Quotes taken from: "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" David Moser, University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies
Learning to Write Chinese by Hand
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Very few Americans, on the other hand, ever learn to produce a natural calligraphic hand in Chinese that resembles anything but that of an awkward Chinese third-grader.
John DeFrancis, in his book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, reports that his Chinese colleagues estimate it takes seven to eight years for a Mandarin speaker to learn to read and write three thousand characters.
I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper.
Concerning Chinese Immersion
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"Simply diving into the vast pool of Chinese in the beginning is not only foolhardy, it can even be counterproductive. . .With the risk of drowning so great, the student is better advised to spend more time in the shallow end treading water before heading toward the deep end."
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