Best way to learn characters

[Beginnerneedinghelp]

Hi everyone, as my name suggests I'm just getting started.

From personal experience and the way in which you may have been taught; what did you find was the best, most efficient and systematic method for learning Chinese characters?

At the moment, i've learnt about 200 characters by making up little stories for each - which, i'm assuming is the worst way to go about it!

Thanks everyone, all proposals welcome!

[renzhe]

Making up stories is actually a really good thing to do. These stories are called mnemonics and are a very powerful memory tool.

In terms of systematic learning of characters, there have been several books attempting to organise characters in a logical progression, Heisig being the most well known. None of these systems have been as successful with Chinese as they have with Japanese (which uses mostly the same characters), for a variety of reasons, but they are probably better than a completely random approach. At the end of the day, Chinese characters are a result of thousands of years of evolution, and they are simply not as systematic as we would like. There is system, but also lots of illogical features that are typical of real people and real history.

The bottom line is that some of these approaches do help, but not as much as people hope. Learning characters requires rolling up your sleeves and grinding, even with the best approach. Everyone I know who worked their way to literacy has done the grind. Personally, I took the list of most commonly used characters and flashcarded them into oblivion. I figured that this would be faster than figuring out the best order first

I've often thought about what the best approach to learning characters would be, if I were to do it all over again. I think that I'd start with the Kangxi radicals, followed by the list of all phonetic elements which appear in the most commonly used 1000 characters. It's hard to find such a list, but it could be created using online tools which decompose characters into all parts. There would be a few hundred of these (214 radicals + several hundred phonetics), and I'd memorise the original meaning and pronunciation for each of these first. Then I would go with mnemonics for learning the most common 3000 characters, most of which would be composed of familiar shapes and having familiar (often guessable) pronunciation.

This might cut down the learning time a bit, and help with recall. People often claim that using systematic methods like Heisig helps their recall later, and this makes sense. But I think that the problem with most such systematic approaches is that they ignore pronunciation, and pronunciation is crucial (many such systems come from Japanese, where pronunciation plays a much smaller role). You cannot ignore the phonetic part of the Chinese script.

[ChTTay]

When I was in primary school we used to use "look, cover, say, write, check" to learn new words and spelling. One day I tried it for learning characters and have found it works pretty well. I usually go through the vocab I want to learn and do this at least 5 times for each word/character. I will review regularly using Skritter or just by going back to the vocab page and writing from memory.

Definitely try to learn common radicals before you do anything else. I just learned the most common 50 and It has definitely helped me remember characters.

[siamang14]

I started learning characters by making up stories and still do on occasion if there's a story that's really apparent. Eventually though, once you're more familiar with the common radicals you should be able to wean yourself off the story method.

You'll find that every character is just a group of radicals arranged in a particular way. If you choose to learn to write you shouldn't necessarily focus on stroke numbers, but on which radicals are contained within the character. It's a lot easier to think of a character as containing 3 radicals than it is to think about the same character as containing 12 strokes.

Once you figure out the logical behind characters as a whole, they become much easier to learn and retain. It just takes time.

The most effective method for me now is flashcards. Either on regular paper or i find the website Quizlet to be really handy in keeping my cards organized.

Good luck!

[OneEye]

I'm just going to quote what I said in this thread. This seems to come up a lot.

Radicals are simply the 214 (give or take, depending on which system you're talking about) components used as section headings in dictionaries. Hence the Chinese term 部首, which literally means section heading. You're talking about character components, not radicals. Components can be semantic, phonetic, pictographic, etc., and understanding how those work can indeed help with learning characters. Knowing radicals can only help you make a decent guess as to where to find the character in a dictionary.

Mnemonic stories can indeed be a helpful way to remember how characters are put together. For me, after learning around 1000 characters, I no longer needed stories and could just remember them by paying attention and writing them a few times. Then again, I'm surrounded by Chinese text all the time, so if you're not then it may be different.

[ChTTay]

That makes sense. I just followed the path Integrated Chinese set me when I first started learning. It gives you the top 40 or 50 most common radicals at the beginning of the book and says its helpful to learn them first. I think it did help.

[teachandlearn]

I'm probably about the same, I know about 300 to 400 characters, and knowing what to do is difficult. I think though that you have to learn to love the way you learn. It has to be fun, so if it requires writing characters with tomato ketchup on your eggs then that's what you should do. I actually wrote a lens about things I do to learn characters, most of them are quite fun. http://www.squidoo.com/chinese-character-crazy

[Herberbt]

If you have an iPhone or better yet, an iPad, look into the softwear "Skritter". Someone at my language school in Guilin China reccomended it to me. It costs some money, but I find it incredibly helpful. I signed up for six more months because it makes learning characters so easy and fun. The best feature is that you can upload the character from your textbooks and they will teach them to you in sequential order. Other users can also post their own little memonics that help them remember how to write characters, so you can use them too!

Happy Studying!

[Ania]

Thanks so much for all your suggestions. I still consider myself fairly new to this whole character adventure (I probably know about 300, maybe 350 characters), so any method I can find to try to learn them is greatly appreciated!

[sparrow]

My go-to method has always been brute-forcing it:

1. Write a group of new words a couple times. (5–15 minutes—hopefully closer to 5.)
2. Repeat a couple times each day.
3. ???
4. Profit.

I find it makes remembering characters REALLY easy.

 

Also, words that are similar or easily confused ought to be kept together on a special sheet or something, so that you can review them somewhat frequently as a reminder.

[RichInChina]

I am also beginning HSK, at level 3 right now. Im cramming for a test by the end of this month. I only have a few more pages in my book to go.... what ive found out in my month of studying HSK 1, then 2, now moving to the end of level 3, making stories / pictures for each character works great! also, not reading each individual character little by little, but reading them in conjunction with other characters that make a word or sentence! helps. also, I have a question not related to this, but, since I just got on here and created an account to ask my questions and get answers, How do I post a topic myself? I cant find out how anywhere.... im in Beijing.

 

大家好。 我的中文名字叫 何美锋。我一个月已经自己学汉语水平考试1到3级，一共1个月。。我有好多的问题，我想要你们帮我的忙。。。

[kikosun]

 

I think that I'd start with the Kangxi radicals, followed by the list of all phonetic elements which appear in the most commonly used 1000 characters. It's hard to find such a list, but it could be created using online tools which decompose characters into all parts. There would be a few hundred of these (214 radicals + several hundred phonetics), and I'd memorise the original meaning and pronunciation for each of these first. Then I would go with mnemonics for learning the most common 3000 characters, most of which would be composed of familiar shapes and having familiar (often guessable) pronunciation.

Renzhe - I am interested in what you mention here about learning phonetic elements. Would you recommend Wieger's 858 phonetic elements as a good list to start? I've been looking at the smarthanzi.net website as a resource, but would you recommend memorizing all of them right off the bat?

[renzhe]

I'm not familiar with Wieger's 858 phonetic elements, do you have a link?

In principle, I'm not against some cramming in the beginning, because you're only learning stuff you will have to learn eventually anyway. I'm not sure if memorising phonetic elements is a good idea, but it does seem like it might have helped in retrospect.

Somebody would have to try it and report

[新墨西哥人]

I use Skritter, but it isn't perfect, but it is also awesome. It's my main way of learning new characters and it does work. Although sometimes I have to augment it. I'm not sure there is any one approach as we all have our different styles of learning.

 

I'm a very visual learner. If I have trouble remembering how to write the character, I pull out my dry-erase board or water-painting paper and write the character a lot while keeping an image of the character available to look at. Then I erase, and try again without a reference image. That has really helped me cement problem characters.

 

but there are other ways. I also use mnemonics. Skritter has user-contributed ones, and also you can write your own. For example gao as in gaosu - "tell the cow with your mouth" I don't know why, but it works for me. I also remember some Tuttle stories although overall I didn't like them. But some are impossible to forget!

 

I also like using Quizlet to study my characters. They have nice flashcards, learning and test modes, and this game called Scatter. You match up characters to their definition/pinyin, by dragging and dropping. It's timed so you try to best your personal record. It's perfectly suited to tablets. It's easy though to get in the habit of doing all the easiest ones first - the best strategy if you want a good time. But when I want to really work on learning new characters, I start with the hardest characters first, read the character first (instead of the definitions), then find the definition. 

 

Also just sheer repetition. The characters I had a horrible time at remembering last year are easy for me now. 

 

The thing I'm getting into now is trying to read more characters in larger contexts. That helps with cementing my knowledge of the definition (and helps with learning the many definitions for some characters). It also helps with recognizing characters. I wish I had started that sooner. Skritter does now include a sample sentence with each character which helps. But also I'm working with graded readers and the simple dialogues online at Rutgers, etc. and the ones in Integrated Chinese. 

[AdamD]

Skritter actually hurt me. The (iOS) next-stroke suggestions were getting in my way—guiding me to the next stroke rather than letting me work it out myself—and after a while my writing ability slipped. It's an excellent tool but that's something to consider.

 

Nothing beats pen and paper (or a whiteboard in 新墨西哥人's case!), but flashcard tools like Pleco, which let you write unguided on a touch screen, are marvellous for regular and easy-to-access writing reinforcement. And, yes, repetition. I'm still amazed how often muscle memory reminds me how to write a character.

[kvetch]

There was a website that mentioned breaking characters down into components and coming up with mneumonics to learn them. Unfortuantely I don't have the link, but I use this site to break down characters http://www.wordbuddy.com/

You can organize characters into lists and create your own memorization techniques.

[lakers4sho]

When I first started learning (first year), I just had to bear with rote learning. Look at each character, try to stamp a mental picture in my head, and and write it down on a piece of paper. Do that for each character. Rinse and repeat.

 

I would repeat that process maybe 2-3 times each, and I would have each character down for tomorrow's quiz or test.

 

I'm now in my 3rd year course (well, it's only technically my 2nd year since I took year 2 as an intensive summer course), and at this point I've seen enough characters and character combinations that I just have to stare at each character for maybe 3 seconds and it would be able to remember it for tomorrow's quiz. Now it's obviously hurting my long term character retention so I'm planning to use Skritter for that.

 

It's not that my memory is below average, it's just at this point we're learning vocabulary that I don't really use in everyday conversations (I've never used 二氧化碳 ever), and so I tend to forget *those* characters, and the ones I use regularly I have no trouble retaining.

 

I agree with knowing your radicals, it also helps (me) to distinguish between homophones and words with the same pinyin transcription.