Resonates with me too. I'm studying Chinese full-time and the classroom format is extremely drill-heavy. Here's a sentence, now say it this other way, using this new grammar device that we just learned. Here's another, and another, and another. After that we _mostly_ rote memorize characters (mostly, because they do have fragments of meaning that you can reason about sometimes). We drill on reading and writing characters daily. There is little to no "creative" homework or classroom activities like writing a dialog and acting it out in front of the class, as we did in Spanish class when I was in high school in the States.
At first I was afraid that this learning style would be ineffective. Foreigners here often malign the Taiwanese education system as full of rote memorization, drills, and testing. Yet, the average Taiwanese can put together functional English sentences. A great many of them can speak fluently, even if they've never gone to an English speaking country. That's a lot more than you can say for the Spanish-speaking abilities of non-Hispanic Americans.
Drilling like this let's me build confidence, memory muscle, and trains you to quickly pattern match and respond without giving the logical part of your brain time to get in the way and start translating slowly. It actually works outside the classroom too, I'm repeatedly surprised how natural words or grammar I drilled in class feel when it comes up in daily life. I cannot imagine the American style of incorporating a bunch of other activities into the exercise would help at all.
Yes, some kind of drilling is definitely necessary, the issue is that traditional drilling is not efficient and there is so much more to language learning.
I don't think traditional drilling doesn't work at all, it's just super inefficient and boring.
That said, I also kind of feel that dialogue with other students isn't that useful.
I don't know about English in Taiwan, but if it's similar to Mainland China then then many of them started with learning English when they were 3 or so. The level of English you get from that is rather disappointing.
> Yet, the average Taiwanese can put together functional English sentences. A great many of them can speak fluently
Not true at all in my experience. I met only a few people there speaking English or French and all where young and most studied in a language department at university. There's surely a big divide along age categories and probably a North/South divide as I sometimes read people on the internet claiming Taiwanese are somewhat good in English, while I haven't seen that at all where I went (mostly Southern part).
That being said I agree with the rest of your post. Anything trying to make learning Chinese fun is actually a waste of time, and rote memorization is extremely effective. In fact, it's one of the most effective way to learn vocabulary (Nation, 2001). I find it very sad that bad methods like Remembering the Kanji are hugely popular when they are in fact a waste of time. The amount of bad content on the internet is staggering. I think the biggest issue is that most people lost the willingness to put efforts in learning, and want everything immediately.
As for learning Chinese, it also helps speakers of Chinese are usually very keen on correcting mistakes and teaching things even when not asked.
> In fact, it's one of the most effective way to learn vocabulary (Nation, 2001). I find it very sad that bad methods like Remembering the Kanji are hugely popular when they are in fact a waste of time. The amount of bad content on the internet is staggering. I think the biggest issue is that most people lost the willingness to put efforts in learning, and want everything immediately.
I haven't read the whole book, but quick skimming got me to this part:
> The highest vocabulary test scores were from the small number of learners reporting mnemonic techniques. The most commonly used strategies were effective but not as effective as the lesser used visualisation, mnemonic, oral rote rehearsal and retrieval strategies. Clearly, strategy training in memory-enhancing techniques could have useful effects.
I can't imagine learning Chinese characters without any form of mnemonics.
> I can't imagine learning Chinese characters without any form of mnemonics.
Username checks out :). Have you learned Chinese? I'm not convinced that my method is the best by a long shot, but I don't use mnemonics. I've tried memorizing other things with tricks like the memory palace, and either I don't know how to do it or my brain is busted, but I've never been able to create a "palace" much less store information I want to remember within it. I recently read about the mnemonic peg system and thought it might be useful if I could use radicals as "pegs." So far I just haven't been able to employ any of these tricks to my advantage.
My memorization routine (about 10 new words per day) is to write down a whole list ~30 words, writing the character and it's pronunciation (I use zhuyin). Sometimes I do this in class while we're going over the chapter's vocab. I set a timer for 5-8 minutes depending on how many new words there are, how "hard" some of them look at first glance, how many have unusual radicals I haven't used frequently, etc. Looking at just the pinyin or zhuyin I try to write them all down before the timer goes off. If I can't write a whole character, I at least try to write down some of the radicals, if nothing at all I just skip it and move on. Afterwards I grade myself and looking at the characters in my textbook again, I write a new list of just the words I couldn't write. I practice writing them several times until I feel like I have the hang of it. Then I test again. Repeat until I can write the whole list. After I can write them all, ideally, I would retest again after some time, sometimes I do. Unfortunately, I usually don't have enough time and I have just barely gotten them memorized before it's time for a chapter test and then a new load of vocab. Fortunately old words get rolled into new chapters and having to write essays and stuff gives me more practice after they've had a while to stew.
If there is some One Easy Trick that I'm missing that would make my routine 10x more efficient, I hope someone can share it, because this routine is very tiresome and time consuming. I have played a bit with visualization, where I would close my eyes and imagine every stroke of a character without actually writing it. It works, but I need a really quiet environment for that.
Yes, and still am. Not really active anymore since I'm busy with other things. I don't read much, but I can read a book, albeit slow and with much difficulty. Writing I do even less, and handwriting I never really did apart from tests and filling in forms. Speaking and listening I do every day. After a while I just decided to not focus really much on handwriting because it easily takes the most effort for something I actually barely use.
I've played a bit with memory palaces for fun and found them to be effective, but really not for Chinese Characters. I mostly used my own flashcards with Anki. I used pictures and tone colored characters to help. That worked fine, but making the flashcards also took a lot of time so it wasn't really perfect either. Having many synonyms also complicates the whole ordeal. But overall spaced repetition really, really helps with managing lots of vocabulary. You can have a deck of several thousands of words without too many issues. If you find words hard to remember it's also OK to just delete them (Anki also helps with this by automatically labeling cards you often fail as leech).
The mnemonics I use are the "build in" ones in the characters, maybe you already do this by yourself and actively learning them won't change too much. Nearly all characters have some meaning and/or pronunciation component hidden in them which can help you remembering them, or guessing their meaning or sound when you first encounter them.
I don't really think about radicals since those are just arbitrarily chosen components used only for paper dictionaries (and who wants to use those in the age of smartphones...).
Some random examples of interesting components:
疒, is a character that is not used anymore (I think) but it means disease and if any character has this component you can be very sure it's some kind of disease.
月 is a tricky one. It's moon and it often really doesn't make sense in words until you know that 肉 is often corrupted into 月. The 月 in 脑 doesn't mean moon but meat/flesh.
Some characters change depending on where they appear as components: 水/氵, 人/亻.
I like to use the Outlier Linguistic Dictionary on Pleco for looking up how characters are build up and see if it can help me remembering the character. I find little stories help me to remember words/characters. A character I forgot how to write and just looked up: 虹 (rainbow). It' made of the component snake/insect/worm because the ancient Chinese thought it looked like a snake in the sky. 工 is there for sound because gong/hong sound similar.
Or 取 (take/get/fetch), it's literally a hand taking an ear.
I don't think mnemonics is the One Easy Trick that will make your routine 10x more efficient, but depending on how you learn now it could really boost your efficiency. If you're not using any form of spaced repetition yet I think that really could be it.
Thanks a lot for the advice! I misused “radical” before but actually meant components, not the one arbitrary radical. Remembering characters as a block of components definitely helps. I think that would fall under the idea of “chunking” that memory experts talk about. Sometimes I remember a character on the first go because it’s a combination of components I’m very familiar with. I haven’t checked out the Outlier dictionary but I’m going to now. I often go looking at the character components to help me remember them, but better composition that Unicode data would but great.
I use Pleco flashcards to do spaced repetition. Not sure how it compares to Anki, but it takes almost no effort to create new cards, and that’s good for me because I can easily get sucked into fiddling with tools instead of using them.
At first I was afraid that this learning style would be ineffective. Foreigners here often malign the Taiwanese education system as full of rote memorization, drills, and testing. Yet, the average Taiwanese can put together functional English sentences. A great many of them can speak fluently, even if they've never gone to an English speaking country. That's a lot more than you can say for the Spanish-speaking abilities of non-Hispanic Americans.
Drilling like this let's me build confidence, memory muscle, and trains you to quickly pattern match and respond without giving the logical part of your brain time to get in the way and start translating slowly. It actually works outside the classroom too, I'm repeatedly surprised how natural words or grammar I drilled in class feel when it comes up in daily life. I cannot imagine the American style of incorporating a bunch of other activities into the exercise would help at all.