You may have heard the interview with Dr Xie in the Saturday Show. It is his belief that the keyboard offers a powerful new way to simplify writing and improve character recognition in Mandarin. I agree that typing pin yin and choosing characters from a number of options is pure cognitive heaven. You will be able to hear more about this and other topics in an extended version of that interview very soon.
I have never learned to write Chinese and I rarely used the software for typing it. To be honest, I’ve always had to consider the cost-benefit of the task. (I’ve never had the luxury of studying Mandarin full-time.) It takes many, many hours to learn the Chinese script, and I don’t foresee many situations where I would actually need to write things in Chinese. That’s why I never really made the effort.
Given Dr Xie’s comments, however, I’ve decide to start using the software to write. Suddenly the cost-benefit equation looks different.
I’ll try to report on my findings as I go along. In the meantime, let’s hear your thoughts on writing. Perhaps we could start with a question: Why would anyone need to learn to write Mandarin?
Update:
Here’s the link to Dr Xie’s famous website.
Ken Carroll
pretzellogic on 
Andrew Cockerham on 
Dave on
{ 46 comments… read them below or add one }
I wonder the same myself. I’m studying Chinese at uni and hence have to learn the characters to pass the course. However the amount of hours this takes seems to be a waste, especially since I can write on the computer just using the pinyin and character recognition (much easier than learning how to reproduce the character).
Paul,
I also find it can be very motivating to use the software. Even learners at a very basic level could write stuff in Chinese in a fast and efficient quick way by using it. I think this adds to the attractiveness of learning Chinese – in a matter of weeks anyone could be writing it! But it can definitely help if youi are learning hand writing, too. It speeds up character recognition. It also allows you to produce a large amount of writing for practice and for correction.
Do you have to use hand-written documents or can you use typed characters? And btw, at which school are you?
Ken Carroll
TEXTING – Why would anyone want to handwrite English nowadays?
I think the same answers for/against would apply to Chinese. With the tools today, knowing pinyin and recognizing characters one doesn’t need to handwrite much. That said, I like being able to handwrite in both English and Chinese, even if it’s only use may be a “I love you 我爱你不得了” scribbled on a note. (theoretically speaking)
BTW, at both a U.S. university and Chinese university I’ve had ‘write a character’ 5x and 20x for homework. I thought this 90% a waste of time. If I SMS that same character a few times to my friends in a context rich meaningful communication, I’m much more likely to remember, recognize and yes, be able to write it. And I’m just going to go out on a bit of a limb, but I don’t know why Chinese language teachers are so lazy as to not correct student writing mistakes and sloppy characters. I know in Chinese schools kids papers are picked over with a fine-tip red pen over and over, feedback helps, writing improves. I think a lot of Chinese teachers of non-Chinese students are enablers to bad handwriting.
I think teachers think that this repeated writing is a great way to memorize characters and the exercise is not for penmenship (which then I would support). I can tell you that I have written characters hundreds/thousands of times which were subsequently forgotten. I’ve got the little notebook with hanzi that I wrote, but today I couldn’t tell you what it means.
I would also recommend a Chinese calligraphy class. One doesn’t have to study so long as to become a brush grass-style master calligrapher, but learning how the characters are written with a brush and the associated practice in hand-eye coordination does get reflected in how one handwrites on paper with a ball-point pen. It also helps to build the eye’s ability to discern the character components and ‘see’ better. I think a a couple hours over two or three weekends would be enough. The first weekend to learn the basics. The following two just for feedback and corrections.
I wonder how many people know that when writing the horizontal line it is not just starting the line from the left and going to the right. Actually there is first a little leftwards movement which then loops back in a u-turn and then goes towards the right, which often ends with a flick downwards to lead into the next stroke. Even when written with a ball point pen this is obvious. It’s also true that even in China today handwriting can reflect a generation and your age. I wonder how many American kids can even write in cursive today?
Hi,
I agree, it takes a lot of time and effort to learn to write the characters.
However, i’ve been using the Simplified Chinese MIcrosoft IME to input pinyin and write chinese. I’ve been using this for 2 months now. It lets me message my friends in China/ Taiwan (this often amazes them). The great thing about this…is that is easy, cognitive, and fun.
It really is amazing…because my character recognition has improved so fast…i can now read the messages in chinese…without having to repeatedly translate everything.
I need to learn to write because I hope to work in China one day as a doctor. As far as i know…the exams are in chinese, and the written documents are usually in chinese in hospitals… But before i start intensively learning the characters I really need to increase my character recognition so that I can start to read simple books…as written chinese seems very different to spoken Mandarin….it seems much more complicated.
So, any advice Ken?
Cheers
Mashhood Uk
Mashhood,
What you’re talking about is a very high level of formal, academic knowledge of the Chinese language. This goes way beyond what you would learn through a process of acquisition alone because you’d have to learn the conventions of writing about medicine and medical science. If those tests are done in hand-writing (and I’d bet that they are) then you’d have the added complication of learning hand-writing for all of that. There is no doubt that you will need years of study to get to that level.
I don’t want to sound negative here. I’ve seen it done – thousands of African students get their medical degrees in China each year – but it has to be incredibly challenging. Let me just add that doctors are also not paid very well in China. Just a note of caution.
Ken Carroll
I enjoy learning to write them by hand, you see the characters different light.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/-bazza-/184359895/in/set-72057594057590118/
I studied Chinese in the States for years, and never had much problem with character retention; it was only after I came to China and started using SMS and MS Pinyin that I started to lose my ability to handwrite characters. I try to fight the slippage these days by writing everything on my Chinese blog out in longhand before typing it up – I find that it helps me organize my thoughts as well – but if i’m going to be honest with myself, I’ve got to admit that there are some characters that I’m just never going to remember how to handwrite.
Oh, my dreams…gone…hehe
I’ll keep that in mind….maybe i should just become an english teacher….:D
Thank you, appreciate the advice
Do you know about the Taiwanese system? would i need to know traditional…adding greater difficulty…:D
Hopefully i’ll find out more next year. I’ve got a few opportunities in China and Taiwan for an elective. Really looking forward to that.
Thanks again,
Mashhood
I’ve had the same experience as Mashhood. My character recognition has increased and I can now read simple sentences. The repetitive pinyin input helps cement the pronounciation and tone in my brain. For the most part, I can fool Chinese people into thinking i’m Chinese (well, not really fool, they just refuse to believe i’m American) due to my typing skills. Then they humble me by asking some really long question, and I have to resort to a translator. Therein lies the problem, it’s too easy to resort to a translator. Although it’s helpful for a word or two, it doesn’t help you learn anything new when it does entire sentences for you. In fact, often the translation is poor. Counterproductive. Does anyone else find reading Chinese webpages painful to the head? So many characters make it seem daunting. Anyways, for typing to be truly productive, you would almost have to have a “Jenny Zhu Teaches Typing” course, that continues to build vocabulary, sentences, grammar, and perhaps even speed. Otherwise I don’t see a long term benefit to this.
Handwriting characters does help you with character recognition, but not in a particularly time-efficeint manner. Learning to write characters is just such a massive time investment and in my opinion an unwarranted one given that computer input is such a viable alternative. That time could be better spent doing more listening, reading and writing.
The other thing is that memory for charcacters doesn’t last at all without constant revision. For my end of semester 1 test i had 400 odd character well memorised. 4 weeks later after a break, my writing retention rate is about 50%, while for recognition it is about 80%. Even our american teacher, who spent 15 years in the country, and now teaches the language for a living, often has problems writing up simple chracters on the board. Is this the same for other long-timers?
p.s. Ken, I go to the University of NSW in Sydney, Australia. The chinese teachers are all very good but the format is still a quite traditional one; most of the assesment is based on written vocab and sentence translation.
Paul,
I agree. My wording may have been confusing. My take is that hand writing is not a time-efficient activity in terms of character recognition. The softeware is far more efficient.
Btw, do the other learners on your program know about ChinesePod? Do the teachers?
Ken carroll
Alot of the students yes, the teachers i don’t think so. I have had to find out on my own about some of the great resources (including yours) that the net has to offer.
Umm… o…k… so you’re reading and typing, not interested in writing by hand. You’re learning lots of characters, reading and typing them with ease. You know your stuff. So, when you really do know those characters, couldn’t you just pick up a pen and write one whenever you feel like it? After all, you’re quite familiar with their shapes, aren’t you? Not speed writing, but enough to write “help!” in the sand when a Chinese rescue helicopter approaches.
Second point: If all of us bods learning Chinese around the world are going to type instead of hand writing, then there’s going to be a pull towards traditional characters. The only thing wrong with them was that some were so damn awkward to write, but they are equal to type and easier to learn to read because they’re more logical. If simplified characters didn’t exist already, there’d be no need for them to be invented in this day and age.
Using a pinyin input system to type characters may also help pronounciation since you must know the exact pinyin (minus the tone) to get it right. Some distinct but similar Chinese sounds to the western ears need to be learned. Those who can pick out the correct pinyin word when listening to someone is ahead of the game.
I second AuntySue’s point. When do you really know the characters? It’s one thing to type pinyin and pick out of a list of 10 or so possibilities and get it right. It is another to see a character and instantly know it’s meaning. Some characters are similar enough that if you didn’t know them well enough to write, you will soon. Seems to me that this might be harder if you only typed. (e.g. 太大， 找我， 买卖， 天夫）
Aunty,
It’s one thing to recognize a character, but another thing entirely to actually write it. But there’s even more difficulty: You might actually remember how to write a character but recalling the elements of the character are difficult enough. Even simple characters can be illegible unless you practice them over and over again (just as bad cursive can be really hard to read).
And yes. There is no differnce in terms of pattern recognition between the traditional and the simplified chatracters. This would actually make the case for re-introducing the complex characters – though that will not happen, I’m sure.
Ken
Traditional characters can be harder to read in their typed form though, particular if it’s a small font, like this one for example: 擊
Aunty Sue started her second point comment with the words: “If all of us bods learning Chinese around the world…” and that made me think “Why did I turn on my computer this Sunday morning an go directly to ChinesePod?”. The answer is that even though I am living as a foreigner in a country halfway arond the world the fact is that ChinesePod is part of my community and I feel much satisfaction and pride as a member of Ken Carroll’s “Big Brain” even though my part of the brain may be very tiny indeed. The thought crossed my mind that it would be nice to have a local ChinesePod sanctioned local club to promote ChinesePod and also bring members together to share face to face their experiences in learning Mandarin and help each other with things like writing characters, exploring Chinese history and culture, cooking (and eating) Chinese food, hosting visitors from China, etcetera, etcetera, and so forth. Has this idea been mentioned before? If so, whatever became of it? If not, what do you “big brainers” think about it?
I think writing characters definite aids recognition; but is slow. Playing the concentration game here, for example, is much more efficient for recognition. However, the way pattern recognition works is that you tend to remember only that which is sufficient to differentiate one character from another. Furthermore, one does not necessarily remember strokes as such, rather overall shape and a few features.
As such, I think, if you intend to learn to write it is probably better to learn characters by writing them. If you have little intention of writing, or are going to rely on computerised input only, then other methods are more appropriate.
Of course *when* one decides to learn characters is another question (one I know Chris (Mandarin Student) has kicked off a debate about before
)
Pandagator,
I’ve had a similar experience…it’s quite ironic really…and sometimes annoying when they refuse to believe that I’m British
With regards to the translating – I use a program called DimSum Chinese Tools. I find it very useful because it gives character by character translations…so it can help with grammar and sentence structure. It also includes a good ‘talking’ dictionary, and can also show one character stroke order…etc
I got it from http://www.mandarintools.com
Mashhood
While there might be a stronger case for learning traditional characters these days if studying outside of China, due to ease of input, my main interest (which I didn’t present properly) was how changes in technology adoption can change writing style preferences and rationales. Who can predict what differences will exist in another 50 years that will influence how Chinese is written.
It might be good or bad that characters aren’t learned as thoroughly when only typed, depending on whether your objective is to learn them well or to learn to read without excessive effort while primarily learning spoken Chinese.
Does anyone else find that hand writing characters for fun (without drill) becomes addictive?
Input methods – some require or benefit from your knowing the tones, while others do not. If you type a “3″ after the syllable, in some that’ll bring up the third-tone version(s), and in others it’ll simply give you the third character in the list. The former is both easier and reinforces memory of the tones with the pinyin.
Of course there are several character based input methods used for more efficient typing in Chinese speaking countries, wubi etc. Does anyone know which one they teach kids in school?
Aunty Sue,
I don’t know to what extent this is true… but my skype friends in China have told me that more chinese input pinyin than use wubi…however…i am in touch with some who use wubi….so it’s hard to say…
To use wubi…one would almost certainly have to know how to write the character…so it could be useful in that regard…
While I can understand how many would find it unnecessary to perfect their use of chinese script, I for one would have a hard time learning to speak the language without it! I need to see a character, know it’s pinyin and pronounciation, and understand its translation before it really sets into my brain. Although computers are making it much easier for us to write and recognize characers, I still find myself going through character strokes in my head when I am trying to pick the correct character when typing. And what about looking up characters in an english/chinese dictionary? Don’t you need to know stroke orders, etc to use one effectively? Though I guess with new online dictionaries, those big monstrosities might soon become a thing of the past!
I’ve got to say, I found learning Chinese characters be be not all that hard — there’s no intelligence required, just dumb rote handwriting until you get them into muscle memory. I can’t really imagine acquiring literacy through computerized Pinyin input, but perhaps I’m just a fuddy-duddy. In terms of writing, I can probably handwrite characters slightly faster than I can input and choose them from a Pinyin IME – though then again, I’m using the Mac OS IME, which isn’t as good as Microsoft’s at predictive input.
Mashhood — Wubi, Cangjie, and other symbol-based input systems are typically used either by professional typists with training in the systems or by people who don’t speak Mandarin natively. Both require a fair amount of training to get the hang of, from what I understand, so it’s not something that most people will pick up on a lark.
Ken – I seem to remember reading an editorial a while back calling for the restoration of traditional characters now that IMEs have more or less obviated the simplification. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.
Hi all,
I’m a big fan of Chinesepod – you guys do a wonderful job! I’ve been thinking about this question a lot recently. My son is starting Mandarin school in the fall and for the first time they’ve decided to drop the teaching of Bopomofo and traditional characters, to concentrate on Pinyin, from kindergarten on. This has garnered some criticism from fans of the traditional characters, but the argument is that pinyin is more practical. As for me, I’m going to concentrate on speaking and listening, since my goal is to communicate with the teachers rather than read a newspaper….
COOLNESS – Okay, all practical or pedogical reasons aside, maybe we might miss that writing Chinese can be fun.
Today, Brendon at Bokane.org posts a blog that is just a fun read about some Chinese characters. If nothing else I learned the character for gruel and
During my studies I’ve been thinking a lot about the order of learning characters. The spoken language has to start with quick rewards, which means words that are easy to pronounce and that can be used right away. Ni hao is a perfect example.
These early lesson words are not very easy characters to write, but more importantly, they’re not the most logical ones to leårn first. Learning them doesn’t make it easier to learn the next few characters, or to observe similarities. By logic I mean human logic. I can see the value in learning all of the radicals really well first, if you’re a machine or a masochist!
I’ve got a book somewhere called “Learning Chinese Through Group Character Analysis” or something similar. It’s a fairly standard old fashioned learning Chinese book, except that it approaches everything in a manner that is optimised for learning characters. For example, the first lesson introduces a small number of very easy to write high frequency characters which are combined in various ways to derive a large number of words. It makes excellent supplementary material, but you’d go bonkers if you tried to actually work through it as a text, and it does nothing whatsoever to help conversation (except theoretical conversations in English). Besides, the first character, ren, is the last thing I’ll ever be able to pronounce
What I took from this book was not its content, but its concept, and I like that a lot.
William McNaughton’s Reading & Writing Chinese looks like pretty ho hum reference book, but on closer inspection it is rather more. The brief notes with each character relate it to other characters similar in looks or meaning or derivation, and the characters are presented in an intertwined sequence that aids learning. You could work through it systematically from cover to cover if you wanted to, covering a page or two each week, and not get bored. When I want to learn a character, I look it up in the book, then flip back a page or two and start working up to that character, which gives me a set of related characters of increasing complexity, a meaningful group which is easier to learn than an isolated individual.
I’m only using these books as examples because they’re all I’ve got, not chosen, they happened to be on sale second hand when I was on a buying spree. If the purpose of typing is not just to read and to write when necessary, but to really learn the stuff, then it would be advantageous to consider the characters separately from time to time, just briefly, looking at their components and related groups so that the brain has a whole big chunk to hang on to. No need to obsess over it.
I also wonder whether, if one wants to “learn” the characters to some extent, there is any point consciously learning about every character in a lesson. Each lesson has one or two interesting characters – unfathomably complex at first, or half similar to a couple encountered before – which would be about all the character study I’d want to indulge in before pushing on to the next lesson. The others can be typed and guessed or looked up if necessary, and eventually the incidental knowledge starts gluing together of its own accord.
I know some people want to study them all in depth, and some people only want to recognise the right one when they type. I’m guessing that the majority of us who write or type fall somewhere between these two valid extremes, but have no moderate models to peg our approaches on. I’ve worked out my own approach for myself, but having no prior experience and no guidance, it changes weekly. Perhaps it would have been be more efficient if I had one known good path to stick to.
Aunty Sue,
Just to pick up on one point, I agree that is doesn’t seem a good idea to slavishly plough through the lesson dialogues learning the characters as they appear. You are unlikely to have a burning desire to write lesson dialagues and as for reading them, by the time you can read it fluenty in Chinese characters you could have listened to it and read it in pinyin loads of times.
I am leaning towards maybe concentrating on an area of interest (like food for example). I might get to the point where I can read something faster that way??
Chris, maybe not a burning desire but a necessity to type the dialogues out. How else can we have material to practise reading them in Chinese without the focus-robbing pinyin on the same page?
When I have a recording and the chinese version is available without pinyin in sight, this is what I do. First, I listen while running my visual finger along the corresponding characters, not even trying to read them, pretty mindless, like following abstract dots on the page. I’m just listening. The contrary brain keeps pointing out little oddities of sound or shape and associating them, so after a couple of runs through I’m half-recognising half of the characters so it’s not easy to lose my place any more. Next the contrary brain, all by itself, starts making observations and hypotheses about what the tones are and which kind of ch sound that might be etc, so that on the next hearing it leaps up and says things like “yes! it’s second tone and a zh! I thought so!” even though I didn’t ask it to do that, I’m really concentrating on the whole phrase and how it’s used, so I ignore these outbursts and tell the brain to go mumble to itself in the corner until I’m ready. But by the time I’m ready to use it, the brain’s all charged up with observations and connections that it’s put together in my (conscious) absence, and eager to do business with them if invited.
Before I’ve set eyes on the pinyin, I’ve worked out what I’m hearing and how it would be represented in pinyin, without effort, almost involuntarily. All I thought I was doing was listening for the overall meaning and following the story. But it happens anyway. Then I can do whatever I would normally want to do to study it more, but with a head start. If I’m into work and not just play that day, I might even take a stab at writing the pinyin out before I see it, to find out if that daredevil brain had jumped to any wrong conclusions in its unauthorised pattern making activities.
Although I’ve started with the characters, focused my vision on them, and delayed the use of pinyin, I haven’t actually studied the characters and haven’t learned them much. The character text, initially, is just a tool to free the brain, like counting on fingers, or like doodling abstract pictures to represent parts of a song you’re learning. They’re pegs.
Using the same methods, I can then go on to learn the characters properly (which are, admittedly, a bit more familiar now), or instead learn and work with the pinyin, as I choose. You see, putting the characters first does not mean a commitment to learning them but it’s still useful, *especially* if pinyin is important to you. If you have no pedagogical fear using the characters that you don’t want to study, then more is less.
This must sound crazy, but give it a go once, it might do something for you.
Hi Ken,
In case you are considering trying out the hanzi texting on your mobile phone, might I recommend that you look for a phone that has a kind of predictive hanzi , this is a function that in addition to the list of alternatives that comes up after you enter in the pinyin, it provides another screen of follow-on characters after each entry of a hanzi. I find it does often give quite relevant selections. Which makes it possible to just scroll around rather than re-entering the pinyin for the next character. There’s some definite lexis technology in that software engine! (BTW, I have not seen this kind of facility in the online/computer hanzi entry software)
The best thing about this is you can probably get your daughter to show you!
Lantian, CJKOS (for Palm handheld PDAs) does exactly that, and it remembers phrases you’ve used and offers them earlier (great when you’re at the ni hao… wo shi stage, and responds when you move past that). It’s the best input method I’ve used on anything so far. Some PDAs (like mine) also connect to do web, email, chat etc., and most can display the PDF while the podcast plays. I use it rather than the computer for reading typing and learning Chinese.
Aunty Sue,
Far from sounding crazy it is not a million miles away from what I do. Although I tend not to work with the text very much on Chinesepod. Often I hear sounds in Chinese audio from many sources and then the challenge is to convert to pinyin and find out what they mean, the more i do this the better it gets.
All the texts from my Skype partner come to me as characters and audio (yes I am lucky here). Listen to the audio and stare at the characters to extract all the meaning I can, only then do I resort to pinyin conversion and word by word translation. By this point I don’t care if I can get half of it or 5%, I always learn something. Without learning characters in the conventional sense I have aquired quite a few for reading. For example I could tell that Bazza’s comment on the last elementary lesson meant he didn’t currently have something in about 1s. As it was a podcast about pets, not hard to guess he doesn’t have a pet.
Will I learn to recognise the characters for pet?? unlikely unless I run over them a few more times (other texts, trying to decipher subtitles etc.) . Good news here being the characters I learn to recognise straight off are the ones I am encountering the most (maybe a very young Chinese child starts of this way, they are surrounded by the things I can’t imagine they start learning them formally from cold).
As for the writing part, I think (only think mind you), I might just be devising a way …..
Guys,
sorry for being rude, but I didn’t join this conversation when it first started and I tried to catch up, but unfortunately it takes too long to read every response.
I want to invest in software that will help me learn Hanzi. I have heard Wenlin is very good. Can anyone provide advice on what they would recommend I get to expedite the learning process. Just a further note, I’d say my Pinyin Chinese is at the lower intermediate level at this point, and not sure if this influences the software I should get.
thanks
David.
When I was learning, initially typing the pinyin in was very helpful, i think it helped me. However I was typing into a chat program with a chinese friend, I suspect that it was the process of trying to recall what I have learnt which made the most benifit. I suspect that typing has the by-product of forcing you to use what you have learnt which is more beneficial than trying to pick the character.
These days typing it seems to have much less value in my learning. Although that may change once I learn to write more complicated sentences.
Yes it takes many many hours to learn the script, years really, there are tools that help make that process faster, Wenlin may be one of them — amongst other things, it lets you search for characters by components, not just radicals, but any element really, not even limited to phonetics, also includes top/bottom or left/right. It also animates stroke order, but there’s a lot more it could do, not sure about others. It lets you search for words in its large (ABC) dictionary that contain any particular character, which is nice. I once asked the developer for a feature that would have pushed this further, namely flagging those characters you know and having Wenlin subset the dictionary to only words containing those.
Anyway, how about being simply fascinated characters rather than using purely utilitarian arguments? I reckon learning to speak is a dozen (if not a hundred) times faster than learning to read / write, but I wouldn’t agree that it doesn’t require any intelligence. And it seems the two processes don’t easily meet, if only because of frequency differences, and it does takes time to reconcile. I may be a special case but my reading/writing is way more advanced than my oral understanding, which admittedly is not very effective though useful as I resort to writing when I’m lost.
One experiment I did for a year was to watch movies, series, business mgt courses even, and type in the subtitles in pinyin as I watched (pressed the back button quite a few times), mostly in simplified characters but some traditional too. Used mostly Wenlin for this, sometimes NJStar with pinyin entry, but frankly I gave up, not sure it helped either my understanding or my character skills.
And while I do use CJKOS and the amazing handwritting recognition of PlecoDict on a Palm I carry with me always, I still do like to handwrite (if nothing else, getting the stroke order right makes the recognizer way more effective).
… and as s.o. said already, how about simply writing characters for fun? I personally would never have learnt Chinese if it weren’t for characters, and handwriting them gives me intense satisfaction.
Incidentally, I find that the ChinesePod transcripts with pinyin below hanzi is distracting if you know the characters, counter-productive if you don’t. Basically Stroop effect at work, rather than re-inforcing the association hanzi-pinyin, it inevitably attract the eye to the pinyin transcription. Typography can be used to avoid this, e.g. 2-3 colums text with hanzi in one and pinyin in another. I think this has long been recognized in textbooks teaching Chinese to foreigners.
Regarding the typesetting of the PDF files, i definitly agree! Too many times have I found myself reading the pinyin when it is characters I already know!
I usually try to concentrate on pinyin first time (to make sure I hear tones properly) then concentrate on pinyin. If I loose concentration my brain fixes on the pinyin.
Ok, so not an unconditional ringing endorsement of Wenlin, but I’ll take YV’s generally positive comments as a buy recommendation.
Any other tools/ books in addition to Wenlin that’ll help? Remember, in terms of Hanzi, I am an absolute beginner.
David.
Hi David – I just bought Wenlin, and I really like it. It’s a big step up from what I was using (NJStar). The character explanations are not great (I still prefer Zhongwen.com and its printed version), but the character entry and referencing are excellent. The handwriting recognition works well, as does the character pronounciation. Buy it if you can afford it!
Thanks… I need all the help I can get! I will look at Zhongwen.com too…
Can I be so bold as to ask whether Chinesepod.com are going to offer any tools of their own on Hanzi study, or whether they endorse any tools…? I realise it may not be your area of focus, but you do all else so well, thought I’d ask…
thanks
David.
Thanks… I need all the help I can get! I will look at Zhongwen.com too…
Can I be so bold as to ask whether Chinesepod.com are going to (or already?) offer any tools of their own on Hanzi study, or whether they endorse any tools…? I realise it may not be your area of focus, but you do all else so well, thought I’d ask…
thanks
David
That article gave me a paradigm shift! I used to belong to the “Spoken Language Only” fraction.
I still don’t care for characters, but characters do help retention through association. And I get forced to take care of my Pinyin.
There is of course a technical issue – the typing of characters in English Windows…… Here what I do:
I use English Windows Xp Home. I have “East Asian Characters” installed. That still does not let you type though….
I don’t like the Xp chinese input routine. It screws up all higher bit characters. That is €, Umlaute, Kyrillic etc.
I downloaded “NJStar Communicator 2.60″ (free for 30 days) – and that works fine for me. It has (also) Pinyin input method. I can now use English QQ and practice Chinese chat!
For character lookup I use the free ZDT Chinese flash tool.
Thanks. So, Fox, is the input into the various applications you mention in Pinyin with tones, and then the software converts this to the applicable chinese Hanzi character?
Thanks. Fox, is the input into the various applications you mention in Pinyin with tones, and then the software converts this to the applicable chinese Hanzi character?
Riddle me this: Why hasn’t China put pin-yin ‘lines’ on its street signs? As I look out my window I see the street sign ‘Fu Zhou Rd’ underneath the Chinese characters （福州路）。
Why haven’t they added the proper with the tones?
Wouldn’t “Fú Zhōu” be more helpful? Maybe they are trying to save money on paint.
Also, why hasn’t someone found an easier way to type these little vowels? Instead of opening up the character map program and finding the appropriate vowel, we need a proper keyboard that makes typing pin-yin vowels easier. Maybe something like another shift button.
David C
An update: you use Pinyin with no tonemarks. You can use NJStar – or windows Xp native input system. I.e., you type “Ni” – and you get 10 common “Ni” characters to chose from. If it’s not there you swap to the next 10.
You just have to set it up and can then switch between different input methods. After I (finally) set it up correctly it works fine for me.
However, some applications that are written for Chinese Windows (namely QQ) do behave “hostile” in English Xp. Characters come out sideways, get messed up etc. If that happens you need to get and install “AppLocale” from Microsoft.com – it’s free to download.
With that I can use QQ with windows own input method with not problem.
In the last 24 hours I could recognize more characters then in the last 3 month.
I’m a Chinese girl.
add my msn gongyingzi@yahoo.com
Maybe I can help you with your Chinese