Time-Efficient Memorization?

[Takucharael]

Hey guys, newcomer here with a couple of questions.

1. I am currently taking Elementary Mandarin 1 in college and am required to memorize around 30-40 Chinese characters a week. I was wondering if anyone knew of a time-efficient way to master the reading and writing of such characters. Right now I am just writing the characters (with the pinyin next to them) over and over again. To it's credit this method does provide the ability to read and write, but it takes an obscene amount of time; I'm talking frustratingly long periods of monotonous writing:help. Any ideas?

2. This question is related, but slightly different. I still need to remember the characters I have previously learned, and for obvious reasons if I was to do the "long write them all out method" for every single character I have ever learned, I would never sleep. Again, any ideas?

Thanks a lot, I appreciate it.

[liuzhou]

Right now I am just writing the characters ... over and over again.

which is what Chinese kids do to learn.

the "long write them all out method"

The more you learn the easier it becomes. But, you will forget some. Don't worry! Chinese people do this all the time!

[shibole]

Greetings,

I just started learning Chinese. I try to use flashcards, radicals, and character etymology. I was pretty quickly able to learn 40 characters in just a couple of days maybe 30 minutes to an hour per day this way. Details:

Flashcards:

I actually bought the "Chinese in a Flash" flashcard set, though I find that it's missing some characters needed for the C&T Integrated Chinese textbook lessons that I'm using. The CiaF set is pretty good as it's almost like a (rather incomplete) character dictionary in flashcard form with stroke order and sample words.

What I'd probably recommend is making flashcards with the character on the front along with all words from the lesson that use that character (also on the front, not back). The CiaF set has sample words on the front like this. A sample sentence from the lesson, written in Chinese on the back, might also help.

The other thing I've started doing is writing the pinyin for a character under each character or maybe every other character when I practice writing a new character over and over again. That might help also.

My brother, who's fluent in Chinese and can read just about anything now, discourages me from trying to memorize lots of characters that I have no context for. Of course if you are stickng to textbook lessons then that shouldn't be a problem but the point sort of underlines the importance of context.

Also, free flashcard software you might try:

http://zdt.sourceforge.net/

DimSum from http://www.mandarintools.com/

Radicals:

Another thing that I think is pretty important is that you learn some of the radicals. The T&C IC textbook gives 40 radicals in the introduction. I made flashcards with all of them with both the full and abbreviated forms (like 3 dots for 水) on the front and pronounciation and meaning on the back. I can't say I know them all yet but I know enough of them that it helps a good bit.

It's much easier to remember that hǎo 好 is nǚ 女 + zǐ 子 than it is to try to remember it as if it were a totally new set of arbitrary strokes. Also, if you know the pronounciation of the radicals then when you see that in a pictophonetic character like 妈 or 吗 then it tells you or at least gives you a clue as to the pronounciation.

Etymology:

I usually look up each new character on http://www.zhongwen.com/ using the RADICAL index (not a pinyin search or using the pinyin input method). This helps me learn the radicals better, but more importantly zhongwen.com helps you see how parts of a character that otherwise don't look like a radical or another character are actually abbreviated or mutated forms of other characters. This helps you see more of the character as consisting of components. It might also be useful to copy this information to the back of the flashcards, but I'm not doing that myself.

If you can't be online when you want to look stuff up on zhongwen.com, there's an extremely nice printed version that you can order from Amazon (see link on main page). I have it and it's done amazingly well. (I thought the conversion of those character trees into book form would be horrible, but was done very well.)

My brother also tells me that learning with Traditional Chinese vs simplified can help since often the character components that might give you cues as to meaning or pronunciation have been simplified into something unhelpful in Simplified Chinese. One example: 兰 vs 蘭. So far I find that Traditional is harder to write but not really any harder to read.

In your case, your class will determine whether you learn Traditional or Simplified first. You probably want to stick to one or the other but I'd probably ask your teacher for advice on the Traditional vs Simplified issue and do whatever he/she recommends.

Another bit of advice on flashcards:

The booklet that came with "Chinese in a Flash" says that frequent review is the key to using flashcards. It recommends that you take cards for what you're trying to learn with you and review them any time you have a few minutes that would otherwise be wasted (like standing in line somewhere, waiting for a class to start, etc.) So you might want to give that a shot too.

Anyway, I hope that helps. Have fun learning Chinese!

[Han-tiger]

Below is my reply to a message posted in this website. Hope it will do you some good.

Re: My Progress after 4 Months of Intensive Study - Suggestions, Advice?

[kdavid]

Flashcards work well for me.

I also plug these guys every chance I get: Chinesepod.com

They've got some great tools for character memorization. I do 99% of my character work on Chinesepod.

Lastly, lots of exposure and repetition. Read and write a lot.

[Lu]

2. This question is related, but slightly different. I still need to remember the characters I have previously learned, and for obvious reasons if I was to do the "long write them all out method" for every single character I have ever learned, I would never sleep. Again, any ideas?

This is what I did, see if you find it practical:

Take three (or more) boxes. Flashcards with new characters go in the first box. Learn them, go over them a few times; then wait a few days, then test yourself. All characters you know go into the second box, the ones you missed go back into the first. Keep studying, then wait a few days again and review them all again. The characters from the second box that you know go into the third box, and you don't need to look at those anymore, as you know them now.

Well, I guess you get the picture. For exams and the like, you can review the characters that have ended up in the third box once more, to make sure you really still know them, but the rest of the time, you can focus on the characters from the first and second box, that you don't know so well yet. The few days' wait between studying them and testing yourself is to make sure the characters you know are in the long-term memory, not just the short-term.

I hope this helps!

[shibole]

Yea, I actually do something like that (with the 3 boxes) too.

[flameproof]

Radicals:

Another thing that I think is pretty important is that you learn some of the radicals. The T&C IC textbook gives 40 radicals in the introduction. I made flashcards with all of them with both the full and abbreviated forms (like 3 dots for 水) on the front and pronounciation and meaning on the back. I can't say I know them all yet but I know enough of them that it helps a good bit.

It's much easier to remember that hǎo 好 is nǚ 女 + zǐ 子 than it is to try to remember it as if it were a totally new set of arbitrary strokes. Also, if you know the pronounciation of the radicals then when you see that in a pictophonetic character like 妈 or 吗 then it tells you or at least gives you a clue as to the pronounciation.

Radicals as such are not that useful. In a few cases they do make sense, in most cases they don't. It's a good idea to remember that most languages are not logically constructed, and looking for logic in characters simply will not work.

Disqualifying characters, it's still VERY useful to look at the different elements characters are constructed of. I find it more helpful to look at a element that I think is helpful in remembering, rather then looking up the radical, which can be very abstract.

That hǎo 好 is nǚ 女 + zǐ 子 is very good to know, but which one the radical is is not that relevant. And it's a good example of elements with no phonetic clue.

Time-Efficient Memorization?

I think the key is lots of reading of context which is (near) comprehensible and context you are interested in. I would find that more interesting then writing the same characters over and over again.

[shibole]

Radicals as such are not that useful. In a few cases they do make sense, in most cases they don't.

The point of learning common radicals that I was getting at is not that identifying the actual radical in a character gives you some huge amount of information but that the common radicals occur in lots of characters, whether they occur as the radical or not, and knowing them helps you remember the characters. So it sounds like we're in violent agreement on this point. It seems like characters are often composed of other characters and the more characters you know the easier it is to learn more characters.

It's a good idea to remember that most languages are not logically constructed, and looking for logic in characters simply will not work.

Admittedly I'm new at this, but I don't think that's entirely true. While it's true that there's no general rule, that I know of, for figuring out the "logical aggregate" characters (like 好）, supposedly 82% of chinese characters are pictophonetic (http://zhongwen.com/x/faq6.htm).

So if you know that 馬　is pronounced mǎ, and you see 媽 but don't know it, you know that 82% of characters are pictophonetic and thus chances are that this one is, and that the phonetic component is usually on the right, so it probably is pronounced something like "ma" rather than meaning a female horse, or a verb "to ride", or a woman looking for a really well-hung man. Like you say, the "logical" aggregate characters can't be reasoned out because there are an infinite number of things that someone could have been thinking of when they came up with the character.

I know that often or usually the phonetic component has a different tone, or different final, or different but vaguely similar initial, but the fact is that there is some logic here. It isn't bulletproof logic that leads to a total knowledge of a character based simply on the components, but knowing that 媽 is composed of 女 + 馬 AND that it sounds like "ma" because of 馬 still gives you more to go on than something like 好 where there's no pronunciation clue at all. Take a look at zhongwen.com.

[flameproof]

Admittedly I'm new at this

Maybe that is part of it. The logical thinker will look for logic. But their ain't much of it and there will be too many exclusions anyway.

A good suggestion is to find your own way. And if that doesn't work try another one. If writing down a character 1000 times for one, then use that. If not, use something else.

But whatever method you use, you need to read a lot. Reading is a good way to being reminded and helps not to forget. Forgetting is the main enemy.

[JimmySeal]

Rather than flashcards, I recommend using an SRS if you have frequent access to a computer. That will make your studying considerably more efficient.

I think that Anki is the best SRS, but Mnemosyne is pretty good too:

http://repose.cx/anki/index.html

[gato]

Also consider jMemorize, another free Space Repetition System (SRS)-based flashcard system, which is very easy to use:

http://jmemorize.org/

[shibole]

Admittedly I'm new at this

Maybe that is part of it. The logical thinker will look for logic. But their ain't much of it and there will be too many exclusions anyway.

Ok, well, don't listen to me then, but I recommend reading this sticky post, from an admin living in a Chinese-speaking area, and see Technique #3:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/5007-some-advice-for-beginners

[shibole]

I just ran across this:

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~jeffrey/jjh-IC/#CDF "Character Deconstruction and Formation"

I think this is pretty cool, regardless of whether analyzing characters helps with memorization.

[sunlightatdusk]

I've created a free site which our users have found to be quite useful.

http://readmandarin.com

Daniel

[plexus]

I'm using the free ZDT program a lot lately. I make sets of about 50 characters. That's not too much so you can easily review a set in one sitting.

What I like about ZDT is that it keeps statistics on how often you tested characters, and how many times you got them right/wrong. You can use this to filter out words when you're testing yourself. For instance you can only review words you got less than 75% of the time wrong, or filter out those that you got right three times in a row, etc. So after a while when you have a lot of characters in there you can just review those you have difficulty with.

Another way of filtering is called "interval filter". I suppose it's similar to the SRS method mentioned earlier. The higher the score you get for a character, the more days before it will be presented again.

Obviously you need to have a piece of paper at hand to write every character a few times before moving on.