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Methods to Retain Chinese Characters??? | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| langtyro Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4718 days ago 14 posts - 15 votes Speaks: Korean*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 12 15 October 2013 at 12:02am | IP Logged | ||
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Hi guys, I'm taking Chinese at my school right now and everything has been going well so far except for the Chinese
characters. I write each down with the correct strokes 10, 20 times but I have trouble retaining them. Any ideas, methods or techniques on how to retain the characters that you guys found successful? Thanks for the help. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bryos Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4807 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 2 of 12 15 October 2013 at 12:17am | IP Logged | ||
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Heisig's Remembering the Traditional Hanzi 1 and 2(or Remembering the Simplified Hanzi if you're learning simplified characters). The first book goes through the 1500 most common characters. With both books, you'll learn 3000 Chinese characters. It takes 4 months to finish both books if you go at a 25 characters-per-day pace. Edited by Bryos on 15 October 2013 at 12:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5680 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 3 of 12 15 October 2013 at 12:32am | IP Logged | ||
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I would recommend "Learning Chinese Characters" by Matthews and Matthews and "Cracking the Chinese Puzzles" by T. K. Ann.
I have also used Heisig's books, but those I've mentioned have been much more useful and inspiring. In my opinion, the "inspiring" part is the most important one, because you'll need to adapt whatever method to your own way of learning it. My initial pace was 10 characters per day. At this point, it's closer to 6. I'm using Anki as well, because, of course, very few, if any, people will learn all these characters only studying each one only once. Well, some of them you'll find so often, or even already know through other ways, that they almost don't require further study, like 不 or 你. Edited by Flarioca on 15 October 2013 at 12:41am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6092 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 4 of 12 15 October 2013 at 1:55am | IP Logged | ||
1. Find something you like to read in Chinese and read a little bit every day. 2. Get used to the idea that you are going to forget characters. Don't let it get you down. You can relearn them again, forget them again, relearn them again. They'll eventually sink in. ... until you forget them again. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4242 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 5 of 12 15 October 2013 at 4:22am | IP Logged | ||
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I have a friend living in the US who wants to maintain his Chinese. We would write letters to each other twice a
year until about 10 years ago I started using Chinese input software on computer before he started typing his letters a year ago. Unlike English or French you can't sound the characters phonetically. To this day I still wouldn't remember some of the characters from memory. The reality is that you have to use your characters regularly to retain them. Even my parents who received their education in China have trouble with some characters in newspapers because you don't use them every day. Fortunately we have computer / online dictionaries. To type a letter I don't have to know even half the characters I am using. As long as I know the English meaning or the Pinyin equivalent I can look up the word or phrase in an online dictionary. Before the computer came along people used to look up characters in a dictionary by radicals & counting # lines and then looking through the table of content to find what page the radical is listed under. Nobody look up words the old-fashion way any more. The more you look up a word or phrase, the more you'd remember it. Of course writing a letter to a friend twice a year isn't enough. You have to be going to online chatrooms sending messages to people, watching movies and TV series whether online or on DVDs. Many Chinese movies come with character subtitles in standard Mandarin for people speaking different dialects. I can be watching a movie from China or Singapore with simplified characters, Hong Kong or Taiwan with traditional characters as subtitles. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5663 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 6 of 12 15 October 2013 at 5:27am | IP Logged | ||
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It also depends what you want. Do you want to write the characters or just recognizing them? Writing the characters will involve a lot more work, at least at first, but it will also make recognizing characters easier.
I really like jimbo's advice. Keep that in mind: you're going to forget characters. But also know that as you go along it will get easier to remember them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6380 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 7 of 12 15 October 2013 at 6:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Right, remembering characters is going to become easier the more familiar with them you get. My three pieces of advice:
1: Avoid trying to memorize and retain forever every obscure character you encounter. For a while I had the urge to look up and try to memorize every character I encountered, no matter how common or useful it was. Of course, I ended up forgetting them and wasted a lot of time I could have used working on more useful stuff. At the moment I'm actually working through an Anki deck with 5000 characters and Cantonese pronunciations, but I'm already very familiar with the writing system and probably knew 2000 or more before I started. So start with the common ones and wait with the rare ones until you've got the basics down. 2: Learn radicals and parts of characters. Actually you don't need to learn them properly, at least in the beginning. You just need to get some memory hooks for them. It makes it easier to remember a character when you can recall the parts of it. 3: Use Anki or similar SRS software. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4072 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 8 of 12 15 October 2013 at 9:50am | IP Logged | ||
You'll find lots and lots of useful tips and a sound method on hackingchinese.com Specifically, you could start with the article titled "Creating a powerful toolkit: Character components". I've spent quite a lot of time writing characters over and over again, in the hope they would stick, but it has not worked for me. Learning the components and building from there has proven much more useful. For the tones, I've long resisted the "color" method and then found it quite useful too. But I suspect that every learner has to test several methods until s/he finds the method that works best. And then, when you will advance in your study of Chinese, you will probably find that the method that worked wonders in 2013 has stopped working in 2014, and you will have to change. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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