Reading Hanzi.. ARGH!!!

Try keeping a journal throughout the day in Hanzi. This helps me! It's good because you will learn the characters you need to know for your daily life, and retain them.

Yet another resource for writing Chinese characters can be found at MIT's Open CourseWare site:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Foreign-Languages-and-Literatures/21F-101Spring-2006/CourseHome/index.htm

This is their offering for 1st semester Chinese as MIT. There are PDF documents that diagram the stroke order of the characters that a student will encounter during the course of study. It can be found at:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Foreign-Languages-and-Literatures/21F-101Spring-2006/StudyMaterials/index.htm

Almost all of the materials including the text book for the first 3 semesters of Chinese can be found there. There are more courses, but you will have to lay out money for the books.

Thanks everyone for your input on this issue and for the websites. It was reassuring to hear that reading Chinese, like hearing spoken Chinese, is something that you just have to get used to through exposure. I have found reading Chinese characters difficult because so many look similar. Maybe the writing practice is what I am missing. Thanks. I'd also like to share that I have noticed that many Chinese speakers are not able to write in pinyin. That seems to be an additional step that westerners have created. But I do find myself leaning on it too heavily in my Chinese language acquisition.

If no one has mentioned radicals as a learning aid, there is a nifty explanation of them with examples of the use of 60 of the 200 or so radicals at:

http://www.clearchinese.com/chinese-writing/index.htm

and another that covers radicals and a lot more at:

http://www.zhongwen.com/

I'm currently working on the belief that if I learn the radicals it will make it easier to remember characters because it will be easier to recognize them by the radical(s) present in a character rather than remembering the character as a whole.

Lester is right. I studied Chinese at university for 4 years and the way learn characters suggested by lecturers is to learn how the chinese kids do, write the hanzi again and again and again until you have it clear in your mind. Also, always associate it with the pronunciation and meaning, and you won't forget it. Once you know what the hanzi means and how to write it, start building sentences to put your new hanzi in practice.

I suggest you do not use the IME in the very beginning, because it won't help you remember how to write the word but it will only develope your ability to spot the word in a storm of other characters, which is useful but you definitely won't need it when you are at a early stage.

Have fun with filling plenty of notebooks (I have loads from my academic years and still keep them like treasures...it's great to see how my calligraphy improved year by year!).

再见

Much appreciated. This is why poddies are good people.

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You mean 'potties'????

I need to try that game....what the web address?

Franch, 哈哈，我要送给我朋友们看一看！

It's funny that you mention environment. My wife is Chinese which you would think would offer a great home environment for learning, however despite my insistence we still communicate mainly in English.. old habits die hard I guess.

I'm not really all that concerned about writing, but just seeing the characters is not enough. I've had a lot of exposure to characters, but I only know about 10 of them-- most of which I learned from writing them (ie names). The others were just super simple to recognize, like 人， 元，& 一二三四。As far as names are concerned, there's mine (大熊）& my wife's name, (小华). So I think there's a lot of merit in the suggestions of writing them to learn to read them. My pinyin is probably better than my wife's, so if I can associate that to my hanzi writing and recognition, I should be in pretty good shape.

learning chinese is the same as learning english. speaking, listening, reading and writing, that is what i did when i started to learn english. another thing is the enviroment, i did part time job when i wa in the uk, it forced me to speak , read , listen and write in english, because all my colleagues are locals,that real helps. i am living in beijing, we can get in touch if u guys want .

Lester,

Great points. Thanks for taking the time to write about your experience with that.

I saw on the home page tips section a few times, and you just mentioned it here... "being able to computer write the correct characters." Have you run across any threads on here that explain how to do this?

I installed the Asian language pack through Windows so all the characters come up perfectly, but I've never known how you all actually type in Chinese.

I'll try starting a new thread and see if anyone has instructions.

-jonathan

TaiPan,

When I tried to just memorize the look of the characters, I would forget them quickly. That may be just the way I am, others may have success without writing.

In fact, the main reason I learn to write the characters is so that I can recognize them when I read them. Being able to hand-write Chinese will not be as useful to me as being able to computer-write the correct characters. This is just a method for getting to the goal.

And, as I have been practicing writing, I have begun to recognize other characters that I haven't practiced yet. When I come across new characters in the PDF, I may make a mental note of its meaning. If it occurs often enough, it goes into the memory without my needing to write it. So, I'm thinking if I follow franch's idea, it will speed up the assimilation process.

What's everyone's opinion about just learning to recognize the characters so one can read as opposed to trying to learn to write?

Any thoughts?

DaXiong - I think experimenting is key. I am still in the early stages of learning Chinese and I'm still experimenting with new approaches. In fact, I am going to try franch's suggestion of copying whole sentences.

I also agree with Man2Toe on understanding strokes and stroke order. But, I didn't have the time or luxury of good instruction material. I found chinese-tools.com which gives 100 characters and their stroke order. Now that I am beyond their 100, I am able to use what they taught to write other characters. I would still like to get the K-6 books, though.

喂 喂 喂， 你 是 谁

哈 哈 哈， 我 很 傻

傻 呵 呵， 我 认 为

那 首 矢 手 诗 很 差!

- N C -

Your approach should really vary and adapt to where your level is at the moment, it won't stay the same, it's important to keep things interesting.

Since you were in China a while, your listening is probably better than your writing and 'seeing' the hanzi is not foreign to you.

It takes some amount of time, exposure, use to 'see' all the parts of a character. I would say this, don't go the learn 20 words a day route, just pick a word or two that you are really comfortable with. You know, like 'wei' 喂， and slowly write it out.

Don't write it twenty times. Just slowly draw out the square, the cross-box, etc. Let your mind really absorb all the strokes.

Come back to it whenever you can, especially when you 'say the word' wei, visualize it in your head, write it down.

Keep coming back to it, try to use it in your written communications, text it a few times in your cellphone. Heck text it to yourself, 喂 喂 喂。

Slowly as you learn to 'see' parts of each character more quickly, then you'll start to absorb characters in large blocks...effortlessly. ;p :)

Thanks for the tips everyone. More learning experiments on the way..

Much appreciated. This is why poddies are good people.

聘用 Was just having an IM session where my friend used this word. I hadn't seen or learned 聘 before. But I have a feeling now that I had this experience with IM, looking it up, than now sharing it with you, I might know this word by sight. This would second Bazza's thoughts.

I add my support to writing the characters also. Make sure you have a strong understanding of stoke order before taking off with self study. This is very important long term. IMO in the long run, knowing how to read Chinese is a must in order to take one's total language proficiency to a deeper level.

I also am a visual-kinetic learning

Children textbooks from China or Taiwan can be very helpful in creating a program- a building block method-to learning how to read and write Chinese. Start with Kindergarten and work through the textbooks methodically until level 6. Getting your hands on a full series that a school use may be difficult but maybe someone from Cpod could help with this.

Declan has 150 xls files here

http://www.declan-software.com/chinese/wordfiles_chinese.htm

50 words per file

The sound is horrid, however has smooth graphics,

another downSide is, no copy and paste function

from their flash card reader!

Sheer Association Between Characters Could be Help.

I support Lester's suggestions with great fervour, and with such fervour do I write as much as I can. But the way I've done it from the beginning was to copy whole sentences, or chengyu (my favourite) in order to get the feeling of it all, grammar and turns of phrases. It makes no sense to me to learn Chinese from an oral/aural basis. Even though the characters have been derived diachronically from the sounds (as the phonetic components attest), I think that one has to tame the written sign first and foremost when learning the living, synchronic language.

Filling in those grids with lines of hanzi is a bore and a chore to my mates, and so it is to me, but only in the relative sense that I much more enjoy writing something which has made sense to many pairs of Chinese writers/readers before. Imagining context is the key to learning, the more emotionally involved the better.

But my approach is personal, since the arcane of shufa has been the main incentive for me to dive and delve in Chinese. I continue to write as many sentences as possible, I copy every text from Cpod and elsewhere with delight and my ballpoint pen. And I'm sure this is a most efficient dao, if discipline can match enjoyment.

If you encounter boredom, there must be a better way :)

I got real motivated to learn Hanzi and am up to about 180 characters. I know that's small but I only started learning them in March or April. The way I am doing it is the same way Chinese kids do it. I write them down 10 times each day.

I don't write all 180 everyday. I write about 25. The list may change each day, or the list may have the most recent addition to the list. It really doesn't matter, as long as I am writing them. I keep a list of all the characters I've learned how to write and I try to add at least 5 characters per day. It will take about 2 years to get to my 2500 character goal.

Before I get too far along, keep in mind, Bazza has it right on that exposure is key. In fact, I am going to give his suggestions a try. But, when I've "hand-written" the character, I am so much more likely to recognize it when I see it. And better yet, I will be able to write it when I don't have a computer.

If you are a visual/kinetic learner like me, writing works wonders. I use a Moleskin notebook with 1/4inch grid. I use 4 square for the first few practice characters, then I shrink it to fit in the 1/4 inch. I use a 0.1mm pen made by Staedtler (Staples sells them). And, I go to www.chinese-tools.com where they have a nice, maybe too calligraphic, method of writing about 100 characters. These are good basic characters to learn.

Now I recognize that most works are not single characters. But, I am taking a building block approach, and am figuring it out as I go.

Good Luck. And don't give up.

Also switch your ipod, mp3 player, digital camera etc to Chinese as well. You more exposure you get the better, you probably find it tough for a while but you'll slowly start to recognise more and more them. It's going to take a few years though, there is no super quick way.

Changing as many of your software programs into Chinese language as you can and using an annotator like hanzibar to help you navigate. ;)

The best thing I've tried so far is the game WeiLiYu. It's free and fun, and has increased my character recognition enormously. Give it a try.