I once walked into the local grocery store to find a big commotion surrounding my friend Chester from America. About four or five Chinese employees were gathered around him craning their necks to see a piece of paper on the counter near the cash register. I asked him what was going on.

“They wanted to know where John went, so I tried to tell them he’s working in another college now but they didn’t understand. So I wrote it out for them.”

I spoke Mandarin to the shop employees and they confirmed, with huge smiles on their faces, that they couldn’t understand a word of what Chester was saying, but his written characters were very beautiful. They understood from the written message that John went to another college.

What Happened?

Here was an example of a guy who had spent all of his Mandarin-learning energy on the written hanzi characters. He could understand books, street sights, menus, you name it. He could also understand a fair amount of what Chinese people said to him in Mandarin. But when it came to speaking, he couldn’t even put together, “He’s working at another college.”

I have taken the opposite approach. All I want to do is be able to understand and speak to people. I’ve always had a great ability to shock Chinese people by the number of hanzi I don’t know. (Once when Chester and I were talking about our respective language abilities to another friend Chester said, “Put the two of us together and we’d make a really great Chinese six-year-old.”)

Choose Your Battle

My experience with learning Chinese has been that you don’t “just pick it up.” It’s so different and so far removed from English (linguistically and culturally) that anyone who wants to reach even a basic level in Chinese needs to put effort into it.

So you get to choose whether you want to be like Chester or me. Since I’m the one writing the article, I’ll tell you why I chose the listening/speaking route rather than the reading/writing route.

Pinyin Takes Only a Few Hours to Learn

Because pinyin is an alphabet similar to our own English alphabet, you’ve really only got to learn the differences between pinyin and English. For example, “ba” in pinyin sounds like the “bah” in “bah humbug!” rather than the “ba” of “bat.”

Once you’ve got a good sense of pinyin, you can write down and pronounce everything in the Chinese language.

You’ve got to learn some kind of writing system so you can take notes on your new vocabulary and look things up in the dictionary. Pinyin is just fine for that. It’s much better to learn the 26 letters in the pinyin alphabet (all the same ones in English except there’s a “ü” instead of a “v”) and start learning how to speak to people than to try to learn hundreds of characters you need to communicate the basic necessities of life.

Speaking is More Useful than Writing

If you live in China (as I do), it’s much better to be able to speak to people than write to them. In my sixth month in China I was already translating for people who’d studied Chinese for several years in school. But because their studies had emphasized reading and writing hanzi they were unable to communicate with the reception desk at the hotel we were all staying at. I guess they would have resorted to the “Chester Method” and just written down what they wanted to say if I hadn’t been there. But that’s assuming they knew enough hanzi to communicate what they needed.

People Can Read to You

But what about ordering food off a menu? What about street signs and train time tables?

Just ask people to read the street sign aloud to you. You could employ the age-old trick all illiterate adults use to conceal their illiteracy: “I forgot my glasses. Can you please tell me what this says?”

Or, if you don’t care what people think, you can just say, ““Qǐng wèn, zhège zěnme dú?” (Excuse me, how do you pronounce this?).

In about my fourth month in China, I was out and about and needed to find sugar-free peanut butter for a friend who couldn’t eat sugar. There was no time to learn the character for sugar, and even if I had tried, look at how complicated it is: 糖. But I knew it was pronounced “táng.” It was very important that I avoid sugary peanut butter so I just explained what I wanted in Chinese to the shop worker. He immediately picked up a jar and pointed to some characters on the label that looked like this: 无糖. I asked him to read them to me and he said “wú táng.” I knew that “wú” (with a second tone) meant “un-“ or “non-“ so I figured that must be “sugar-free.”

Buckle Up

Believe me, if you choose to let your speaking/listening ability surpass your hanzi you’d better get ready for some raised eyebrows, shocked faces, and a lot of laughter. When I point to hanzi and ask strangers to read it aloud to me, it’s a real shock to them. “How come you’re speaking Chinese right now but you can’t read this?!”

I have to remind them that when they were young they too could speak fluent Chinese but they couldn’t read anything. It was only because they spent hours and hours in school that they learned all the characters. “Just think of me like a child,” I tell them. That seems to set their minds at ease.

Besides, all that time I spend explaining why my speaking and listening is better than my reading and writing just gives me more chances to practice my speaking.

Guest post by Albert Wolfe author of LaowaiChinese.net and Chinese 24/7: Everyday Strategies for Speaking and Understanding Chinese.