Should you learn to speak Chinese before you learn Chinese characters?

One of the most hotly debated topics in Chinese language pedagogy is the question of when to introduce Chinese characters.

As a student, should you learn Chinese characters from the very start, in parallel with the spoken language, or should you delay the learning of Chinese characters and focus on the spoken language first?

And if you delay learning characters, then for how long should you delay learning them? The delay can be very short and relevant only for the content you are studying.

For example, you can first listen to a dialogue, then talk about it, and then finally read the transcript and learn to write the characters.

This is very different from delaying character learning for months or even years, becoming fluent in the spoken language before even starting to learn the written language (as native speakers do).

Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#1 or #261).

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Learning to speak, read, type and handwrite Chinese characters

The question of when to introduce characters has several layers to it:

• When to start reading characters
• When to start typing characters
• When to start writing characters by hand

Most of the discussion in this article is about when to introduce characters at all, so it covers all the cases above. Since learning to write characters by hand takes much longer than just learning to read them, however, it follows that an approach that introduces reading early, but delays handwriting, slows down acquisition of the spoken language less than an approach that emphasises handwriting.

Still, this article is about delaying learning the writing system in general, not just handwriting characters. If you’re interested in handwriting specifically, I suggest you check these two articles:

• Chinese character learning for all students
• 16 reasons to learn to write Chinese characters by hand

Chinese character learning for all students

What’s easy to say in Chinese is not necessarily easy to write

Furthermore, it’s not obvious which characters we’re talking about. Should they be those that are needed to write what we learn to say? Or should they be the most common characters in written Chinese? Or perhaps the most basic building blocks?

Another approach is to treat the written language as a completely separate entity, which could be learnt either in parallel with, after, or even before the spoken language. Such an approach acknowledges the fact that something easy to say is not necessarily easy to write, and if you learn to write what you learn to say, the learning curve will be very steep indeed.

Compare starting with writing characters like 我 (wǒ), “I; me”, 你 (nǐ), “you”, and 是 (shì), “to be”, which are all extremely common in spoken Chinese, with starting with basic building blocks, such as 人 (rén), “person”, 日, (rì), “sun” and 月 (yuè), “moon”, first and gradually building up to more complex characters.

In most courses, students learn to write what they learn to say, but in this article, I will focus mostly on the timing issue, rather than on whether or not you should learn to write the same words you learn to say. For an example of a course that is based on what makes sense solely based on the writing system, you can check out the character course I’ve built for Skritter, which uses this approach.

If you’re not interested in the timing issue, but rather how to learn characters in general, I suggest you head over to this article instead: My best advice on how to learn Chinese characters.

My best advice on how to learn Chinese characters

To delay learning Chinese characters…

The reason the question of delaying character learning is a hotly debated topic is that it is possible to argue either way, depending on your own opinions about the meaning and purpose of learning Chinese.

The main argument in favour of focusing on the spoken language first is that it takes a disproportionate amount of time to learn characters. If you learn how to write everything you can say, students will end up spending most of their time on the written language, which will inevitably slow down their progress in the spoken language.

…or not to delay learning Chinese characters

But it is also easy to argue the opposite and say that the written and spoken language are intertwined, and that you can’t really say you are learning a language if you only focus on one side of it. Are you learning Chinese if you’re not learning the characters?

While I have nothing but personal experience to back this up, I have a feeling that native speakers who teach Chinese voice this argument more often than non-native speakers such as myself.

Some people also claim that Chinese can’t be understood without the writing system, arguing, among other things, that communication would break down if Pinyin (a way to transcribe Chinese using the Latin alphabet) were used instead of Chinese characters. There are simply too many homonyms (words that are pronounced the same way, but mean different things).

This is nonsense if we are talking about the majority of adults who learn Chinese as a second language. It is perfectly possible to become fairly advanced in a language without knowing how to read and write, even if this comes with some problems of its own (more about this later). Homonyms don’t become a real problem until well beyond the beginner stage, and we’re talking about delaying the introduction of characters here, not skipping learning them entirely.

English also has homonyms. The sentence “I want to be there for you” consists of only homophones (“eye wont two bee their four ewe”), yet nobody would find this sentence hard to understand in context. Still, I don’t want to dismiss the problem of homophones entirely, because there are many more than in English. However, as I mentioned, this is not a significant issue for beginners, and it’s doubtful that learning characters would even help.

Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 6: Why is listening in Chinese so hard?

Delaying Chinese character learning: A tricky topic to research

The debate is further complicated by the fact that it’s almost impossible to do empirical research to prove who’s right, because there are so many variables involved.

• How long is the delay?
• When do you start reading characters?
• What about typing?
• Or are we talking about handwriting?
• What’s the curriculum like?
• Who are the students?
• Who’s teaching them?
• What teaching method is used?
• How are they tested?

And so on.

This doesn’t mean that people haven’t tried researching this topic, of course. For an overview, see Ye (2011), whose dissertation strives to answer this question and has a comprehensive overview of the literature.

For those who want to read more, I have added more articles to the reference section at the end of this article. One thing most people seem to agree on is that delaying character learning is great for developing spoken proficiency, which we’ve already talked about and which ought to be fairly obvious.

Yes, you should delay learning Chinese characters, one way or another

In general, I think it makes sense to delay learning characters in favour of developing the spoken language first. That doesn’t have to mean that the entire process is delayed for months or years, just that you make sure you have a solid foundation in the spoken language before starting to learn characters seriously.

The problem with learning characters is that it takes too much time from other areas and will slow down your learning. The writing system is one of the main reasons that learning Chinese is difficult, and if you postpone the introduction of that obstacle, you can learn the spoken language at several times the speed.

Spending time learning characters instead of mastering pronunciation is a really bad idea, and one you will regret later. Doing the opposite, neglecting characters for some time until you have grasped pronunciation, has no serious drawbacks at all.

Once you can speak basic Chinese, learning the writing system becomes much easier as well. You now have those pesky tones and tricky initials and finals under control, freeing up mental capacity to tackle characters.

Furthermore, there is plenty of research in support of phonology playing a major role in reading Chinese, even when reading silently (see, for example, Ziegler et al., 2000). Learning to read is easier when the spoken language can support your efforts. This is also what native speakers do.

Reasons for learning Chinese characters along with the spoken language

Now that we have looked at the case for postponing characters, let’s consider the alternative, which is by far the most common approach in formal education.

There are several reasons why you might want to learn characters in parallel with the spoken language, or at least why you might not want to delay learning characters for too long.

I still don’t recommend that you learn to write everything you can say, but rather that you put some effort into character writing early on. If you put the same amount of effort into both, your reading and writing will still lag far behind your listening and speaking, which is perfectly in order.

Learning Chinese characters in parallel with the spoken language makes more sense in certain cases:

1. If you’re not learning Chinese in an immersion environment, it can be difficult to find materials that support learning without using characters at all. Sure, you can find a few people to speak with, a tutor, a textbook and some podcasts, but without someone to guide you, it will be hard to rely only on the spoken language. If you study in an immersion environment or have people around you who can help you and talk to you in Chinese at your level, focusing only on spoken Chinese is doable.
2. If you study Chinese anywhere near full-time, you might find it difficult to spend all your time talking to people or listening to them, especially if you’re an introverted student. Sure, you can find learning materials using only Pinyin for reading (or use tools to convert characters to Pinyin), but this is hardly practical. It will be easier to make the most of your time if you can spread the time over completely different areas, simply because it’s more varied and stimulating. This is a matter of time quality.

So, the bottom line is: Yes, you should delay character learning, at least until you have a good grasp of basic pronunciation.

This doesn’t mean that you should learn zero characters; it just means that learning characters shouldn’t take up a large proportion of your study time. Later, you can ramp up character learning as much as you want, depending on your goals for learning Chinese.

Short-term delays: Reception before production

Even if you are learning the spoken and the written language in parallel, as most of us do, you should still sequence the learning in a way that emphasises the spoken language first, and makes sure that reception comes before production. In essence, that means:

1. Listen and understand before trying to learn how to speak and make yourself understood.
2. Read and recognise characters before learning to write them on your own.

This results in a sequence that looks like this:

Listening → Speaking → Reading → Typing → Handwriting (optional)

Depending on what software you’re using for vocabulary learning and reviewing, this can be handled in different ways. Anki is very flexible in this regard, so I will use it for this example, but you can achieve similar results with other software, too.

There are four basic types of flashcards to consider:

1. Listening – Audio on the front, the rest on the back.
2. Speaking – Definition, cloze sentence or picture on the front, the rest on the back.
3. Reading – Characters on the front, the rest on the back.
4. Writing – Definition, cloze sentence or picture on the front, the rest on the back.

If you want to learn a bunch of words, such as key vocabulary from a story, you then go through the sequence in order. You add all four cards for each word, but suspend all except the listening card.

You then go through those words for a few days or weeks, focusing only on listening until you feel comfortable with them. After that, you activate the speaking cards and have a go at them. You then move on to reading and writing, although you can of course treat the spoken and written language separately if you prefer.

For more about flashcards and how to use them for optimal results, check the series of articles starting here: Why flashcards are great for learning Chinese

Make learning easier by focusing on reception first

This approach is helpful because it eases you into speaking and writing. It’s very hard to know how to say things correctly if you’ve never heard them before, and the same is true for writing something you haven’t seen often enough. This is particularly true for beginners, and especially when it comes to pronunciation.

To make the most of this approach, you should be at different stages in the cycle for different words, so you don’t take a batch of words and see them through the whole process before starting the next batch. Instead, you might have one set of words at each stage, adding a new set only when another set exits the process (nothing ever really ends, of course, but rather moves into long-term retention mode).

If you want to do this in class without your teacher’s explicit support, you have to start listening and reading ahead of time, making sure you’re at least a few weeks ahead of your classmates, focusing on listening and reading before you’re forced to deal with speaking and writing in class.

Sadly, many Chinese teachers force you to say things immediately after hearing about them for the first time: “Here is a sentence pattern, here is what it means and how it works, here is one example, now make your own sentence!”

Read more about why listening is more important than speaking here. This can also be applied to reading and writing, of course: Is speaking more important than listening when learning Chinese?

Is speaking more important than listening when learning Chinese?

A simpler and more natural approach to learning Chinese

A more natural way to apply the same principles is to focus heavily on comprehensible input (listening and reading) through graded readers and listening content aimed at your level. If you immerse yourself in Chinese, focusing on general understanding, you will acquire words and grammar naturally.

When you do this, it’s essential that you focus on content at the right level (i.e. not too difficult), because otherwise, you won’t see words and grammar patterns used in enough contexts. If you read a difficult chapter in a textbook, you spend a lot of time seeing just a few instances of each word, but if you spend the same amount of time reading a graded reader at the right level, you’ll be able to read ten times as many characters.

I wrote more about how to manage difficulty when listening in this article, which can also be applied to reading: The Input Pyramid: Chinese Listening for Any Situation.

Conclusion: Yes, you should focus more on the spoken language first

As I hope is clear by now, the question of when to start learning Chinese characters is complicated. It is, in fact, more complicated than I have let on here since it also touches on many other issues, including reading, typing and handwriting. My goal with this article was to provide you with an overview of the topic so that you can find an approach that suits you if you’re a student, or your students if you’re a teacher.

In my opinion, the conclusion is straightforward. For most people who aim for long-term proficiency in both spoken and written Chinese, the case for delaying characters is very strong. Focusing more on the spoken language initially has many benefits and no serious downsides. Focusing too much on the written language at the expense of the spoken language does have serious downsides.

This doesn’t mean that you should learn no characters at all as a beginner. It just means that you should avoid adopting an approach that leads to spending too much time with the written language. Learning to recognise some important characters, studying how the writing system works and even learning how to write a bit by hand is fine.

Just don’t let it take up too much valuable time from learning the spoken language.

References and further reading

Dew, J. E. (1994). Back to basics: Let’s not lose sight of what’s really important. Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, 29(2), 31-46.

Knell, E., & West, H. I. (2017). To delay or not to delay: The timing of Chinese character instruction for secondary learners. Foreign Language Annals, 50(3), 519-532.

Packard, J. L. (1990). Effects of time lag in the introduction of characters into the Chinese language curriculum. The Modern Language Journal, 74(2), 167-175.

Poole, F., & Sung, K. (2015). Three approaches to beginning Chinese instruction and their effects on oral development and character recognition. Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(1), 59-75.

Ye, L. (2011). Teaching and learning Chinese as a foreign language in the United States: To delay or not to delay the character introduction.

Ziegler, J. C., Tan, L. H., Perry, C., & Montant, M. (2000). Phonology matters: The phonological frequency effect in written Chinese. Psychological Science, 11(3), 234-238.