Yvette wrote to me in response to my new blog on my wall and, rather than taking up all the space on her wall, I thought I’d move the discussion here. Here’s what Yvette originally wrote:
Hi, David. I read your new post. I think your approach to learning Mandarin is wonderful. I’m curious, in any case, about what you wrote regarding children learning language and how you want to mimic this type of language learning. Children do begin learning to read and write around the age of four or so: there are building blocks with letters, toddler cardboard books with pictures and words, crayons etc. My point is that children do utilize the written form and learn to read and write the words that become part of their vocabulary, their understanding, their language development. The notion that children learn to speak first without the aid of written and visual implements, if you will may be underestimated to some degree. Children reach fluency with the incorporation of oral, audile, visual, and through application. (Please note that I am referring to ‘literacy’ as well as fluency.)
And my response:
Hi Yvette, thank you again for your interesting and insightful comments. You’re right that children immediately start learning how to read and write when they enter school, but you must also take into consideration that by the time this happens, they’ve already listened to many thousands of hours of their native language being spoken and are already speaking to some extent. Of course reading and writing help them to learn new words and become literate, but they are not necessary for speaking fluency - just think of all the fluent but illiterate speakers of different world languages .
My point in learning the spoken language before learning the characters is that learning the characters requires memorization, where you have to learn and memorize the pronunciation along with the meaning. This ‘memorization’ of pronunciations without speaking the language reminded me of learning a language from a book or wordlists like in school, and I found myself resisting it when I started to do it at the beginning of my Chinese studies 3 months ago. Children don’t have to do this, as the word is already in their heads - they just have to associate it with a certain character. Consider this excerpt from page 2 of the introduction of Heisig’s ‘Remembering the Simplified Hanzi’ :
“The Chinese themselves are not faced with (the) problem (of learning a character’s meaning, pronunciation, and writing at the same time). As children, they are exposed first to the spoken language, learning how to associate sounds with meanings. When the time comes to learn how to read, they already have at their disposal a solid basis of words whose sounds and meaning are familiar to them; all that remains is to associate those words with written forms. Doing so opens them to printed texts, which, in turn, helps them assimilate new words and characters. Those of us who come to the language as adults can gain a similar advantage by tying each character to a particular unit of pronunciation and meaning, a ‘key word’ in English, that we already know.”
So you see, it IS possible to learn the meanings of the characters without learning their pronunciation - I simply have not started doing this yet because I prefer to spend my time listening to the spoken language intensively in an effort to reach a level where I can understand authentic material as quickly as possible, and I am getting there fast after only three months:)