Practising writing by hand

[Scoobyqueen]

as title

Edited April 16, 2013 at 12:47 PM by Scoobyqueen
spelling

[尼奥思维系]

Hi

I don't know if it would help with note taking but I've decided to abandon learning hanzi by writing sentences. I've found it just does not work for me at this moment. Instead i've taken a hanzi dictionary which is in pinyin alphabetic order and take one sound at a time. I just did dang for example - 党部 当代 裤裆 挡风 档次. Because there is a link(phonetic I think) between the dang's in there I found it was very time efficient in my effort and memorised and wrote them all in around 15 minutes. I can spare 15 minutes daily for this activity. It should help me remember how to write characters and help me increase my vocab. I found writing sentences I couldn't remember how to write anything after! I'm still in the pilot stage for this new experiment. It may be another one of my plans that didn't work!

Anyway I now know how to say 'crotch' in Chinese which at least made my wife smile. 臭裤裆 - smelly crotch she said:clap That's starting to go in the direction of a useful sentence!!

Anyway - just thought I'dshare! You may be at a better level than that.

Edited August 16, 2009 at 01:38 PM by 尼奥思维系

[Scoobyqueen]

尼奥思维系 - Thanks for this suggestion. This is a good way of introducing variation. I sometimes get the hanzi wrong and write another that sounds phonetically the same. Thanks for the tip.

[wushijiao]

If you write text messages in Chinese, you can get a PDA that recognizes handwriting.

Another similar way would be to write on the computer using a electronic pen system.

While I think it's nice to be able to write by hand, may I ask, why not just take notes in pinyin? You could always go back and re-write lecture notes in characters, when time isn't a factor.

[Scoobyqueen]

wushijiao - Thanks for your useful advice as always. Also on other threads. Always full of useful information and I am implementing some it for my learning

why not just take notes in pinyin

I once did that and my teacher nearly fell off his chair. Since then I havent done that. Is that how you and others would take notes in Chinese? Say you are at a conference with Chinese speakers would you take notes in hanzi, pinyin or English?

[wushijiao]

I have frequent meetings at work in Mandarin, and I take notes mainly in a pinyin,or characters if I know the characters. If the notes are just for my own use, I don't really see why I would need to write in characters. And even if I were charged with taking minutes, I could always write the memo later in characters from my notes in pinyin.

Nonetheless, I don't want to disuade you from learning to write by hand if that's what you want to do! I kind of enjoy writing by hand, even though my handwriting is ugly. But, there might be better uses of your time (opportunity cost-wise), seeing how we are in the digital age.

[wushijiao]

wushijiao - Thanks for your useful advice as always. Also on other threads. Always full of useful information and I am implementing some it for my learning

Thanks Scoobyqueen.

Also,one other thing you can do: keep a character practice book around, and practice when you are watching some sort of mindless TV in English (especially the type that doesn't require much concentration).

[Scoobyqueen]

learning to write by hand if that's what you want to do!

I never really meant to take it this far. However, I noticed that having written a lot of characters by hand reduced my misreadings of characters that were similar and also it helped me remember words better and above all understand the roots within a character. But I do think it is time-consuming and as you say maybe there are better ways to use my time.

[Meng Lelan]

I kind of enjoy writing by hand, even though my handwriting is ugly.

I'm like wushijiao in this way.

scoobyqueen, I don't know if the Chinese even bother to take notes at a meeting unless attending as a journalist. I attended a conference on hydrogeology three years ago in Beijing and the Chinese were literally taking digital photographs of every Powerpoint slide. Yes, every Powerpoint slide. Then I realized that's how they DON'T take notes, they let the camera take down the notes.

[roddy]

Rather than writing down entire sentences or paragraphs of what you hear, why not just take notes? That's the skill you actually want to have at the end of the day, so it seems to make sense to practice that directly. Or perhaps listen while taking notes, then attempt to reconstruct the entire piece from your notes. I can see a 听写 type exercise being useful, but it's still kind of artificial.

Having learned (partially) to write more than once, and forgotten much of it as many times, I do think you need to be doing some kind of writing on a daily or semi-daily basis, for an extended period of time, if you want to have the skill actually stick. I've never managed to do this.

[carlo]

I agree, you should practice everyday. One thing I still manage to do fairly regularly is to take down simple notes (shopping lists, bullet points of ideas I want to focus on in an email or other written material that gets written on the PC etc). You still tend to forget those characters that for purely statistical reasons you don't get to practice (eg it happened to me just yesterday with 悠), so it would be nice to have a way to go over all the 3-4000 most used characters in a systematic way.

One of the most useful and challenging things for me has been to look at Chinese coworkers notes: learning to read them (an art form by itself) and trying to produce something vaguely similar with practice.

[wushijiao]

However, I noticed that having written a lot of characters by hand reduced my misreadings of characters that were similar and also it helped me remember words better and above all understand the roots within a character. But I do think it is time-consuming and as you say maybe there are better ways to use my time.

That's a good point. I have a friend who lived in Shanghai, and for years he made little progress with his Chinese in general. It was only after he switched to writing a lot of characters by hand, and memorizing vocabulary via writing by hand that he started to get better. I guess it goes to show that every learner is different, and writing by hand can be useful for some. I think some degree of writing by hand is useful in the process of being able to recognize characters quickly, start to differentiate radicals from their phonetic component, and maybe some other things (as is scoobyqueen's experience). I think in my case, I made thousands od flashcard the old fashioned way- writing them out by hand, which helped serve that purpose, I think.

[ChristopherB]

I love writing Chinese. I write out all my SRS sentences every day by hand into a quad book, and already have pages and pages of the stuff. This is just one element to my studies (I certainly don't neglect listening), but an important one. It reinforces and solidifies everything in terms grammar, vocabulary, individual characters and, to a certain extent, pronunciation (as per the

method). Edited August 19, 2009 at 06:24 AM by ChristopherB