I have discovered that students with different mother tongues learn Chinese in very different ways. For Japanese students, I do not spend too much time teaching how to write Chinese characters, because Japanese already uses many characters that are similar to Chinese. However, since Japanese has fewer sounds, many Chinese pronunciations do not exist in Japanese, so I spend much more time helping them improve their pronunciation. For students from France, the United States, Mexico, and other Romance-language backgrounds, I focus more on explaining how to write each Chinese character. Within two months, they are able to write short compositions using Chinese characters. They also understand that Pinyin is only a tool to help with pronunciation and to get started. If you want to go further in Chinese, you must learn characters from the beginning. Every Chinese character will appear again and again in future words. Characters are like letters—how can you write words if you don’t know the letters? Moreover, there are countless different characters with the same pronunciation. You will truly realize this only when you go to China, where even shop menus are written in Chinese characters. Do you think Chinese characters are important? 

My Journey with the Bible