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Thread: Comparing languages
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[quote=TOMSPENCER,258871]For me, and for those who learned Chinese with me, it was definitely worth studying characters alongside oral communication. I had the benefit of two free lessons per week, provided by the school for which I worked. The quality of lessons was variable as the teachers changed frequently, but my fellow students and I all bought boxes of flash-cards, 'Da Shan' VCDs, dictionaries and other materials, and we really took control of the content of our lessons as much as we could. We were out every day, lunching in local restaurants, haggling for goods on the street and meeting strangers in bars. We had the added benefit of living in a small town with very few foreigners, so there were plenty of opportunities to practise. Other people in the same situation didn't want to learn characters at all, and studied purely oral Chinese, for basic communicative purposes, in a separate group. They, too, got along fine with Chinese, although their objectives were much more limited in scope. And that's the crucial point - if you just want to hold a conversation then there's relatively little point in learning characters. While an understanding of the characters certainly helps to fit the pieces of the linguistic puzzle together, it is undeniably time-consuming and some people (quite reasonably) argue that understanding the finer points of WHY the language works is less important than understanding HOW to use the language for practical purposes. For my close band of friends and me, learning the language in greater depth was a key objective, and while we are all still struggling to achieve the incredibly lofty goal of "understanding" Chinese, I believe that we couldn't have hoped to make the progress that we have without studying characters. Also, of course, even learning a few hundred basic characters will be as useful to any student as learning a few dozen key phrases. Some characters are so common-place and so useful to know, that students who missed out on character-learning in the early part of their Chinese studies often express the sentiment that they can't believe they were walking around all that time completely oblivious to giant signs telling them very useful things in very simple Chinese.[/quote]
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