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Efficient Method: just reading Chinese?

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10 messages over 2 pages: 1
mthmchris
Newbie
United States
Joined 5354 days ago

6 posts - 8 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 9 of 10
02 April 2010 at 7:13am | IP Logged 
Lichtrausch, I think this might end up being the best method. After a little bit of
thinking, here's my plan - let me run it past you experienced polyglots to see if the
method seems reasonable ;):

1. Take an article of a website that interests me. I'm a finance nerd, some I'm going
to use Hu Shuli's Caing.com.

2. I'll find an article, and using Google Chrome (Chrome has a very integrated
translation option), I'll translate the article and have a quick read so I know the
general idea of what's going on.

3. I'll go through piece by piece, and look up anything I'm unfamiliar with (which is
quite a bit) in dict.cn. Another awesome thing about Google Chrome is that if I
double click on a character, I can tell if the author inputted it as one character or
as two or more. For example, in the article I'm looking at currently
(http://magazine.caing.com/2010-03-28/100129899.html), when I clicked on the character
"陈" the entire phrase "五味杂陈" lit up. Now I know that I need to look up the whole
phrase, which actually translates pretty well to "to crack a smile" (i.e. to smile when
you don't feel like smiling).

4. If I don't know a component character (e.g. looking through an article I just found
the character "均") I'll look it up and memorize it using Heisig's mnemonics.

5. I'll read one or two articles per day, and write down all of the characters/words
that I don't know in a list. If there's any characters/words that I see at least twice
over the course of three articles, I'll know its common and make a flashcard out of it
(reviewing flashcards via SLS).

Edited by mthmchris on 02 April 2010 at 7:19am

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 10 of 10
02 April 2010 at 5:43pm | IP Logged 
Learning characters in isolation beyond the first few hundred is a really slow way to
learn to read Chinese. You could learn 5000 characters and still not understand a simple
article! The Hesig book is good for getting mnemonics into your head so that you can
remember how to write the character. Reading though you'll have to remember the tens of
thousand ways the characters are combined together. Anyway for writing I think it's much
more natural to be able to read fluently and then start on the writing.
1 person has voted this message useful



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