Are you studying Chinese characters?

大家好！其实学习一门语言其主要目的也是用来交流的，对吧？你们学汉语的这种情形犹如我们学习英语，感受是一样的。我觉得既然想要学习那么就从日常生活开始吧，只是汉语意思很广，延伸的意思很多。从你们的对话，发帖开始，慢慢积累就可以了。

@urbandweller: I really enjoyed reading the discussion above on stroke order. Have you noticed before that when native speakers of Chinese are having a "brain fade", ie. they are struggling to remember how to write a particular character (yes! it does happen! :p), they will write the character in the air with their finger? Or else they will start writing the character, very quickly, to see whether their muscle memory can help them to complete it.

It's all muscle memory for them. I do the same because I am not a "visual" person, in fact I am absolutely hopeless at picturing an entire character in my head. For me, I remember new characters by sight -- I no longer practice writing characters -- but the process involves breaking down the characters by radical, and having a good "muscle memory" for each radical.

I'm curious to know: How are you able to count the number of strokes in a character if you don't use stroke order? It must be like trying to do a head-count in a classroom full of Stunt Toddlers spinning about and skipping everywhere like Stunt Toddlers do!

@diegan_storm: I don't recommend trying to learn the radicals as if they were words on their own.

The radicals are like lego bricks. A few of them -- eg. 日 (ri4) -- are words in themselves, but most aren't, and are only ever seen as part of another character.

Radicals convey meaning in roughly the same way as the "tele-" in English words such as: telemetry, telecommunications, television, telegraph etc. And "tele-" isn't always the only element which corresponds to a "radical"; eg. the "-metry" in telemetry. The tricky thing about Chinese is that only one radical in each character will be considered to be the "root radical" (regular Chinese dictionaries list entries by the root radical, not by alphabetical order). 

The best way to "learn" radicals is to get a feel for the meaning which they convey, by seeing them in context ie as part of characters. Flashcards aren't really helpful in this respect.

Here are my (humble) suggestions:

1. Develop a feel for recognizing radicals by flipping through the section in your dictionary which serves as an index for looking up words by radical.

It's hard to describe, but you should be able to find an index where all the characters under each "root radical" are listed in order of the total number of strokes in the character. Eg. starting with 亿 and ending with 儡.

With only a bit of practice, you should find it easy to break any new Chinese character you see into its component radicals. This is useful because it means that when you learn a new character, you are not trying to learn it as a long sequence of strokes, but rather as "this radical + that radical".

2. Another good way to get a feel for radicals is to explore the way they are used to create characters which convey different meanings even though they may sound alike. The next time you look up a word in a print dictionary, let your eyes wander to the entries above and below the exact word you were interested in.

Just try looking up "老“ (lao3) in a print dictionary. You will discover that most of the characters listed under the pinyin "lao" consist of this character 老 in combination with various radicals. I'm guessing that there will be another character -- 劳 -- which also generates a few of the "lao" words.

Another useful one to try is "马“ (ma3).

Hope this helps, and that my "advice" wasn't too confusing! Good luck with the Chinese!

but I am still deciding If I just make them with the most common signs, or first try to learn the 214 radicals. What would you recommend, start with the most used characters, or with radicals?

Learn some common radicals first but no need to learn all of them to start off with because theres a lot you won't see that often at a basic level of reading and writing

Hi, I am also a newbie trying toi decide which strategy to follow. I am making my own flashcards, but I am still deciding If I just make them with the most common signs, or first try to learn the 214 radicals. What would you recommend, start with the most used characters, or with radicals?

A very newbie question: each radical is a word for itself, normally used in written chinese, or are all radicals always part of another character?

As I promised earlier in this thread, now I'm back in China, I put a small part of a practice book online (write 1 to 10) . If anyone is interested I can do this regularly.

I think that writing characters is extremely important, but if you just want to learn to recognize them at the beginning, I found a wonderful set of flashcards to invest in published by Tuttle (http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Flash-Vol-Tuttle-Cards/dp/0804833613).

This really cuts down on your hours spent making flashcards, which, although helpful, has not resulted in any long-term benefit for me besides too many redundant flashcards with poor handwriting. Each Tuttle card shows the stroke order. There are four volumes, each including 448 character cards. Each card has both simplified and traditional forms as well as compound words and examples. I bought them at my local Borders store here in Seattle.

I'm a complete beginner, so I can't offer any advice.  But I can describe what I am planning to do and let people flame me for it (actually, any criticism would be useful.  that's why I'm posting this)...

I figure speaking and hearing Chinese should be my main focus early on.  To that end, I'm using Pinyin to learn new vocabulary and sentnece structures.  I'm also trying to learn to recognize some of the more common characters in the words I am learning (pronunciation and meaning).  If I can recognize the characters, then I can read some text and I can write some of the words I know using WenLin or Microsoft's input system (I type the pronunciation, both give me a list of characters to choose from).  Finally, some day I will learn the stroke order.  But, I've been a native english speaker for almost 40 years now, and no one can read my English handwriting, so why should chinese be any different!

I realize 2 things as I try to learn characters in this way:

1. There are a lot of characters with subtle differences.  If I were writing them, I might recognize those differences sooner, but mistaking one character for another forces me to recognize those differences, too. 

2. Most characters are made up of radicals, and it would probably be helpful for me to learn those radicals instead of recognizing dan1 as a zao3 with "devil horns" and recognizing shuo1 as an "i" and a "TiVo". 

But I'm sticking by my general strategy of waiting to learn stroke order (with the caveat that I am not handwriting characters at all so I won't learn bad stroke order).  Rather than spend time writing a character 100 times, I spend it with my flashcards trying to learn to recognize the characters, and with WenLin looking at Chinese texts and trying to pick out characters I know (and hovering over to make sure I am right). 

-jim

I studied Chinese for almost 2 years before jumping in and learning hanzi.  I'm happy I did.  Like Henning and others mentioned, it definitely reinforces the language and ties everything together.

I've always found Chinese characters to be little works of art, so I have always wanted to study them.  I also find that learning the stroke order is like a game (especially because I write a lot on my Palm, using Dragon Character Training and Pleco).  Learning how to read and write characters actually keeps learning Chinese fresh for me, because it adds fun and "art" to the process.  Just wish there was more time in the day for it!

Stroke order could be important for three reasons:

1. Running script (Chinese "cursive") is heavily dependent on the combined motions your pen makes over the paper for a set of strokes. Without using proper stroke order, running script will never be readable to you.

2. Computer handwriting recognition. For example, my tablet PC. Again, maybe this doesn't matter to most people but I look forward to the day when we don't use keyboards to work with computers in non-romanizaed languages.

3. If you ever want to write even the simplest note to a friend you'll need to know how to write a few characters without a computer.

Thanks for the writing resources, although maybe it's just me, but I have no real need at this point in time to learn to handwrite characters.  Even if I one day go to China (*crosses fingers*) I don't plan on going any place without something to type with, like a cell phone or whatever.  Plus, this way I can learn to read 30-50 hanzi a day! (not EVERY day of course, that's way too painful)  I've recently begun to chat with people on Chinese IM, and it's far more useful to me to learn pinyin and hanzi without handwriting.

And nice stat chart mandarinboy!  I must be learning the wrong characters, I'm past 300 and can still barely grasp what a friend writes to me!

Traditional character stroke order according the rules published by their ministry of education can be accessed here

http://stroke-order.learningweb.moe.edu.tw

An excellent resource.

I totaly agree that stroke order can be tricky from time to time  but that is mainly since there are different rules in Japanese versus Chinse and also between the simplified and the traditional ones. Since we when learning mandarin only looks at the simplified ones, is is easier. For an example of the differences between  Japanese and Chinese: http://www.jvgruat.com/Chine/strokes.pdf

I use the basic Chinese standard for every single character and do not honour any exeption:-) that makes it easy. In Japanese it is much harder since there are so many exeptions. We also have not only the kanji to learn but also katakana and  haragana.

Stroke order is important, but can become tricky at times. So you need to become pragmatic here and there.

You can look up stroke order at

http://www.nciku.com/ or

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php

Additional resources next to the excellent ones from hape:

1. Frequency List and
2. zdic.net (too bad that this über-resource is reported to install malicious software and is blocked now)

hmmmm....i will think about it...thanks mandarinboy

About stroke order, Since there is so very few stroke order rules, It is worth learning them:

Top to down.  Special case: Left side of squares is drawn before the top. 

 
Left to right.  Exception: Hook on the right side comes first. 

Horizontal lines and squares before crossing vertical lines.  Exception: Bottom lines are always drawn

last.  Frames before contents.  Note: The bottom line of a frame is drawn last. 

Centre before symmetrical sides. 

Secondary dots drawn last

The reason? Study have proven that things that we repeat over and over again sticks better. That is the simple fact. Since the parts of the character are repeated in other characters, we will learn new characters faster as well. I started as a "non bealiver" but I have changed. Now I can learn a new character in just minutes comapred to days for the first ones. Give it a try, it takes longer time in the beginning but then the feeling is there, you will learn faster!

Then, if you like to write real calligraphy then the brush stroke will be very visible and then you can't hide the wrong strokeorder anymore;-)

I would like to add an link to a place where a Swedish guy (in English) explains the basic behind how characters are build up. http://www.zein.se/patrick/chinen9p.html

There is also links to to a list with the 3000 most common characters in Chinese.

It can be nice to have an basic understanding how many characters you need to know to be able to understand X amount of the language. Here is the list:

Note, this is statistics! ( there are  three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.....) Those numbers gives an aproximation hint about it but then you need to have X amount of learned characters from the top 3000 list. Another thing is also that this is for CHARACTERS, not words. A character can be repeated in many different words and you might or might not know that new words, even if you do know the characters. Take the lovely expression mamahoho. Literaly horse horse tiger tiger. You know the character but there is no way you know the word if you have not learnt it.

so this is how i learn the characters...

first, making flashcards of all new vocabulary and takign them everywhere i go...always a free moment to study

two, writing on a dry erase board!! you can write over and over and over so this is the best thing ever!! most importantly is environmentally freindly(saves lots of paper)

three, not worrying about stroke order!

:)

of course!! to be fluent in this language i think you have to study and learn the characters!!

But this language is challenging enough already..can someone please tell me why "stroke order" is really that important?? I really dont think it is...honestly i dont pay any attention to stroke order...i just write them and get it done...i know its not the proper way but whatever...i dont care if they look pretty, i just want to memorize as many as possible and move on!!

i am currently studying one lesson a week...i break that down into 1- 2 sentences a day...i write and memorize...again they dont look that great but from what i have heard many real chinese people dont write them very good either!!

ha ha!

I actualy started with writing before speaking. Partly that can be because my first teachers in China did not speak one word English;-)

My love for Chinese have always been the written version. By working on that i have also been able to expand my spoken Chinse a great deal.

Todayw with so many gret programs for writing Chinese there is actualy many taking a shortcut by only learning to write the characters by the use of e.g an IME system (keyboard) Me my self love the old system of actualy writing them. This is how I do it:

- Take the new character. Write it a couple of time on an white board. i use an A4 sized paper thin film to write on. I write it about ten times before i wipe out the page and start over. For me it works better to start writing big characters and write slow to get all lines perfect. This writing tends to stick better to my brain. After than i go back to normal sized characters. While writing i break down the characters and looks at the parts. There must be one that is the radical, if not the whole character is one. I most cases there is also a pronunciation part. Those a good to know since they will give hints about the meaning as well as the pronounciation. By doing this you will also soon find that the same radicals are coming back for the same sort of characters, look e.g. on the radical for person, that is involved in many activities made by a person. The sames goes for the pronuncation. They come back over and over again. To help you break it down there are many dictionaries on line that can helt, e.g. zhongwen.com or yellowbridge.

Note, as said before, the stroke order is important. Our brain saves many memories based on frequency and patterns. If you write it differently every time, it will take longer time to remember it. Also, Chinese people  that sees you write will correct your writing if it is wrong;-)

- when i master the character i look up other words that contains this character. I am not interestd in words that is seldom used so i search only for words that are in the top 3000 most frequently used words. The ones that i find i try to learn as a bonus. My own frequency list i have actualy created my self by programming a simple script that harvest news paper articles and count the word and pattern setences in them. There are many such frequency list on the net for anyone to use.

Now, since i now hopefuly do know the character i try to read as much as possible to practice it. This is the important part. 

Since i love flash cards i also print all my cards and use them for repetetitions. Newly learnd words i repeat once a week and the once that i already have been repeated some times i take up about once a month to make sure that i still know how to write them. By flipping the cards over and only look at the translation and i can practice both the pinyin and the character.

Most of this is right on, especially ZDT, the program Paigeums recommended.It's much more than a flashcard program: I love the Annotator functionality.

As for stroke order, it's more important than it seems. Not only does it help you break characters into constituent characters but knowing stroke order is the only hope you'll ever have of reading running script!

I use a Tablet PC running Vista for practicing my writing. It doesn't recognize characters that are "badly written". That is, it insists on proper stroke order and a bit (though not much) of proper form. I copy passages into the tablet and find it quite helpful to get immediate feedback. (The XP version of Tablet didn't work too well with characters.)

And it looks like Apple's coming out with a tablet so that means that the "think different" masses can finally endorse this method of practicing characters :P (Yes, I know about the Newton.)

 I study writing characters mostly from John Defrancis "Beginning Chinese Character Text". It is a pretty old book, but it is pretty comprehensive. The only bad thing is that it is handwritten in traditional characters. I usually make flashcards of my own with the traditional and simplified characters. I think it is easy to get overwhelmed by the characters, so for the most part I just keep going forward in this book (sometimes if there is a word I really want to learn then I add it to my flashcards). For extra practice, I like to listen to the Chinese Pod dialogues and see how much of the dialogue I can write in characters. Whatever I can't write yet then I just write in pinyin.  There are about 500 characters in this book. I am on the last chapter and then on to John Defrancis, "Character Text for Intermediate Chinese". 

Thanks to all of you. I was going to finish writing the previous post I had started but I think everything that I was going to say is explained wonderfully in everything that you guys have said (plus a ton more that I didn't plan on saying). Thanks for the posts!

Jordan

When I first began to study Mandarin, I tried to do it as I would study Spanish. When studying a language with a phonetic written form, you learn to say new words and to read and write them simultaneously. This is what I tried to do in Chinese, and it was terrible. Having to learn characters as I went made the mastery of simple starter phrases into huge tasks. It's not easy for a complete beginner to learn to say, "Wǒ pǔtōnghùa shūo de bù hǎo," but if you need to learn to read and write "我普通话说得不好" before moving on, it can make for a very slow start. (At the beginning, this was one of my favorite starter phrases, because I knew that if I tried it on a Chinese person they would be convinced of my point even if they couldn't understand me.)

When I stopped studying characters I was able to make the leap into studying the language and being able to converse at a simple level. I looked up characters when I needed to, and did make some effort to remember them, but didn't practice in an organized way.

When I added characters back into my study, two things had changed. First, I had enough exposure to the characters that I had absorbed many of the common ones and was far less intimidated by the others. Second, while my Mandarin was still very basic, I had begun to compose Mandarin sentences as though I were speaking a language rather than using a decoder ring.

One of the most important early hurdles to language study is reaching the level of comfort where the new language begins to feel like a language. This makes the whole thing begin to feel possible, and makes it much easier to continue to study.

Though some visually-oriented people have said that character study was a vital part of their language study from the very beginning, I would suggest that beginners should not hesitate to back burner character study if they feel that it is slowing down their acquisition of the bare bones of the language. If, like me, you have an emotional desire to organize your language study by separating the language into a "learned" column and an "unlearned" column, mastering each word in its spoken form and its written form (or forms) before progressing, fight the temptation. You could do it for a while, but language study is too fluid for such a scheme to work for long, and in the meantime the effort might hurt your study.

I didn't start studying characters until a month or so after getting used to vocab and pinyin.  I really reccomend using Zhongwen Development Tool (http://zdt.sourceforge.net).  It's basically a flash card program with a full dictionary (simplified by default, but each entry has the traditional spelling as well), and you can make your own lists and word entries to study.  It does NOT offer any help in learning to write characters, but for learning to read, I find it to be fantastic.

For more character "enlightenment", I recommend

http://zhongwen.com

http://chinese-characters.org

http://www.chineseetymology.org

Zhāng Lìhuā's blog "Learn Hanzi - Mnemonics for learning Chinese"

http://www.yellowbridge.com

and my own website in German "Taeglich. Chinesisch" (trad. only).

Good Books:

• Harbaugh: Chinese Characters
• Ann: Cracking the Chinese Puzzles
• Wieger: Chinese Characters
• Karlgren: Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese

The following will come out soon

"Remembering Traditional/Simplified Hanzi"

Sample (PDF)

Hello,

I, like Henning feel that learning to read Characters is critical, and also very enjoyable. I'm in the same boat as Henning in that I can't write very well, maybe I can only write about 500 characters at the most.

One thing that's a huge help in learning to write characters by hand (and a great aid in remembering them) is to learn the components.

For example: 闻 wén (to hear) is made up of two parts.

1- 门 mén (Door, Entrance)

2- 耳 ěr (Ear)

This method is EXTREMELY effective, and when you break it down this way, it's similar to the concept of spelling a word. 

In English: Hear, H...E...A...R

In Chinese: 门 mén + 耳 ěr = 闻 wén

This is also how the Chinese remember their characters.

Hi guys,
the other name for "learing Chinese characters" is "Elementry-Intermediate gap". Seriously, this is the door to the language. The characters show the mechanics of the language and help you remembering and distinguishing critical vocab.

Besides: For me, most of my limited English vocab I learned through reading and more reading - and it is much more so with Chinese.

However, my handwriting skills are close to zero, so I recently started tackling this again: I now always carry 2 pages of a PDF printout for an Upper Intermediate or Advanced lesson with me. When there is free time I read a sentence and try to "write" it from memory with my fingers (in the air, on the table, on a chair, on my hand, etc...). If I don't 100% remember a character, radical or stroke, I look at the printout and afterwards repeat from the beginning. Until I complete the complete sentence. Then I move on.

This would of course be much more effective with actual pen and paper, but most of my times I practice this way are "no-desk situations".

Excellent! I am on-board with your "all at once" way of thinking. Of course, writing a lot does help to cement those sometimes pesky characters into one's brain. Less obvious is the usefulness of STROKE ORDER! Stroke order is beneficial to remembering characters because it makes writing the characters a simpler process, thus making it easier to remember the characters. I commend you on your efforts (even though I am only 16 and my commendation probably doesn't mean too much :S )

I would also like to say a little something about pinyin vs. characters. Lots of people who are learning Chinese feel that it is less important to study the Characters than it is to learn the spoken language. After all, that's why pinyin was created! To cover our backs, right?  Pinyin was created so that non-Chinese learners could get a feel for the sound of the Characters in an comfortable, familiar fashion. On top of that, for those of us who are not as familiar with Chinese characters, looking through a radical based dictionary is nothing short of a nightmare. *Catches Breath* With that in mind, when it comes to reading sentences, paragraphs, NEWSPAPERS!!!, the task becomes much more complicated. Primarily, the difference is that reading pinyin is SLOWER! For a beginner, learning to read pinyin is acceptable and actually, recommended. However, there is a point when you should wean yourself off of pinyin. When is that point? I have to go now but I will write more later and finish this up. Sorry :S

Jordan

Hi guys, I'm doing the writing reading speaking and listening thing all at once. For the character writing: 1) I write a LOT. 2) I practice correct strokeorder :-). That works for me.

Also, I bought loads of children's practice notebooks. They are designed for children around 3 or 4 years old I believe and serve as a preparation for school. They cost almost nothing in China and haven't seen them here in Holland yet. Maybe i could put them online for the people outside China when I'm back.