Newbie

bryann
 December 09, 2008 at 10:01 AM posted in General Discussion

Ok - I am a newbie struggling with oral chinese and a touch of pin yin - I would also like to start to study chinese characters - but where on earth do you begin? HELP

 

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tvan
 December 09, 2008 at 01:28 PM

bryann, I've forgotten the exact statistics, but there are 400 commonly used characters which comprise a significant percentage of those used commonly in print.  I would suggest that you start with those 400, along with the radicals as Henning suggests.

Are you interested in learning to write or simply recognize characters?

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henning
 December 09, 2008 at 11:39 AM

Hi bryann,
all you need is a brief overview on the basics of the writing system (what does a character represent, what is a "radical", what is "stroke order", where did the characters come from). After that you can start with skritter.