In the interest of efficiency, I have begun learning Chinese characters so that I am able to read, though not write. That might sound strange, but Chinese and other logosyllabic languages are unique in that it is often much easier to recognise what you have learnt once you see it again, rather than produce it yourself. Think about a party you went to about a year ago. You meet someone briefly for the first time. What was their name? What did they do? What did they look like?
You can probably remember the latter the most clearly as pictures represent themselves in our minds much better than information held in words. But could you draw that person, their facial features, eye colour, hair length, smile etc accurately? Probably not, yet if you bumped into them one day in the supermarket, even if you didn’t really remember who they were, you would have a nagging suspicion that you’ve met this person before…
Chinese characters are similar to that in terms of difficulty of reproduction and recognition. With careful attention to detail, the latter is relatively easy. The former however, takes much more time, focus and dedication for not only do Chinese characters have a certain form but also a number of rules about how to draw each character, the order the brushstrokes must follow and from where they must begin. Failure to follow these rules is not often a disaster, but it does render the character odd-looking, similar to writing the English ‘P’ by looping the rounded area first and bringing it down to look like an inverted ‘9’. This is fine for understanding, but strictly goes against the rules of handwriting.
My aim in learning Chinese is not to be able to write characters, but to merely recognise them. To recognise characters allows you to type them on a computer or text message, using phonetic inputs in latin script. So, for example, the Chinese word ‘le’ can be typed into the computer and an option of ‘le’ sounding characters will appear, with the most commonly used first. Recognition of characters will allow you to find the correct ‘le’ that you need.
There are of course advantages and disadvantages to this method. The obvious advantage is that it is easier and less time-consuming. Typing is also the method favoured nowadays by young Chinese adults and they too actually hand write characters increasingly rarely (to the extent that some of them have told me that they have often forgotten how to write some of the characters!)
The main disadvantage is that it is obviously not a viable option if my phone dies or I have no access to email and I need to handwrite a message to someone in Chinese. This, I wouldn’t be able to do. Moreover, without practicing how to write Hanzi by hand, handwritten variations of the characters are not logged into my memory. These slight variations often present themselves when I’m reading a hurriedly hand-written message from my Chinese friends, and I can’t also recognise the character in its hand-written version where strokes clash into one another and aren’t as regimentally ordered as they are in digital.
Saying that however, I believe learning to recognise first is a solid way to begin learning Chinese characters, and one which has the ability to greatly boost confidence due to the quick progress that can be made compares to learning how to simultaneously write Hanzi, and thus opening yourself up so a slower learning slope.
Aya Khan 