Part of “Pinyin Was Plan A” tiandi.info Post Added To and Rewritten

Some of the material under the Meanwhile... subheading of the tiandi.info post “Pinyin Was Plan A” has been added to and rewritten.

Here is the current form of the section that was added to and rewritten:

The current reality is that it is good for those in the Chinese field to learn as many Chinese characters as they reasonably can. However, experience has shown that focusing too much on characters can cause one to get bogged down with their multifarious complexities and vagaries—while a picture may be worth a thousand words, it can take a thousand words or more to precisely describe a picture! All these complexities and vagaries can slow one’s progress in mastering other aspects of the language that are actually more important in the Chinese ministry. What other aspects are these? John DeFrancis, the linguist mentioned above, said in his book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy that

Speech is primary, writing secondary

Meaning is ultimately carried in the sound of a language; writing mainly carries meaning not in itself, but because it represents the sound of the spoken word. This primacy of speech is not functionally or culturally poor or limiting, as held by some proponents of Hànzì and their contained meaning. Note what multiple award-winning composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim (who wrote the lyrics for West Side Story) said about something that, like speech, is made up of sound alone:

Music is the richest of the arts because it’s the most abstract. And it is so filled with emotion.

Yes, speech is made up “only” of sound, but then so is music, which is merely the richest of the arts! Since it is so closely related to something that is the richest of the arts, it should come as no surprise that when it comes to language, “speech is primary”.

That means that understanding and speaking a language are even more important than reading and writing it. Indeed, understanding and speaking are the proper foundation upon which reading and writing must be built, not vice-versa. That is a basic fact about language, and about how Jehovah created us to learn and use language. For example, a baby naturally first learns to understand a few words, then one day it sees its father and says “Dada”. Only later does it learn to read and write the word “father”. A baby who writes out “father” before it ever said “Dada” would be most unusual!

Also, Jehovah built right into us the specialized equipment we need to directly produce speech, but we can only produce writing indirectly through the general purpose tools that are our hands, which generally must do so using man-made tools and media such as pens and keyboards and paper and computer screens. So, Jehovah himself supports that “speech is primary, writing secondary” in the very way he designed our bodies.

In our ministry specifically, we definitely need understanding and speaking much more than we need reading and writing, as important as they are. For example, a Japanese sister once explained to me that since Japanese writing uses many Chinese characters, Japanese people can often understand the meanings of Chinese characters that they read. However, the pronunciations of those characters are different in Japanese. So, before a Japanese publisher can be effective in the Chinese ministry, he must still first learn how to understand and speak Chinese—knowing the meanings of the characters is not enough. Think about it: When witnessing, what good is it for you to know the meanings of the characters in a scripture if you can’t

• introduce it,

• pronounce the words in it correctly when reading it out,

• explain it understandably,

• understand the student’s questions,

• or answer the student’s questions effectively?

Conversely, we can often give a good witness just by understanding and speaking Chinese, even if the opportunity does not arise to read or write any Chinese while doing so.

In view of the above, it may be good to keep in mind the counsel in the January 15, 2011 Watchtower:

Jehovah’s Word urges us to “make sure of the more important things.” (Phil. 1:10) Likening the Christian life course to a long-distance footrace, under inspiration the apostle Paul recommended: “Let us also put off every weight . . . , and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.” (Heb. 12:1) His point was that we must avoid needless pursuits, needless weights, that will tire us out. It may be that some of us are simply trying to squeeze too much into already busy lives. . . . Reasonableness and modesty should move all of us to recognize our limitations and keep unnecessary commitments to a minimum.

Yes, overemphasis on Chinese characters can be a burden that weighs us down rather than helping our progress in learning and using Chinese. And as the above counsel from The Watchtower emphasizes, we really do need to avoid things that weigh us down on the long-distance marathon of our Christian lives, let alone our long-term efforts to learn Chinese. Yes, to us it is indeed a significantly bad thing that Chinese characters are as hard to learn and remember as they are.

As it says in the recently posted update:

I have just rewritten some of the material under the Meanwhile… subheading of this post. Also, recently, I added Pinyin with tone marks for the Chinese names that were previously written only in English, without tone marks.

I continue to believe that the subject of this post is one of primary importance to those of us who are learning Mandarin for the Mandarin field, and I will likely continue to add to and tweak this post in the future.

I highly recommend coming back and rereading this post once in a while, both to catch any recent additions and tweaks, and also just to refresh your memory about this subject that is of primary importance in our language field.

Again, here is the link to the entire post:

“Pinyin Was Plan A”

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