It seems obvious in hindsight then, that if our brain is a vast series of interconnected nodes, the best way to learn new things is to break them down into small components and find a way to relate them to things you already know, rather than just trying to repeat them over and over. You can learn something that way temporarily, but if there aren’t any other connections then it never gets used, and your brain will prune that information, leaving you with nothing but a bunch of wasted time.

Case in point, what led me here was an insight about Chinese culture and history that came about basically because I got curious about the “jade slips” commonly used in Chinese fantasy fiction as information storage. More commonly used in actual history were wooden slips, which were made of bamboo and are basically the ancient Chinese version of paper. Once I knew that, it became immediately apparent why these strips would pretty much always be thin and vertical (bamboo is plentiful, and therefore anybody with a knife could make wood slips, and from those create scrolls).

Since the strips were always thin and vertical, it’s then obvious why Chinese writing developed vertically instead of horizontally like western writing. It’s also then obvious why Chinese never developed into a phonetic language like the Latin languages and others did, because you needed to cram as much information into a 1 inch block as possible in order to keep your scrolls manageable.

You can put much more information in a single Chinese character than you can in a 3-4 letter phonetic word, which is about all you’d get into a space on a wooden slip, so phonetics won’t even have a chance against the symbolic characters until paper is widespread, and even then there doesn’t seem to be a huge advantage to switching from vertical to horizontal, so there’s not a huge pressure to switch to a phonetic language. Unless illiteracy becomes a huge problem in China some day, I don’t see the language ever switching to a phonetic system as the primary writing system.

All of that information basically came out of thin air, just because I knew a little bit about Chinese culture and learned a new thing about ancient Chinese information storage methods, and I’ll probably never forget it. If you look for such opportunities every time you try to learn something, your ability to learn will probably skyrocket.

I think it’s a terribly interesting topic, but I think it’s way too vague for a thesis. 🙂 What we’re talking about here is fairly easy for students to do if they have the determination and want to experiment a little bit. However, it’s even harder for teachers. Sure, I know how to learn Chinese fairly well, but making the students understand this is not easy. As usual, I think my task is to open doors, but I can only give people the necessary means to study, I can’t walk through the doors myself.

‘I’m going to argue that the traditional way of learning languages (or learning anything, for that matter) is deeply flawed.’

Yes, you have hit the nail on the head. Almost all learning is ‘oblique to adjacent’, that is, we do not learn what is given to us directly . . . often the subject is learned in an adjacent way, that is, some part of our faculty or mind picks things up, often tailoring things and webbing them in a way which the teacher may not necessarily want. This is why, perhaps, learning for examinations and the like has traditionally be perceived as ‘difficult’.

These are new times . . . and new ways are needed. Maybe a good subject for your senior thesis.

Hello! I have around 4000 unique characters, which means that most of the words I learn are combinations of old characters. I still learn new characters though, around 100 in the past 100 days. During the same time, I added around 1500 new words.

Regarding how to progress, I think you have a quite solid foundation with those two books. In essence, I see two things you can and should do: broaden that foundation and keep on advancing forward.

Broadening means that you should study material which is at the same level as the books you’ve already studied. Even though you have mastered Chinese to certain level, there are many things around that level which you probably haven’t seen.

Advancing forward means reading more difficult texts. Since you’re level is already quite good, I would suggest authentic material such as newspaper articles. You might also try some of the more advanced textbooks, including one focusing on newspapers called 新聞華語 (Media Chinese: A primer in Chinese journalism) by Chris Wen-Chao Li. It’s an excellent introduction to more formal language. There might be many other books like it, but that’s the one I used in 2009, also after finishing the two books you mentioned.

I would spend more time on broadening my knowledge than advancing forward, although both are important. Good luck!

May I ask how many different characters you have among those 17000 cards? Do you often learn new characters or are there only new combination of the old ones?

I’d also like to here if you have any recommendations of how I could continue my studies after finishing 實用視聽華語5 and 今日台灣.