(My background: 6 months exposure + 2 months of self-taught reading + 6 months of formal studies + 12 further years exposure, 8 in country. Also recently married)
Over the last near decade and a half I have met hundreds of foreign learners of Chinese across the mainland and Taiwan, and the most obvious thing is that it is pointless to learn to read before speaking. Just as children first learn to speak by imitating their parents and guardians, so too must language learners learn to recognize and reproduce the sounds of a new language.
Once that's done and some rarified stem of grammar has been acquired by environment, the absolute joy of making sense of characters in their written form will propel the learner forward with far more speed and ease than a rote-learning non-speaker.
The article whinges about romanzation but Pinyin is great. It's only the stubborn Taiwanese who refuse to use it, as the product of the Communist enemy! For a truly scary alternative, look at what the French did to the Vietnamese language.
(My background: 6 months exposure + 2 months of self-taught reading + 6 months of formal studies + 12 further years exposure, 8 in country. Also recently married)
Over the last near decade and a half I have met hundreds of foreign learners of Chinese across the mainland and Taiwan, and the most obvious thing is that it is pointless to learn to read before speaking. Just as children first learn to speak by imitating their parents and guardians, so too must language learners learn to recognize and reproduce the sounds of a new language.
Once that's done and some rarified stem of grammar has been acquired by environment, the absolute joy of making sense of characters in their written form will propel the learner forward with far more speed and ease than a rote-learning non-speaker.
The article whinges about romanzation but Pinyin is great. It's only the stubborn Taiwanese who refuse to use it, as the product of the Communist enemy! For a truly scary alternative, look at what the French did to the Vietnamese language.