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Chinese characters hard to learn? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| MeshGearFox Senior Member United States Joined 6695 days ago 316 posts - 344 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 33 of 40 01 February 2007 at 4:05am | IP Logged |
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Hm. Kanji, hanzi, and whatnot -- they're more visual than phonetic alphabets. I've been told that one's visual memory is better than one's word-memory. In addition to this, I'd imagine that the fact that Chinese characters simply carry more information per character would provide for additional "memory hooks" if you will.
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| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6768 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 35 of 40 01 February 2007 at 8:47am | IP Logged |
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Still, you have the advantage that basic kanji/hanzi – sun, moon, fire, mouth, tree, etc. — resemble their meanings, and there's a large class of characters where one side lends meaning to the whole character — like metals which all have the gold radical on the left.
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| MeshGearFox Senior Member United States Joined 6695 days ago 316 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 37 of 40 01 February 2007 at 6:25pm | IP Logged |
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Tadeo, that's not what I meant. I don't mean you can deduce a single character's reading and meaning from the look of it, or that a single character's radicals tell you much about the meaning or whatever.
I mean that with the characters, you have to remember the shape of the character, the reading, and the meaning. These are three separate elements that must be associated. So yes, while that's more to remember, at least for me, having to remember three different things about the same unified concept makes it EASIER for me to remember. With whole words, then, it wouldn't matter if the components make any logical sense -- the wood-rice-woman thing would have some sort of peculiar mnemonic value, at least, and again, you'd be memorizing the word's entire reading and not just the separate components of it, and the meaning, and whatever etymological elements you can figure out from the formation. Yeah, more things you have to remember, but -- and maybe this IS just me -- the more I have to remember about a single *something*, the more I'm likely to remember more of that information and what said something is in the first place. And, as I understand it, the advantage of radicals is that you can see the patterns the characters are made of instead of simply seeing them as random shapes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| victor Tetraglot Moderator United States Joined 7318 days ago 1098 posts - 1056 votes 6 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, FrenchC1, Mandarin Studies: Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 39 of 40 02 February 2007 at 9:45pm | IP Logged |
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MeshGearFox: While I do agree with you that there are three separate elements to remember for Chinese characters, English only makes it easier in the writing/reading sense. Knowing the reading doesn't really mean you can write it, and sometimes it's difficult to say what you can write!
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| Yukamina Senior Member Canada Joined 6264 days ago 281 posts - 332 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean, French | Message 40 of 40 20 October 2007 at 10:12pm | IP Logged |
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I'm studying Japanese, not Chinese, but with my experience with kanji, I don't think it's impossibly hard to learn enough characters/words to be able to read Chinese fairly well(even if you are missing a few words per page, you'll still know what's going on. When I read in English, I might not even notice if there are words I don't know/don't know well on the page)
If you learn the characters systematically and/or with mnemonics, it's much easier. Once you've learn a enough(~600ish?) it gets easier too. So, say you learn 30 characters a day. You would know 6000 in less than a year. But since you need words to actually read...if you learned 30 words a day, you'd still know 10 000 words in less than year. Does this sound too crazy? When I dedicated myself to learn the meaning/writing of 2000 kanji, I learned the second half in a couple weeks, at about 100 a day. And I've been learning about 50 kanji compound words a day. So I think it can be done. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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