The professor is even more right, a decade later. I left China in my late teens. Now I am pushing 半百。

I nearly forgot ALL of the strokes. The so-called muscle memory is all but entirely dissipated from 3+ decades of non-use. Apart from super simple characters (i.e., 天， 人，大 sorts of kindergarten stuff), and my name (actually I do have to “think” before I can write out the strokes of my last name), I can hardly write out any characters “free hand” anymore.

However, my ability to read Chinese (in terms of speed of comprehension) is as preserved today as the very day I left the country. It mainly has to do with the fact that I read online often.

When it comes to writing, I am saved by Pinyin, without which I would not be able to write anything at all.

My personal conclusion is that learning the character strokes is almost entirely unnecessary in the 21st Century, for anyone outside of China.

BTW, few, if anyone under the age of 60 in the land of PRC could possibly write out the strokes of that notorious 憂鬱的烏龜 free hand. Yet they recognize the traditional characters simply from context or with a bit of guessing.

I’m glad the power-that-be back in the 50s Romanized Chinese pronunciations. Surely it wasn’t their intention to make it compatible with typing on modern keyboards, which has been made all the easier from predictive texting.

Once Elon is done with his monkey, the day may be drawing closer when one can just “think in English”, and out comes Chinese or any other language, requiring nothing more than a couple of electrodes glued to the head.

O wait, he did say that with “AI”, we wouldn’t even have to “think” at all anymore.

I would like to share here a Chinese words separator tool. This tool allows Chinese language learner to easily read Chinese text from web. CWS puts pinyin or zhuyin/bopomofo underneath (or above) the hanzi. CWS’s sentence dictionary is particularly convenient when a large portion of words in the sentence/phrase are unfamiliar to the Chinese language learner, the definition of each word in phrase/sentence are all displayed at the same time

It also has offline reading functionality where the language learner can read Chinese text that are not from web by pasting the text in the textbox of CWS’s *Read sources other than web or offline*

To use Chinese words separator:

For computer users: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chinese-words-separator/gacfacdpfimbkgcnlegknnmcccjgcbnp

For Android users, download Kiwi Browser, then install the Chinese words separator Chrome extension from the link above

For iOS users: https://apps.apple.com/app/chinese-words-separator/id1598790017

Example uses of CWS in screenshots:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/npuqf6/chinese_words_separator/h09d1p7/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/oj7djv/chinese_words_separator_80_updates/

Regards

One app I recommend is Du Chinese which I’m sure you already know about. I’ve been using that for almost a year now and love it! The stories are interesting, funny, and relatable. The interface is so simple and clean so there’s no faffing about trying to navigate.

Loving the blog mate! I’m here in Taiwan too btw Traditional characters FTW!

“With this in mind, it is a good idea to choose reading material that is essentially a record of natural speech, such as movie and TV scripts, transcripts of actual interviews, talk shows, lectures, and even posts on social media platforms like Weibo and Weixin.”
This should be emphasized again and again. Especially in Chinese. I have never seen a language that is so divided in the areas of speaking and writing. Chinese written language is not what you can read aloud and learn how to speak, because expressions, sentence patterns and even tone combinations are far too apart from the language as spoken by 老百姓 in daily lives.

What is your opinion on subvocalization and its importance when learning language as an adult? Do we need pinyin for learning correct pronunciation or can we just learn character sound without pinyin, then repeat and remember when reading it?

Amazon provides several free chinese dictionaries: chinese-chinese, which is difficult for learners, and chinese-english, which includes little pinyin information; both are in simplified characters only.

To facilitate reading chinese texts for learners of Chinese of both simplified and traditional characters, I have recently published the LXM Chinese-English Instant-Lookup Dictionaries for Kindle (separate versions for simplified and traditional characters). The LXM dictionaries, which are based on the CC-CEDICT database and provide English definitions and pinyin for more than 114,000 headwords; each headword is shown in traditional and simplified characters. The LXM Dictionaries are “instant-lookup” dictionaries designed for use on the Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Voyager ebook readers. From within a chinese text, the reader highlights the desired characters, and the dictionary entry pops up–no having to figure out radicals or count strokes or leave the text being read to check a separate dictionary. Entries include links to example sentences on juuku.com. Highlighted entries can be saved for review or use in the Kindle Vocabulary Builder. Saved entries can in turn be imported into programs such as the Kindle Mate Kindle Clippings and Vocabulary Builder Manager (see http://kmate.me), which provides tools to export words to the file format used in the Anki flash-card system.

I am running a three-day promotion on Amazon beginning Thursday 2/16/17 through Saturday 2/18/17 during which both fully functional dictionaries are available for free. For further details see the LXM Simplified-Character Chinese-English Instant-Lookup Dictionary for Kindle and the LXM Traditional-Character Chinese-English Instant-Lookup Dictionary for Kindle on Amazon.

Enjoy!

David Givens

The attitude towards furigana (pronunciation characters) in Japanese teaching is similar: that it is a crutch that must be dispensed with as soon as possible. I have seen some few Japanese training materials that gave furigana for the first appearance of a kanji in a chapter, but expected the reader to get along without furigana for the kanji for the rest of the chapter. Of course the purpose is to enable the student to read without any furigana, since newspapers, periodicals, and books do not supply them.

My principle has been, and continues to be, not to read ANY material that does not supply FULL furigana. The two factors that make reading Chinese characters so darn hard for English speakers are: 1. no cognates and 2. weak phonetic mnemonics. There is no remedy for the first problem, but furigana completely solves the second problem.

In the past, my Japanese reading has been limited to the Bible and the collected works of Soseki. Now, however, technology has completely changed the situation. A wide variety of materials are being supplied in electronic format. The google project to enter books electronically on the Internet. Amazon supplying e-books for Kindle. All e-mail. Anything that can be electronically copied can be pasted to a site that supplies furigana. The Kindle and ipod will surely have apps to supply furigana, if they haven’t already.

Technology should revolutionize the teaching of Chinese characters. However, I suspect that most language teachers will be hostile these new resources. After all, technology will cheapen the value of the knowledge the teachers acquired by cramming all those flash cards. Teachers may allow furigana and pinyin a limited role in training materials. They will consider it cheating, however, if furigana and pinyin are used in language competency testing. These teachers are Neanderthals, and the sooner technology drives them from the face of the earth, the better for students of Chinese and Japanese.

This is one of the main advantages for me (who doesn’t have good eye-sight at all). I can just about read normal printed books, but that’s because my character recognition is quite good and I don’t need to see all the details to figure out which character it is. With electronic texts, I can just make the text bigger and read more comfortably. It also has the added benefit of making pages swish by faster, giving the impression of covering more text. 🙂

Another tip: I don’t know about other e-readers, but the Kindle includes a Chinese- English dictionary, also works with all versions of the Kindle App. The dictionary is downloaded automatically when you save a Chinese e-book into your device. You won’t know it’s there until you use it, but if you’re reading a text in Chinese you can click on the characters and get the meaning. It is fiddly but it works. It also allows to build vocabulary lists.