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When to begin learning Chinese characters | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| ihoop Newbie United States Joined 4609 days ago 29 posts - 66 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 1 of 13 09 October 2012 at 2:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi all,
As some of you may know, I am now living in Taiwan and am trying to learn spoken Mandarin. I will be here for at least a year, and hope to make some serious progress in regards to learning Chinese. I wanted to gain some insight in regards to when I should begin learning traditional characters. I see so many different opinions about this, so it is hard for me to decide what to do! I figure I can go one of several routes. 1. Learn 10-20 characters a day with ANKI and a word frequency list 2. Put traditional characters on my FSI flashcards and only learn characters that I can actually speak 3. Begin learning characters only after I have solid conversation ability in Chinese 4. Ignore characters until I am fluent in Chinese and then begin my studies. I know some people think that reading is essential in gaining fluency in a language, which is why I am torn between these different options. I just imagine the process of trying to learn the character of ever word I learn in FSI a bit boring! Right now I am so driven to have conversation ability that I just want to focus on spoken Chinese....But, I do not want to regret not learning characters from the beginning. Any and all opinions are welcome! Thanks in advance ihoop 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4698 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 2 of 13 09 October 2012 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Probably somewhere between 2. and 3. I think it's rather pointless to learn characters for something you can't understand anyway.
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| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4677 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 3 of 13 09 October 2012 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Definitely learn food related characters. You'll need them absolutely all the time. Also write down the characters you see on emergency signs, or signs like "toilet".
You'll surely see them often enough, but whatever you choose to do with your character studies, there's easily a hundred characters you MUST know. And food is absolutely essential. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 13 09 October 2012 at 6:30pm | IP Logged | ||
You sound like you're torn between two different options and you're afraid that You're Doing It All Horribly Wrong™. I totally sympathize with this feeling. My advice is to try a couple of options, and then do whatever seems helpful and fun. Sure, knowing characters is useful, but so is speaking, and there's nothing wrong with attacking whatever seems most important. You'll get to it all eventually, in any case. When I started Egyptian, I used Anki to learn 3–10 hieroglyphs per day. I wound up using all sorts of weird mnemonics. Some of them (like pr for a symbol of a house) stuck instantly, while others vex me a bit to this day. When my Assimil course arrived, I could already read most of the common hieroglyphs, and it was certainly handy. But I also had to learn some new ones as I went along. And it all worked out OK. So here are some random ideas you might try. Note that these are not specific to Chinese, so there's lots of room for fine-tuning. 1. Look for a nice big deck of characters. Major bonus points if they're ordered from most common to least common, or in some sort of sensible order based on structure. 2. Suspend all the cards, and unsuspend the first hundred or so. 3. Set your "leech" threshold really low. Maybe 2 or 4 in Anki 2. This will automatically suspend cards that just aren't sticking yet. Also, learn the hotkey or the gesture to suspend a card. The idea is to lean everything that your brain wants to learn effortlessly, and blow off the rest. 4. Look for a site with pre-made mnemonics for characters, typically based on breaking them down into radicals. I've flipped through these sites, and I really wish something similar existed for Egyptian. 5. Learn 5 or 10 characters a day for the next two weeks or so. Maybe start slowly and ramp it up? 6. If you run into a useful character somewhere else, go ahead and unsuspend it. The idea is just to get a taste of learning characters. No stress, just a short experiment. See where it takes you, and make adjustments as you go along. And if it gets frustrating, use the suspend key with great enthusiasm until you feel better. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| leonidus Triglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 6325 days ago 113 posts - 123 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, French Studies: German, Mandarin | Message 5 of 13 09 October 2012 at 6:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would say start learning characters when you have a basic listening comprehension ability (a couple of thousand words under your belt). After all, reading characters is also a passive skill just like understanding speech. You don't have to be fluent in speech, but you need to understand a lot of other people's speech first. This is the stage to start learning characters. It's more fun and motivating too, because listening comprehension in most cases comes before reading ability. So, go the natural way, like a child does.
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| skeeterses Senior Member United States angelfire.com/games5Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6617 days ago 302 posts - 356 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Spanish | Message 6 of 13 11 October 2012 at 4:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Ihoop, I would recommend getting a set of the Elementary Chinese Readers, which will teach you the basic Chinese
phrases and essential Chinese characters. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| yakherder Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 4428 days ago 4 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Korean, French | Message 7 of 13 11 October 2012 at 5:17am | IP Logged | ||
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Most children's books in China, up until maybe a 4th grade level, are written with pinyin directly above
the characters. I assume it's the same in Taiwan. I found this very useful when I wanted some basic literature to improve my vocabulary but only had a handful of characters under my belt. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5566 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 8 of 13 12 October 2012 at 8:42am | IP Logged | ||
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My advice is to start learning characters right away. In the beginning stages of Chinese, you'll want to focus on being able to write what you can speak. My personal experience is that you can get a lot out of systematic study of characters for words you don't know yet, but that's probably not effective if you're not already at an intermediate level in Chinese with plenty of experience writing the basic words.
So, try to learn the characters for the words that you know. You'll be surprised how far you can go with just a few hundred of the most basic characters. And you'll also be surprised how much easier it gets to learn new characters with time. With each new character the logic of the Chinese writing system will become clearer and clearer (yes, there is logic to the system — it's not terribly consistent, but there are lots of patterns that you will notice and find useful). Don't worry too much right now about memorizing each and every stroke of each and every character. Just try to get the shapes in your head. If you can look at a character and say "hey, I remember seeing that one before", mark that down as a success. That's most of the battle right there. If you have some vague idea about the meaning or pronunciation of the character, even better. Perfection is your enemy; time and practice will hammer the details into your head. For now, focus on training your visual memory to recognize the shapes (whole characters as well as components), and getting the big picture of the writing system. I had a lot of trouble with the characters when I first started learning Chinese in college. It got so bad that I considered giving up the language. But after college, I persisted, I discovered Skritter and got addicted to learning new characters. Now I'm at a point where I can take an hour of study per day, spend a half hour learning 50 new characters and a half hour reviewing old characters, and maintain a 99.9% retention rate. It no longer feels like work for me, it's a game. Edited by Levi on 12 October 2012 at 8:49am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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