Johnnn
How do you guys memorize Chinese characters?? Help!! :D

Little background about me: I'm a German born illiterate Chinese who learned Chinese from speaking only with my family since childhood. I speak 100% perfect and accent-free Chinese and know +1000 words. At the beginning of this month, I could barely write/read 10 Chinese words. Now I found this website and pushed myself to ~180 characters.

 

http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html

 

But I still keep forgetting the characters I previously learned. You people got any tricks/tips for me?

 

Dec 28, 2014 7:25 PM
Comments · 8
2

Sorry, I didn't read your post very thoroughly. Typing is good, but you should practice hand writing them too - this really helps memorization. And of course, read a lot. You can find a simple text, learn all the characters in the text on the side, read it several times, then move onto another text, etc. HLRN is right in that an SRS is very helpful for review. 

December 29, 2014
1

This is a free pdf of the method Emilio mentioned:

https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2013/11/RH-S1-sample.pdf

Using it verbatim wouldn't be efficient for you, since you already speak the language. But the mnemonic method is straight forward, and you can imitate it using the actual Chinese names for the characters and radicals. 

December 29, 2014

SRS - spaced repition software. Basically, electronic flashcards. Arguably, it's more efficient than paper review, because it remembers how well you know each character, and doesn't make you review the ones you know really well as often as the ones you don't know well, for example.

I'm glad to hear you are writing characters. But if all you're doing is going through that list in order, you're making a mistake imo. Context is really imortant for memorizing characters. You should be reading the characters frequently as soon as you learn them. Learning all the characters in a simple text, as I recommended above, is a good method to start. Or you could write a sentence in English, German, or pinyin in google translate, translate into Chinese, learn the characters, and read the sentence a few times. Then you could move onto writing paragraphs, then pages, etc. It's best to hit the high frequency characters first. Good luck! 

December 30, 2014

you are gonna forget them sooner or later if you seldom write in chinese.

December 29, 2014

For the handwriting, it has the rules for the writing order.

its like, if you wanna write "文 " the order should be " ‵"、“ 一”、“丿”、“ \”

when I first started learning how to write, my teacher taught me one by one, there are some(actually a lot ) basic words that be used in a lot of other words. Like, if you know how to write " 文“, then youll know how to start writing " 刘”、“斌”、“吝” 。

December 29, 2014
Show more