Fluent in speaking, but problems with memorizing Chinese

[Guest lryz]

My parents are both Chinese. I was born in the U.S. and have lived here all my life. I speak Chinese fluently. I have been enrolled in a once-a-week Chinese school for a couple of years now, but just cannot memorize Chinese characters. Simple writing the words lots of times does not help me at all.

Does anybody have a similar problem? What are some other useful methods for memorizing Chinese?

Thanks

[Guest Barbara]

Hi lryz! Don’t expect too much of yourself in too short a time. It took me about 4 years of intensive (self-) study, until I was able to read ordinary texts without simultaneously having to search the dictionnary. AND THERE’s NOTHING WRONG WITH MY IQ! So, the only „useful“ method that I know of, is lots of patience and something like a stubborn keeping at it. And don’t be mistaken, a few hours a week won’t get you far, I mean, even the kids in China need four years in primary school to learn the first few thousand characters.

By the way, Chinese kids who are growing up here in Germany seem to have the same problem, many of them are sent to a once-a-week Chinese school to learn to read and write, but they hate it. They also prefer to speak German among each other while they naturally switch to Chinese when they talk to their parents. My friend is a teacher there and she’s just about at the end of her wits how to get them motivated.

[trooper]

I found writing characters in isolation dozens of times to be a dull and ineffective way of learning characters. It works for some people but it doesn't work for me and it obviously hasn't worked for you.

It's fine to write characters in isolation dozens of times in order to learn stroke order, but once you have learnt a few dozen characters, stroke order is something that starts becoming instinctive.

I think learning is most effective when you use association, i.e. context. So, I think characters and vocabulary are best learnt in real contexts, not in isolation. The best way I have found is to get an elementary written Chinese text (something like Practical Chinese Reader vol.1 which you can easily get from Amazon) and start reading! As you carefully work your way through the book you will start to retain more and more. Don't spend time memorising every character and word by writing them out endless times. Instead, after you become familiar with reading the text of a given lesson and can read it aloud without consulting the pinyin or the English translation and have done the written grammar exercises, move on to the next lesson.

You'll soon find many characters and words reappearing lesson after lesson, automatically giving you repetition in a natural, unforced way. Move through the Practical Chinese Reader series systematically. Each book builds on what you learn in the previous one. It goes up to volume 6 I believe, which is at high intermediate/advanced level so there is plenty of material for you. At the end your reading level will be quite high and ready to tackle advanced college textbooks in Chinese and introductory textbooks in newspaper reading.

You're fluent in speaking Chinese, so this will help you a lot. But because you are not familiar with written Chinese, you will still find much in the books that you have not come across before. The style and vocabulary of written Chinese can differ from what you encounter in everyday spoken Chinese, so it's worth starting from the beginning, even if you might think it to be too simple at first. You shouldn't be surprised if each volume in the series takes months rather than weeks to get through. You are definitely not being slow. It's just that each lesson introduces a lot of new material and you will be encountering thousands of new words and expressions.

[smithsgj]

What's your motivation for wanting to write? Just read! Plenty of characters will stick in your head if you keep at it.

Your school like every Chinese educational establishment in the world has the idea that there's one way and one way only to learn Chinese: memorizing and recopying characters zillions of times. But if you're not motivated to write (Chinese kids in China are motivated, cos otherwise they'll get hit by the teacher, fail all their exams and have to work in a tractor factory) you'll never learn by this means.

Drop this silly school, I say, and go to a university library or bookshop and get the course Trooper suggests. Make sure you have a good dictionary (a paper one, not some online thing, so you're forced to look characters up by radical -- this will help you understand their logical composition). Make sure you've got pinyin or bpmf down properly. Get some magazines on topic you're interested in from Chinatown or the library.

Are you a speaker of Mandarin btw?

[blob]

I am not sure if this is true, but I have read from somewhere that learning chinese characters when your reading/writting background is english is the most difficult at the very first phase. One finds that they forget lots of words despite countless memorisations, wrtting the same character N times and so on. Of course, the improvement is there, just not very noticable yet.

However, after a while, where your brain is comfortable with a number of characters, the learning curve suddenly shallows out and you find yourself grasping and remembering new words very very quickly.

So, if it is difficult at first, don't despair, if you persist, you will find that one day not too far away, memorising words becomes not too difficult, or even a breeze.

Ohh.. writting essays helps too, writting a character 1000 times repetitively can help, but that is like I say, to learn how to speak a chinese word, please repeat saying it 100-200 times. I think it is safe to say we learn quicker if we spoke that word by using it in different types of sentences when speaking.

My 2 cents

Good luck lryz.

[roddy]

Just read! Plenty of characters will stick in your head if you keep at it.

No they haven't

I can read contracts, newspaper articles, manuals - I can get the gist of pretty much anything that isn't classical / highly technical. But I would have serious trouble writing a simple note.

Maybe if you read AND pay attention to the structure of the characters as you go - but that's going to slow down your reading and make it less enjoyable.

I'll keep trying though . . .

Roddy

[blob]

Just read! Plenty of characters will stick in your head if you keep at it.

No they haven't

I can read contracts, newspaper articles, manuals - I can get the gist of pretty much anything that isn't classical / highly technical. But I would have serious trouble writing a simple note.

Maybe if you read AND pay attention to the structure of the characters as you go - but that's going to slow down your reading and make it less enjoyable.

I'll keep trying though . . .

Roddy

I think thats why the teachers always told us to read a good article (or an interesting article) 2-3 times. The first time, to understand its contents. THe 2nd, you don't have to worry about not understanding what you read, so one can concentrate more on the structure and style of the sentences, and so on.

An effective(?) way is to copy down sentences you like and at the end of the day, try to find excuses to construct similar style sentences, writting a diary or small story is a good way I think. Then if possible, get someone to correct it, an even better, get someone to hear you, while you read out your own corrected essay (this is a bit difficult sometimes, depending on contents of essay).

Blob

[roddy]

Yeah, I'd do that for sentence / paragraph / essay construction. But the OP's asking about memorising characters.

Roddy

[Guest lryz]

Thanks for all the replys. I will try all the methods here.

smithsgj: I speak Mandarin.

lryz

[smithsgj]

Yeah, I'd do that for sentence / paragraph / essay construction. But the OP's asking about memorising characters.

You're right, so he is. I was sort of ignoring that... or challenging his motivation.

You've internalized sufficient characters that you can read effectively, right? Keep reading and you'll internalize some more. But for recognition, not for production! OP has even less motivation than you to memorize for production -- what would be the point? Presumably he wants to learn the characters for reading, not writing... he's not going to use it for shopping lists or billets doux to his girlfriend, but he may well want to read up on his cultural heritage in the original.

[blob]

Ahh, I didn't realise that point, my apologies . But I do somehow think that writting can help in increasing the speed of a person's writting, or maybe these listening, reading, speaking and writting are all entangled within each other , and therefore, increasing one will help the others? Hmm.... :?

[smithsgj]

Don't apologize Blob. OP does indeed want to memorize characters stroke by stroke -- I think. I'm saying that for someone in his position that's pointless.

The different skills -- listening, reading, speaking and writting -- are indeed all intertwined, you're right. In my opinion, this is the main thing that makes learning Chinese so damnably difficult. For languages with alphabet-based writing systems, one skill can be used to reinforce another: you can read something in a magazine, not be 100% sure what it means, coincidentally hear it in a conversation the next day which gives you a better idea, use it in a report you're writing and gauge the reaction. This doesn't really work in Chinese, since the written form doesn't represent the spoken language in a systematic way, so it's almost like learning the spoken and written forms in parallel.

OP of course already has the spoken form down.

Writing in Chinese -- as in putting pen to paper -- isn't really necessary. It's not something even native speakers do very much of these days. I'm sure everyone will agree that word processing in Chinese is a very different process from writing by hand: a superficial internalization of characters, which can be had from reading widely, is sufficient. It is no longer necessary to memorize thousands of characters stroke by stroke (although you must learn some to understand how character components are configured).

This said, personally I *did* memorize thousands of characters. SO i'm interested in the cases of people who did not, but still have a good reading knowledge. Like Roddy: you say you can't write a simple note, but I'm guessing you could write a composition using a computer readily enough? Or am I wrong?

[roddy]

Yeah, I can type more or less coherently - when the IME pops up the characters I can recognise the one I need, even though I couldn't write it from scratch. Writing by hand is becoming less and less important - not just for Chinese, but for many languages. I can't remember the last time I wrote anything important by hand. Shopping lists, notes, etc yes - but job application letters, CV's, everything at work - it's all on computers for me . . .

I've never worried that much about not being able to write Chinese characters by hand, and to be honest I don't think it's done me much harm, except in exams. I have an understanding of how the characters are formed of course, and I can use a dictionary / take guesses on what a character means based on its components and so on.

Perhaps I'll regret this in the future, but right now I'm glad I spent the time on developing my reading / listening skills. My current 缺点 is my speaking, though.

Roddy

[Shi Rui'en]

For what it is worth, I can offer you the way I that is helping me to learn how to read and write chinese. I started off with the recopying of hundreds of characters and it helped in the beginning but doesn't know. Now I tend to read, read, and then reread stories, articles, and newspaper clippings as often as I can. One of the starting books we had is a book called "Hua Shang de Mei Ren" (sorry about it in no characters...I'm not on my apple). It is a cute book and kind of cool.

If you are interested I can give you a detailed list of all the books we are using at OSU. Most of them are really good, and help a lot.

[Guest Wuliao]

Mandarin is not Latin.

Homo opportet

[Jamie]

I've never worried that much about not being able to write Chinese characters by hand, and to be honest I don't think it's done me much harm, except in exams.

Roddy, you're referring to the HSK exam? What percent of the HSK exam is devoted to writing characters from memory? Since this seems to be a weak area for a lot of people (me too) I wonder how much of one's HSK grade would be affected by this.

[Guest gaoliying]

Thanks for the hot tip on how to properly use Practical Chinese Reader. Maybe now I'll get it off my shelf. Everyone I know that is fluent at reading and writing characters says it's from writing every character out until their hand feels like it will fall off and saying the word to themselves as they write. I have no personal advice though because my chinese is still BU HAO. g'luck.