I have never used an extremely structured approach, considering that I’ve studied and learnt Chinese under so many different conditions, but I would say that I normally learnt most individual characters when learning words, but as this experiment showed, there were a fair number of individual characters I did not know, or just kind of knew. Nowadays, I would recommend students to always start from the basic unit of communication (words) and then learn individual characters and components whenever it helps to do so. Not compulsively learn every single individual character and every component of every character, but at least look them up and see what makes sense and use that.

Do you think you benefited from this approach or would you have rather learned the individual characters along with the word when you first learned it?

I keep finding myself wanting to understand the individual characters of new words that I learn because it gives me a more “grounded” understanding but I’m not sure if that’s actually a viable approach because it does slow down acquisition of new vocabulary down quite a bit, at least in the short-term.

Would be very interested in a citation for that!

“I think it’s clear that when compared to Western language teaching, East Asian countries tend to favour memorisation over actual communicative ability.”

I think in the case of language learning there is an advantage to classroom teachers focusing on areas they can make the most difference. For a Chinese English teacher with a class of 30 kids it’s really hard to build speaking and communication skills effectively, but it is much easier to teach reading, writing, vocab, grammar, and perhaps listening. These are useful skills and maybe it’s better to focus on them even to the exclusion of spoken communication. It’s a lot easier for them to build off those skills later on and develop full communicative competence, particularly if they have a large prelearned vocab to leverage off, but even if they don’t being able to read and write is still useful.

This is probably also why 外教 usually end of teaching ‘oral English’!

I love the idea of progressively going one word per page.

I have enjoyed alphabetical work, however. For people who employ Memory Palaces, it can work very well.

But with what you’re suggesting, mnemonists could use each page as a Memory Palace and perhaps encode 3 words per page.

Chinese isn’t that bad, though. For instance, the loanwords and Confucian culture mean that translations from Japanese and Korean have higher fidelity than to English. Likewise, Chinese is purportedly higher in text-based reading speed (content per hour) than any other language, so if you want to make Chinese a primary language it has its benefits.

The numbers I’ve seen for Chinese range to 22,000 words for a beginning undergrad. Japanese supposedly sees 45,000 words for an educated adult native speaker, and English is around 35,000 words.

Part of the fun of Chinese is realizing that there’s a time to stop, ironically. Since the estimated time for an English speaker is supposed to be around 4,000 hours to reach C1 proficiency, the average learner is likely to end up setting targets for use, i.e, business Chinese, restaurant Chinese, dating Chinese, etc. HSK 4 targets should be doable in only 1,000 hours and make someone passable at 口语 and low-level conversations.

Part of the deal is active vs passive vocabulary; i.e, once you get past 5000 the amount of effort put on retaining characters beyond recognition can begin to drop as these just become low frequency, and as you say, more important for proper nouns. 文言文 I’m told also ends up a lot in modern Chinese, putting more obscure characters alongside traditional characters into the fore.

One nice thing about Chinese characters is that they’re tough to learn over the first 1000-2000 or so, but once you move on, the characters are merely variants of each other with differing meanings and pronunciation. And the rare character that beats this pattern becomes notable and memorizable for that reason.

As far as vocabulary cramming goes, the most notable trait of this is front-loading, i.e, the effort is intensive at the beginning but makes things easier toward the end. The pure dictionary memorization approach basically means you’re stuck processing up to ten thousand words before you can begin the praxis / 实践 level. If you have a lot of time and/or are efficient at memorizing words, this can work. If you’re doing an hour a day, you’ll be lucky to get even 25 Chinese words memorized per day, implying a prep period of more than a year before you can actually learn the language. Stuff like English, on the other hand, is memorized faster so to get to the 10k mark, you would “only” need 3-4 months at a pace of 100 English words a day.

And of course, the prep method would require preparation on its own in attacking pronunciation and the ability to use a dictionary. You’d need two levels of dictionary work as you move from bilingual dictionaries to intra-lingual dictionaries. Huge amounts of front-loading. But I’m looking forward to doing 10k words of French in 2 weeks under self-employment conditions.

Regarding the number of characters, that roughly matches my experience as a learner. Characters beyond the most common 5000 start being really specific, often names of mountains, rivers, emperors and so on. There are also non-names, of course, but then usually they are part of one single word or expression that’s usually limited to written language. I think the cut-off for practical use is 5000 or thereabouts, unless you want to read text that aren’t in modern Chinese.

I agree that memorising dictionaries is good preparation for language learning (that’s what this article is about), but if someone only does the prep work and not the actual language learning, it isn’t very good. I think it’s clear that when compared to Western language teaching, East Asian countries tend to favour memorisation over actual communicative ability. Memorising a dictionary is only useful if you combine it with other activities, like you say.