If my wife is any indication, reading does work to retain language (she speaks Mandarin, reads Mandarin novels, and has no problem w/ the language ever after more than a decade living in North America). Conversely, I had a japanese friend in college that fully immersed with non-japanese friends and liked to spend free time going to the movies. She realized after a couple years that she had forgotten how to write the name of train stations in Japan. Use or lose it, seems to be name of the game.

Chinese characters (used in Japan as well) are interesting in that you frequently have no idea how to write them by hand, but if you use an IME on your phone/computer and can enter it phonetically, you can trivially recognize and select the right one.

Very much so - even if you’re partially immersed.

Grew up with immigrant parents where Mandarin was spoken in the household but lived in a area with no other Chinese-Americans. Even though I was exposed to the spoken language daily, I wound up forgetting how to read and write Mandarin by middle school.

Did my best to re-learn it but I rarely ever read/write in Mandarin so I would just regress after a bit - by this point I think I’ve re-learned how to read or write basic Mandarin at least three times and have regressed each successive time. Interesting note is that I seem to be significantly faster at re-learning things each time I go back to it, but that might just be constant repetition more than anything.

> Interesting note is that I seem to be significantly faster at re-learning things each time I go back to it, but that might just be constant repetition more than anything.

This is the phenomenon exploited by spaced repetition learning. “Trying to remember” is when you learn things the best.

Reading something in Mandarin for a couple of minutes every few days will be better than weeks of effort every few years, even though it's less time spent overall.

I was about to make a comment on the lines of Clewza313's: does your wife retain writing proficiency without the use of a reference?

Yes, she frequents chinese online forums and writes todo lists in Chinese

I've been wondering about this; with logographic languages could you read the language without actually thinking the words. Or in other words could you learn to read e.g. Mandarin without ever learning the language.

You would likely be interested in Literary Chinese, specifically the way they read it in Japan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun )

In theory you can do that with any language that has a written form (eg. English). Just that it's counter intuitive and nobody does it that way.

I doubt anyone _actually_ learns Mandarin without learning how the common characters are pronounced... Unless you don't have to verbally communicate with a teacher / fellow classmates?

I am learning simplified Chinese without the pronunciation. "It significantly cuts the amount of memorization." I thought. I am primarily interested in Chinese internet which I believe will open a massive new world, and understanding how this completely different way of expressing oneself works.

When I go through a text I understand I either don't sound the words or pronounce broken translation in my mind.

I've doubted this approach a few times because, as you say, it's uncommon, but I'm sticking with it and I'm curious what comes out of it in a year or two.

By the way, AFAIK (not an expert) the Chinese internet often uses pinyin to obscure various "sensitive" words, so you might eventually have to learn some pronunciations :)

The article seems about 10 years out of date...

Sure, but it gets the point across.

So you're mapping characters straight onto English? That seems inflexible.

It's not that simple. Let's say you memorized the main meanings of all characters in a Simplified Chinese character dictionary - each sentence you read will feel as if you've understand the verbs and very basic nouns in the sentence, but the way they're connected to each other would be quite a wild guess.

For instance, rewriting your sentence above into something somewhat like this:

I finish wonder this; accept word element character language, you not think word ability read language.

Hardly readable once you start getting long sentences in books. Japanese speakers can't just natively go ahead read and understand 95% of a Mandarin book even if they know all the Simplified/Traditional Chinese characters which are not commonly used in Japanese. They can sometimes understand simple sentences, and can more easily understand, say, street signs.

That's how my Japanese friends get around when in Taiwan. According to them, they understand ~95% of everything that's written, but have no idea how to express any of that verbally.

It's the same the other way round. I'm a from Hong Kong and I have no trouble reading Kanji in Japan. Once I learned Katakana (which usually just transliterates English) I can also decode 95+% of the things written.

And I can't communicate verbally at all...

That said, the voice in my head just pronounces the Japanese Kanji in my native Cantonese...

I've seen this quite a bit- very educated people who forget how to write characters, but can type them and read them easily. I remember reading years ago about how few college students could correctly write "打喷嚏" (to sneeze) without a computer.

There's a video about not being able to write 打喷嚏 (and some other words)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxHskrqMqII