Why Learning To Write Chinese Is a Waste of Time: A Modest Proposal

Abstract: This article argues that for students of Chinese and Japanese, learning to write Chinese characters (hanzi/kanji) by hand from memory is an inefficient use of resources. Rather, beginning students should focus on character/word recognition (reading) and electronic writing. Although electronic technologies have diminished the usefulness of Chinese character handwriting, its cultural importance remains. This leads to a hegemony of hanzi/kanji through which the assumed primacy of the written language is reinforced. After reviewing these conditions, strategies are offered to integrate handwriting skills with the new electronic writing technologies, creating an efficient and culturally sensitive program of instruction in hanzi/kanji writing. The article concludes with suggestions for further research needed to explore the theses of the essay. Key words: Chinese, Chinese characters, electronic writing, hanzi/kanji, writing instruction Language: Chinese (ProQuest: ... denotes Greek characters omitted (or Cyrillic characters omitted.) Introduction The title of this essay is perhaps unnecessarily provocative. My thesis is quite simple: Learning to write Chinese characters (hanzi, or in Japanese, feanji)1 from memory is an extremely inefficient use of time for students of Chinese as a foreign language-and this may be even more so for students of Japanese as a foreign language. It is inefficient for a very straightforward reason: The time necessary to learn to write the characters is inversely proportionally to the usefulness of that skill. The inefficiency is twofold. First, learning to write Chinese characters consumes an extraordinary amount of time, particularly at the early stages of language learning when the student has no linguistic frame onto which to attach the rote memory; at the same time, opportunities that students will have to practice this skill in any natural fashion are extremely limited in the early (and maybe most) stages of language learning. As Walker (1989) writes: Chinese orthography is a major factor in the difficulty of learning to function in Chinese. That being so, writing is the most time-consuming activity for the learner. . . . For reasons too diverting to explore now, the return to the learner for the hundreds of hours spent writing characters has a smaller payoff in terms of functioning as a participant in a Chinese society than the work she puts into any other of the skill areas, (p. 65) The second contributing factor in this inefficiency is that in almost all Chinese social settings today, the need to write the language by hand is rapidly declining. This is even truer for Japanese, where both kanji and the kana syllabaries are fully integrated into electronic media. Electronic writing, both on screen and in print, has taken over most of professional and personal correspondence in these languages. Thus, as Walker suggests, the hour spent learning to write Chinese characters (as opposed to working on skills in listening, speaking, and reading) yields very little benefit for the language student-it may benefit him or her in some other arena, such as self-esteem, but not as an early learner of the language.2 That hour is, literally, a waste of time. I would argue that there are, however, embedded cultural ideologies that complicate this simple formulation; these also need to be addressed. In the first part of this article, I introduce the sources used for this study, including a review of classroom conditions and attitudes seen in the data; I then speculate on the ideologies that inform these conditions. These arguments might be familiar to colleagues who have experience in teaching Chinese or Japanese as a foreign language; I offer this background for the new teacher and for the researcher interested in the culture of writing generally. In the second part of the article, I suggest different strategies for engaging the changing conditions of the Chinese and Japanese as a foreign language classroom, as well as areas of research that need to be explored further to understand fully these conditions. …