Learn Chinese Characters by Reading: Foreword by Matt Coss
Learn Chinese Characters by Reading
This summer of 2024, AllSet Learning has published a new book on how to learn to read 200 essential Chinese characters and quickly progress to reading.
Learn Chinese Characters by Reading is a course of 200 characters designed to get you reading real Chinese as quickly as possible. The course works best when you have a foundation in Mandarin vocabulary and grammar plus pinyin, as it focuses entirely on (simplified) Chinese characters and reading. Over 20 units, the book systematically introduces groups of 10 new characters, highlighting their structures and similarities, and then immediately provides simple sentences that you can read using only the characters you have already learned. After 20 units, you will have learned 200 characters, which is enough for basic literacy in Mandarin Chinese. In fact, the end of the book features a collection of short passages containing only the characters you have learned.
Learning to read Chinese without spending a lot of time on writing it (by hand) is a somewhat unorthodox concept, but strongly supported by new research in the field of Chinese language pedagogy. One such researcher is Matt Coss, author of the foreword to our new book. With permission from Matt Coss, we would like to share what he has to say in the foreword to our book:
Foreword by Matt Coss
For far too long in Chinese as an additional language (henceforth L2 Chinese) teaching and learning, achieving proficiency in reading and writing (i.e., literacy) has been the biggest 拦路虎 (lánlùhǔ, lit. “the tiger blocking the road”—a formidable obstacle). But is Chinese actually inherently difficult? This is certainly the dominant narrative, especially given the way that governmental organizations like the United States Foreign Service Institute (State Department) classify Chinese as a “Super-hard language” (State Department, n.d.). To me, though, asking “is Chinese hard” has never been the right question. The right, that is more productive, question is “what can we (teachers and learners) do to make learning L2 Chinese as efficient, effective, and enjoyable as possible?”. The vast majority of L2 Chinese learners want to learn Chinese to be able to communicate functionally—to socialize, to enjoy entertainment, to travel, to develop relationships, and possibly to engage in professional activities—using Chinese for both spoken and written communication. Our teaching and learning, therefore, should prioritize these goals.
Historically and even contemporarily, L2 Chinese pedagogy has conflated a few related but not exactly identical concepts: writing, handwriting, and literacy development. Put simply, the longstanding belief has been that in order to learn to read in Chinese, one must learn to (hand)write many thousands of characters. While it is likely that cognitively there are benefits to learning to hand-write, the key question which has been left out is that of the multiple opportunity costs (plural!) of this overemphasis on handwriting and rote character memorization. First, the most obvious cost is time—students spend hours (and hours and hours) copying characters, often for very low return on investment in terms of retention or functional reading/communication abilities. Second, and equally important, is motivation. Understandably, after spending years focused on handwriting with very little communicative competence to show for it, learners’ motivation decreases, often to the point that they quit learning Chinese before they can communicate for their own goals. A question we, as educators, must continue to ask ourselves, is whether our methods are achieving the desired results, both in terms of language development as well as student motivation and self-confidence. I think it is safe to say that the status quo of the handwriting-focused pedagogy most common to L2 Chinese learning is not ideal for the majority of L2 learners.
Recently, practitioner-scholars across the globe have come together to propose an alternative approach to L2 Chinese learning, one which prioritizes (typed) written communication in tandem with spoken communication, and which shifts handwriting to a minor supporting role in the curriculum (see ‘the e-writing as primary’ approach presented in Chu et al., 2024). This exciting proposal has already been taken up by a number of highly successful L2 Chinese programs across the United States, and many more programs continue to adopt this approach worldwide. While this approach is likely to attract and retain many more learners of L2 Chinese, and indeed help them achieve their desired levels of communicative proficiency without sacrificing (wasting!) their time or motivation, there is still a dearth of resources to support L2 Chinese learning which does not require massive amounts of handwriting. Just when I was beginning to worry about this lack of available resources, John Pasden contacted me to share yet another excellent resource produced by the AllSet Learning team: Learn Chinese Characters by Reading, this set of learn-by-reading characters designed for complete beginner learners of L2 Chinese. What I love about this resource, as both a researcher and teacher of L2 Chinese myself, is that it puts into readily-accessible practice the intuitive but not-yet-implemented idea that one learns to read in any language, including Chinese, by reading. This is exactly the kind of resource I, as a trainer of teachers, will be glad to be able to share to say “see, this is possible!”. Even more, it is a resource that I wish had been available when I was in classrooms in the United States and China learning Chinese myself. I have no doubt that this resource will benefit classroom-based and independent L2 Chinese learners all over the world and will also serve as proof to the naysayers of the e-writing that L2 Chinese learning is no harder than we are making it!
References
Chu, C., Coss, M. D., & Zhang, P. N. (Eds.). (In press). Transforming Hanzi Pedagogy in the Digital Age: Theory, Research, and Practice (电写时代的汉字教学：理论与实践). Routledge.
U.S. Department of State. (n.d.) Foreign Language Training. https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
Matthew D. Coss (高正远) is a doctoral candidate in Second Language Studies at Michigan State University. He has also worked as a teacher of both Spanish and Mandarin as additional languages since 2011 and a language teacher educator since 2016. Matt’s research focuses on improving and assessing L2 learner outcomes and programs/curricula as well as the (potential) symbiotic relationship between L2 education, language teacher professional development, and applied linguistics research. His recent research has appeared in Foreign Language Annals, Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition. He is also the co-editor of two edited volumes, Transforming Hanzi Pedagogy in the Digital Age: Theory, Research, and Practice (Routledge, 2024) and Technology and Instructed Second Language Acquisition: Connecting Research and Pedagogy (John Benjamins, under contract).
You can find Matt’s most recent publication here:
Transforming Hanzi Pedagogy in the Digital Age: Theory, Research, and Practice: 电写时代的汉字教学: 理论与实践 (1st Edition) by Chengzhi Chu (Editor), Matthew D. Coss (Editor), Phyllis N. Zhang (Editor).
AllSet Learning’s new book is here: Learn Chinese Characters by Reading