|
 |
Efficient Method: just reading Chinese? | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| mthmchris Newbie United States Joined 5354 days ago 6 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 10 01 April 2010 at 7:21am | IP Logged | ||
|
I can read and type (using Pinyin input) a bit of Chinese (mostly limited to text
messages, etc.). I would like to gain literacy in Chinese, but learning to write has been an absolute nightmare. The vast majority of what I know is derived from a period of time when I simply plopped myself down in the library and wrote character after character by hand. I decided to really put in the effort into learning characters about two years ago, and stuck with it for about six-seven months. At the height of my studies, I knew how to write about 800 characters. To even accomplish this, I would study my characters perhaps 15 hours a week. I devoted every Sunday to 8 hour marathon character memorization sessions in the Library, and I took classes at a language institute that did not separate writing from speaking. Well, I tried to keep the studying up, but once I started working a 9-5 it just started to depress me studying/working all the time. So eventually, I stopped. And when I stopped, my ability to write Chinese just went out the window. It's not like learning spoken Chinese, where I can just turn it on and off and keep on learning. If I don't practice my characters for a week, they start to leave me. So while I gave up on learning to WRITE Chinese by hand, I would really like to know how to read and type. Even though I forgot how to write most characters, whatever I learned from that period of time I can still recognize and type (using Pinyin input). So, my question is this: is there any effective method for learning simply how to RECOGNIZE (e.g. read and type) Chinese characters? What do you think? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6470 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 2 of 10 01 April 2010 at 9:53am | IP Logged | ||
|
Try the book "Reading & Writing Chinese" by McNaughton or "Learning Chinese Characters",
it's much like the Heisig method but for Chinese. I'm up to 3000 characters after one year of half-assed study and no writing out by hand. Edited by Sprachprofi on 01 April 2010 at 9:53am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5567 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 3 of 10 01 April 2010 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | ||
I second the recommendation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mthmchris Newbie United States Joined 5354 days ago 6 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 4 of 10 01 April 2010 at 2:23pm | IP Logged | ||
|
A friend of mine has an extra copy of Hoenig's "Learn and Remember 2178 Chinese
Characters and their Meanings". Does his approach seem reasonable? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| delectric Diglot Senior Member China Joined 7181 days ago 608 posts - 733 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 5 of 10 01 April 2010 at 5:39pm | IP Logged | ||
|
You need a good graded reader. I'm going through the 步步高汉语阅读教程 (Step by Step A
course in Chinese Reading Comprehension) series. In all there are 5 books each book has 64 texts. Then of course you need Supermemo. Of course even better you could do with having all the texts in electronic format. Luckily I have classes of willing and helpful Chinese students. The week before exam time I ask if there are any students that could help me do some typing! Seems every student is keen. So now I have nearly the entire series in word format save for a couple of the texts. There's the occasional typo but nothing too serious. If you've got 800 characters already then you're ready to start with the first book. All the texts build upon each other. I have all the word texts on my windows mobile phone. The content then goes into supermemo (old simple/better version) for my phone. I use pleco dictionary (usually te Chinese dictionary now) to look up words I don't understand. Then of course if something is really difficult I could text someone but I usually use my tutor now. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5403 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 6 of 10 01 April 2010 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Try "Remembering Traditional/Simplified Hanzi" by Heisig. Book I is already out there for both character sets, each teaches 1500 characters. I've been using it for Traditional Hanzi and it is pretty good.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mthmchris Newbie United States Joined 5354 days ago 6 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 7 of 10 02 April 2010 at 2:07am | IP Logged | ||
|
While the logic of their approach is apparent, the problem I can already see with Heisig
and the book I mentioned above is that they only go over the meanings of single characters. Yet most Chinese words combine two characters, and often arrive at a different meaning than just each character in isolation. For example, "麻烦" means troublesome, and while the "烦" in isolation would make sense, the "麻" in isolation means "hemp". So if you didn't already know and have some familiarity with "麻烦", you'd rack your brain trying to figure out what "annoying hemp" was. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5960 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 8 of 10 02 April 2010 at 5:28am | IP Logged | ||
|
A few years ago I was in a similar situation to you, except with Japanese. I had rote memorized something like 600 characters but it was taking so much time to remember how to write them that I gave up on the writing part. I started reading lots of online news and stories in Japanese with an online dictionary opened in another tab. This worked out quite well for me as now I hardly ever need to look up a character and also my vocabulary has grown quite large (although still not sufficient for my needs). It was important that I read material that was interesting to me so that I wouldn't burn out on this method.
1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
