Hi Michael! Linkou feels very, very far away, both in time and space! 🙂 My experience is similar to yours, except I haven’t given up entirely on handwriting yet. I agree, though, that asking politely for help often works. I remember the first time I need to use 大寫 for numbers when transferring money (or whatever it was I did; can’t recall). So many strokes! I asked and got help. This was probably in 2088 or so.

Over the past 20 years, unless I was in a local school, I have rarely written in Chinese. Such that I no longer bother with writing practice. And on the infrequent occasions that I need to write, speaking the phrase 請幫我填寫 works wonders.

I really like how you described how learning Chinese makes your life more interesting! This is very close to what I myself think about language learning in general, including Chinese. Being able to make sense of something that used to seem like a jumble of strokes or strange sounds is a joy!

Many people who react to my article (or similar ideas), miss one of two things: either the one you mention about when to learn being a separate question, or that this is meant to be a discussion on a curricular level. It’s not about what an individual student can do or even should do, it’s about what we force, by law, all students to do (hence the title).

As you point out, when to learn characters is a different question. If the goal is communication, you may be right that listening and speaking should proceed at a faster pace than learning characters. Some textbooks follow that plan.

I enjoy learning Chinese because it makes my life more interesting. I can find meaning in sounds and squiggles that used to be meaningless to me. That is an amazing thing, and no translation app, even a perfect one, can replicate that experience. When the goal is to find meaning in the world, perhaps listening and reading can proceed at the same pace.

I agree that handwriting has benefits! However, I’m not sure if your analogy is accurate. I can definitely learn how to read Chinese characters aloud without knowing how to write them by hand. I also think that it’s possible to know a lot about components and the composition of characters without knowing how to write by hand. These are not the same thing. You can also spend hundreds of hours on handwriting without knowing much about components and composition too!

I think being able to write decently is a requirement for most teaching positions (if nothing else, it’s very practical to be able to write on a whiteboard), but 99.9% of students who study Chinese don’t do so to become teachers.

In summary, I agree that all the things you mention are useful, but I don’t believe handwriting is the only way to learn them!