The Article “SPEECH is Top Priority, Not Characters” Has Been Revised

[Update 2018-08-16: Since this article is no longer accessible from 3lines.org, references to 3lines.org have been removed, and the article link has been updated.]

This article has been revised:

• SPEECH is Top Priority, Not Characters
  This short article boils down what our top priority should be when it comes to learning Mandarin for the Mandarin field, and why, according to Jehovah’s Word and his organization, and according to modern language science.

Here is a paragraph that was added:

Sadly, that “faith follows the thing heard” is made painfully obvious by how, occasionally, publishers leave the Mandarin field (or even leave the truth) because they’re not getting the spiritual nourishment they need from the Mandarin meetings—since they’re not understanding what they hear, their faith is not getting built up. Rather than successfully continuing to help out, such ones instead become spiritual casualties on the Mandarin front of the spiritual war we are fighting. (2 Corinthians 10:4, 5) Learning characters does not fix this—publishers need to learn to understand Mandarin speech to benefit spiritually from Mandarin meetings, because the talks, comments, etc. at such meetings are made of Mandarin speech, not characters. In fact, focusing on characters makes this problem worse because it makes learning Mandarin speech harder and slower. At the very least, it distracts from learning Mandarin speech.