Are you counting characters? Maybe you should stop.
This goes back to my objection to the flash card mentality which I wrote about in another post.
I remember once asking my parents about how many characters existed in the Chinese language and how many they knew. They said they didn't really know how many existed, buy maybe something like 50,000. Too big for them. And how many did they know? About 5,000.
I remember thinking, "Impossible!" In that way, I think I was like a lot of kids of that generation - They had achieved so much! We always felt like such failures-in-the-making because we had not achieved or struggled with what they had to do. Their entire group who "made it" over to this side of the Pacific, they had survived two wars (Japan's invasion of China, then the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists), total upheaval of their families, homes, and all their belongings, still managed to graduate with top honors from National Taiwan University, won scholarships to study PhD's at the top universities in the world. (Mine went to Berkeley, many of their friends ended up at all the other usual elite schools.) All this, and they could write about 5,000 Chinese characters while looking at a blank page. Their kids, they would constantly remind us, we had it easy...
So here is a very mildly interesting article (only because it was published in BusinessWeek, not because it is that interesting) about learning Chinese and new technologies that mostly deals with the "character count" issue:
"The New Digital Playbook for Learning Mandarin Chinese"
In China, the official standard for literacy is bifurcated: In urban areas, the ability to recognize 2,000 characters makes a person “literate”; in rural areas, it’s 1,500 characters. To read a Chinese magazine or novel easily, one must know 4,000 to 5,000 characters. Even for native speakers, acquiring literacy takes several years of diligent study. By about third grade, most American students have internalized the main spelling rules of the English language and can write down most of the words they can say. Many Chinese students, meanwhile, are still learning to recognize new characters throughout junior high school or even high school.
But the thing is, not only did my parents never count characters for themselves, they were never taught to be counting and categorizing them. And they certainly didn't do it for the Chinese school that they helped to run. We just had to learn stuff and copy stuff all the time.
So I had no idea what this character-count business was when we started MI. Parents and teachers were flinging little tidbits like the above, and more. But then one native speaking Chinese parent said something to me about character-counting not being enough, then I was handed the Jinshan ZW Books by another parent, whose methodology I then studied as I had my child do all the exercises. Even though she was only in Books 1 and 2, I bought all the books through 6, compared them to other textbooks (MeiZhou, Shuang Shuang, Singapore), and looked through all the books through #12 (elementary for the ZW Books is a 12-book set, while they have developed more for middle and high school), in order to realize that the trick is not to count the characters.
Already, at a very rudimentary elementary level, someone with a beginner's level can see that one character can go on to create many, many vocabularies that are the equivalent of "words" in English. But knowing what those "words" mean and how to use them... wow, what a huge feat.
The structure of the Chinese language is so different from English! Any adult who knows both might be able to explain this to you. One of the best and most concise ways I learned came from some professionals who authored a report for Asia Society, and they used the term "cognate" to reference the disparity.
Vocabulary-acquisition is a challenge that our current school's Chinese Director acknowledges is a huge feat. Our school does not count characters. They refuse. Thankfully, they recognize the "whole language" approach. This does not remove the challenge of vocabulary-acquisition, however. Most "vocabularies" are 2 and 3 characters. But the patterns of meaning, associations and usage can vary so much in response to context. So how do you help a little kid through this? It is very, very, very hard. I do not envy the job of any MI teacher, especially in the face of the craze and hysteria that has hit with parents so overly anxious for their kids to "acquire Mandarin" while not holding themselves accountable for the hard work they need to do themselves, let alone trying to get their kids to do that hard work.
Learning the Chinese language is hard. It is even harder to do it in an English-dominant society. But counting how many characters your kid has "mastered"... It has very little meaning if your kid cannot read a story and be able to talk and write about that story. Usage matters. Engagement matters. Whole language experience matters. These are all routes to increased vocabulary acquisition, which then feeds increased usage and functional ability.
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