Ah, yes, that’s true! I actually wrote that myself a while back for a different article and used it here for convenience. I tried simulating beginner handwriting by using my non-dominant hand and deliberately inserted some errors in the text, not all of which are related to handwriting! Well-spotted! 🙂

It wasn’t completely without value, but inappropriate over all.

The other use of textbooks at higher levels was story after story either centring around explanations of the origins of traditional idioms, or else long historical tales. The vocabulary here was often useless to modern living.

If a conversation outside of the classroom ever did stray into idiom/historical territory, it was a rare opportunity to impress, I guess.

Basically, how to learn characters simply wasn’t taught, beyond compiling flash cards and repetitive copying.

I had to learn the component system on my own, in a second, independent go at mastering Chinese.

Very grateful for Skritter.

Good point! I think the process of writing down what you hear in and of itself is not necessarily a problem, but I do agree that it is a problem in many classroom, precisely for the reason you mention. This can very easily be done on your own if you think you need the practice and there’s really no good reason to use up so much time in class to do to 听写. Ideally, time with a teacher should be spent on things that can’t be done without the teacher, or are much harder to do without the teacher. I think the reason 听写 is so widespread is that it’s used as a check to see if students are doing their homework or not, but I see little reason to focus so much on handwriting in favour of all other things that could be emphasised.

I think this depends on how it’s done and for what purpose, but I agree it seems odd in a HSK 5 class. Saying things together in chorus is actually quite good for practising pronunciation and prosody. If you’re interested, look up Olle Kjellin’s work on chorus repetition for prosody, mainly for teaching Swedish as a second language, but works well for any language.

Interesting observation! I think there are (at least) two things involved here.

First, it’s a discussion about function and form. Traditional teachers (maybe particularly in Chinese) tend to be very form oriented, caring more about if a stroke is wrong than if the sentence is legible and makes sense. A more progressive approach is of course to regard language as functional, and if a student is able to use language to achieve a certain communicative goal, that’s the only thing that matters. This approach has some problems if taken too far, though. It might be true that one isolated stroke mistake will note make a sentence illegible (it won’t, of course), but many small mistakes can add up and make something truly incomprehensible.

Thus, we can say that “one spelling mistake is not very significant”, but we can’t say “spelling is not important”. Similarly, we can say “a single tone error is not a problem” but not “tone are not important. It’s also the case that mistakes from various domains add up, making a students Chinese less and less easy to understand.

Now over to the second part. Provided that the teacher has a reasonable approach to minor mistakes and communicative goals in general, “find the mistake” can be a valid form of assessment, I think. It can be convenient sometimes, too, because checking handwriting can be very, very time-consuming for the teacher, so rather than ask you “do you know how to write X” I can ask you “can you find the mistake in this sentence”, where I have included an incorrect version of X.

This also applies to grammar, which is what you’re talking about. If the goal is to assess someone’s grasp of the language, being able to spot which sentences a majority of native speakers would deem wrong is fine, I think. What bothers me, and what is maybe what you’re describing too, is when the “incorrect” cases presented by the teacher are actually fine for most native speakers, but not according to some artificial, formal grammar. A bit like deducting points for starting sentences with conjunction in English. Some of the more advanced proficiency tests also do this.

Sorry, I don’t think I can recommend any textbooks. Those that I use don’t do a very good job here, some don’t explain anything and leave it up to the teacher, which is fine by me, but like you said, can be a problem if the teacher relies heavily on the book. I’m working on a character course for Skritter that will contain all the essential stuff, kind of a distilled version of what I would normally teach beginners. If you do find good textbooks, though, please leave a comment so I can check it out. 🙂

I’m not completely unfamiliar with the approach after reading some of your writing, but mostly through Diane Neubauer. I haven’t tried it myself, though, and it does seem to be something that needs to be tried to be truly understood. That being said, getting to know the method better would be interesting, not just for me, but for others who might have never heard about it. Would you be interested in writing a guest post about it? Feel free to contact me at editor@hackingchinese.com! Writing something here might be a good way to convince both me and reach more people at the same time. 🙂

‘Chinese characters made easy for everyone” is a good textbook! I have used it since the very beginning.
Still later, I looked for mobile and web apps to learn characters in my cell phone. I have found and tested many tools. However, there is one app that I am still using now. Hack Chinese has no advanced functionality, but it perfectly suits for learning and revising characters.