Translator: Gwyneth Jocelyn Reviewer: Lisa Thompson
Thank you.
It's really a great honor to be here.
After Chris' inspiring talk,
I guess everybody now is really confident about learning a language in six months.
Right now, I'm going to tell you something about the Mandarin Chinese writing system.
You can learn the Chinese Mandarin system in six minutes.
Can you believe that?
No, just kidding. Okay.
(Laughter)
But I am still going to help you
to learn to read Chinese in a more efficient way.
Let's get to know a little bit about Chinese first.
Let me ask a question.
Is anybody here trying to learn Mandarin?
Yes, please.
Great. Okay.
A lot of them.
Are any students or teachers going to teach Mandarin in the future?
Who wants to be a teacher?
Okay, still some of them.
Now, I guess many students have a feeling
that the Chinese writing system is really difficult.
Take a look at this one.
There are 7,000 morphemes in the Chinese writing system.
What are morphemes?
Actually, it means the characters.
But for daily use,
you only need to acquire 3,600 Chinese characters.
Let's get to know a little bit about the old way of learning Chinese.
For the local kids,
they have to learn Chinese
from the really, really simple characters.
They start from learning characters.
And before they start acquiring this,
at a really early stage,
they're exposed to the environment of Mandarin for quite a long time,
so there’s a big difference between foreigners and kids
because you have to acquire the meaning
and the sound and also the script in Chinese.
But still, there are kids who are unable to learn this.
This is called dyslexia in Chinese.
Do you know dyslexia?
I guess everybody does.
Because even though they've been learning for a quite few years,
they still can't master this,
because they can't store
the words in a systematic way.
Okay. Here pops up a problem.
There are many foreign students that have such a problem.
It's that they store 1,000 characters but can't make it into a systematic way.
Let's take a look at this PowerPoint.
There are about 280 simple characters.
I guess most of it you have to learn at the really early beginning
because these characters -
including those high-frequency use characters -
you have to use them in your daily life.
For example, you have to go shopping, you have to bargain.
This kind of characters
are included in a message of such detailed things.
Okay. Then you have to go through these 200 semantic characters
as well as those 800 phonetic radicals.
Does anybody know about phonetic radicals?
Actually, this is the sound clue for you to predict how to read the characters.
Let's think about how the local kids learn the Chinese writing system.
Actually, for the first grade in primary school,
they start to learn really simple characters,
about 700 characters.
And then, for the second grade,
they are trying to learn 1,000 characters,
including those characters with some strategy [to learn]
by using regularly.
They have some regular strategies.
And after they go into the third grade,
they have to use analogies
to read all these characters.
For the fourth grade, now you are going to learn vocabulary.
You know that in Chinese writing systems, characters are only the building blocks,
but vocabulary is the most important thing for you to start speaking Mandarin.
If you can't conquer the characters,
there is no way you can master 30,000 vocabulary [words] in Chinese.
Okay, let's see how those phonetic radicals
can help you predict the regularities in Mandarin.
Here is a really simple PowerPoint that is an example.
Does anybody know how to pronounce this character?
Anybody?
(Audience) Yuè.
Yuè, yes. It means the moon, right?
The pronunciation is yuè, right? Okay.
Take a look at the regularity effect.
The left part is wáng, right?
The right part is yuè.
So, they combine together ...
pronounced yuè.
This is how the phonetics works
to predict a character.
So, the left part is the semantic radicals.
As I showed in the previous slide, there are 200 semantic radicals,
but not all 800 phonetics
are necessary to learn to predict a sound.
You only need to master about 200 or 300 phonetic radicals.
This is enough for you to take care of these regularity rules.
The other part of this system is something more complicated.
It's called the consistency effect.
What is the consistency effect?
Okay, for primary school students, this effect happens in the third grade.
So, let's take a look at the above line there.
Five characters share the same phonetic compounds.
Actually, the phonetic compound is pronounced pang,
but the family are all pronounced bang,
just with a different tonal message.
For example, the first one is pronounced in third tone, fourth tone,
fourth tone, then third tone and fourth tone.
So, this means this character family has a really high consistency value.
Once you master this,
using an analogy to this character family,
you can easily predict five of them.
But some of these can only [be learned through] rote memorization.
There is no way you can use any rules on this,
but the good news is there are not many of them.
So, the bottom line,
this consistency effect is useless for these characters.
How do I classify these characters?
There are four types of these kinds of rules.
Why do we classify it like this?
Because it can easily help you
to build up a system to read Chinese characters.
For example,
there are two types of characters: regular and irregular characters.
To make it short,
use R to represent regular
and IR to represent irregular.
And there is consistency value, okay?
For high consistency value, we use C to represent it.
With low consistency value, we use [IC] to represent this one.
So, they combine into four types.
Once a character can be read as a regular, consistent character,
then another one is irregular and consistent -
also a consistent family.
With these two families, RC characters and IRC characters,
it's so much easier for you to predict
because you can apply the phonetics to read aloud.
But with inconsistent characters, for RIC characters,
now we have to learn a little bit later,
because you need to build up those phonetic sound cues
and also you need to build some information about Chinese.
[Once] you have enough oral Chinese information,
then you can use analogies.
So, forget about the four-part IRIC; you can only use memorization [for that].
Okay. With these roots, there are -
hold on -
As we all know, there are only 540 high-frequency characters.
You learn that at the very beginning, from the first year of studying Mandarin.
It's easy, for example, le and de.
Everybody knows that, right?
And with the useful phonetics, there are only 200 phonetics,
but you can predict 1,600 characters,
which means you are able to predict by yourself
70% of the Chinese characters.
Then, you can go into the fourth grade.
You relax so you can start the adventure
of learning 40,000 character families.
So,the really basic thing
is you have to build up the foundation of characters.
There is one more question:
To learn 500 learning characters
to read aloud Chinese,
or there is another choice -
[to learn] 2,500 characters to learn Chinese,
which way do you prefer?
I guess everybody prefers to choose the previous one,
the 500 characters instead of learning 2,500.
Does anybody think you can memorize 2,500 characters
just by rote memorization?
Can you raise your hand?
No one, yes.
So, you can try to use this method
to build up your system to read Chinese.
And how are we going to learn this?
I'll show you.
For the classrooms in the university or in some outside centers,
they use textbooks.
You have to read the textbooks every day, practice your sentences,
and copy from time to time,
but still cannot quite memorize all these characters.
But with this method,
you just need to use characters and words.
This is the sound cue
for you to build up this method.
You have to learn, like I said, 200 phonetics,
and now, this is the teaching materials.
This is not an easy word, actually.
Let's take a look at this.
Teaching materials.
Now you see the flashcard of our pictures representing the meaning.
It means engaged.
And then we are coming to this one,
which means a nail.
Do you find there is something different with these words?
Actually, the first and the second word
share the same phonetic radicals, right?
So, try to use this way.
We hope we can offer you a chance to observe by yourself,
to build up this system.
If you can conquer this stage,
then we will going on to the next stage
to figure out how the consistency works.
I guess this is all [of] my presentation.
Thanks.
(Applause)