China’s rapid growth and advancement has lead to their status as a major power with key advantages of a new global political economy. China has become highly competitive in the world economy as a result of their growing human capital (labor skills necessary to produce economic vitality), increasing impact on foreign and global policy decisions and cooperative trade relations with Asia. Considering China’s growth in the global economy, their role as a major power and their dominance in the trade industry, it becomes increasingly necessary to develop skills for communication in Chinese.
As a native American-English speaking learner with absolutely no exposure to the Chinese (hanzi) language, our perception of learning Chinese is incomprehensible. We have the misconception that learning Chinese is extraordinarily difficult and that Chinese is impossible for us to understand and comprehend. In fact English speaking language learners might even consider Chinese unintelligible, which in turn makes us fearful of failing in our efforts to learn Chinese.
Americans have had more exposure to Spanish, German, French and Italian and therefore feel more comfortable with the idea of language learning in a familiar context. American’s develop a familiarity with these languages during language study that is usually required as part of compulsory education through the 12th grade. Television and other media in the United States frequently advertise and/or communicate in Spanish, which increases recognition of familiar words. Additionally, movies, cartoons and sitcoms routinely present scripts in Spanish, French and Italian.
For Americans French, Spanish and Italian are easier to learn because they are in the same language family (Indo-European Family). The English language shares many common grammatical structures, shared words, and similar vocabularies with French, Spanish and Italian. Additionally, these languages share similar alphabets that provide a frame of reference for the language learner. Unlike Chinese, that uses mono-syllabic characters that represent a spoken syllable with a fundamental meaning. Chinese has more than 50,000 characters. Imagine the English alphabet having 50,000 letters! This would markedly change how children learn their ABC’S and would make memorizing the letters by singing the alphabet quite challenging.
A high school senior knows approximately 4000 characters in the Chinese language. The average university graduate has functional command of about 6000 Chinese characters. Teachings in China show that literacy requires one to know between three and four thousand characters. Simple knowledge and memorization of these characters do not lead to fluency. Mandarin Chinese is written and spoken through the combination of two or more characters that generate a specific meaning but are still dependent on the use of syllabic characters. Fluency requires the understanding of a combination of characters that give meaning.
Chinese language learners are taught that each character has a specific meaning and the combination of those meanings make words that are used to communicate. Chinese is not thought to be a phonetic learning system like English. Linking Chinese characters to a phonetic representation makes the system of learning Chinese much more useable. It is true that every Chinese character has a meaning, but the character also represents a sound that can be seen in the written word. Identifying the sound of the Chinese character makes learning words that sound alike easier, which increases a language learner’s ability to learn and remember a greater number of characters. With that in mind, the task of learning to speak in Chinese becomes an aid in learning to write and retain the Chinese language.
For English language learners this discovery markedly improves their success rate at learning Chinese. Now we know that learning Chinese does not require randomly memorizing characters for the 4000 most frequently used characters, instead we can connect sounds to meaning.
The best approach to learning Chinese is to learn the sounds and their meanings first without focusing on the characters. After gaining familiarity with the sounds and demonstrating some practical usage, begin learning the characters and associate them to the sounds and the meaning of words (in 6 months or so).
