{"id":1014,"date":"2007-11-28T23:18:36","date_gmt":"2007-11-28T15:18:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2007\/beginners-should-skip-writing-characters-by-hand-use-computers-instead-teachers\/"},"modified":"2007-11-28T23:18:36","modified_gmt":"2007-11-28T15:18:36","slug":"beginners-should-skip-writing-characters-by-hand-use-computers-instead-teachers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2007\/beginners-should-skip-writing-characters-by-hand-use-computers-instead-teachers\/","title":{"rendered":"Beginners should skip writing characters by hand, use computers instead: teachers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Sino-Platonic Papers<\/em> is rereleasing a much more recent issue this week. This issue, no. 102 from March 2000, is by two university professors of Mandarin Chinese who advocate a &#8220;penless&#8221; approach for beginning students of Mandarin: i.e., students should use specially designed software on computers to write characters and <em>not<\/em> bother at first with learning to write characters by hand.<br \/>\nHere is the abstract: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In view of the fact that hand-writing Chinese characters is the most frustrating factor in Chinese language learning, we propose in this article a fairly radical approach that could bring a fundamental change into Chinese language teaching. Our suggestion is abolishing the requirement for writing Chinese characters by hand at the beginning of Chinese language learning process, and utilizing Chinese word-processing software instead to help the students <\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>bypass the difficulties entailed by character hand-writing,<\/li>\n<li>achieve an early development of writing skill, and<\/li>\n<li>reach a comprehensive improvement of their language competence.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>In this article, we have offered our assessment on the following three aspects: <\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>The degree to which character hand-writing constitutes a major obstacle to early Chinese language learning;<\/li>\n<li>The benefits of using Chinese word-processing software in acquisition of Chinese language skills;<\/li>\n<li>The side effects from adopting this approach and the possibilities of their overcoming.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>We believe this proposal addresses one of the most pressing issues in today&#8217;s Chinese language teaching, and should generate fruitful discussions among Chinese language teachers, as well as general interest in the field of foreign language teaching.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The full article is here: <a href=\"http:\/\/sino-platonic.org\/complete\/spp102_teach_chinese.html\">Penless Chinese Character Reproduction<\/a>, by Theresa Jen and Ping Xu. This is a quick-loading HTML file. <\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;penless&#8221; approach also has a website: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.penlesschinese.org\/\">Penless Chinese Language Learning: A Computer-Assisted Approach<\/a>. Has anyone tried the software available there?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sino-Platonic Papers is rereleasing a much more recent issue this week. This issue, no. 102 from March 2000, is by two university professors of Mandarin Chinese who advocate a &#8220;penless&#8221; approach for beginning students of Mandarin: i.e., students should use &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2007\/beginners-should-skip-writing-characters-by-hand-use-computers-instead-teachers\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,15,113,106,28,32,128,38,107],"tags":[288,859,289],"class_list":["post-1014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinese","category-chinese-characters","category-computers","category-hanyu","category-languages","category-mandarin","category-sino-platonic-papers","category-software","category-teach-chinese","tag-learn-chinese","tag-teach-chinese","tag-teach-mandarin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}