Remembering Hanzi pronunciation

[pio_n]

It is not difficult for me to remember hanzi meaning, but with pronunciation it isn't so. I always forget character transcription, even after reading it several times in different contexts. Hence is my question: what mnemonic or other tricks do exist for remembering hanzi pronunciation?

[kdavid]

what mnemonic or other tricks do exist for remembering hanzi pronunciation?

Study every day for months at a time. Then things should start to sink in.

But in all seriousness, you just have to study. Every day. For a long period of time.

[chaxiu]

Try reading.

Whether it is a simple book or a dialogue doesn't really matter. Try to use something that has a good audio track. Listen to the sound track while reading the characters. Then read it aloud. Repeat, Repeat....etc

If you get bored, find a new book/text/dialogue, return to the old one at a later stage.

DON'T read the pinyin unless you really need to. Try to associate the sound and tone with the character not the Pinyin. I always write the tone above a character it if I can't remember it.

Hope it helps.

Chaxiu

[renzhe]

I will agree with kdavid here.

Most characters have a phonetic component that hints at the reading. It's not always exact, and often the tone changes, but it's a good hint, and that will often ring a bell in your head and help you remember the exact pronunciation.

This is very difficult in the beginning, when you know few characters. Also, the more common characters tend to have non-standard readings more often (because common words change more quickly in the spoken language). When you've learned about 2000, it becomes much easier, because you'll recognise the components that give the sound and the less common the character, the more regular it usually is.

You could try to devise a system, learn all the phonetics, or other things, but simple learning more characters is the fastest way. It will click eventually.

How many characters have you learned so far?

[Guest realmayo]

I've mentioned a book lots of times here called Learning Chinese Characters by Matthews & Matthews.

It has a great way to learn both how to write a character, and how to pronounce it. Initially I thought it was really stupid and was sure it wouldn't work, but now I swear by it.

There are two parts, the sound and the tone.

For the sounds, you simply have to find an english word that sounds similar. These will usually be imperfect and vague matches, but I've found that this doesn't actually matter.

For the tones, I chose four people. Eg for first tone, I have Roger Federer, fourth tone is pop singer Coco Lee, etc. The important thing is that these are all very distinct types of people/personality.

I know you didn't ask about writing the characters, but because for me that's tied up with the pronunciation, I'll say that -- again following the Matthews & Matthews book, and others (eg Heisig I guess) I break characters down into their components and use their component parts to build a story. This is the first part of the story. The second part of the story is the sound part.

So, 帮 bāng help. I learned this with the following story:

At the Olympics, athletes from each nation have their own towels with the national flag on them, to HELP them find their spot in the changing rooms. At the opening ceremony, it's Roger who lights the flame (the olympics are in Switzerland), which ignites with a big BANG!

(I should add that I'd also learned 邦 as "nation" and "巾" as towel.)

The component/story part is nothing new, but the sound part of the story is.

Having used this story to learn 帮, I no longer think about the story any more.

I made two changes to what the Matthews & Matthews book suggests.

First, they have four fairy tale characters for each tone, a giant, fairy, dwarf and something else. I preferred my four "people" because it's easier to invent specific stories for them -- eg anything in my stories involving a tennis court shouts "First tone!" to me now, while my fourth tone Coco Lee tends to act like a spoiled diva in most of her stories.

Second, the book complicates things when it comes to "i on-glides", this is where in pinyin where an "i" is added, so bao becomes biao, pao becomes piao, etc. The book's solution is to use the same english word for them both, so "bow" is used for both bao and biao, but in the latter case the story must involve two of the "people". A similar thing is done where the pinyin has a "u on-glide", ie duan, guan, zhuo etc -- in these cases a ghost must be introduced to the sound story.

I didn't bother with this at all, I just use different english words, so bao = bow, biao = a dog barking biow biow, not perfect I know but it doesn't need to be, as long as the story is memorable it fixes in my head.

To quote from the book: "... the role of the soundwords is not to teach pronunciation, but to work as a memory system."

I should also say that, obviously, characters which share the same component will often sound the same, or similar, because that component is responsible for the sound of the character. This element of the language is not addressed at all by the Matthews & Matthews book, but the more characters I learn, the more helpful this fact becomes. But as renzhe says, it's not so useful until you know lots of characters aleady.

Anyway, I promise I have no connections whatever with this book. But it's great, the stories it suggested (and which I modified) for the most common 800+ characters got me learning them much much faster than I'd expected, and I've since extended the principles of the book to more characters, and it still works great. I easily learned over 1200 in six months.

[mvk20]

I can second realmayo's recommendation of this book. I haven't reinvented the people wholesale like he did, but I have tweaked some of the stories to make them more memorable to me (the book encourages that you do that). I've gone from knowing zero Chinese to pushing 300 characters with pronunciation in 2 1/2 months, studying no more than 1/2 hour a day. It's not the only book I'm using, but I am relying on it pretty hard for my character learning. I'm not real good at writing the characters since I haven't spent time doing that, but I can recognize them and type them since I know the pinyin. I will probably go back later and focus hard on handwriting them.

[pio_n]

How many characters have you learned so far?

300-400 approximately

I'd like to be able to read hanzi just as sounds in spite of meaning, so far as to learn later their meanings is easy task, on my view. So if there is a good method to zoom throw a huge amount of characters and memorize only transcriptions, it would be great.

Concerning stories by Matthews&Matthews, at cursory glance it seems to me that they are slightly longer than could be used as tenacious mnemonic knot, and far away from etymology, though not without a charm. And again, they cover meaning, whereas I'd like to memorize just sounding pictures.

[imron]

Probably your best bet is a spaced repetition system like Anki or Mnemosyne. Input flashcards with the character on one side and the pronunciation on the other.

[ronpburton]

I don't know if I recommend the complicated mnemonics. When I was first studying Chinese, all it really did was create this weird web of associations (Federer is connected to Chinese characters how?) that I had to work to get rid of later. It's not as easy, but likely better for fluency in the long run if you just immerse yourself in it - which means a lot of repetition and as little pinyin as you can get by with.

The thing that really cemented the association between the character and its pronunciation and meaning for me was writing it. If you write - doesn't matter what, as long as it's grammatical, roughly - and read aloud what you're writing, eventually you will look at a character and see it's sound. It's funny that you can retain the meaning of a character and not its sound, because I'm at an odd point now where I can guess the sound of characters pretty accurately, but often have no clue as to meaning.

I have found, at least for myself, that being forced to generate language by speaking and writing gets it much more firmly stuck in your head than passive language activities like listening or reading. Do others agree?

[renzhe]

300-400 approximately

It will definitely get easier then. You will find that there are many recurring elements which carry pronunciation hints. Like 反 (usually pronounced fan or ban), or 包 (usually bao or pao), or 帝 (usually pronounced di). The tones vary, but with these three, it's relatively easy to remember the pronunciation of 版板阪坂舨钣扳返饭畈 (variations of fan and ban), 饱抱雹胞苞孢龅泡袍咆刨庖匏狍跑炮泡疱 (variations of pao and bao), and 碲缔谛蒂 (all pronounced dì).

I'd like to be able to read hanzi just as sounds in spite of meaning, so far as to learn later their meanings is easy task, on my view. So if there is a good method to zoom throw a huge amount of characters and memorize only transcriptions, it would be great.

You could take a ready-made deck with lots of characters for a flashcard program, and then simply remove everything other than the character and pinyin.

Many decks use the "*" character to separate pinyin from the definition, so you could filter it using some script or editor command.

Personally, I think this approach is good if you have a lot of exposure, and learn aurally. This is similar to how the native speakers learn -- listening and speaking first, then the meanings of characters. But without loads of exposure, I find that knowing the meanings of the characters really helps -- for example, when watching Chinese TV shows.

A "bao" can mean SO many things, and unless you have enough context through the words and the sentence (e.g. you understand Chinese completely), it's likely that you'll be lost.

[renzhe]

I have found, at least for myself, that being forced to generate language by speaking and writing gets it much more firmly stuck in your head than passive language activities like listening or reading. Do others agree?

I think that different people will respond differently. For me, the key is being able to HEAR the phrases in my head. If I can hear it vividly, I can recreate it, and the best thing for me has been loads and loads of listening, so many common sentences and phrases got stuck in my mind.

[pio_n]

spaced repetition system like Anki or Mnemosyne

usefulness of such simulators is obvious for me, but in fear of multiplying by zero, I would like to use them, already having some mnemonic tricks for a pair of picture-sound.

You will find that there are many recurring elements which carry pronunciation hints. Like 反 (usually pronounced fan or ban), or 包 (usually bao or pao), or 帝 (usually pronounced di). The tones vary, but with these three, it's relatively easy to remember the pronunciation of 版板阪坂舨钣扳返饭畈 (variations of fan and ban), 饱抱雹胞苞孢龅泡袍咆刨庖匏狍跑炮泡疱 (variations of pao and bao), and 碲缔谛蒂 (all pronounced dì).

As in the case of calligraphy, here we get an increase in the duration of sound, there is - at the time of drawing, and here - for a few characters, which of course increases the chance to remember it. And it seems so far only that I know of facilitating techniques.

I think that different people will respond differently. For me, the key is being able to HEAR the phrases in my head.

Here again we touch memory through context and understanding of the meaning, but the idea is precisely to ignore any sense, as this is something we are always able to catch up, due to such excellent sources as T.K.Ann, Rick Harbaugh, Wieger and others.

[mvk20]

I guess I understand the concern about long and complicated mnemonics, but they really aren't that complicated once you read them, they just help create a picture in your mind that jogs your memory about the sound and the meaning of a character. They are not hard to shake at all for me - for the first 50-100 characters I learned, the meaning and sound comes instantly when I see the character, and I have to actually make an effort to remember the mnemonic story if I want to. Once you've seen the character and heard the sound often enough, you don't need the mnemonic anymore and you can just let it slip away. I'm an experienced language learner, a language teacher in fact, and I'd say I have way above average facility with learning languages and memorizing. I've never needed mnemonics before, and I probably don't need them now, but I feel pretty certain that they have accelerated the learning process for me.

Bottom line is, every learner is different, and no one should "poo-poo" a method that has worked for quite a few people, two of whom have even written on this very thread. I think that makes something worth a try for anyone to see if it is useful for them.

[Guest realmayo]

Yes it's a common misconception that these stories are permanent: they're only temporary, once they've helped you force a character into your head you don't remember the story any more, just the character. The stories don't impose themselves on to your memory of the characters, rather your memory of the characters pushes out the stories from your head.

If I'm not feeling very creative then they can be a real hassle to invent when I'm doing new characters, actually quite draining. It will easily take me an hour to make up stories for 20-25 new characters: this involves breaking them down into their components, seeing if I need to learn any new components first, etc. But once the stories are done, that's the hard work finished.

To pio_n's main point.

but the idea is precisely to ignore any sense, as this is something we are always able to catch up

My guess is you'd need an exceptionally strong memory to do this: you're talking about memorising pure abstract symbols rather than a language. Meaning, context -- these are what the writing was devised to achieve in the first place!

One example. 花. Even if you're not doing any fancy-pants memory techniques thing here, I'd guess most people learning this would be aware that the top part is the grass radical, and the bottom is 化 huà (change). *

Now, if you didn't know what that the top part symbolised grass, and 化 was change, then you'd memorise 花 by thinking: [horizontal line plus two short lines through it] on top of [[left slanting line and vertical line] + [left slanting line through hooked line] = "hua".

I think you need some "meaning" or "context" to help your memory of what the sound component of the character is.

* or, if someone learned 花 first, then when they got to 化 they'd think "ah, this is the bottom part of "flower" rather than "this is the bottom part of a character with a horizontal line plus two short lines through it on top etc etc...

[pio_n]

Yes it's a common misconception that these stories are permanent: they're only temporary, once they've helped you force a character into your head you don't remember the story any more, just the character.

Such non-etymologies may not burn and fall off on their own, as rocket stages do. Sometimes to forget is not much easier than to remember, as with white monkeys, when we try not to think about them. Anyway I apologize if I made some disparaging comments about techniques, whereas there wasn't any intention to demotivate somebody.

Back on the topic, the only gap I see, which differ for me chinese study from other languages is absence of any indigenous pictorial-sound associating. Cover this gap, and the rest you have is just a large amusing set of idiomatic roots to learn.

you need some "meaning" or "context" to help your memory of what the sound component of the character is.

Sure, meanings of radicals can be used, if it is enough for.