Comments on: Don’t Try to Learn A “Language”

By: khatzumoto

khatzumoto — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 03:53:56 +0000

Read the intro to RTK, here

By: Mediat

Mediat — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:03:57 +0000

Learning the letters/characters first…wow, I never thought of that. I thought it was “learn the words first, and after 40 of so start learning sentences at the same time…and maybe, just maybe start learning the characters if you really really really really…..really want to.”

why learn the characters first?

By: Peter Parisi

Peter Parisi — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 19:44:29 +0000

Great site, and mucho hilarioso! Thanks!

By: John B

John B — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 01:40:30 +0000

Totally agree. If I were starting Chinese over again from scratch I would have invested the six months of effort that it would have taken to learn the first 3000 or so characters and then started the task of proper learning. It would have saved me so much time compared to the piecemeal way I actually went about it.

I wonder about how fast we learned words as children. I think the key was that, except for spelling tests and the like, we didn’t learn words explicitly like we are when studying a foreign language. At first we probably encountered hundreds or even thousands of unknown words per day and through that exposure slowly caught on. It was probably slower than 50 per day (after all, as adults we have the benefit of having already worked out all the concepts behind the words we’re learning, whereas when we were children we had to do that, too), but I suspect it was pretty fast.