The best TECHNIQUE for learning characters ?

[daxia]

Hey all

I have been studying chinese in china for about one year, I also live with my girlfriend that is chinese so I get 24/7 lessons in chinese pronounciation.

Since i have been lucky getting a chinese girlfriend thats helping me with my talking skills all the time, my pronounciation is pretty much the same as a chinese person by now.

Now, I am back in sweden for some time working and stuff. I figured this would be a good time to start to really study characters.

I think I know about 1000 characters, and I know all 214 radicals and their meanings.

Lately i have been feeling that im not getting anywhere in my studies.

The books i have seems to be aimed at learning how to talk chinese rather than writing and reading it. For example, you would learn 你 before you learn 人 and 尔, thus making it very hard to truly understand the characters.

I figure the best way to study characters would be to start with the easy one with a few strokes.

For example, instead of starting with studying 矮. I would first study 矢 and 委 (ofcourse before studying 委 I would start with 禾 and 女.

Now, to the questions.

1. What are theese character that only consists of one character called (like 口 女 丫为 etc) ?

2. Would this be a good way to learn chinese characters ?

3. Could anyone recomend a good book for learning atleast 3000 simplified characters ?

Thank you in advance !

/梁伟明

[百變星君]

William McNaughton's "Reading & Writing Chinese"

This is a great book. It explains the components/radicals of characters, and there are over 2,000 characters in this book, which is a good goal to focus on.

[geraldc]

Well if you already speak at a reasonable level, then you might as well just buy a book and get your girlfriend to read out passages out aloud and record them, and then read out aloud along with the recording. You could buy one of the more advanced level Practical Chinese reader books and the tapes, and read out aloud with them. The early books spend a lot of time going over grammar that you'd already know.

You would have to spend a fair bit of time, copying each new word out and repeating etc, but that happens in every system of learning to read and write.

Some US universities have specialist books like this that are designed for people who can already speak Chinese, but can't read or write. They may be worth a try.

Alternatively, find your local Overseas Chinese school, and join a class with the Chinese kids.

Learning characters by number of strokes is a bad idea, it's like learning a dictionary, it will be a year before you can read anything not beginning with A etc.

Once you know the radicals, it's easy enough to remember words by what radicals are in them.

[Long Zhiren]

After learning the first couple thousand, the next couple thousand characters aren't so commonly used. My present favorite learning technique is to surf the web.

like: http://cn.yahoo.com/ where I try to read the news articles.

When there's characters that I don't recognize, I cut and paste them into an online dictionary like: http://www.mdbg.net/chindict to learn that character.

The next step, if I so desire, is to jot that character down and writing it 25x in case I don't recognize it the next time I encounter it.

In your case, you can bug your g/f to tell you what each character is?

Good book for learning to read and write characters:

I went through the five volumes of DeFrancis' "Chinese Reader."

(2 volumes Beginner, 2 volumes Intermediate & 1 volume Advanced)

That's where I got a thousand of the most of the common characters down. DeFrancis puts them in a sequence close to most common to least common. I noticed that the prices for these volumes have gone up quite a bit in the last twenty years...

[logos]

I believe I read in a different thread about the importance of learning the radicals (bushou 部首), as a way to foster recognition of Chinese characters. This seemed like a reasonable goal to me and I started memorizing close to a dozen yesterday. I don't know many actual words yet, but when I look at a character, I can already recognize some radicals I just learnt, and its clearing up the apparent complexity of characters for me.

I am going to at least learn the 40 radicals as taught on this site, and the accompanying characters. http://www.usc.edu/dept/ealc/chinese/character/

I talked to someone who's a native Chinese speaker, and they told me that they themself don't know the radicals that well, which surprised me. However, I still think learning the radicals or at least a fair amount of them could ease me into learning words.These are my thoughts on characters right now. Please let me know if there is a way to improve my method and understanding.

xiexie

[haoren]

Dude, I have been studying Chinese on my own for the past 6 months, and started learning characters only 3 months ago.

I found the best way was to learn the simple radicals first as you suggested. Like logos mentions, within about a week I could look at any Chinese writing anywhere and pick out recognizable symbols all over the place. Helps to make you familiar with the language I reckon.

It also helps heaps when it comes memorising the characters. You can make up a stupid story starting with the English word and including any radicals built into the Chinese word. Know what I mean? I think better than rote learning.

Hope this helps,

Haoren.