Which book was most useful for learning characters for you?

[DavyJonesLocker]

20 hours ago, pross said:

 

My experience: somewhere around 3500 characters, reading became noticeably easier

 

 

What was your strategy to get to that level? Did you learn to handwrite these 3500 characters.

I'm wondering where to pursue handwriting for purposes of character recognition. They do seem to fall out of my head as fast as the enter now.

 

[imron]

5 hours ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

I'm wondering where to pursue handwriting for purposes of character recognition

This is as good a place as any to start.

[pross]

9 hours ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

What was your strategy to get to that level? Did you learn to handwrite these 3500 characters.

I'm wondering where to pursue handwriting for purposes of character recognition. They do seem to fall out of my head as fast as the enter now.

 

Strategy: read (and write and listen and speak) every day.

 

On handwriting. I practice writing about 100 characters per day with pen and paper, and use Anki for randomisation. In the beginning, I used the Heisig books, and now continue to learn new characters as I encounter them.

 

Good luck.

[DavyJonesLocker]

7 hours ago, imron said:

This is as good a place as any to start.

 

 

Thanks Imron, I should have been clearer. I do hand-write but I am wondering where the cut off point is for people. 1000, 2000 etc characters, @pross mentioned 3500

 

 

2 hours ago, pross said:

Strategy: read (and write and listen and speak) every day.

 

On handwriting. I practice writing about 100 characters per day with pen and paper, and use Anki for randomisation. In the beginning, I used the Heisig books, and now continue to learn new characters as I encounter them.

 

Good luck.

 

 

Pretty similar actually i use an anki deck to produce the randomisation and repetition intervals, however I notice  that progress really started to slow around the 1000 mark. I limit it to 100 characters a day due to time constraints, but it's rare to add any new ones in. When I leave it for a few days and I'm faced with 300 reviews. Draining ....

 

Mind you, I'm old, my memory is not so good any more ?

 

 

[anonymoose]

I just learned characters as I came across them, from Basic Chinese by Yip and Rimmington to begin with. I used zhongwen.com to learn stroke order, which was about the only online resource with animated strokes in those days. (I have just noticed the animations don't seem to work any more.)