![]() ![]() I know what you're thinking: what's the point? A Chinese character only needs to turn out alright in the end. It takes some time and preparation to reach this speed but it’s certainly doable.In closing Top tips for memorizing Chinese characters 1. I personally used this system to learn up to 100 characters per day. ![]() Taking new content from our usage of Chinese and feeding it back into the top of the system as new material to be learned.Use content by withdrawing it from our SRS, writing weekly “model” sentences, getting them corrected and then applying them in conversation (all using free tools like Lang-8 and HelloTalk, which I discuss).Review new content using SRS until it moves from short term memory into long term memory.Feed these memory stories and our new characters into a SRS system like Anki.Use the pieces to create memory stories to remember the meaning, pronunciation, tone and English translation.Break apart new words and characters into their constituent “pieces” (only 214 of these pieces exist!).What types exist, how are they structured, what “pieces” are they made up of etc.Īfter that I look at how to use this knowledge to: The first half of the course therefore focuses on understanding the how of characters. ![]() Once you know how they are constructed and the rules surrounding their construction you can start to recognize patterns and learn characters much faster. In truth however Chinese characters are extremely logical. When we first start to learn Chinese characters everything seems so random, so unique. The key to learning Chinese characters quickly is to first understand Chinese characters. The diagram below is an outline of the entire Sensible Chinese Character Learning System. Sensible Chinese Character CourseĪfter looking at all the existing systems for learning Chinese I decided to take the best practices, combine them, add a few extra tricks of my own and create a more comprehensive system for learning Chinese characters. This will be a very important part of our system and will allow us to get a handle on the 90% of the language that isn’t “picture based”. Once you realize how the language is constructed of small pieces that are easily understandable even complicated looking characters representing abstract concepts like modesty (谦虚) can be broken down into smaller “pieces” that are easily understandable. In fact the actual way that Chinese characters are composed is much more logical and systematic and does not rely on visual representation. This might well set false expectations about the Chinese language and cause dismay when the characters simply stop looking like what they represent. Unfortunately some of the marketing surrounding Chineasy does suggest that this is the method to easily learn Chinese characters. Just don’t expect all the characters to follow the pattern of looking like the thing it represents. If nothing else the beautiful presentation will get you excited about learning Chinese. Instead Chinese has a far more ingenuous way to represent these concepts – we’ll talk about this later.ĭefinitely check out Chineasy for it’s coverage of the early ideographic characters. But when asked to draw a picture of “modesty” (谦虚) it becomes a lot more difficult. Representing a simple abstract like “to rest” ( 休)is relatively easy – 亻(man) + 木 (tree) looks like a man resting against a tree. This is the reason why Chinese characters had to move away from being ideographic. The ideographic characters are not used as soon as anything abstract needs to be represented. ![]() There are only so man “little guy with a hat” characters you can remember because they all blur into one another. They are excellent for introducing Chinese to learners and for explaining Chinese to non-Chinese speakers but their utility runs out very quickly. Only with supplemental study would they be able to hook the Chinese pronunciations onto the characters they had learned. They had indeed mastered a large portion of the Chinese characters but I would argue their objective of learning the English keywords was the wrong objective. Instead they could recognize a huge number of characters and know the English meaning. They could point at a restaurant sign and say “Aha! That says Sichaun spicy chicken restaurant” but would be at a loss to actually read the characters in Chinese! I have known a number of people who had successfully mastered Heisig’s books but didn’t necessarily know how to actually say the words in Chinese. One is that Heisig chose not to include the pinyin pronunciation in the main body of the book (they are relegated to the appendix).There’s debate over whether this was the correct thing to do and really this depends on the learner’s objectives.įrom the point of view of communication though this seems like a flawed approach. There are a couple of problems with Heisig’s system which make it unsuitable for our goals. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |