With the
increasing amount of Chinese learners, more people choose to learn Chinese with
Pinyin, not characters. The main reasons are:
1
Pinyin is easier and similar to English letters, people don’t need to worry
about memorizing a lot.
2 Most people want to acquire Chinese
language at a fast way, like the fast food ,they don’t want to be bothered by
the slow pace of writing with strokes .
3 The majority people learn Chinese for the
purpose of communicating, they think it useless for the character study.
Are they right?
No.
For beginners, it might be easy and effect
to learn with Pinyin only. But for those who would like to improve their oral
speaking at a intermediate level, they will have a hard time. CLE used to have
many students who want to learn oral speaking only. They think they can finish
everything with Pinyin. But when seeing the characters in their advanced
textbooks, they seemed totally lost. Even if their teachers helped with Pinyin,
they couldn’t tell the difference between “ bao zhi “ and “ bao yuan “,they
have to memorize this syllable, therefore it is very difficult for them to
learn and improve more and higher.
The reason is the spirit of Chinese language exists in
the character part. If you understand the radicals, you will find it easy to
remember the related character, e.g. 饱 抱. They share the same pronunciation radicals, but the
differences exist with the meaning radicals. The Pinyin bao 3 and bao 4 doesn’t
make any sense at all. The two radicals 饣and 扌tell people that they are related with food and hand
action. This will help student know about more characters.
So it is clear the Chinese learners will try to
understand the Chinese characters. People have the fear of learning to write
characters, but you need to at least understand each character and know to read
it without Pinyin. Only in this way, can you understand the structure of the
character and know the differences between similar characters.
