你们好 and a few questions

[shady]

Hello everybody,

I'm new to this forum, I have read a lot

before I was joining, great community here!

Well, I've been in Shanghai for 3 month last year,

and now since i'm really loving the country/language,

I decided to learn the language.

So far I'm using Pimsleur (currently at lesson 17 part one)

for the basic understanding of chinese, listening and speaking.

As you all know, learning characters is a completely different

science for itself ;)

I've been learning the characters using flashcards, and got quite

ok, now I know about 50 characters.

But...

It all went ok with the learning of the characters, until I reached

level 10 of the flashcards, it's like totally different.

Suddenly I have such a hard time remembering all the new

symbols... it's like my head is full and I can not go on learning

anymore.

I think the way of just looking at the characters more and more,

and learning by memorizing doesn't seem to work from now on.

My question is: How did you succeed in learning all the characters,

did you approach it by radicals, or just keep looking at it thousand

of times, or something else?

I'm quite stuck here...

Hope you can help me a little bit on this journey.

Anyway, enjoy your day,

Best regards,

shady

[xuechengfeng]

Don't worry, it's normal, at least from a non-native perspective. The more you remember, the more you forget. Studying by radicals helps, and repetition is really one of the best and only ways [in my experience] to learn.

[shady]

Hi,

first of all, thanks for giving me hope ;)

What's the best resource for learning by radicals?

I've been throught a lot of pages on the net, but almost

anything is just based on the "flashcard" attempt.

Thanks,

shady

[carlo]

There are many ways of grouping characters, by radical (拉抹拽 etc), by phonetic component (扁偏编), by etymology (北背比), by pronunciation (八巴疤), by meaning (日阳昢). All these methods can be helpful in retaining characters, but ultimately the most important thing to learn is how to break them down into basic shapes.

'Reading and writing Chinese' (McNaughton, Li) tries to teach you just that. A course in calligraphy (书法) can greatly increase your awareness of the internal structure of characters. If I ever decide to teach my future children to read Chinese, I'd probably start from brush and paper.

[Lu]

Shady, maybe you can try to write them too, not just learn them passive but also active.

[gougou]

I also would definitely recommend writing them. In fact, I urge you to write them.

When I started studying, I also rushed through the first few lessons of my book, all the characters (I suppose it was also about 50) easily went to my head, and (surprisingly?) stayed there.

Then, I felt exactly like you wrote: it felt like my head was full, it suddenly seemed like a compeltely different language. So I just stopped studying. I restarted after two or three months. Then, everything went fine.

I am not sure whether this is due to me studying more regularly and spending more time on writing and repeating characters (I don't think the difference was all that big), or just on this short time-out, which gave my mind some time to adjust...

[shady]

Thanks for your input, interesting to see some different thoughts on this.

When I first started learning Chinese, I thought "well, i'll learn speak/understand, and writing pinyin. I'm not crazy to learn handwriting" ;)

But, I can understand your points pretty good. It's an amazing help to remember something if you actually get a pen in your hand and bring it to paper.

I'm going to buy McNaughton's book soon, and start writing these characters. Let's see how it works. ;)

Btw: as I see it, most of the character books are just dictionaries, is there something about a real "lesson based" approach to learn more and more things?

[browny]

u don't have to know radicals or practice writing characters to be able to read characters, as long as you read chinese everyday, you'll learn the characters easily. It's not rocket science~

[shady]

I understand... although right now it seems like a science indeed ;)

I just got the book "Reading and writing Characters" lying in front of me... it's pretty good, thanks to the suggestions in this forum.

I also ordered a german lessonbook, which I heard to be extremely good. Should come on monday... then it starts at full speed!

[Learner]

I recommend the book Rapid Literacy in Chinese, by Zhang Pengpeng (张朋朋), published in 2001 by Sinolingua. The book consists of 25 lessons, with each lesson introducing 30 new characters. An attractive feature is that each lesson contains a sentence including all the 30 new characters in that lesson. This not only makes it (relatively) easy to memorize, but also greatly simplifies my daily revision to avoid forgetting previously studied lessons: I just mentally review every sentence every day. This is _much_ easier than memorizing word lists or long dialogs or texts. In addition to the comprehensive sentence for memorization, each lesson also contains additional texts for reading (not memorization). The characters are introduced in an order that, according to the author, simplifies the learning process. Altogether, the book teaches 750 characters and about 1300 words.

Learner