Week 6 of 52 Weeks of Chinese
You don’t always need a dictionary.
You can figure out the meaning of words more often than not. If you don’t understand 1 or 2 words in a sentence, don’t look them up, try to figure out what they mean without using a dictionary.
Dictionaries are to language learning as calculators are to arithmetic (basic math), i.e. they kinda make you stupid.
The more you use dictionaries, the less you use your brains ability to figure out meanings on it’s own. With over use, you’ll become a lazier and weaker language student. By trying to figure out the meaning of words without a dictionary, you’re strengthening your language learning abilities.
An example: years ago, one of my teachers introduced us to Chinese poetry. He asked us to read a short poem 30 times. None of us knew the ancient Chinese necessary to understand the piece. The first 5 times, I didn’t understand much. Around the 10th time, I started figuring the basic gist. By the 20th time, I pretty much got the main ideas. By the 30th time, my classmates and I were ready to ask questions about the intracacies of the peice.
Actions to take
When learning Chinese, it’s essential to flex all of your language muscles. Next time you try to do some reading, put the dictionary down (or turn off the popup tool) and let your brain do the work.
Weekly update
This was a pretty busy week (working hard on version 1.0 of 3000 Hanzi’s Chinese Reader). I did some reading on Weibo, but not a huge amount. And I studied some flashcards on two occasions. I also read a few magazine articles in the taxi. It was nice to get away from the tools and just let my brain do the work. Overall, it was an average week.
This week’s plan
- Re-organize my study journal. I have some ideas on ways I can improve my study journal to help me avoid some problems I’ve faced (e.g. not remembering to do something I wanted to do). After re-organizing my Chinese study journal, my studies should get more focused.
- Continue reading Weibo. Any suggestions for people to follow?
- Retest my reading speed. Has my study been fruitless? I will see how much progress I’ve made at the end of the week.
Do you find yourself relying on tools like Google Translate or dictionaries when studying Chinese?
Leave a comment.
Good point. Yes, it is would be good to try to figure out the meaning from the context. Most of time, yes, you can sort of knowing what’s going on. However, dictionary has its function too and it is a very important useful tool. I would not say dictionary make people stupid, I would say dictionary is like a wise friend who can lend you a helping hand sometimes when you most need it.
We don’t ask for help all the time, but, sometimes, there is always sometimes …
@Shu: Thanks for your comments. I agree that dictionaries are useful tools, but as they say, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. People use popup-dictionaries and other tools even when they don’t have to use them.
If you’re a beginner, you don’t have a huge knowledge base, so using a dictionary is more essential, but as you advance, you should take the training wheels off.
I go back to the calculator analogy: 40 years ago, people did math problems in their head. Today, people will pull out their cell phone and check the calculator. Are people worse at simple mathematics then they used to be? Yes. Does that make them, in that case, stupider? I’d say yes.
And back to dictionaries: are people more dependent on dictionaries than they used to be? yes. Are people using dictionaries when they don’t need to? Yes. Does that make them stupider when it comes to figuring out the meaning of something they read? Yes.
Steven,
Chinese is not math
If Chinese is that predictable, then learning Chinese will be as easy as 10 +10 or 100×100 or 1250000 x 2399890. No matter how big the number is, the rule of calculation is the same.
Chinese characters are formed through six methods, so called Liu shu: pictograph, indicatives, ideographs, phonetic semantic compounds, mutual explanatory, and phonetic loans. The first four rules refer to the ways of composing Chinese characters, while the last two refer to the ways to use them.For pictograph and indicatives, or ideographs, we might be able to figure out the meanings if we know an extensive range of word roots or radicals. But, the 90 percents of characters we have today is phonetic semantic compounds. The semantic part of phonetic semantic compounds only gives very rough meaning. Some of the characters we are able to guess to comprehend with our Chinese skill and ability, but, some of them are not so predictable as math and some can be very erratic and highly confusing.
Even as a Chinese language teacher myself, I check or consult dictionaries from time to time. Why? I want to know the most accurate explanation, so that I can give my students the best answer I can. We can guess, yes, I can too. Guess can be correct, if our luck is good or if the characters are not hard, but there are many times, the guessing can be very wrong.
So, as I said your article has certain good point — try to figure out the meanings of words through the context first. But, if we are not sure, there is no harm to check dictionaries, and check dictionaries won’t make people stupid.
Have a good day there
@Shu: I never said Chinese is like math. I said using a dictionary is like using a calculator.
Also, at the beginning of the post I said:
I recognize the need for dictionaries, but I think it’s important to try to figure out the meanings of words through the context first.
Steven,
I agree on this sentence of yours –”I recognize the need for dictionaries, but I think it’s important to try to figure out the meanings of words through the context first.”
Thank you for the interesting post:) Have fun learning Chinese!
The only difficulty of this with Chinese is that even if you figure out the meaning, you’re often unlikely to guess the pronunciation. So you’ll understand the sentence, but you may not have acquired a new word from it. Using a dictionary would help you acquire the word for later use.
Also, using a paper dictionary is inconvenient enough that there’s natural motivation to remember the word, in order to avoid going through the process of looking it up again.
Good points.
If you don’t even know the words pronunciation, you should consider looking it up.
I love paper dictionaries (I have over 20 different ones), but in today’s world of IOS and Android, do most students still use paper dictionaries?
Thanks for writing about this issue. I started learning Chinese when the only good electronic dicts were on the Chinese side so I’ve always used a paper dic, although Pleco is nice. Over the years, I’ve gone to various polar ends of this issue from 100% dictionary lookup to no dictionary lookup. To find some balance, when reading I only look up a word if I don’t know a character in it or if it is really annoying. I still find a dictionary useful for learning words, but I make sure that that activity is separated from reading.
@Adam: Thanks for your comment.
I agree: learning words would be hard to impossible without dictionaries. Like you mentioned, finding balance is the key. With all the tools available to people these days (popup browser extensions, google translate, etc.), it’s too easy to go to the extreme of always looking up words, even when you kinda know what it means.
I live in Beijing. Whenever I go to a coffee shop near a university, I almost always see someone studying Chinese inside Google Translate. They just paste the text in and hover over the words to see the meaning. They seemingly don’t even try to think abou the meaning of a word before checking it.