What is your approach to learning characters?

Read only or read and write?

  • I move on after I can read a character

    Votes: 13 81.3%
  • I make myself be able to write it before I move on

    Votes: 3 18.8%

  • Total voters
    16

bulian

Member
I have found I can easily, well, more easily I should say, memorize characters for reading versus writing. IE, out of a hundred characters, I can see 95 of them and say the word. However, I may only be able to write 60 of them or so. I've been adding about 10-15 characters per week and I can memorize them for reading within a few days but it takes a lot longer to remember how to write them so I am slowing down on adding new characters until I can write every one I've added. My question is this-

Do most of you move on once you can read a character or do you stop until you can write it?

My thought has been to just move one and keep developing the ability to recognize them and eventually I will remember how to write them. My wife says I should wait until I can write them all before I move on. My argument is that most of us can read a word and reconize it even though we may not know how to spell a word. There are a lot of words my 8 year old can read but if I asked her to spell the word she could not. So I am asking you all what you do. Wait until you can write it or do you move on once you can read it?

Thanks in advance for your input.
 

caesartg

榜眼
I once read somewhere that the average student will typically learn and forget a character 8 times before it's mastered.

Aside from this depressing outlook, my best suggestion to you for learning characters would be to study their components and use these to break characters down as much as possible into atomic constituents. I would recommend you use something like Harbaugh's http://www.zhongwen.com or his published version of the dictionary. He provides a set of tree structures within which he places the most common characters, highlighting the similarities and differences between them.

Another good book for breaking down the characters would be to get a copy of "Kanji ABC: A Systematic Approach to Japanese Characters", written for students of Japanese, but incredibly useful for students of Chinese too (especially traditional forms).

Once you get used to breaking new characters down, you can really start working on rapidly increasing your character knowledge beyond say 1000 characters.
 

chao-ren

进士
my opinion...Move on after you can recognise the character.
There are just too many characters even for native speakers to remember (on the "first" sight) to the extent of being able to write everyone.

I am of course assuming that the total "universe" of characters you
know is at least 2500. (intermediate-advance student). From this "point"
onwards it is increasingly impractical to write each new charcter over
and over to make sure it "sticks" in your memory.

I think most people remember Chinese characters using the "parts"
approach. ie what is on the "left", or on the "right" side or top or bottom etc..Which radical is being used and why. Just remembering two of the four parts is usually enough because most characters are so unique.

Writing down a character at least once with your own hand is important because we also "remember" a character because we remember the stroke order and the "feel".

This is much like you can't remember the "password" to a particular login screen on your computer but once you sit down and let your fingers play with the keyboard the password can be type out correctly!!

So don't balk just because you seem to be spending what seems like hours copying characters over and over.

After several years of study, most people get an intrinsic feel for what is
a "proper" Chinese character. ie the parts are rarely put together totally random. I forget the study or survey, but a one such study was given to Chinese children who have had on average 6 years of schooling. Enough to read most basic notices or even newspaper. They were tested on rarely seen characters. Anyway the better students could immediately tell you which is a "proper" Chinese character and which is "made-up" artifically even though they haven't come accross the same character in their studies or couldn't recognise the charcter from other readily available reading material.
 

koreth

榜眼
I find it takes me about the same amount of time to thoroughly memorize a character whether I learn to write it or not. (Speaking as a beginning learner, about 700 characters so far.) Learning just to read is less effort at first but I forget more easily and have to review more times before the character sticks.

What makes a big difference to me is the order in which I learn new characters.

Right now I'm working my way through the first couple books in the "New Practical Chinese Reader" series to prepare myself for an intermediate class. Its approach is to start off with simple grammatical structures and give you the characters you need to understand the dialogues and sample sentences. This has the upside of letting you use all the characters in real sentences from the get-go.

But I find that in terms of number of characters per day I can retain, it's much slower than what I started off with: McNaughton's "Reading and Writing Chinese." I was working my way through that from start to finish (rather than just selecting the "elementary" words and going back for the others later) and I found I could retain about 10 new characters a day because of the structure of the book: you learn a bunch of related characters at the same time, so you only have, say, one or two new radicals to remember on a given page of the book.

With NPCR I'm lucky if I can retain 5 new characters a day because they are all more or less random in terms of which components they contain. It is actually a bit frustrating, since I'd gotten used to the 10-characters-a-day pace. Now, in NPCR's defense, I was up to about 500 characters from McNaughton before I switched, so I skip a lot of the simple characters in NPCR. But even without that factor I think it would be significantly slower for me.
 
Writing over and over again is the only real way to remember characters. I came to understand this when I realized that I could type just about anything I can say on the computer but would often forget how to write even simple characters. I have handwritten input on my cellphone, and I find using that to write SMS helps me to remember how to write.
It's not a question of stopping and repeatedly writing each new word you come across. It's about writing often. Make a habit of it and your writing memory will improve
 

Piers

Member
it all depends on your personal goals, of course.

but i think that for a vast majority of students, it's by far most important to learn to hear and speak, more than even reading (which can comesnaturally with a little practice), and much more essential than hand writing. of course i don't major in Chinese literature or anything, but i know that learning to write takes hours of practice every day. learning to speak (and read) is much much easier. learning to write would come either when needed, or when you think you can spend more time learning to write that learning to talk.

writing on a computer or phone is a good way to practice your reading/recognition skills!
 

trickyt

Member
I am trying to learn characters using Pleco Flashcards. I have been at it quite a few years now. To be honest I only spend a few minutes every day, which I am sure you will agree isn't enough. The problem is that if I stop practicing for a week I forget what I have learned. The technique I use is to start with a small batch of characters (say 10), and only when I know them 100% do I add another 10, then when I know the 20, I add 10 and so on. Eventually the number of cards learned becomes too big, say 400 cards, so I reset all cards to "unlearned" and move a small batch of 10 to a new Flashcards set and start all over again, 10 at a time. Usually by the time I do this I have forgotten half the cards but testing and learning them a second time goes faster. I wish Pleco had testing against the clock, so it would be more like a game to beat the clock.
 
I had to create slideshows with audio and string together the characters with a pidgin English definition and put spaces between the 'words' so that the definition of each character was reinforced. Colouring verbs and nouns helped. Memorising the radicals seems to be very important for my mind too - but it's a journey - always open to learning new ways.
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denmitch

探花
Muscle memory is the strongest because the synapse route gets laid down much more firmly. Speaking, writing, and listening are keys to language acquisition. Practice like a gymnast!
 
I think this is true. The body is memory. The body 'is' mind. Pathways (doorways) to it 'do' work but the one door is not the entry to the main room.

It is through action that we learn, remember and modify.
 
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abdrifter

Guest
Lots of good advice above, but let me put my two cents in.
If writing out a character helps you remember it, fine. However, practicing writing in the language you are learning will not help you to acquire the actual language very much. This is true not only of learning Chinese, but any and all other languages. My authority on this is Stephen Krashen's work on language acquisition. In short: we learn languages by understanding messages in the target language. It basically boils down to being able to understand what you read (and of course, hear, too, but reading comes first for more distant languages). We even type using pinyin, and then "read" and select what we mean.Too much emphasis on writing out hanzi is a serious waste of time. By the way, Chinese native speakers read more hanzi than they can write.
I think reading (both extensive and intensive) is basically the key (that's the way I learned English ;))
I'd also like to recommend James W. Heisig's "Remembering Simplified Hanzi" and Alan Hoenig's "Learn & Remember 2,178 Characters".
 

keffot

Member
I have a daily habit of reviewing flash cards with Pleco. I read all the posts my Chinese friends make on we chat moments. I type character transcripts of chineselearnonline.com podcasts, and have their review chinese only lessons among music so they come up random, I save sentences for each character i learn and read it again, i try as much as possible to use Chinese in SMS/wechat with Chinese friends/acquaintances, I write out the dialogues in my textbooks (Integrated Chinese), I use www.memrise.com everyday, aaaaand... that's about it.

Tech I use is basically Pleco and Apple's notes app. I write down everything in Apple notes, because it's on my computer, ipad, phone and iCloud.com. Simple, backed up and kept in Sync. Whilst I use Memrise i only use their website and find their iOS app annoying. Pleco is in the "dock" on my phone, I aspire to be religious about using it and looking stuff up.


On my want list is: Something I actually want to watch in Chinese. TV Shows, movies etc. Most I've find is pure crap, bad acting etc. But I haven't looked very hard. I wish the CCTV ipad app had text for its programs, I wanna add watching a program or show daily to the above routine.


Handwriting I do zero of and I'm interested in opinions on this. I despise writing English by hand, my handwriting is terrible. I almost never do it.

Having to learn to handwrite Chinese put me off learning the language for a loooong time. Is it necessary? I'm now at about 500 Characters, will I get up to 1000 and then really struggle because you need that muscle memory?

I know stroke order, so I can copy characters. I can use handwriting input quite well. I've studied radicals.
 

xiaocu

Member
My experience in learning Japanese is that simply memorizing pictures, ie. isolated meaning, like flashcards is the most effective in wasting time.
It is like wanting to learn how to dance through a set of photos of dancers in different positions.
Language is a certain dance of the mind. It's better to start dancing clumsily from the very first moment than preparing for an impressive
start somewhere off in the future. Whether you will be successful in remembering a character or not has to do a lot with how much context you
provide in the moments of learning and memorizing. I studied Japanese with the help of English material, and now study Chinese from a
German book (none of these languages are my native language). What I found is if there is an expression in German that I am not so familiar with, regardless of whether I check it a hundred times in dictionaries, I will have serious trouble in learning the equivalent Chinese meaning and the character with it. Of course this sounds obvious - if you don't have enough to connect to, than you will struggle. But the same goes to our native languages,
and this we may forget time to time. Best way to learn something new in my opinion is to create something new in your old, "host" environment,
parallel with the very first engagement/ encounter with the new expression - while it's fresh, it is easier to work with it. Look at pictures, people saying out the expression (here the body is what is important), provide a colorful range of different context. When you have forgotten something
the 20th time, there is a certain annoyance and negativity around it and that is harmful and definitely slows you down - to be honest, I think
in this case you will have learnt to forget it as well, so simply repeating the same learning "move" (flashcards) will be very ineffective, as it already
contains the sequence of forgetting. In this case that particular learning experience needs to be overwritten - and this is what happens through
extensive reading, that's why it is so effective. I am not saying flashcards are not useful, I am saying that I would not recommend to use them exclusively to learn new form\meaning. Once you have got a certain piece inside your system, you can happily turn to these flashcards, and this can happen in the course of a few days as well, depending on how much time you spent with studying.

I am taking an intensive Chinese course right now, 18 hours per week with a lot of different types of homework, and we go with around a 100 new
expressions a week, which - since some characters started to be "recycled" - means about 60-80 new characters per week by now. So that is like learning
10 to 15 new ones, but I have to say I wouldnt be able to memorize them, if didnt have to do the homeworks and if I wasnt exposed to them in
different kind of situations so much.

Writing out hanzi is imo never a waste of time, as body movement is basically memory.
Anyway, constant and planned review plus multimedia are key, imo.

I hope it is not a problem to post this here: I have been using iKnow for studying Japanese, and I can only say good things about it. Very useful
tool.
 
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abdrifter

Guest
I think flashcarding any new hanzi as you go on reading is really the best way to go. That way it's both contextual and fun. It almost becomes a game, hunting for those hitherto unknown characters.
 

xiaocu

Member
Yes, abdrifter, one important aspect is that it needs to be fun and excitement! Also, without profund curiosity in the background culture learning a language is really just a pain in the buttock.

I forgot to add two more things to my first comment:
- there is nothing like studying the hanzi - there is studying the language as a complex system of expression and interaction with reality, it's better
not to think of learning just reading and writing (even if that is what it looks like from the outside), because these things are inseparable from the
whole living body of the language
- everyone has a different mind, so there is no formula. There should be formulas to how to explore and recognize our own mental habits and patterns to be able to plan carefully and cleverly a successful study route. Are there any books on this kind of approach that anybody knows of?
 
A

abdrifter

Guest
Lots of books written on the subject, but they are all in Chinese... - just kidding :).
 
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