Matthew's Journal

How do people typically teach the characters for Chinese? For Japanese the stock method is basically brute force memorisation starting with the simpler stuff, with some 'just so stories' about meaning thrown in.

It was fairly similar for me, for Chinese. The first words you learn, for simple conversations, often have very straightforward iconic links to meaning - as well as the "man" character mentioned above (which I think is jin in Japanese), words like "sun/day" and "moon/month" spring to mind. ISTR my teacher explaining the etymology of such characters, with reference to the oracle bone evidence. Sometimes only the radical would be meaningful e.g. in the 3rd person pronouns, "he" used the male radical, and "she" used the female radical. Helpfully they also had similar pronunciations, using the same syllable ta but different tones - so I suppose I might initially have thought of the other (shared) part of the characters as representing the pronunciation, whether or not this was etymologically accurate.

Of course, as time went on, the words became more complex and the obvious connections to meaning rarer and less helpful in general! Sometimes I would notice similarities in pronunciation between characters with a shared component, and sometimes (rather more often, I think) the links would be via meaning, often the radical. But usually I just ended up inventing my own mnemonics, typically linking form and meaning in some etymologically unlikely way :-)

While I believe some people are taught to speak a variety of Chinese before learning to write it (and obviously all native speakers will have done this!) my own experience, and the practice in most FL textbooks I've seen, involved learning characters right from the start, with a great emphasis on correct stroke order and direction in writing. (This made such a deep impression on me that I still feel obliged to draw boxes - for any purpose - as though they were components of a character...) There is, of course, no clear hiragana-like alternative to characters when writing Chinese, and I noticed that the letters home of some of my Cantonese schoolfriends were dotted with occasional English words, where (they said) they had forgotten the character and couldn't be bothered to look it up.

Is it the case that Chinese has only one reading per character?
Pretty much, yes. The idea of "readings" only really makes sense for me for Japanese, where I gather that many characters have both a native Japanese pronunciation (perhaps not even matching the character in number of syllables) and a pronunciation derived from the Chinese pronunciation at the time of borrowing (e.g. ren2 ~ jin mentioned earlier). In (Mandarin) Chinese, each character will typically have one pronunciation, exactly one syllable long (there are probably a few exceptions, but none leap to mind). The many-one mapping occurs rather in the other direction i.e. each syllable, even with a particular tone, will have several different characters available to represent it (with different meanings). In speech, only context can disambiguate most words, though apparently, Chinese people will occasionally sketch a character in the air to clarify which meaning is intended, though I haven't personally observed this.