super software?
Posted by site admin on 20 Dec 2004 at 10:38 am | Tagged as: Chinese, Chinese characters, Mandarin, pinyin, romanization, software
I keep seeing vague references to “ICT” software, whose boosters like to make claims such as the following: “Usually students take six years to master 2,500 characters. With ICT they can learn 2,000 characters in a year. With this they can spend less time learning Chinese and more time on other subjects like English, Music and Science. With ICT, six-year-olds can write essays within a month!”
While I believe computers can help people learn Chinese characters, that’s roughly 10 characters every school day. I just don’t believe that all of those would be learned and fully retained. Where are the scientific studies? Does anyone know anything more about this?
On the other hand, Hanyu Pinyin can most definitely be learned within a month. Once that is done, people, including six-year-olds, are limited in what they can write only by the extent of their vocabulary.
What is meant by “master”? To be able to write that many characters by hand or just read & recognize? Taiwanese people forget characters all the time, in the sense that they are unable to write a character for their life (ask someone, say, to write the lyrics to the national anthem) at times.
Also, does this presuppose command of the language?
I agree that one can learn pinyin very quickly. I generally use bopomofo, as more Taiwanese are familiar with it; however, I find I can read pinyin faster, so I use it when learning songs. Also for typing in an instant messenging context it’s more forgiving, with the one flaw that I cannot make an umlauted-u (ㄩ in bopomo) which causes some problems.