City Guide
Answers
Login
Home
/
Community
/
Forums
/ Post a Reply
Post a Reply
Thread: How do you memorize Chinese characters?
Title:
(100 characters at most)
Content: ( 3,000 characters at most, please )
You can add emoticons below to your post by clicking them.
[quote=TOMSPENCER,295728]First I should say that everyone has a different way of learning - there is no single, uniform method that works for all people. I struggled for a long time with boxes of flashcards, just trying to remember the 'picture' that I saw by little more than sheer repetitive exposure. This worked for a couple of hundred of the simplest characters, but ultimately didn't work at all for the more complex characters or the myriad characters whose overall 'picture' looks more or less the same. To recognise and understand the small differences is the key, for me. I found a book that teaches the 3,000 most common characters. The book is a little inconsistent, but at least in the early pages it does a good job of breaking down each character into its constituent radicals. This helps in several ways: first, it helps when you look at a character - you don't just see a 'picture' but you see a number of recognisable radicals. Second, the book demonstrates how, quite often, the meaning of a character is related to one or more of its radicals - this helps to remember what it means. Third, in the same way, the book also demonstrates that, also quite often, the sound of a character is derived from one of its radicals - this helps to remember how to pronounce it. Fourth, if you learn to write all the radicals, then you can more easily, more quickly and more expertly write any number of characters. Now when I look at a new character, instead of being baffled by it I take a minute to analyse it. It may be a bit of a long-shot, but I might even have a go at guessing its meaning (especially if I am able to see the character in context). Then, of course, I look it up in my electronic dictionary that I always carry around with me. That's my other secret weapon - a PDA-style dictionary that allows you to draw the character that you see and gives you the meaning and pinyin pronunciation. Besides these ways I also read Chinese at every opportunity (advertising boards, subtitles on TV, notices on the Metro, bus schedules, menus, lease agreements) in order to get real-life exposure to the things I have studied in books. Putting the characters into a regular and familiar context helps me to remember them more easily.[/quote]
characters left
Name:
Get a new code