Have any tips to get back on track?

[jkhsu]

食堂 is typically used to refer to a school / company cafeteria. It's usually not open to the public. 餐厅 can refer to a restaurant or cafeteria that is open to the public.

Also, words are made up of characters. While each character will have its own meaning and often, you can guess the meaning of a word from the characters, the actual definition of a word is separate from just combining the definition of the characters. So learn words as words and characters as characters. Hope that makes sense.

[grawrt]

Thanks for the clarification. When I googled 餐厅 there was naked people at a bar o__O and a homes dining room...

um...... sorry I dont know why this is hard to understand x_x so I should be studying both characters & words (this is what I've been doing), or just characters that stand alone as their own words (like 去 ?).

[querido]

I don't think there is a "should" either way.

In the beginning I wanted to include as much as possible, so I would have flashcarded the word 食堂 and its parts 食 and 堂 even if these are not words when standing alone.

But there is another approach (which I'm not necessarily recommending but which in hindsight might have been wiser) which would be to exclude everything inessential to working through and mastering some set of lessons or some book *first*. I think it would have been wiser to *finish* *something* *useable as language* *first*.

I don't want to talk about methodology anymore. I spent a lot of time studying *Chinese-studying methodology* instead of the language itself. I hope you don't do that.

[grawrt]

Don't worry I'm not . I've just kept going at what I was doing (studying the characters alone as well as in compound words). It's a little bit more learning but I never forget the pronunciation this way so I guess it's helpful for something.

I was just hung up on the characters that have multiple meanings, and how to decide which meaning to fit fot it. But you're right querido it is a bit of a waste of time to think about it (I think I wasted about an hour trying to figure out what to do xD)

[imron]

so I should be studying both characters & words (this is what I've been doing), or just characters that stand alone as their own words (like 去 ?).

Some words like 去 are one character only. Some words like 餐厅 and 食堂 are two characters only. Other words have 3, 4 or even more characters. Don't worry about how many characters a word has, just focus on learning the word. For multi-character words it's useful to make a mental note of what the individual characters mean in the context of the word, and it may even be useful to drill the meaning of the individual characters for a short time, but make the focus of your learning the whole word.

I was just hung up on the characters that have multiple meanings, and how to decide which meaning to fit fot it

This problem mostly goes away when you learn words as a whole rather than individual characters. Although there still might be some issues with single character words, for multi-character words, you just fit it to the meaning of the word at hand and don't worry too much about the other meanings yet (though it might be useful to make a mental note about the different meanings).

[grawrt]

I didn't know which board to ask this in so I just decided to post it here...

I started out using memrise for testing my characters and it's been wonderful since they had Rapid literacy in chinese (as opposed to Anki which does not), but the person who uploaded the list only completed about half the books vocabulary. I tried to make a deck myself on memrise and anki for the remaining half of the book but I dont know how to make the character font look *good*.

What I did was copy the character from the dictionary so it's in that tiny generic size. How do you guys change the font so it's a little easier on the eyes (and can make it bigger without messing up the appearence)?

[roddy]

I think you'd be better off starting new topics for these questions - there are quite possibly experts on memrise on here who aren't paying attention to this topic.

[grawrt]

Okay thanks! Ill do that now