plan of attack

Classes at my school make slow progress, because they are designed so that students learn to write almost every word which they learn to speak and understand. The major exception are class room expressions which students have to learn very early in order to understand the teacher. Those are not (all) taught in writing.

Indeed, learning of Chinese characters is impossible unless the characters are repeated and reinforced very often. In class this happens mostly through reading from the book where previous characters are reused. I am pretty sure that students forget all the words which are not repeated often and I think those are quite a few words, since not every word can be used in every lesson. Since the characters are so complex, forgetting ones that you don't use very often is unavoidable. Since I do not have time to learn Chinese, I am convinced that I should only spend this valuable to learn characters which are of personal use to me, so I have a good chance of remembering them later. Anything else is just a waste of time (and of much time!), since it bears no long-term result.

As a consequence of this, I will have to expand my spoken vocabulary much faster than the written one, otherwise I will just not learn enough words for even the most basic conversations. That's why bopomofo and pinyin are so important to me.

For the written part, I have to find out for myself which characters are worth learning. I will probably have to skip many characters we do in school, simply because there's no chance of using them often enough later, and therefore no chance of ever remembering them. I am trying to come up with a list of characters worth learning:

1. Those on street-signs (traffic signs, as well as shop-signs).
2. Those on menus in restaurants and especially in garage kitchens since the latter have a very short menu written in big letters (on a poster, usually) and I go there often.
3. Some basic characters talking about "when and where do we meet?" which I can use in text messages on the cell phone or computer.

In order to have some success, I have to keep the list short and only learn the most important characters in each category.

Concluding remark: I would much prefer if the school's classes were separate for conversation and writing, so that student's vocabulary and pronunciation would progress faster and effort on reading/writing concentrates on characters that are really read and written often. This would be good for many people, but unfortunately not so for the school's main clientèle: Asian people who come to Taiwan to study at a university. Those youngsters do indeed need to spend all the time, make the big effort to learn to read as well as possible. Poor dudes, they'll need many years!
(As a contrast/comparison: Asian or other students who came to Western countries only need one (yes, one!) or two years of language learning to be able to successfully attend university. As another comparison, some children in any country but China can already read simple and medium texts before they go to school. Chinese kids, however, need for years of education to reach the same level of literacy!)