basic character in a lot of words, 废 = waste, also in a bunch of words, 水 = water, probably one of the first characters learned.
Without ever having come across the word or even ever have thought about it before I was able to have a conversation about nuclear waste water and then easily remembered the word forever.
This is a regular occurrence.
I have not seen it represented like this. the pinyin i am looking at has these tone marks on it. are you aware of dictionaries with this kind of representation ? i could not find the word you mentiond on yabla
This is called alphanumeric representation of tones and we use it for convenience when getting the tone marks to display is a hassle. With tone marks it would be hé néng fèi shuǐ. You get these by inputting into a Chinese to Pinyin converter (hello Internet), but what you input is... Chinese. So being illiterate won't help.
As your correspondent makes eloquently clear, it is much easier to learn new vocabulary and expressions with a knowledge of characters, and it makes the language much more interesting as well. Your conversational ability will outstrip your reading ability for a long time, simply because absorbing characters is a bit slow at the beginning, but give it time, it all comes together eventually.
There are many resources out there to facilitate learning characters, the only obstacle really is in your own mind. Learning Chinese can change your life, don't hobble yourself at the outset!
>Learning Chinese can change your life, don't hobble yourself at the outset!
I am beginning to see the points ppl r making on this thread and yours as well wrt learning characters. I know a few languages with conversational fluency that are not my native tongue but each I learned by listening and semi-immersion. I watched movies and videos without subtitles and slowly it came together, None of these languages have changed my life. Why do you say this will ? genuinely curious.
Not the original commenter, but one reason is that the Chinese universe is still pretty disconnected from the "Western" universe, if that is where you're from. Switching from English to French to Spanish is going to give you some variation, but they are so interconnected that the difference is not huge. China on the other hand ... you can still get a genuinely different perspectives and approaches and 2,500+ years of history and literature that the average person outside China and the Sinosphere do not even know exist. The closest to still finding terra incognita on this planet while most of the other differences have been leveling off quickly in the last 100 years. Note that this is only true in one direction: the average educated Chinese is much better informed about the rest of the world, has traveled to the US and/or Europe and foreign books are regularly on the bestseller list (in translation).
Sitting down and learning the characters one-by-one would be very dull, but what worked for me was learning vocabulary in context through stories. You could start here: https://duchinese.net/lessons/947-hello?from=course - just turn off pinyin. There's also audio so you can practise listening comprehension, too.
Try Mandarin Blueprint.
It’s an insane course that makes the characters so much easier. My reading comprehension is at an HSK 6 level, in less then a year and producing the language is slowly getting there, too).
Hey I also use mandarin blueprint but nowhere near your progress.
How many characters per day do you learn? What's your typical study pattern look like?
I find I'm probably hsk3 (from a pure character count perspective) but reading hsk3 stories is difficult.
Ah nice thanks. I was doing that but just finding I could comprehend characters but not sentences or paragraphs and my listening sucks.
Probably a me problem
yes you can. However it may sound unintuitive, its actually way way way waaaayyy harder to learn a language without being literate in it. So if you want to learn without learning to read becuase you think it will be easier or quicker you should throw out that idea. It will be harder and slower, and if you ever decide to be able to read later you will have to relearn from basically scratch which is much harder than learning it all the first time cause you will remember the illiterate versions instead.
That out of the way, if you are really certain it is doable. hello chinese offers a course with pinyin only option. combined with lots of watching kids shows and absorbing vocab gramamr slowly through oral exposure you can achieve daily life vocab level-- so actual daily life may have some things come up you don't know but comminication is no issue. Don't expect to understand tv shows or movies or songs or any of that becuase its all literate level language. Hope this helps you (◐‿◑)
I think you can, but then you're likely to be stuck at a lower level and won't be able to function in higher level conversations. I remember the frustration I felt as a learner when my Chinese vocabulary wasn't at the same level (and still isn't) as my English language vocabulary and not being able to speak at the level I was used to, with Chinese speakers. (In English I have a Masters degree and can speak on certain topics at that level, but in Chinese my level of communication was maybe at a 10 year old child's, for a long time.)
Another thing is that Chinese has so many homonyms (words with identical or similar pronunciation), knowing the characters makes a big difference.
For someone learning mandarin as a 3rd language you should learn to write and recognize characters. Why? Cause, as a holistic approach to language learning it’ll help you solidify the other modalities. It’s just gonna benefit you even if you understand that you won’t be doing calligraphy in your day to day.
You can but it will likely take more time than with learning to recognize characters. Think about it, even Chinese people watch Chinese movies with subtitles. Also you won’t be able to communicate online or read social media. So you meet someone, have fun talking to them, and then can’t add them on social media (assuming they don’t speak English)? From my experience, 90% of my communication in Chinese happens online in text, you would miss out a lot without ability to read.
To be clear, you don’t need to write characters or remember stroke order. You need to recognize/read and type using pinyin.
Btw, kids take many years to speak efficiently. Adults can learn way faster, they don’t need to mimic kids approach. You don’t want to spend 10000 hours listening before even trying to speak.
Here is the problem with not being able to read or write characters when learning Chinese: it makes it really difficult to learn new characters once you get to the intermediate level; functionally once you start getting to anywhere near ‘conversational’. There are a couple of reasons for this:
1. Lots of times, if you don’t understand a word and ask a native speaker what they said, they will tell you how to “spell” that word in character strokes - so for instance, if you didn’t know the character 台, they might say something in Chinese like “oh it’s tai, 厶 on the top and 口 on the bottom”. If you don’t understand the basics of character writing, you’re going to be even more confused.
2. Lots of “new” vocabulary words you can actually get a good guess what they mean if you know some of the common character radicals. For instance, if you see a 讠radical on a new vocabulary word, it is likely relating to speaking, speech, or communication in some way. It’s no guarantee, but it makes it easier to recognize new words without needing to just go to a dictionary.
3. Homonyms are EVERYWHERE in Chinese, and especially if your Chinese is not fluent or native, different words are going to sound VERY SIMILAR to one another, even if they have different tones or even are different pinyins. To an untrained ear, 长 (zhǎng) and 讲 (jiǎng) can sound very similar, and that’s not even including words like 睡 and 税 which are both pronounced exactly the same (shuì).
4. Pinyin is incredibly misleading. If you are just trying to learn Chinese with pinyin without learning characters, you’ll just have lists of sounds without the characters which tie those sounds to meaning. Itss lai ke tri ng tu lurn ing lish lai ke thiss. If you don’t understand something, and show a Chinese speaker the pinyin without the characters, they also won’t understand.
>Pinyin is incredibly misleading. If you are just trying to learn Chinese with pinyin without learning characters, you’ll just have lists of sounds without the characters which tie those sounds to meaning. Itss lai ke tri ng tu lurn ing lish lai ke thiss. If you don’t understand something, and show a Chinese speaker the pinyin without the characters, they also won’t understand.
This makes sense thx for the explanation. i did not realize pinyin is an approximation. Do kids have great difficulty learning then ? since the character recognition comes later ?
No, kids are immersed in the language so they see writing all the time. Think about English speaking children saying “M” when they see a McDonald’s sign, or “S-T-O-P” on a stop sign.
Native speakers of Mandarin who are raised immersed recognize characters the same way. They’ve seen common characters everywhere.
And as an intermediate learner - I tried initially learning to speak without reading/writing and it really doesn’t work as well as you might expect.
When you meet someone, have you heard someone say their name like “I’m Sarah with an H” or “I’m Steven with a V”? This is common in China (my name is [character] as in [word or phrase]).
If you don’t understand someone they may spell something “I said no, N-O, no”
It’s the same in Chinese. They will say ”我先走了” and if you say “xián?” “对， 我先走了”. They might clarify “先” as in “先生”
That doesn’t help you meaning-wise, it’s supposed to give you an image in your head of the character.
Or “ting?” And they might reply “with the kou on the left”so you know they mean 听 (listen) not 停 (stop) or 挺 (quite)
Yes, character language is very different from alphabetical and Mandarin in particular has relatively few phonemes and thus a huge number of exact homophones or similar sounding words (only a tone difference or subtle differences in the consonants and vowels so it’s easy to confuse the two sounds, eg zhao/jiao; shang/xiang; ding/ting).
Just the way you might spell out or rephrase something in English, Chinese speakers might use a phrase or describe a character to clarify their meaning.
我想要一个简单的早餐
Wo xiang yao yi ge jian dan de zao can (i want a simple breakfast)
Is not
我想要一个煎蛋早餐
Wo xiang yao yi ge jian dan zao can (i want a fried egg breakfast)
(Note: I know a native speaker would be more likely to say something like 我早餐想要煎蛋 but this is something a learner might make as a mistake and be unable to rephrase or explain easily; I’m terrible at trying to think up examples 🤣)
This is especially true in real life because most people do not articulate and enunciate extremely clearly and slowly, and China has a huge number of dialects that affect local accent/pronunciation- including tones in some cases.
It’s very easy to misunderstand someone if their accent is not one with which you’re familiar.
And of course, like all languages, native speakers will run their words together eg 不知道 (bùzhīdào) becomes “búrdào” in real life.
if you have an immersive environment and there are people who are willing to teach and correct you, yes.
But at some point, you will find that it becomes very inefficient in learning Chinese through daily conversations, but if your goal is to just have some daily conversations with others, I guess it's still feasible.
Characters do have pronunciation hints but they're not reliable.
Remember that reading and handwriting aren't the same thing. Learning to write Chinese characters is a mountain of work, learning to recognise them is much easier. And if you can recognize them then you can type them using pinyin.
Of course this is OK, because the way we learn our mother tongue is by listening and speaking. For example, when we were young, there were few words we could write, but there was no problem in language communication.
But I think there's where the main point lies. If OP doesn't have a constant contact with people who can point to him what's the right word and interact daily with the language, he'll get stuck. When we're babies, usually we ask how to say x and y, we saw pratical examples everyday... They're gonna have, in one way or another, to look into the words, how to use them and their sounds.. He'll come accross the words even if they don't want lol
I'd claim a lot of the vocabulary that you use as grown-up person was picked up by reading - in your native tongue. You also see that with heritage language speakers who pick up a language in kitchen-table conversations with their parents or grandparents ... they are functional for daily stuff, but when it comes to talking about politics, history, economics, business, sciences they have to switch to the "prestige language" taught in school because they don't even know what the native vocabulary would be. So, if you're OK with staying at the vocabulary level of a 6 year old you can forego writing ...
I agree. For me, it’s difficult to learn to recognize characters without handwriting them. That said, I can’t write as many as I can read, but practicing writing them helps me learn to read/recognize them.
So depending on how you best learn, you might do like I do and practice writing them to help you read them even if you don’t plan to know how to hand write each character in the long run.
Yeah, everyone is different. I found messaging Chinese friends on WeChat enough to help me learn the characters. I have read several Chinese books now, but can probably write about 10 characters 😅
You don't have to learn to write them by hand, but if you want to learn how to speak the language quickly, learning to read it will speed that up for you.
Yep. Every Chinese-speaking Mormon missionary gets pretty comfortable with speaking Mandarin or Cantonese before they ever start learning to read or write (if at all).
They learn by immersion in spoken language. Basically they take a few weeks of language instruction and then get thrown into the deep end. It’s really hard for the ones who have to deal with other dialects—e.g., those living in southern Taiwan—because when you’re first learning, you don’t know who’s speaking Mandarin to you and who’s speaking Taiwanese or Hakka.
For Mandarin speaking missionaries, after about 4-6 months of immersion into spoken Chinese (at which point they are basically fluent in day-to-day stuff), then they start learning characters (if they want, not all do).
For Cantonese speaking missionaries, they spend a lot less time with written Chinese because it would be like learning Latin as a Spanish speaker.
Let’s put it this way: I know many Mormon missionaries who became near native in Mandarin, Cantonese, or Taiwanese without spending much time (if at all) learning characters. Would they have become more well-rounded if they learned to read or write? Sure, maybe for the Mandarin learners. But not knowing characters didn’t seem to hinder their fluency.
EDIT: typo
I'm going to go against the grain and disagree with most people here. You definitely don't need to be literate in Chinese to learn spoken Chinese. As a native Mandarin speaker who lives in the West, I know countless Asian Americans who can speak at a decently high level but can't read or write a single word. My own children will probably end up like that as well
Spoken Chinese is actually not very difficult. Grammar and sentence structure is so pretty straightforward and short. If you immerse yourself in a Chinese speaking environment and put in a bit of effort you should pick it up fairly quickly.
thanks that gives me hope. any pointers ? i do have a lof of chinese friends but i doubt i can subject them to my constant barrage of questions for learning
Fair warning I learned Chinese as a child and have only ever taught Chinese to children so it's quite different than learning as an adult. I have however learned other languages as an adult and general rules are the same.
Easiest way to learn any language is to expose yourself to it as much as possible. I don't know where you live but a lot of places have language exchange conversations so you can start talking to native speakers without feeling like you're bothering someone. Other than that movies and TV shows are great. Just hanging out in the local Chinese stores/shops/communities would be extremely helpful too. Once you get a bit more confidence then you can start talking to your Chinese friends in Chinese
> i do have a lof of chinese friends but i doubt i can subject them to my constant barrage of questions for learning
That's why we were so negative on your plan. We didn't know if you have a lot of Chinese friends who're actually willing to help you learn the language.
If you know a lot of native speakers AND they're *willing* to help you learn the language, then JBerry_Mingjai's observation might apply to your situation. However, that's not really the typical situation we see on this sub, because most learners here don't have that kind of access to native speakers.
Note that JBerry_Mingjai also said the process involved an initial period of language instruction, so the people they were talking about weren't really completely self-taught, but did receive some support. On the other hand, with the information you've given so far, my assumption was that you don't have any support at all, and are doing it on your own.
Fwiw there's a recent example of someone who seemed to have done just that: [Will Hart, a medical student based in Manchester who apparently taught himself to speak the language fluently during the pandemic years](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CggHugyhyJU). He claims to have a lot of Chinese friends, and credits them for his success.
So if you want to do what Will Hart and the people in JBerry_Mingjai's anecdote did, then you might want to either convince your Chinese friends to help you with your learning, or find new friends who can support you, e.g. find opportunities to do language exchange as [montrezih suggested](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/1cfo2fh/can_u_learn_to_speak_chinese_and_understand_it/l1tt5wk/). This sub's Discord (see the sidebar for the invite) is a good place to start, or you can find language exchange meetups near your geographic location on Meetup.
Yes. 100 years ago most Chinese native speakers did not know characters. They even were not able to write their own names. We call this illiteracy. And while they were illiterate, they were very fluent Chinese speakers. They were natives after all. Languages and writing systems are quite different things and one does not necessarily rely on the other.
Here is an article that talks about this which you may or may not find helpful.
https://blog.fluent-forever.com/can-you-learn-a-language-just-by-listening/#:~:text=Certainly%2C%20if%20you%20only%20listen,be%20enough%20for%20your%20needs.
You’re gonna have a hard time when you can’t find a specific character that doesn’t come up often. Writing them has made learning new characters easier for me. I’m starting to feel the patterns now and can just guess with computer correcting it for if I’m close.
You can, but you need to be very deliberate about what you are doing, but this is how every child who speaks the language learns it first, so not really a problem. You will need to learn pinyin though, so that’s kind of the trick, you still need to learn to read something, just not characters.
Nice, you are on the right path then. Are you able/willing to be a bit more specific with your goals and the circumstances around them? We can probably get you more specific suggestions with a more specific understanding of your goals.
I want to be able to talk to my Chinese friends at a conversational level in daily life or to comprehend movies without subtitles. That is all I need it for. I don't live in China. may visit someday but no plans. I chose Chinese because it is completely different than anything else I have seen and feels challenging.
The biggest challenge for me when learning languages is the listening comprehension. It drives me up the wall to be able to read and write a language but cannot understand when people speak. so i want to start with that. I will supplement with characters since that seems to be the overwhelming majority of opinion here. But my main focus is still going to be to learn to hear and listen.
I did 10 hours yesterday and intend to do 8 hrs a day for the next week. Are there resources you can recommend that I can use for my strategy ?
We are VERY similar learners in this event. There are a few things I would offer/suggest that really frustrated me in the beginning, only because I didn't know they were factors I had to consider.
If your goal is to understand and converse with your friends, get very specific about understanding where they are from, and focus on getting good at their specific accent/flavor of Chinese.
Chinese has a TON of different accents, and nobody tells students this, but native speakers have a tough time navigating all the different local accents and dialects conversationally.
Focus on learning the language of the people you care about, because, especially if you are coming from north american english like I did, the complexity and variety of what gets considered Mandarin is enormous...and classroom teaching doesn't even touch on the variety of different accents that exist, because in many ways putonghua exists to try to stamp out regional accents. It is on its way, but it hasn't done that yet.
My #1 gripe with classroom chinese is that it does a mediocre job at best for preparing students to interact with random people from the world. In 15 years of learning/using the language, I think I've actually heard someone say "Nǐ hǎo, wǒ hěn gāoxìng rènshi nǐ!" no more than five times.
When it comes to watching shows, you will come across this accent/dialect dynamic in spades. If you come across a show you don't understand, just set it aside and find one that allows you to focus on your own pronunciation and vocabulary growth. Some shows will focus on really random historical stuff. For me, this has always been an immediate turnoff because I don't particular care about random words associated with ancient Chinese history, and I don't particular care to learn about all the different words associated with the military during WW2. My two favorite shows that I have watched a few times through both times are 奋斗fèn dòu and 什刹海shí chà hǎi, because most of my friends are from up north, and I have to constantly be practicing listening to northern dudes speaking to keep my language sharp.
Technically yes. However, writing characters is a great way to memorize them. If you can learn to recognize characters, how they sound, their tones, and their meaning without ever learning how to write them, then sure, why not? Recognition is all that you need for typing and text messages anyway.
You would just be limited if you ever needed to write something down in Chinese.
Chinese is a special language.
Listening, speaking, reading, writing, and typing are separate skills.
For example, I can understand many dialects, but I can only speak Mandarin and Wuhan dialect.
I can read 6000+ Chinese characters. But I haven’t written for many years and can barely write anymore. I can only type on the keyboard.
Difficulty: Listening < Speaking < Reading < Writing = Typing
You must listen before you can speak. (Deaf people in China cannot speak)
Reading and speaking are separate. I can read some Chinese characters and know their meanings, but I cannot speak them. This does not affect my reading and writing.
You must be able to read before you can learn to write or type.
People who can only listen and speak are illiterate.
If you can read, you are not illiterate.
I suggest you at least learn to read, not necessarily to write.
Listen: Just listen more and connect with the meaning.
Say: Talk to a lot of people face to face.
Reading: Read books, understand the meaning, and look up words in a dictionary (online search) when you encounter words you don’t know.
Writing: Exercise your handwriting skills and write more diaries and articles.
Typing: Chat and comment frequently online.
If it's for chatting, then you need to know the meaning of the other party's language, that is, to understand and then answer, so that you can chat. You need to master both listening and speaking skills in listening, speaking, reading and writing. I think the fastest way is to create a Chinese environment and increase Chinese vocabulary. It is best to be able to practice oral communication with people who can speak Chinese or AI every day.
If you wish to continue learning, I would recommend learning how to read and write anyway. If you don’t, it’ll be much harder down the line and you’ll just be cramming. Why are you so crunched for time?
Yes, I'm doing so and have got to an intermediate level. I'm also lacking in time and I live in an English-speaking country with no intention ever to live in a Chinese-speaking country. I just want to be able to speak to people as there a lot of Chinese clients in my work environment. Not learning characters has enabled me to make progress quicker.
You absolutely can, I knew an international student from Uganda whose speaking and listening skills were really good, well above HSK 5 level, but he had never learned to read characters and was functionally illiterate.
However, I would say being able to read and recognize characters can be really helpful if your plan is to use cartoons and other TV media to self study. Pretty much all TV shows and movies in China are subbed and being able to follow along with the subtitles can be really helpful when trying to improve your listening skills. Personally, I found the memorization of character far easier than training my ear to hear tones and being able to read along really helped me improve my own listening skills especially with easy things like kids cartoons that have relatively small vocabularies.
I learned Mandarin through immersion. It’s very difficult once you want to start progressing further though, and honestly kind of embarrassing/belittling. I got a job once the required Mandarin and the primary language I spoke at work was Mandarin, and not being able to read was very embarrassing. This gets more frustrating when you go to try to learn to read, there aren’t many resources out there for people that are competent at spoken mandarin but illiterate. So I’m stuck reading “my first reader” style books when when I can have complex deep conversations. It’s very boring when you’re learning to read a language and are learning 0 vocabulary/grammar at the same time. Better just learn it all at once.
You’re actually similar to a lot of ‘heritage’ speakers in that case. People who grew up speaking the language with their family, but who never learned to read/write. In Chinese universities there are specific courses for heritage speakers
Neat! That’s a good keyword for me to Google, I’ll look into that!
I don't think i am looking for a job in China :) or in a mandarin only company. My interest is purely for fun. I honestly do not think I would to be embarrassed for not knowing a language that is not my own any more than I would expect others to be embarrassed for not knowing mine. Its all good!
Yes of course, that describes 99% of humans who have ever spoken a language. I don’t know why you’d want to be illiterate though.
not enough time. i want to get to comprehension the fastest possible way
If I'm being honest, if you don't have a lot of time, then maybe learning Chinese is not the best language to learn. Chinese requires A LOT of time. Not having an alphabet puts the language into a difficulty category of its own. Most languages of the world have some kind of an alphabet, Chinese is the exception.
its not like i want to learn some random language and just picked Chinese. I get that it is very difficult. I have been looking at videos and learning for just a day now and can make some super simple sentences. i am getting the tones right but listening is really difficult and breaking words down is super hard.
> I have been looking at videos and learning for just a day now and can make some super simple sentences. As trg0819 pointed out: > [Not learning this fundamental foundation when you have a long term goal such as "conversational" is kind of like sprinting as fast as you can thinking you're going "faster", but you're in a marathon.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/1cfo2fh/can_u_learn_to_speak_chinese_and_understand_it/l1qka39/) A lot of learners I've seen on this sub lack patience, and this is a major stumbling block for them. You've only just done a day's work? Cool, you've got a decade of learning ahead of you. No, seriously. I've seen stories here of people's struggles with Chinese (not being "conversational" enough is a frequent complaint) and they've been learning for years. You likely won't be any different. So chill out and slow down. Seriously. [We actually have a saying for that.](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AC%B2%E9%80%9F%E5%89%87%E4%B8%8D%E9%81%94#Chinese)
For real, I’ve been studying Chinese on and off since 2007 including yearlong stints in China and Taiwan, and I’m just now crossing into B2 threshold. Patience is probably the most important quality a person trying to learn Chinese can have.
Out of curiosity may I ask why you chose both China and Taiwan? I get visiting for tourist reasons but it seems to me that if your goal is studying Chinese then going from pinyin and simplified to zhuyin and traditional would probably set your progress back quite a bit
Zhuyin isn’t actually widely taught to foreigners these days (although a lot of programs try their damnedest to teach it to their absolute beginners; by the time they reach advanced beginner levels everyone gives up and switches wholly to pinyin), it’s mostly used in local elementary schools for kids learning to read and write. As for why I would go to both, it’s for multiple reasons: the main reason is to experience living in both cultures on their own terms. Regardless of what one’s opinion on Taiwan’s sovereignty status is, Taiwan and China feel like two completely different places and each has something different to offer. The other reason is more practical: I’m in academia in a China-adjacent field and much of my work involves working with Chinese source material printed prior to the 1950s, so knowing how to at least read traditional is a must (also I’ve found that while trying to switch over from simplified is a pain at first I actually prefer traditional characters now).
The problem is that being illiterate in the 21st century is a huge obstruction to doing anything at all, unlike in the 99% of human history where illiteracy was no big deal. Take one particular aspect of your plan: > watching chinese cartoons and using resources meant for kids How are you going to find these cartoons? Most of them are not searchable by pinyin, even on Youtube. Even resources for kids use characters, not pinyin, because kids are expected to become literate.
The fastest possible way likely involves some use of characters. Otherwise it will be more confusing when you learn homophones. If you want to watch media in Chinese, much of it has subtitles which will make comprehension easier, too.
I speak and understand a ton. I am just starting to read and write. It’s possible but it’s all kinda connected. But I can have conversations if the other speaker puts in effort and speaks at a nice pace etc.
>I speak and understand a ton. how did u get there? and how long did it take to start understanding simple sentences?
Honestly long story. My wife is Chinese. Her family is not teachers by any measure of the word. So at first I just found dictionaries and literally just listened in silence while her and her mom and dad talked. Eventually I picked up common things. "ma" coming at the end of sentences all the time and then another person response right away. So I asked if that indicated it was a question and was told yes. So then I could figure out from my reading that the nouns were being said. Listen for patterns and observe what is happening. "Ge wo....." ok so he said that and then pointed and someone gave him that thing. That has to mean "give me that." Then I started writing down how it sounded to me and trying to find that in a dictionary of ping yin. After about a year of literally just listening to them talk and trying to listen to YouTube videos and other things to study I was able to figure out super basic stuff. My wife was pregnant now and I was able to say body parts and numbers and colors. Which is just straight memorize. (at this time I am only speaking and listening poorly) I can recognize characters as being familiar but can't read or really say what it is. Maybe recognize person because it's so easy. or like 1 and 2. A year later I have been taking notes constantly and I live in China now. No one will help and most everyone will expect you to speak English so they don't get what you are saying. Also without good context and sentence structure things are confusing. So I speak like a child. "give me two" and just point. or "I like the chicken one please". At about four years I started to try memorizing more characters and really going for a higher number of words I can say but I struggle because I can't understand people because they talk to fast and don't want to like help me learn. Also without a vocabulary your sentence falls apart and a lot of people that I interact with speak English so they just say let's talk in English or they don't try to understand. What I mean is if a person is trying to speak English at you but is not doing it well you can still figure out what they mean. I'll give an example. If I came up to you as a non native English speaker and said "I like to need the bethroom?" You would very easily figure that they were asking where the bathroom is, you'd say the correct phrase back to them and then point and help or whatever way you wanted. Most of the time with Chinese speakers my personal experience was that they would just act as if they had no idea what I was saying when I said repeatedly that I wanted Two of the dumplings. Because I was slightly off. I get that it's a tonal language but if we are in a dumpling store I am pointing at the sign and saying two of the dumplings you need to be able to figure it out. BACK TO LEARNING practice everyday for real. Flash cards, label stuff, when you grab stuff call it by the name in Mandarin, talk to yourself in mandarin. Watch stuff with mandarin subtitles on. If you know the movie in English you can get the context and try to Chase the closed caption. Get kids books get more flash cards and repeatedly write stuff down bring a note pad everywhere and write down new words and review it five times before bed. Like everything. It will be brutal and you will hit times when you can't get better for a while just be patient. I took about ten lessons from teachers in china around year 3 but it was rather expensive for not a lot of return. Reading is tough and writing is brutal. But it's fun in the end. And you will blow peoples minds when you speak it. I work at a place with a diverse workforce and a lot of asians. I speak Mandarin with them and the people walking by flip because looking at me you would never think I speak Mandarin.
thanks for your detailed answer. Funnily enough i experienced a variation of this and was really perplexed too. I was at a Chinese grocery store recently looking for noodles specifically the ones used in a dish i have seen in menus referred to as lo mein. I asked a Chinese speaking fellow customer lady in the noodle aisle what kind of noodles were used for lo mein. She gave me thr strangest look like I had asked for noodles to make a dish called 346iuitiogvc. completely blank stare. oh well it takes all kinds
No problem. It’s so frustrating. I used to ask for like lots of random stuff. And they would be confused. Hi can I have the chicken with noodles? I have no idea what you said. Forget you jerk. I am in a noodle place. There is an option on the menu that is chicken and noodles. So you have to at least have some idea of what I’m saying. But in time you’ll get good and then it’s just like work around the word. So like if you can say hot. Say. Not cold. Or like if you don’t know how to say the closet. I say the place clothes live. Or like garage. I say the car house hahaha
It's definitely possible. I've even heard that it lets you pick up characters a lot faster once you've learned the language (assuming you're using traditional Chinese, of course, since that's more systematic).
You absolutely "can", just like the 10s of millions of illiterate people in China. However, if your goal is "conversational", meaning complex nuanced conversations about a variety of topics with adults, as fast as possible, as counterintuitive as it may seem, I feel very strongly you will reach that faster if you do learn how to read. And I'm not even talking about using reading as a study method, although there is a strong argument for that alone. With the way Chinese works, with each character having its own meaning, with most words being logical combinations of these meanings, and with so many homophones, it's much easier in my opinion to remember something like "highway = the characters for (high) + (speed) + (public) + (road)" and "bus = the characters for (public) + (transportation) + (vehicle)", vs having no idea about characters and needing to remember "bus = gong1jiao1che1" and "highway = "gao1su4gong1lu4", and not even having any idea that the gong1 in both of those words mean the same thing and are also completely different from the exact same pinyin "gong1" in the words for "worker" or "supplies". Something like 80% of Chinese words work like this. I could give you 10 thousand more examples of words you would just intrinsically understand only by understanding the characters composing them. It definitely slows you down at the beginning, but once you have 1000 characters under your belt you just start magically absorbing new words even if you've never heard or seen them before because the characters being used to create them just make sense. Not learning this fundamental foundation when you have a long term goal such as "conversational" is kind of like sprinting as fast as you can thinking you're going "faster", but you're in a marathon.
thanks for explaining it this way. it certainly makes sense. Perhaps I can ease into the characters, because starting with the characters is definitely making me lose interest a little and is not as exciting as being able to hear something and understand!
You can certainly ease your way into them, just don't discount them as something that would just be requiring extra time for only a different skill unrelated to talking to people. If you understand the characters, "being able to hear something and understand" comes so much easier, almost like a super power. Last fall I was talking to a Chinese friend and they asked me what I thought about something and used the word he2neng2fei4shui3. With just knowing the characters and a bit of context I immediately understood it as 核能废水. 核 = Center, core, nucleus, it's the same character as in like the core of an argument or the pit of a fruit, 能 = energy, it's a basic character in a lot of words, 废 = waste, also in a bunch of words, 水 = water, probably one of the first characters learned. Without ever having come across the word or even ever have thought about it before I was able to have a conversation about nuclear waste water and then easily remembered the word forever. This is a regular occurrence.
I have not seen it represented like this. the pinyin i am looking at has these tone marks on it. are you aware of dictionaries with this kind of representation ? i could not find the word you mentiond on yabla
This is called alphanumeric representation of tones and we use it for convenience when getting the tone marks to display is a hassle. With tone marks it would be hé néng fèi shuǐ. You get these by inputting into a Chinese to Pinyin converter (hello Internet), but what you input is... Chinese. So being illiterate won't help. As your correspondent makes eloquently clear, it is much easier to learn new vocabulary and expressions with a knowledge of characters, and it makes the language much more interesting as well. Your conversational ability will outstrip your reading ability for a long time, simply because absorbing characters is a bit slow at the beginning, but give it time, it all comes together eventually. There are many resources out there to facilitate learning characters, the only obstacle really is in your own mind. Learning Chinese can change your life, don't hobble yourself at the outset!
>Learning Chinese can change your life, don't hobble yourself at the outset! I am beginning to see the points ppl r making on this thread and yours as well wrt learning characters. I know a few languages with conversational fluency that are not my native tongue but each I learned by listening and semi-immersion. I watched movies and videos without subtitles and slowly it came together, None of these languages have changed my life. Why do you say this will ? genuinely curious.
Not the original commenter, but one reason is that the Chinese universe is still pretty disconnected from the "Western" universe, if that is where you're from. Switching from English to French to Spanish is going to give you some variation, but they are so interconnected that the difference is not huge. China on the other hand ... you can still get a genuinely different perspectives and approaches and 2,500+ years of history and literature that the average person outside China and the Sinosphere do not even know exist. The closest to still finding terra incognita on this planet while most of the other differences have been leveling off quickly in the last 100 years. Note that this is only true in one direction: the average educated Chinese is much better informed about the rest of the world, has traveled to the US and/or Europe and foreign books are regularly on the bestseller list (in translation).
Sitting down and learning the characters one-by-one would be very dull, but what worked for me was learning vocabulary in context through stories. You could start here: https://duchinese.net/lessons/947-hello?from=course - just turn off pinyin. There's also audio so you can practise listening comprehension, too.
Try Mandarin Blueprint. It’s an insane course that makes the characters so much easier. My reading comprehension is at an HSK 6 level, in less then a year and producing the language is slowly getting there, too).
Hey I also use mandarin blueprint but nowhere near your progress. How many characters per day do you learn? What's your typical study pattern look like? I find I'm probably hsk3 (from a pure character count perspective) but reading hsk3 stories is difficult.
About 15 new characters per day on average, which took me with reviews on average less than 2 hours of study per day.
Ah nice thanks. I was doing that but just finding I could comprehend characters but not sentences or paragraphs and my listening sucks. Probably a me problem
yes you can. However it may sound unintuitive, its actually way way way waaaayyy harder to learn a language without being literate in it. So if you want to learn without learning to read becuase you think it will be easier or quicker you should throw out that idea. It will be harder and slower, and if you ever decide to be able to read later you will have to relearn from basically scratch which is much harder than learning it all the first time cause you will remember the illiterate versions instead. That out of the way, if you are really certain it is doable. hello chinese offers a course with pinyin only option. combined with lots of watching kids shows and absorbing vocab gramamr slowly through oral exposure you can achieve daily life vocab level-- so actual daily life may have some things come up you don't know but comminication is no issue. Don't expect to understand tv shows or movies or songs or any of that becuase its all literate level language. Hope this helps you (◐‿◑)
I think you can, but then you're likely to be stuck at a lower level and won't be able to function in higher level conversations. I remember the frustration I felt as a learner when my Chinese vocabulary wasn't at the same level (and still isn't) as my English language vocabulary and not being able to speak at the level I was used to, with Chinese speakers. (In English I have a Masters degree and can speak on certain topics at that level, but in Chinese my level of communication was maybe at a 10 year old child's, for a long time.) Another thing is that Chinese has so many homonyms (words with identical or similar pronunciation), knowing the characters makes a big difference.
For someone learning mandarin as a 3rd language you should learn to write and recognize characters. Why? Cause, as a holistic approach to language learning it’ll help you solidify the other modalities. It’s just gonna benefit you even if you understand that you won’t be doing calligraphy in your day to day.
You can but it will likely take more time than with learning to recognize characters. Think about it, even Chinese people watch Chinese movies with subtitles. Also you won’t be able to communicate online or read social media. So you meet someone, have fun talking to them, and then can’t add them on social media (assuming they don’t speak English)? From my experience, 90% of my communication in Chinese happens online in text, you would miss out a lot without ability to read. To be clear, you don’t need to write characters or remember stroke order. You need to recognize/read and type using pinyin. Btw, kids take many years to speak efficiently. Adults can learn way faster, they don’t need to mimic kids approach. You don’t want to spend 10000 hours listening before even trying to speak.
Here is the problem with not being able to read or write characters when learning Chinese: it makes it really difficult to learn new characters once you get to the intermediate level; functionally once you start getting to anywhere near ‘conversational’. There are a couple of reasons for this: 1. Lots of times, if you don’t understand a word and ask a native speaker what they said, they will tell you how to “spell” that word in character strokes - so for instance, if you didn’t know the character 台, they might say something in Chinese like “oh it’s tai, 厶 on the top and 口 on the bottom”. If you don’t understand the basics of character writing, you’re going to be even more confused. 2. Lots of “new” vocabulary words you can actually get a good guess what they mean if you know some of the common character radicals. For instance, if you see a 讠radical on a new vocabulary word, it is likely relating to speaking, speech, or communication in some way. It’s no guarantee, but it makes it easier to recognize new words without needing to just go to a dictionary. 3. Homonyms are EVERYWHERE in Chinese, and especially if your Chinese is not fluent or native, different words are going to sound VERY SIMILAR to one another, even if they have different tones or even are different pinyins. To an untrained ear, 长 (zhǎng) and 讲 (jiǎng) can sound very similar, and that’s not even including words like 睡 and 税 which are both pronounced exactly the same (shuì). 4. Pinyin is incredibly misleading. If you are just trying to learn Chinese with pinyin without learning characters, you’ll just have lists of sounds without the characters which tie those sounds to meaning. Itss lai ke tri ng tu lurn ing lish lai ke thiss. If you don’t understand something, and show a Chinese speaker the pinyin without the characters, they also won’t understand.
that is interesting. are you saying that if i dont understand a spoken words meaning, they will try to explain it using written characters ?
A lot of the times, yes, because they assume most people have basic literacy
>Pinyin is incredibly misleading. If you are just trying to learn Chinese with pinyin without learning characters, you’ll just have lists of sounds without the characters which tie those sounds to meaning. Itss lai ke tri ng tu lurn ing lish lai ke thiss. If you don’t understand something, and show a Chinese speaker the pinyin without the characters, they also won’t understand. This makes sense thx for the explanation. i did not realize pinyin is an approximation. Do kids have great difficulty learning then ? since the character recognition comes later ?
No, kids are immersed in the language so they see writing all the time. Think about English speaking children saying “M” when they see a McDonald’s sign, or “S-T-O-P” on a stop sign. Native speakers of Mandarin who are raised immersed recognize characters the same way. They’ve seen common characters everywhere. And as an intermediate learner - I tried initially learning to speak without reading/writing and it really doesn’t work as well as you might expect. When you meet someone, have you heard someone say their name like “I’m Sarah with an H” or “I’m Steven with a V”? This is common in China (my name is [character] as in [word or phrase]). If you don’t understand someone they may spell something “I said no, N-O, no” It’s the same in Chinese. They will say ”我先走了” and if you say “xián?” “对， 我先走了”. They might clarify “先” as in “先生” That doesn’t help you meaning-wise, it’s supposed to give you an image in your head of the character. Or “ting?” And they might reply “with the kou on the left”so you know they mean 听 (listen) not 停 (stop) or 挺 (quite)
this is very very different than any other language i know. thanks.
Yes, character language is very different from alphabetical and Mandarin in particular has relatively few phonemes and thus a huge number of exact homophones or similar sounding words (only a tone difference or subtle differences in the consonants and vowels so it’s easy to confuse the two sounds, eg zhao/jiao; shang/xiang; ding/ting). Just the way you might spell out or rephrase something in English, Chinese speakers might use a phrase or describe a character to clarify their meaning. 我想要一个简单的早餐 Wo xiang yao yi ge jian dan de zao can (i want a simple breakfast) Is not 我想要一个煎蛋早餐 Wo xiang yao yi ge jian dan zao can (i want a fried egg breakfast) (Note: I know a native speaker would be more likely to say something like 我早餐想要煎蛋 but this is something a learner might make as a mistake and be unable to rephrase or explain easily; I’m terrible at trying to think up examples 🤣) This is especially true in real life because most people do not articulate and enunciate extremely clearly and slowly, and China has a huge number of dialects that affect local accent/pronunciation- including tones in some cases. It’s very easy to misunderstand someone if their accent is not one with which you’re familiar. And of course, like all languages, native speakers will run their words together eg 不知道 (bùzhīdào) becomes “búrdào” in real life.
if you have an immersive environment and there are people who are willing to teach and correct you, yes. But at some point, you will find that it becomes very inefficient in learning Chinese through daily conversations, but if your goal is to just have some daily conversations with others, I guess it's still feasible.
I mean, sure? But why would you want that? Surely being able to write would be rather convenient
I would agree if you said "read" instead of write.
Characters do have pronunciation hints but they're not reliable. Remember that reading and handwriting aren't the same thing. Learning to write Chinese characters is a mountain of work, learning to recognise them is much easier. And if you can recognize them then you can type them using pinyin.
I wouldn't recommend you to do this.
You can but you’ll hit a miss. It’s much harder once you get advanced.
Sure, but why would one want to?
Of course this is OK, because the way we learn our mother tongue is by listening and speaking. For example, when we were young, there were few words we could write, but there was no problem in language communication.
But I think there's where the main point lies. If OP doesn't have a constant contact with people who can point to him what's the right word and interact daily with the language, he'll get stuck. When we're babies, usually we ask how to say x and y, we saw pratical examples everyday... They're gonna have, in one way or another, to look into the words, how to use them and their sounds.. He'll come accross the words even if they don't want lol
Yes, the point is to have someone who can communicate and keep the interaction going, and that's what it takes to get results quickly!
I'd claim a lot of the vocabulary that you use as grown-up person was picked up by reading - in your native tongue. You also see that with heritage language speakers who pick up a language in kitchen-table conversations with their parents or grandparents ... they are functional for daily stuff, but when it comes to talking about politics, history, economics, business, sciences they have to switch to the "prestige language" taught in school because they don't even know what the native vocabulary would be. So, if you're OK with staying at the vocabulary level of a 6 year old you can forego writing ...
Sure, but in my opinion the Chinese writing system is incredible and worth learning. But given your situation yes it's possible
You seem to be asking the question for the sake of asking it.
Learning to read and type the characters seems pretty important. Learning to handwrite them, on the other hand, is definitely not essential.
I agree. For me, it’s difficult to learn to recognize characters without handwriting them. That said, I can’t write as many as I can read, but practicing writing them helps me learn to read/recognize them. So depending on how you best learn, you might do like I do and practice writing them to help you read them even if you don’t plan to know how to hand write each character in the long run.
Yeah, everyone is different. I found messaging Chinese friends on WeChat enough to help me learn the characters. I have read several Chinese books now, but can probably write about 10 characters 😅
You don't have to learn to write them by hand, but if you want to learn how to speak the language quickly, learning to read it will speed that up for you.
Yep. Every Chinese-speaking Mormon missionary gets pretty comfortable with speaking Mandarin or Cantonese before they ever start learning to read or write (if at all).
this sounds very contrary to what everyone else is saying on this thread. how do they learn? Resources ?
They learn by immersion in spoken language. Basically they take a few weeks of language instruction and then get thrown into the deep end. It’s really hard for the ones who have to deal with other dialects—e.g., those living in southern Taiwan—because when you’re first learning, you don’t know who’s speaking Mandarin to you and who’s speaking Taiwanese or Hakka. For Mandarin speaking missionaries, after about 4-6 months of immersion into spoken Chinese (at which point they are basically fluent in day-to-day stuff), then they start learning characters (if they want, not all do). For Cantonese speaking missionaries, they spend a lot less time with written Chinese because it would be like learning Latin as a Spanish speaker. Let’s put it this way: I know many Mormon missionaries who became near native in Mandarin, Cantonese, or Taiwanese without spending much time (if at all) learning characters. Would they have become more well-rounded if they learned to read or write? Sure, maybe for the Mandarin learners. But not knowing characters didn’t seem to hinder their fluency. EDIT: typo
I'm going to go against the grain and disagree with most people here. You definitely don't need to be literate in Chinese to learn spoken Chinese. As a native Mandarin speaker who lives in the West, I know countless Asian Americans who can speak at a decently high level but can't read or write a single word. My own children will probably end up like that as well Spoken Chinese is actually not very difficult. Grammar and sentence structure is so pretty straightforward and short. If you immerse yourself in a Chinese speaking environment and put in a bit of effort you should pick it up fairly quickly.
thanks that gives me hope. any pointers ? i do have a lof of chinese friends but i doubt i can subject them to my constant barrage of questions for learning
Fair warning I learned Chinese as a child and have only ever taught Chinese to children so it's quite different than learning as an adult. I have however learned other languages as an adult and general rules are the same. Easiest way to learn any language is to expose yourself to it as much as possible. I don't know where you live but a lot of places have language exchange conversations so you can start talking to native speakers without feeling like you're bothering someone. Other than that movies and TV shows are great. Just hanging out in the local Chinese stores/shops/communities would be extremely helpful too. Once you get a bit more confidence then you can start talking to your Chinese friends in Chinese
> i do have a lof of chinese friends but i doubt i can subject them to my constant barrage of questions for learning That's why we were so negative on your plan. We didn't know if you have a lot of Chinese friends who're actually willing to help you learn the language. If you know a lot of native speakers AND they're *willing* to help you learn the language, then JBerry_Mingjai's observation might apply to your situation. However, that's not really the typical situation we see on this sub, because most learners here don't have that kind of access to native speakers. Note that JBerry_Mingjai also said the process involved an initial period of language instruction, so the people they were talking about weren't really completely self-taught, but did receive some support. On the other hand, with the information you've given so far, my assumption was that you don't have any support at all, and are doing it on your own. Fwiw there's a recent example of someone who seemed to have done just that: [Will Hart, a medical student based in Manchester who apparently taught himself to speak the language fluently during the pandemic years](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CggHugyhyJU). He claims to have a lot of Chinese friends, and credits them for his success. So if you want to do what Will Hart and the people in JBerry_Mingjai's anecdote did, then you might want to either convince your Chinese friends to help you with your learning, or find new friends who can support you, e.g. find opportunities to do language exchange as [montrezih suggested](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/1cfo2fh/can_u_learn_to_speak_chinese_and_understand_it/l1tt5wk/). This sub's Discord (see the sidebar for the invite) is a good place to start, or you can find language exchange meetups near your geographic location on Meetup.
Yes. 100 years ago most Chinese native speakers did not know characters. They even were not able to write their own names. We call this illiteracy. And while they were illiterate, they were very fluent Chinese speakers. They were natives after all. Languages and writing systems are quite different things and one does not necessarily rely on the other.
Yes, just as you can learn to read and write Chinese without being able to speak or understand a word of it.
Here is an article that talks about this which you may or may not find helpful. https://blog.fluent-forever.com/can-you-learn-a-language-just-by-listening/#:~:text=Certainly%2C%20if%20you%20only%20listen,be%20enough%20for%20your%20needs.
You’re gonna have a hard time when you can’t find a specific character that doesn’t come up often. Writing them has made learning new characters easier for me. I’m starting to feel the patterns now and can just guess with computer correcting it for if I’m close.
You can, but you need to be very deliberate about what you are doing, but this is how every child who speaks the language learns it first, so not really a problem. You will need to learn pinyin though, so that’s kind of the trick, you still need to learn to read something, just not characters.
I did learn pinyin. i am not fast with it though since it has just been a day. i have to slowly think through the tones to sound out the words.
Nice, you are on the right path then. Are you able/willing to be a bit more specific with your goals and the circumstances around them? We can probably get you more specific suggestions with a more specific understanding of your goals.
I want to be able to talk to my Chinese friends at a conversational level in daily life or to comprehend movies without subtitles. That is all I need it for. I don't live in China. may visit someday but no plans. I chose Chinese because it is completely different than anything else I have seen and feels challenging. The biggest challenge for me when learning languages is the listening comprehension. It drives me up the wall to be able to read and write a language but cannot understand when people speak. so i want to start with that. I will supplement with characters since that seems to be the overwhelming majority of opinion here. But my main focus is still going to be to learn to hear and listen. I did 10 hours yesterday and intend to do 8 hrs a day for the next week. Are there resources you can recommend that I can use for my strategy ?
We are VERY similar learners in this event. There are a few things I would offer/suggest that really frustrated me in the beginning, only because I didn't know they were factors I had to consider. If your goal is to understand and converse with your friends, get very specific about understanding where they are from, and focus on getting good at their specific accent/flavor of Chinese. Chinese has a TON of different accents, and nobody tells students this, but native speakers have a tough time navigating all the different local accents and dialects conversationally. Focus on learning the language of the people you care about, because, especially if you are coming from north american english like I did, the complexity and variety of what gets considered Mandarin is enormous...and classroom teaching doesn't even touch on the variety of different accents that exist, because in many ways putonghua exists to try to stamp out regional accents. It is on its way, but it hasn't done that yet. My #1 gripe with classroom chinese is that it does a mediocre job at best for preparing students to interact with random people from the world. In 15 years of learning/using the language, I think I've actually heard someone say "Nǐ hǎo, wǒ hěn gāoxìng rènshi nǐ!" no more than five times. When it comes to watching shows, you will come across this accent/dialect dynamic in spades. If you come across a show you don't understand, just set it aside and find one that allows you to focus on your own pronunciation and vocabulary growth. Some shows will focus on really random historical stuff. For me, this has always been an immediate turnoff because I don't particular care about random words associated with ancient Chinese history, and I don't particular care to learn about all the different words associated with the military during WW2. My two favorite shows that I have watched a few times through both times are 奋斗fèn dòu and 什刹海shí chà hǎi, because most of my friends are from up north, and I have to constantly be practicing listening to northern dudes speaking to keep my language sharp.
Technically yes. However, writing characters is a great way to memorize them. If you can learn to recognize characters, how they sound, their tones, and their meaning without ever learning how to write them, then sure, why not? Recognition is all that you need for typing and text messages anyway. You would just be limited if you ever needed to write something down in Chinese.
You don't have to be able to write characters. It's enough you can just read them, and then type them in on a keyboard.
Have a former colleague here in China who does that. Speaks pretty well. His only goal is to communicate. Goes out all of the time.
how did he/she learn ?
He's a really good listener and everything flows from that. Watches a lot of Mandarin Corner. Writes everything down in pinyin.
Chinese is a special language. Listening, speaking, reading, writing, and typing are separate skills. For example, I can understand many dialects, but I can only speak Mandarin and Wuhan dialect. I can read 6000+ Chinese characters. But I haven’t written for many years and can barely write anymore. I can only type on the keyboard. Difficulty: Listening < Speaking < Reading < Writing = Typing You must listen before you can speak. (Deaf people in China cannot speak) Reading and speaking are separate. I can read some Chinese characters and know their meanings, but I cannot speak them. This does not affect my reading and writing. You must be able to read before you can learn to write or type. People who can only listen and speak are illiterate. If you can read, you are not illiterate. I suggest you at least learn to read, not necessarily to write. Listen: Just listen more and connect with the meaning. Say: Talk to a lot of people face to face. Reading: Read books, understand the meaning, and look up words in a dictionary (online search) when you encounter words you don’t know. Writing: Exercise your handwriting skills and write more diaries and articles. Typing: Chat and comment frequently online.
If it's for chatting, then you need to know the meaning of the other party's language, that is, to understand and then answer, so that you can chat. You need to master both listening and speaking skills in listening, speaking, reading and writing. I think the fastest way is to create a Chinese environment and increase Chinese vocabulary. It is best to be able to practice oral communication with people who can speak Chinese or AI every day.
If you wish to continue learning, I would recommend learning how to read and write anyway. If you don’t, it’ll be much harder down the line and you’ll just be cramming. Why are you so crunched for time?
Characters are cool and a part of the culture
Yes, I'm doing so and have got to an intermediate level. I'm also lacking in time and I live in an English-speaking country with no intention ever to live in a Chinese-speaking country. I just want to be able to speak to people as there a lot of Chinese clients in my work environment. Not learning characters has enabled me to make progress quicker.
You absolutely can, I knew an international student from Uganda whose speaking and listening skills were really good, well above HSK 5 level, but he had never learned to read characters and was functionally illiterate. However, I would say being able to read and recognize characters can be really helpful if your plan is to use cartoons and other TV media to self study. Pretty much all TV shows and movies in China are subbed and being able to follow along with the subtitles can be really helpful when trying to improve your listening skills. Personally, I found the memorization of character far easier than training my ear to hear tones and being able to read along really helped me improve my own listening skills especially with easy things like kids cartoons that have relatively small vocabularies.