This is a very late reply to your question; I must have missed it when you posted it and only found it now when I was updating the article for other reasons. I’ll still answer in case other people are interested, though, or if you’re still interested five years later.

Typing and reading falls somewhere between focusing only on the spoken language and writing everything by hand. I still prefer to focus mostly on the spoken language early on for the reasons given in this article, but when characters are introduced, it should definitely be mostly in the way you describe. This is something I have written quite a lot about elsewhere, including in more recent articles such as this one: Chinese character learning for all students.

How much do you understand right now? I generally recommend that you spend a majority of your time with materials you can mostly make sense of unaided. You don’t mention how much Chinese you know already, so it’s hard to give more specific advice. You can safely ignore characters up to at least an intermediate level.

Thank you for sharing! I think the most important thing is to study according to one’s goals. If one wants to read and/or write, then focus on the written language; if one wants to listen/speak, then focus on the spoken language. If a balanced competence is desired, then mix both. This ought to be obvious, but far too often, courses and teachers impose a syllabus very heavy on reading and writing, even if students want to learn the spoken language too.

Yes, my primary goal is to master reading.

Thanks a lot for your answer.

If your main goal is to read, then you can certainly do that! I’m mostly talking about people who want to learn all aspects of the language here. Tones aren’t very important when it comes to characters, because they are rarely preserved in phonetic components anyway (in fact, Chinese hasn’t always been tonal either, so many characters were created when there were no tones).

You advised against this method (in another article) because it usually neglecte the phonetic components in most Chinese characters.

I’m learning characters by their phonetic components (using the Outlier dictionary).
So i guess there’s no reason why i shouldn’t learn Chinese by learning the written part first, right ??

Particularly since if i did so, it will make it easier for me to focus on the tones (when i start learning spoken Chinese later on),, because by then, i will be familiar with many of the syllables/toneless pinyin.

I’m only fascinated by the characters, so i hope this method works.

Thanks.

I’ve been learning for three and a half months, and from day one my teacher has been exposition us to characters. As we progress, she uses less and less pinyin, and sometimes only when introducing a new word or a new character, and I love her approach.

I do a massive amount of listening, reading, shadowing, and flashcards on my own, and I’m now able to read level 1 graded readers and understand a lot of what’s said in children’s tales and such. So far, I’ve put zero effort into handwriting, but I do type a lot on my computer and phone (doing internet searches, leaving comments on social media, writing sentences and words that I want to study later).

So, it confuses me a little that you don’t make a distinction between handwriting, or rather, that you don’t really mention typing as a form of writing, which is really a separate skill. To me, this approach of only using electronic devices to write almost from day one has proven effective, and I don’t feel like it’s making me compromise the other parts of my learning.

I’m a professional wishing to remotely communicate with coworkers in China, both via email and video conferencing (mostly email, though), so does it make sense where I’m coming from? What are your thoughts?

Love your articles, by the way!

Should the flashcard (Anki for example) be set in a way that for Speaking it expects me to pronounce the character and check my pronunciation? Is that even possible in Anki?