Lately I've been thinking about Middlebrow and his comments on the difficulties of the Cyrillic alphabet -- made as he was preparing for his trip to Russia a while back. It seems there are three basic types of letters: letters which look and sound like Roman letters, letters which look like Roman letters and sound like something different, and letters which look and sound like nothing you've seen or heard before. I'm sure I am simplifying and getting it wrong, but that was the crux of it. One would think that learning the third category of unfamiliars would be the most difficult, but it is actually the second category which presents all of the problems. Something that looks like an "N" but sounds like a "P", for example... These are what throw all of your learning out of whack, because the first category is telling you that you have a head start (that A really does sound like an A!). But you'd be better off to learn and entire language of the third category, a language of sounds and letters that are all unfamiliar, with no head starts.
I've decided to dive into learning Mandarin, for the first time really since I traveled to China in 1997. In the meantime, I learned some Japanese, which gives me a head start on many of the characters. And since Taiwan uses traditional Chinese characters, they are closer to what I already learned studying Japanese (but not exactly, of course, why would it be so easy?). However, most Chinese study materials use the characters that mainland China uses, simplified characters, which I have no real desire to learn yet, since they are like the category two above (familiar but different, and just plain lousy to look at) and because K's family is all in Taiwan.
So that is one issue. But the main thing I seem to be wrestling with in Chinese language acquisition is the tonal component of Mandarin. The ideal way to learn it would be VERBALLY only from a very young age, but as a foreign adult I have a hard time retaining this info without a written, visual reference. Learning the vocab and even learning the characters and learning grammar isn't so hard, it's the retention of the tonal component of the word/syllable that gives me fits. The problem is that pinyin (Romanized pronunciation of Chinese with a tonal marking (or diacritical mark)) is often used to give foreigners a chance... but because pinyin is in Roman letters it is impossible for me to create a permanent link between the sound of the word and and the tone it's supposed to carry... The word for big ("DA") is said with a fourth tone, but if I see the word "da" in pinyin (English) with a number four diacritical mark, it doesn't sink in because the letters D and A are seen all over the place in my life, in that order, and everywhere, and there are other words containing "da" that use different tones.... so a "da" will not always have the same tone inflection so how in the hell do I know which "da" I am looking at if I'm in the world of Pinyin? Using romanized pinyin as a bridge to reading comprehension is actually obfuscating the connection between the word and its tonal meaning. You're back in Middlebrow's second category (things that look familiar, but sound and mean something different), and maybe it's easier in the long run to go to the third category instead...
So I think it will actually be easier to NOT use pinyin once the word and its meaning have been apprehended, but instead to get it out of English as soon as possible, hand off the visual association to a character, and attach a one-to-one relationship between a traditional Chinese ideogram and its tone. "This character here is always a three-tone", etc. And in some ways this is easier than Japanese because each character as one syllable, always, as opposed to Japanese, in which kanji can have many different readings of varying syllables (often a Chinese variant and a Japanese multi-syllabic variant). There are a zillion 2-syllable compound words in Chinese, however, that are slammed together much differently than Japanese...but hey...
K thinks I'm crazy, though, because written Chinese is a huge barrier to 99.999% of all foreigners (and to some locals too, I'm sure), not a LIBERATING device with which to learn a language. This is why simplified Chinese was invented, of course, to improve literacy, because the language is impossible!
One doesn't learn Chinese through the writing. Writing comes after speaking, much after... But I'm going to go the other way, dammit, just watch!
