how many new characters a week?

[taijiphoenix]

Just wondering what you guys thought would be a reasonable number of characters to try to learn in a week. Also I was wondering, how many characters (for thoese of you taking college courses) you learnt in your first semester?

[Hofmann]

Depending on your preferences and/or abilities, I'd say 7-100 isn't bad.

[imron]

I think 3-5 characters a day is a sustainable rate if you have other commitments beyond studying. The key word here is sustainable. You want to make sure you go at a rate that you can keep up over a prolonged period of time. As your Chinese improves, you can start to adjust this more or less to meet your learning speed, but go too hard too fast and it's easy to burn out.

I would also recommend learning characters by learning words.

[renzhe]

I used to do 30-50 a week in the beginning. I'd memorise a new batch over the weekend, and then reinforce it during the week. I got to 1000 very fast, and to 2000 relatively soon after that.

But, as imron says, it's not sustainable. It slowed down, and nowadays I have my hands full just maintaining the characters I already know.

The best advice is to follow your feeling, and cut down on new characters when you start forgetting too much. You will likely have a very high speed in the beginning, but it will slow down, and if you don't cut back and invest more time into revision, you will regret it.

[Li Shen]

I agree that it's mostly about sustainability. 5 new characters a day is a good rule for me, but as others said, it depends on what you're comfortable with yourself.

Not knowing your current level, I'd say that it's something of a rollercoaster: most difficult at first when you're not yet familiar with how they work and how they are composed, then quite easy as you learn basic ones (~500-1000), before it gets gradually more difficult as you learn more and more obscure characters that you'll rarely see in practice. But, that's no reason to be dispirited! At all stages, try to think where you stood a few months back, and you'll notice real progress.

In my (college) course, I think we theoretically learned 500 characters in the first semester, but most of that was in an intensive course at the end where we did nothing besides learning about 300 characters. Quite harrowing! Not sure whether that was really a good idea, steady does it much better in my experience...

[taijiphoenix]

Thanks for the advice. I think maybe I will start with five then see how that goes. I don't want to learn a whole bunch only to forget them.

[imron]

In this respect, you might find SRS software such as Anki or Mnemosyne useful (search the forums for the many threads on these programs for more info).

[tooironic]

I think learning characters just for the sake of learning them is not a good method for a learner. You should instead try to learn words as they function in real-life, and let the memorising of the characters themselves accompany that (i.e. and not the other way around). This way the characters will stay meaningful and useful to you and you'll feel like there's a real purpose to why you're learning them. Moreover, it's always easier to recall words you learn in a real-life text or conversation than it is to remember them from vocabulary lists. Lastly, I do think learners should focus more on quality rather than quantity. In other words, learning a dozen or so words inside-out is preferable to "learning" 50 characters in one week (which you might forget in a few weeks due to lack of maintenance anyway).

[Li Shen]

Well, I agree or disagree with this, depending on how you mean it .

One should definitely now draw up a random list of characters (like a frequency chart) and learn a certain number of them daily.

On the other hand, it's not useful to try to learn how to read and write every single (er nearly every single) word you encounter or need to know from a textbook. That will only inhibit your progress. For a typical Western learner, the characters are after all the most difficult part, and should not make you slower on the other areas.

So, my recommendation would be to choose of which words you know you want to know/learn how to read and write, and then learn the characters in these words (and which words they form ;) ) on a steady basis, like 5 per day.

Uhm, I hope that was not too confusing .

[imron]

I agree with tooironic. That's basically the longer, more thought out version of what I meant when I suggested learning characters by learning words.

[renzhe]

Opinions will differ on this one

Nobody suggests only ever learning characters. It's just that some of us feel that it's easier to learn the characters first, and then learn the common words consisting of them shortly afterwards, than the other way around. After all, characters are the building blocks for words, at least in the written language.

In any case, you will have to read the words in context to get them to really sit.

[anonymoose]

I think you should be able to do more than five per day. I'd say ten per day is a realistic sustainable level, at least to start with, provided you can set aside a certian amount of time each day to practice. As your repertoir expands, then maybe you can cut back on new characters.

Also, as others have suggested, it is useful to learn characters as parts of words. For example, if you want to learn 详, you are unlikely to ever need this character in isolation, so it makes sense to learn it as part of 详细 for example. If you already know 细, then it won't be any extra work for you, and if you don't, well then it's a good opportunity to learn 细 at the same time.

[krinque]

And if you don't know the character 羊 then you should learn it as well. It is generally good to know components even if they are not popular (as 亥， which you can find in 刻 or 核）. On the other hands I'm not sure if it makes sense to learn the meaning of very rare 丂 just because it can be found in pretty popular character 号

[Sarevok]

Learning the individual parts and how are they combined together does make sense in the beginning. I even teach 豕 to my students, telling them that they don't need to remember it's pronunciation as it is not used anymore as an individual character, but they should remember the stroke order, because of 家 and 嫁, which are taught shortly afterward (since they already know 宀 and 女 at that point). Whether they remember it's meaning for the sake of etymology is up to them. For the less popular ones like 丂 I wouldn't bother with neither its meaning nor pronunciation (as it is not much helpful as a phonetic component in most cases), just learn it as a structural part of given character...

One should pay more attention to the individual characters, at least for the first few hundreds... let's say 300-400. Once you have some basic knowledge about their structure, stroke order rules etc., you can start focusing on words.

Of course, there are different approaches, but this one worked for me...

[trisha2766]

I'm at around 1000 characters now, at least according to what it says at the end of NPCR3. If I remember correctly 3000 characters is considered somewhat literate. So by the end of this year I could be at around 3000 if I do around 38 a week or around 5.5 each day. That's probably doable. I don't know how much time I will be able to study after this year, so that might be as far as I get, at least for a while.

I should be able to learn quite a few from NPCR4, then after that I'll try to use other materials for new words/characters.

[imron]

For a native speaker, 3,000 characters is more than enough for literacy. However they have an advantage in that they already know the words that the characters are making up. A Chinese learner doesn't have that luxury and you could well be able to read every character in a sentence but not have any idea of the meaning. So for example, when a native speaker comes across the word 即使, if they know the character 即 and they know the character 使, then when they see them together they will realise it is the word 即使 and will be able to understand the meaning because it's a reasonably common word they will know from their spoken vocabulary.

A Chinese learner who had learnt the characters 即 and 使 but not the word 即使 would have no such luck. Words are more important for literacy than characters, but obviously, words are made up of characters so they are important too.

Edit. See also this thread, for more in-depth discussion on this issue.

Edited January 6, 2010 at 11:00 PM by imron

[doraemon]

For me, the number of characters I learnt each week decreased exponentially overtime. When I started focusing on characters a couple of years ago, I began with around 150-180 per week (I spent a LOT of time on them, but that was during my longest holiday) and it gradually decreased to just a few and eventually barely any. I've kind of stopped now, but I probably should continue...