Is it possible to read chinese without speaking it

These courses are meant to be consumed quickly, usually via audio but sometimes on a computer. If you start these about a month before leaving on your trip and remain diligent in your studies, you should be more than competent enough to get around China. Here is what I have personally used along with my thoughts:. I used Pimsleur Mandarin before I left for China and I think it gave me an excellent head-start on learning the language. Because in the all-audio format it forced me to learn a Chinese accent without worrying about the characters.

Pimsleur also offers a full Chinese Level 1 Course which is excellent for someone coming to live here but would be overkill for a traveler. Unlike Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone Mandarin functions either on your computer or mobile device. As a short-term travelers, this will be the most important. There are enough people who just want to travel to China without speaking the language that many companies have catered extensively to you.

There are day trips, 10 day trips and longer available to pretty much any place that you might want to go. For example, you can try to navigate around Shanghai on your own, or you can explore some of the most under-appreciated Shanghai destinations with an English-speaking guide to provide historical context. The bottom line is, these companies will charge you for a pleasant trip in China. In short, you can rest assured that a trip to China does not require you to speak Chinese.

It is possible to get around China sometimes using only English and most certainly using voice translation apps on your phone or Mandarin phrasebooks. I encourage you to take some time to learn as much as you can before you leave, though. One thing is for sure. The time spent learning the Chinese language will only benefit you — whether now or in the future. These simple but often overlooked tips could make or break your trip!

You want to be able to read and write. You want to be able to pronounce things correctly. Roman letters can just get in the way. Chinese characters, on the other hand, are a different story all together. They are no guide to pronunciation. I suppose I'd use Pinyin If you're in China, it might work for you. If you focus on learning speaking, listening and reading, you will quickly develop your Chinese skills needed.

I learned early on that I was wasting too much time trying to memorize character strokes. Once you get past understanding pronunciation, just invest time in reading Chinese Characters with Pinyin on top, then move to Chinese characters with pinyin at a later section in the book.

Eventually, you will only need pinyin when learning new characters. This way, you get the best of both worlds, can expedite your learning and you will still be able to type Chinese using pinyin input. But that was from according to Wikipedia, and apparently was fought over control of Korea. Need to clarify whether by "learning Hanzi" you mean only learning to read it or learning to write it.

The former is easier. Also need to clarify what you mean by "a proficient level. You will get better advice after that. Whether you want advice or not is another matter. Your original post sounded more like a declaration of intent. Just out of interest, what does your personal tutor think about your plan? I also must wonder and ask how much language progress you have made since your last post on this topic in March?

Well, it can be done, but let's face it. Your Chinese will pretty much resemble that of a migrant worker. No offense to migrant workers. To be fair, I have had many conversations with well-spoken taxi drivers. However, on the whole, they're far from eloquent. In other words, if the OPs objective is to be conversant in daily routines, this would be fine. I think the correct approach indeed lies in writing by hand vs. I don't think learn to read is extremely hard, but learning to distinguish between several thousand characters, remembering how to write them all and keeping track of which characters go together in which words, that takes some serious time.

Learn how to write the most common characters in the beginning, though, because that really helps with understanding characters. So, I wouldn't remove characters entirely for reasons others have already elaborated on , but I would definitely cut down on or remove handwriting. That's what takes the most time compared with how much you actually get out of it.

Jeez, was the last post really in March? My progress has been abysmal. First one laoshi didn't show up after New Year, then I contemplated getting the hell out of Mainland, which made sitting down to study Chinese difficult in the middle of looking at job advertisements back home you could say one doesn't complement the other. I quit trying to learn hanzi, which ruined any structure I felt I had in my self-studies.

Being a visual person, learning a character seemed easier than learning the sound of a word. But it just took too long, and my conversational skills did not progress though my reading incrementally did. Now, reinvigorated and remotivated and also staying here in Mainland for the foreseeable future, so this helps a lot , I will try this whole 'immersion' thing once more and see how far I get without studying hanzi.

I highlight words or grammar I do not understand, and keep a notebook until I have a native speaker with me to break it down. Then, I can input these things into Supermemo to memorize words, etc. And of course, let's not forget the Japanese invasion-themed dramas and cartoons, and listening to talk radio in the office, impossible to understand as it all may be. One of them number three in the article I just linked to is the problem of remembering the correct tone.

I think this is a problem common for all learners, from beginners all the way up to advanced learners. Now, if you read a text without any annotation at all, this problem could in theory persist forever.

If you annotate the text with tones, you get the benefit of reinforcing your knowledge of tones while still avoiding the distraction of Pinyin. This is particularly useful for reading aloud, which is hard enough as it is.

There are two simple ways you can add information about tones to a Chinese text without also adding Pinyin.

You can either use colours or tone marks only. Colours can be used to annotate tones. The idea is simple, just let each tone correspond to a colour, and then colour characters according to the tones with which they are pronounced. The link between the colours and the tones is completely arbitrary, of course. There are in fact many different colour schemes, which is one of the disadvantages of using colours unless you always have control over which scheme is used.

This can be learnt, of course, but still takes some getting used to. I wrote more about this here:. Does using colour to represent Mandarin tones make them easier to learn? The second method, which I prefer myself, is to add tone marks without Pinyin.

This can be done using another nifty tool over at Purple Culture. The same text looks like this:. Update: After writing this article, I e-mailed Purple Culture to ask them if it were possible to add a dot for neutral tones.

They have now updated their tool so that is adds dots for neutral tones! The above picture represents this new output rather than the original version which had nothing at all above characters with neutral tones. I personally find this method more appealing because it gets rid of the arbitrary colours and sticks to tone marks, which are directly linked to the contour of the tones.

Still, to each his or her own! I think both methods work and they serve the same purpose. Which method do you prefer? Leave a comment! Godfroid, A. Language Learning , 67 4 , Wang, X. Training for learning Mandarin tones.

In Handbook of research on computer-enhanced language acquisition and learning pp. IGI Global. Tips and tricks for how to learn Chinese directly in your inbox I've been learning and teaching Chinese for more than a decade.