ZombieKing Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4525 days ago 247 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*
| Message 9 of 15 29 August 2012 at 4:02am | IP Logged |
You can make your own readers :)
With about 10 minutes of effort, you can turn any online text into a reader. Download perapera Mandarin if you don't have it, it's a popup dictionary addon for firefox. Go into options and uncheck "disable keys", this will allow you to press "s" whenever you hover over a Chinese word and save it into your own vocab list. Go through an entire text, doing this with all words you don't know, and then copy and paste the vocab list, as well as the original text into something like microsoft word. Then you can print off both those pages and study them as you would with a normal reader. That's what I do myself with the Little Prince.
For actually learning the characters well, I've found that learning all 214 radicals changed my perception of characters so much. Now I see them in a different and fascinating light. Besides, of the 214, 80% are characters themselves, so you'll learn most of them eventually. If you study the radicals first, you'll realize that actually, Chinese characters are not only logical, but to a large extent, phonetic. And even for characters that aren't phonetic, thinking of them and writing them as radicals (puzzle pieces) of a character (puzzle), reduces the amount of effort needed to be put in. A character with 12 strokes for example, would require you to remember 12 steps. However if that same character had 3 radicals, then that means you only have to remember 3 steps.
Anyways, even if you don't take my suggestions, I wish you lots of luck!
Edited by ZombieKing on 29 August 2012 at 4:02am
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Vegemighty Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4486 days ago 45 posts - 67 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 10 of 15 04 September 2012 at 5:40am | IP Logged |
I just signed up for remember.it two week trial. I like it so far. Thougyh I dont like how you need to give them your credit card info before the end of the two week trial and automatically enroll you if you don't unsubscribe in two weeks.
They say one can learn 2100 or so characters in 3 months with it. I'll see if that really is the case.
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Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5957 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin
| Message 11 of 15 04 September 2012 at 7:02am | IP Logged |
Vegemighty wrote:
They say one can learn 2100 or so characters in 3 months with it. I'll see if that really is the case. |
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I think it's going to mostly depend on how well the approach suits the way your mind works. For instance, Heisig learned 2100 Kanji in about a month...though note the number of forum members who dislike his approach. Good luck to you.
Edited by Snowflake on 04 September 2012 at 7:03am
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Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4669 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 12 of 15 04 September 2012 at 7:21am | IP Logged |
There are 10 shared anki decks called "Mastering Chinese Characters". Each deck has 300+ characters. They come
with very good audio, single character cards, sentence cards, English to Mandarin, Mandarin to English. Personally,
I'm like you. I read and write Japanese fairly well already, so I strip out everything except the Mandarin to English
sentences.
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shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4442 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French
| Message 13 of 15 17 October 2012 at 8:20pm | IP Logged |
I rely on online dictionaries a lot. If you know how to pronounce single characters and
words and know their meaning, you can enter it easily. In 1 click you can select between
Traditional & Simplified fonts. Once you know the basic rules of writing from L to R &
top to bottom the rest is just looking it up. When I'm typing online I don't have to be
writing in every stroke like I do on paper. Just go by the Pinyin or word meaning and out
comes the word.
The characters are hard to learn and even harder to remember. So every once in a while
when I have to write or type something I'd look up a character online to make sure I'm
using the correct one instead of something that sounds the same or similar.
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OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6848 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French
| Message 14 of 15 24 October 2012 at 4:23pm | IP Logged |
Quote:
However if that same character had 3 radicals, then that means you only have to remember 3 steps. |
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You mean three 'components'. A character can only have one radical. The radical (部首, literally "section heading") is the component under which it is listed in the dictionary.
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john33 Newbie Australia Joined 4423 days ago 4 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 15 of 15 29 October 2012 at 1:00pm | IP Logged |
I need to learn the characters, both reading and writing, to make the spoken language stick.
I use Matthews [M] "Learning Chinese Characters" and find it very good. It has mnemonics for both the character
and the sound + tone, for the 800 most common characters. For characters not in [M] I make up my own
mnemonics in a similar manner. I use Anki with Pinyin toolkit to help enter each character and word, including
mnemonic, as I work through NPCR and Pimsleur, and am quite exhaustive in entering all vocabulary I come
across.
I also have a spreadsheet, with one line for each character and word, and columns corresponding to the Hanzi,
English, Pinyin, Radical number (if it is one), phonetic component (if useful), mnemonic coding as in [M], and
various bookeeping. It is then easy to sort so all characters with the same sound, or same radical, or same
phonetic component, etc. are together. I first populate the spreadsheet and then transfer to Anki.
Wenlin is well worth the expense, keeping it open all the time gives interesting info about the characters as they
come up. It is also very good for reading any electronic material.
In summary, [M] + Anki + spreadsheet + Wenlin. Not everyone's approach --- and it needs to be combined with
Pimsleur and shadowing, for example.
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