Yet, I didn’t exactly have the smoothest time myself in learning the language, especially—yup, you guess right—memorising the characters.

I hear all the time on the news or in newspapers that the level of Chinese in Singapore is said to be in decline of late, in part due to the increased use of English. It isn’t uncommon to hear the Chinese speaking English to their Chinese friends, even if their Chinese are of serviceable/decent standard.

I agree that, yeah, it’s unfortunately the case that knowing the characters字isn’t enough, and that a learner has to know the various combinations/词to fully grasp the meaning of many sentences.

Even recognising a character (knowing its pronunciation, tone, meaning) does not guarantee one actually knows how to replicate it in writing. To know the correct characters to write these 字and词requires not just “memory space” for recognition but also a additional memory space for the strokes.

You might recognise and be able to read and understand the词when used in a sentence/in context, but when asked to reproduce it, or at least choose the correct one, one might be stumped. But it’s not just knowing the strokes for the characters, but also which character, out of the many同音词。

Like the case for 打喷嚏: Recognise? Yup. Read/Pronounce? Yup. Write? Erm… oops. (Although I do know how to write it… now).

:^)

I don’t at all doubt the DLI’s rating of Mandarin, but my wager is that it’s (almost) all due to the characters. That’s my central point. I don’t think you can function well in Chinese society if you don’t know characters, of course. But can you achieve pretty good conversational fluency nearly as fast as in any other non-Indo-European languages if you avoid wasting early stage learning time on the characters? I think so.