Memorizing Chinese Characters is NOT the way to learn Chinese successfully

I kid you not - this is a huge myth that pervades learning Chinese. But I was glad to learn from a language teacher recently that I am not the only one who objects to this approach.

The thing is, I used to think this way. As an imperfect bilingual growing up in America, I really did think that the problem was that the Chinese language required us to memorize every single goddamn character - no wonder we were always struggling! And we didn't grow up with it all around us, so we couldn't compare ourselves to our brilliant parents. It just wasn't fair. Plus, we could make fun of their English. Yes, looking back, we were cruel. America had made us hard.

Now, of course, I have a different view. I realize how adolescent my own perspective had been. And wholly unrealistic, on top of that. First of all, I was a kid. The child's developmental stages, as any serious parent or developmental professional can attest to, is a far different reality than the adult brain. My parents, like many immigrants, did not know what it was like to learn both English and Chinese simultaneously as children. They did not start learning English until they got into high school. This is a very different developmental stage than ages 5-10, or K-5. (As many parents also know, 6th-8th grade is also another big developmental leap, as well as the changes that go on still at high school...)

So my parents, like many parents, as well as many professional native speaking Chinese teachers - they have struggled to understand what happens at these early ages of learning Mandarin while being surrounded by an English-speaking environment. I think it has been hard for them to speak against this "memorization" approach because they genuinely think that this is the approach that must be comprehensible to the English-speaking brain.

And my generation fully supported that view because we were made to do a lot of things we didn't understand as children, in order to learn this language. I went through most of my adult life up to having a child with the notion, "Yeah, learning Chinese is really hard; you have to memorize everything cuz there is no alphabet!" And oh, we were worked hard as slaves to do it, too! Yeah, right. Not so fast.

Now that I am a parent, and I've taken my child through these early K-3 stages, I can definitively say that "memorizing characters" as most people think of it, is not the way to go. I now see the illusions and even delusions - all mythologies that take people's focus away from the best practices, away from the things that really are different between the languages and could be better bridged. So in the coming months, I hope to illuminate why memorizing is not the way to go. Engagement is the way to go. And engagement in the right things. You might say, "Well, how is that different?"

My response, "Let's hope you have a giant light bulb moment after you read all that needs to be understood." It needs a paradigm shift in your thinking. Not a terribly big one. Not like Copernicus figuring out the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not the other way around, level of shift. But a significant one that will change your view on what memorizing characters adds up to being.

I get that this is hard. Like I said, I didn't understand this until becoming a parent. Now I see how faulty my own thinking had been, as well as even my parents or other Chinese teachers, and certainly the thinking of parents who don't know Chinese but are participating in this fast-growing experiment of Mandarin Immersion programs in America. I also think that Chinese teachers, despite their perhaps long tenures of teaching, it is hard for them to fully appreciate how powerful the faulty paradigms can be because they didn't grow up in English-dominant societies.

It is nobody's fault. These are the reasons that distinct languages and cultures exist in the first place. But to perpetuate the myths with hubris... that, I think, is distinctly American and needs to be left behind.