Don’t learn characters, and don’t do tone drills. These probably sound like unlikely things for any Mandarin teacher to say, and yet I am saying just that. Let’s take a closer look.
Don’t bother with characters
When you first set out to learn Mandarin, the first essential thing you need to do is to ignore the characters. Let’s unpack this further. When we are just starting out learning Mandarin, characters serve no real function, since we don’t yet have anything to connect them to.
Think of it like this, when you learned to read your first language you already knew how to speak it, and reading was mainly a matter of cracking the code for how to use your eyes to access what your ears already knew. Learning to read in a foreign language is different, since you’re not just learning to crack the writing system, you’re also learning the words themselves. If ihe writing system is such that it’s easy to figure out what the pronunciation should be even if you’ve never seen the word before, then reading is an excellent way to boost vocabulary, and build competence in understanding whole sentences. Let’s take a look at Finnish to see how this works.
Let’s take a look at Finnish
The Finnish writing system is a version of the latin script, and represents both vowels and consonants in a straight-forward and systematic way. Each letter represents one sound, and one sound only, and each sound is represented by one letter, and one letter only (with very few exceptions, usually in loanwords).
This means that once you can roughly distinguish the 23-ish (it’s never that easy to count these things) language sounds (phonemes) of Finnish the writing system only has 29 letters you’ll need to learn in order to write these sounds. And since it’s more or less obvious how to spell every sound every time, voila, you have just learned how to write and read Finnish.
Finnish sample text (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
Kaikki ihmiset syntyvät vapaina ja tasavertaisina arvoltaan ja oikeuksiltaan. Heille on annettu järki ja omatunto, ja heidän on toimittava toisiaan kohtaan veljeyden hengessä.
(Source: https://omniglot.com/writing/finnish.htm)
Honestly, you don’t even have to know how to speak Finnish in order to be able to pronounce it from a text once you’ve learned the basics. I’m not saying it will sound good, but your chances of being understood are actually not too bad. Now let’s return to Mandarin.
A closer look at Mandarin
Mandarin is the opposite of Finnish in that the symbols of its writing system contain almost no information about sound at all. This has the consequence that reading is not as excellent a way to boost vocabulary or build competence in understanding whole sentences. We can easily see why. In Finnish, when you come across a new word you simply decode the pronunciation in fractions of a second and look to context for meaning. In Mandarin, when you come across a character you’ve never seen before you’ll have to stop to look up its pronunciation in a dictionary, even if the meaning is obvious from context. Furthermore, where Finnish only has 29 letters (Upper and lower case arguably makes it 58) Mandarin has over 100 thousand characters. Granted, you’ll only have to learn 20–30 thousand of them in order to read something more advanced, like international news, or science. But whereas learning 29 letters takes a weekend, 20 thousand characters still takes years and years.
Traditional Mandarin sample text (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
人人生而自由﹐在尊嚴和權利上一律平等。他們賦有理性和良心﹐並應以兄弟關係的精神互相對待。
(Source: https://omniglot.com/chinese/)
The way to do it
Now, learning 20 or even 30 thousand characters is not just possible, but also fun and rewarding, however it does require energy and time. And as beginners, that time is much better spent on other tasks, such as learning words, and listening to easy input that makes sense to us. That will rapidly build up our intuition for both pronunciation and how sentences work from the get go, and is something we can start doing from day one.
For example I always enjoyed the cartoons from Little Fox, especially the animated adaptation of Journey to the West, featuring none other than the Monkey King, 孫悟空, himself. The stories are simple enough to understand from context and the hilarious animations, which makes it possible for us to pick ut Mandarin words and expressions naturally.
(Source: https://chinese.littlefox.com/en)
The traditional way
It is true that traditionally Mandarin teachers have put a lot of emphasis on the characters, and on cramming them from day one, as many Mandarin students, as well as Chinese children, know. Often special stencils are used to have the students copy out characters by hand until they finally just stick.
There is a reason for doing it like this and it’s not hard to understand. If your goal is to get 20 000 characters into your skull in any reasonable amount of time, and your students are Mandarin-speaking natives who already know the language, then this is a proven way, and it works.
Should foreigners use the traditional way to learn characters?
We can clearly see how this proven method is effective for native Mandarin speakers, but the problem for us is of course, we’re not native Mandarin speakers. We are acquiring Mandarin as a foreign language, and because of this we’ll have to consider other methods of learning more tailored to our situation. First and foremost we should have some patience when we have just started, and spend our energy wisely.
Why even bother with characters?
100 thousand or merely 20 thousand characters, the number is staggering, and it’s easy to sympathize with the foreign learner who throws up her hands in defeat exclaiming “I’ve had it, I’ll just learn how to speak. I don’t need to read.” But is this wise? As foreign learners, I think we should learn to read and write characters. Here are some reasons why.
Writing keeps China together
Writing is crucial in China, because over the centuries writing has become a glue that keeps otherwise mutually unintelligible dialects intelligible. The Chinese-speaking sphere is very large and diverse, and it’s far from certain that native Chinese-speakers from different areas understand each other’s speech. This is when people who don’t understand each other’s dialects can use the standardized writing system to bridge the gap and communicate. Mandarin is actually a constructed official dialect created for the purpose of serving as the national language of China. Nevertheless, tens of millions of people who speak Chinese don’t speak Mandarin. But, they all use the same characters!
Chinese dialects map
(Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_sinitic_languages_full-en.svg)
Another plus for characters
Modern Mandarin Chinese only has around 1200 ish permissible syllables. A syllable is roughly speaking a vowel that might or might not be surrounded by one or many consonants. A normal (don’t ask haha, it’s not important) word has a minimum of one syllable, but can have many more. A “permissible syllable” is a syllable that is allowed by the “sound rules” of the language. These “rules” determine for example whether multiple consonants are allowed clustered together or not, and if they are, which consonants are allowed, and in what order.
Permissible syllables of Mandarin
(source: http://www.pinyin.info/rules/initials_finals.html)
Since Mandarin only has 1200 allowed syllables, this means that if the vocabulary of Mandarin contains more than 1200 one-syllable words, which of course it does (after all we just saw that it has 100 thousand characters, and we didn’t say anything about multiple-character words) then we’ll end up with a ton of words that sound the same. Such words are called homonyms, and Mandarin has a ton of them! Every language has homonyms, but not all languages have the vast amount of homonyms that Mandarin has. This is where characters come in to save the day though, because since they’re all written differently, you’ll know what the writer meant.
So why is this important again?
At this point you might be thinking “Wait, didn’t you just say that I shouldn’t bother with characters?” That’s right. Because, as a beginner you won’t have enough vocabulary to run into any of these problems (yet). Confusing synonyms and such will only start happening to you once you can actually start having longer conversations with people, like when you meet new friends and ask for their names in Mandarin. But for now, your time is better spent on other tasks.
What beginner foreigners should do
What you should do instead is use pinyin. Pinyin is a writing system based on the roman alphabet but for writing Mandarin Chinese. Let me show you an example. This is what my friend wrote to me last Wednesday after I went to a picnic (I was wearing an N95-mask though, and we were outdoors, but she didn’t know that). She said:
你跟他們疫情玩，所以你也是笨。(Eng: You hung out with them during the pandemic, so you’re also stupid.)
If you don’t know how to pronounce this you simply don’t know. Here is the same passage in pinyin:
Nǐ gēn tāmen yìqíng wán, suǒyǐ nǐ yě shì bèn.
See? Smart isn’t it? Check out this blog post about pinyin.
Tip 2 — Learn tones in context (don’t keep doing tone drills)
If your first language is English or any other of the large European languages chances are that tones will be a totally new concept to you, and it’s understandable that as foreigners we would like to take some time to get accustomed to them. It’s understandable that we would need to practice them, since we need to train our speech apparatus to produce these tones on command.
Minimal pairs
Are tones really important? You bet they are! Each word in Mandarin has a tone, and changing it effectively changes the meaning of the word. In a bit more technical terms, linguists have a way of distinguishing language features by finding minimal pairs. This basically means that if two words differ by only one sound feature, then that feature is important to meaning, and not just a quirk of pronunciation.
Like sit and seat in (Standard American) English, which differ only in the vowel sound. In the International Phonetic Alphabet we can see this single difference clearly:
/sɪt/ and /sit/.
On the other hand nasalization is not contrastive, say fine and fine (nasalized). They still mean the same thing. (Honestly this example makes more sense in the video, check it out here).
Minimal sets
So what if there are more than two words who are different in meaning but differ in only one way, for example by having different tones? In that case what we’re dealing with is called a minimal set, and I think you’ve already come across one.
One minimal set that gets used so much in Mandarin classes that it’s almost a cliche by now is mother, hemp, horse, scold, and question mark? Or in Mandarin: Mā má mǎ mà, and ma.
While this set is useful to demonstrate the different tones, summarized in a nice chart and all, there’s a danger of fixating too much on it in this form.
I bet that if you’ve already googled “Mandarin tones” you’ll have seen charts such as this one, or even more detailed charts with overlapping arrows in different colors, aimed to teach you the “five MAs”.
There is nothing wrong with charts like these. After all, all Mandarin words have lexical tone, and to be able to speak Mandarin you’ll have to learn how to pronounce them. The problem is that the strength of the chart, it’s simplicity, is also its biggest drawback. If we try to learn tones out of context we’ll end up sounding like a robot. Let me explain.
Sounds are more like guidelines
You see, sounds are not always pronounced the same way from context to context or moment to moment. For example, think of the english phrase “I do not want to do a lot of stuff, I am kind of tired”. If you say it like that you sound robotic (I mean no harm, future robotic overlords). What most people will actually say, and what you’ll hear if you listen closely, is something closer to “Irun wanna do alora stuff, a’kin’a tire’ ”.
We can see from this example alone that learning to pronounce each sound perfectly in isolation is only good up to a point, and that point actually arrives pretty quickly. From thereon it’s better to learn sounds in context, by picking up on how they get mushed together, stretched, mutated or deleted.
It’s all about the context
It’s the same with tones. Tones in context tend to change their form from their “iconic contours” to other versions of themselves. This has to do with many factors, for example tonal context, how fast the speaker is talking, and dialect. So, while the minimal set of MAs is a good starting point, we shouldn’t dwell on it for more than two or three weeks. After that it’s way better to start learning in context.
How to learn tones
There are two main ways I want to recommend doing this:
First, practice compound words. Even on the level of compounds, sound changes will occur. Something as basic as níhǎo or pīnyīn don’t sound as the separate words Nǐ + hǎo (tone change) or pin + yin (nasalisation and consonant deletion). Zhèyàng will sound like jiàng in just moderately rapid every-day speech.
Just like in English or any other language the process of fluent speech makes itself heard. For a longer Chinese example I learned this lesson the hard way the first time I tried to pronounce the end station of the Taipei MRT blue line:
南港展覽館站 (Nángǎng zhǎnlǎn guǎn zhàn)
Nangang Exhibition Center Station
Or an adverbial like:
據我所知 (Jù wǒ suǒ zhī)
As far as I know
Try to say these words individually and you will definitely mumble it up. They need to be learned as compounds.
Phrases
Secondly, and once you’re a little bit more advanced, learn longer phrases. Phrases are great, and you can think of them as templates for social interaction. In practice fluent speakers improvise a lot in conversation but it’s also true that they improvise based on patterns. For example, most people (except my friend Emil) wouldn’t go into a coffee shop thinking:
I want” and not “me want”
Because it has to be in the subject form of the first person singular pronoun,
and then, want, and not wants because that’s the third person singular form,
and then I need to say “a” cup and not “the” cup since the cup is being mentioned for the first time,
after which there is a preposition “of”,
and now let’s see, what do I actually want?
What most people actually do is take a phrase, like:
I want a cup of ___BLANK___ please.
And say: I want a cup of tea, please. Or coffee or whatever.
So, in Chinese, you say 我要一杯茶，謝謝。(Wǒ yào yībēi chá, xièxiè)
Final thoughts
Ok guys, so these are some final bonus tricks you can use when you interact with people speaking Mandarin.
Compound words
The solution to knowing what character a speaker means if it’s not clear, is by using compound words. For example:
是什麼 hong? 紅色的紅嗎？
不是，是洪水的洪。
Shì shénme hong? Hóngsè de hóng ma?
Búshì, shì hóngshuǐ de hóng.
Which “hong” is it? Is it the “hong” of “red color”?
No, it’s the “hong” that means “flood”.
Pretty cool right?
What makes this so powerful is that this is something you can do even if you don’t know how to read or write characters. But honestly, these situations where synonyms become an issue usually start to appear a bit later in the learning process, so don’t worry too much about it just yet.
The double power of Chinese compounds
Remember how I said that compound words are also great for learning tones? It turns out that in Mandarin, because of how the writing system works, and because of how the sound system works, compounds come in really useful for multiple reasons.
This is great for you as a learner, as you’ll kill two birds with one stone (Like metaphorically, don’t actually go killing any birds…).
But never mind the birds, by now you already know what to do and where to spend your energy when you start learning Mandarin. To recap:
Recap
1)
Learn pinyin, the writing system that uses latin letters to write Mandarin Chinese. This will radically speed up your learning process in the beginning, allowing you to make much faster progress than if you put that energy into rote memorizing thousands of characters.
2)
Listen to easy beginners material that is so basic that you can understand it from context. This will allow you to both pick up new words quickly, as well as their pronunciation without over-thinking what tones they are.
And remember, we’re in this together.
