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Become Proficient in Chinese Characters When Mastering Mandarin
posted at  2012-03-12 02:05  Lori Finney
Should you be making the decision to learn Chinese languages, then one of the things you will need to ask yourself is whether you ought to learn Chinese characters. Called Hanzi, this intricate system of characters may be rather scary to individuals from the West, hence a lot of people will not bother to be able to become familiar with it.

Should you be just learning Chinese to prepare for a trip and plan to communicate via talking at all times then you probably will be fine if you do not learn the printing. Most people from the West will study Pinyin, a Chinese writing style which happens to be founded on the Roman phonetics and alphabet. This tactic assists you to pick up the Chinese dialect quicker because you will need to only understand the tone plus spelling of every term.

Nevertheless, there consist of a few disadvantages you will come upon if you do not become familiar with the printing. These drawbacks will be particularly obvious should you stay in foreign lands awhile or else desire to learn the dialect of Chinese.

The first predicament encountered is if the expression tends to be a homonym. Homonyms are expressions which have different meanings however sound similar. In Pinyin, these terms will be spelled identically, which makes it complicated sometimes to decipher its meaning. Nonetheless, if you learn Chinese characters, you then ought to comprehend every homonym has its own pictograph character. This knowledge will make printing as well as reading simpler.

The second dilemma happens if a person masters Pinyin first and then wants to be able to study writing later on. Though you will have conversations in the Mandarin dialect, you will be basically studying these symbols from scratch. This scenario puts you at the same level as a young beginner. Furthermore, you will discover yourself completing a large amount of memorization to master the various pictogram characters plus their interpretations.

If you do not mind taking more time to study the dialect of Chinese, then you will find it is much easier to learn printing while you are learning the words. Utilizing this method means studying these pictogram characters together with Pinyin plus their English conversion. It takes more time to be able to become proficient in the complete dialect whenever you learn the writing simultaneously, but your training tends to be even more thorough. Moreover, you will discover comprehending the written expression tends to be an invaluable ability to have.

Whether you choose to learn Chinese characters will be a personal decision. You will possibly find your style of studying allows you to commit the characters to memory very easily. Thus, becoming proficient in just Pinyin at the start might by no means be a problem for you. However, should you be a visual person, you then should find when you learn to print it will be much easier to be able to memorize the expressions. You may want to give both tactics a try in order to determine which tactic is more effective on your behalf