Practicing Chinese Characters Effectively and Efficiently
This is going to be my first article in a series covering my efforts to learn Chinese quickly, effectively and efficiently. My hope is to create a new set of strategies which will make the learning process easier for everyone because most of the available teaching materials seem incomplete or deficient in one way or another.
I am specifically emphasizing speed and effectiveness because, if you are like me, you have very little time and energy to practice Chinese and you must make that limited time useful. I have spent quite a bit of time thinking and reading about how to practice and what works and what doesn’t work. What follows are the results of what I have learned and some suggestions about how everyone can learn Chinese much faster. Practice doesn’t make perfect, practicing effectively makes perfect.
Forget Rote Memorization
First things first: Completely forget trying to use rote memorization when it comes to learning Chinese characters.
One of my first attempts to get Chinese characters into my brain was to use the familiar techniques of flash cards and rote repetition (writing and rewriting the same characters). What I found was that this simply didn’t work. I would spend hours attempting to memorize the characters only to find that effort wasted. All the characters I had “learned” simply evaporated by the next day or week despite my efforts. It was frustrating and the very definition of “ineffective.”
Why Rote Memorization Won’t Work With Chinese
I have a theory about why these classic “rote” techniques are so ineffective with Chinese. While rote memorization and flash cards may be (questionably) effective for memorizing things in English (and Romance language), the “alien nature” of Chinese characters makes this approach a non-starter.
If you approach Spanish, many of the words sound vaguely familiar and the writing system is the same. An English speaker reading the Spanish phrase “Yo no comprendo?” Might be able to guess that it sounds like “I don’t comprehend.” Your brain has English-language “hooks” into Spanish. This make rote memorization possible.
In learning Chinese, your brain has no such hooks. The Hanzi characters are unfamiliar and don’t look like the concepts they describe. Your brain has nothing to stick to and your attempts to memorize will fail. Before you can grasp the characters, your brain needs a meaningful bridge to cross the chasm. You must create English-language hooks artificially where they don’t exist. It is your job to build that bridge, no one else can do it for you, I will show you how.
If you start out climbing a mountain by walking backwards you will make slow progress. Likewise, learning Chinese will be excruciatingly slow if you adopt an incorrect learning techniques. You should direct your energy towards optimizing your study pratices.
Chineasy and Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters
The technique we are going to explore is derived from the technique taught in the Chineasy and Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters book with some changes. The way the technique works is that you take a set of basic characters and learn to associate them with visual clues and stories. You then use those stories as building blocks to create new stories for the more complex characters which contain these sub-characters.
The character for “fire” in Chinese looks vaguely like a fire (火). The character for “moon” looks vaguely like a crescent moon(月). There are a number of such “helpful” characters which a beginner can use to build a basic vocabulary. These helpful characters are not as common as one might hope.
The Story Language Technique Problem
Using the basic technique of attaching a story to each character is very valuable with some important exceptions. Take the example of my first name in Chinese: 雷克肵. The first character “雷” consists of a thundercloud over a rice field. You can even see the little drops of rain pouring out of the cloud down onto the field. This character easily lends itself to a visual story. Unfortunately, a significant number of the characters are not this helpful.
Many of the Chinese characters do not look like…well…anything. Many characters look confusingly similar. Many Hanzi are composed numerous such confusing characters. This makes our lives difficult and can “break” the technique taught in Tuttle and Chineasy. Good luck telling cute stories about characters such as these: 帮, 器, 斯, 链, 蜘.
Learning Characters Has Many Steps, Focus On The First
Learning the characters involves the following steps. My technique focuses initially on the first step:
Recognizing and remembering the characters (becoming familiar)
Understanding the characters (their meaning)
Associating characters with their sounds (pronunciations) aka “ma,” “chi,” “wu,” “ni” etc.
Associating characters with their tones (ascending, descending, flat, none, descending-ascending)
Recognizing and remembering words (composed of one or more characters)
Understanding the words (associating meaning)
Grammar (constructing your own sentences with the words and characters)
As a beginner, if you nail this step with many characters (perhaps an initial subset of a few hundred), proceeding through the next steps will come easily and naturally.
The Skill Of Becoming Familiar
The breakthrough for me began by focusing on the problem of “feeling familiar” the characters. When I use the word “familiar” I have a very special, specific meaning here. I do not mean “understanding” the characters or their meanings. I do not mean the ability to pronounce the characters properly or their tones. I mean that you can look at a character and remember it’s “meta-story” in English. This test below will show you what I mean.
The Familiarity Test
Write the following characters on a sheet of paper – 雷克肵. Now turn the paper over and write them again without looking. For maximum effect, wait a minute or two. Chances are, unless you have a really strong memory you might not be able to do this as a beginner. The reason you can’t recall the characters is that, to your brain, they are just meaningless random scribbles – impossible to recall. Your brain has no hooks into them yet.
By the end of this article you will be capable of generating the necessary English-language hooks to remember any random series of characters like this in a very short period of time. This is a crucial skill to building a vast vocabulary rapidly – I call this skill “familiarity” and it has nothing to do with knowing the meaning or pronunciation of the words, only recognizing them and being able to recite their English “meta-story.” The test for familiarity is the ability to recall a string of characters shortly after seeing them without peeking or cheating.
Introducing Meta-Stories and Meta-Poems
To solve the problem of rapidly becoming familiar with characters, I have given a specific name to the technique of “Building an English-To-Chinese Bridge” for your brain to walk across. I call this technique “Meta-Stories” and “Meta-Poems.” The reason I give this technique this name is derived from the word metadata. Metadata is data which describes data or provides context to data. Therefore, a Meta-Poem or Meta-Story is a poem or story which describes a Chinese character (which is one form of data) to help give context and create “connective tissue” and meaning.
Using Meta-Stories and Meta-Poems
Your brain loves meaning, it loves emotional connection, it loves shock-value, it remembers danger, it loves rhymes, it loves poetry and interesting rhythm. We are going to use these traits to our advantage to make Chinese Hanzi characters feel familiar.
Lets start with my first name: 雷克肵. Here are some meta-poems or meta-stories for these characters:
雷 – Raincloud on rice-field
克 – Cross-stuck-in-mouth-legs ( I call this one a “Zombie” myself because the cross character represents dirt or a grave and the totality of the figure represents a walking person to me)
肵 – Moon over cave-T or moon-shine on cover-t or moon-rising by hill-T
Try writing your own meta-poems or meta-stories. The more poetic or action-sounding the better. Making your own is essential, they must be logical to you or they won’t work.
After a bit of practice, generating these stories becomes second-nature. Within a short period of time it should be possible to look at a full paragraph or sentence and render it into this “gibberish” story format. If you are successful, you should be able to find that completing the exercise of seeing a few characters and writing them without looking becomes second nature. That is a critical first step to beginning to feel that these characters are “your friends” rather than random, meaningless scratches.
Demons, Snakes, Robots, Aliens, Crowns, Scepters, Staffs, Baskets, Thorns and Keys
Now that you understand the basic technique and goal (familiarity, not complete comprehension), lets introduce the core cast of characters you will encounter over and over again. Finding ways to turn these familiar characters into recognizable “friends” is important. Once I began looking for characters and weird stories, I found them in tremendous abundance.
Demons, Thorns and Aliens
美 – This is the demon king, note the horns and regal stature (he has many arms)
南 – Demon-child in a box. He is just a little demon, the priests have contained him.
手 – Mega-thorn or “thorn.” Thorn is a very common item, it comes in many varieties.
于 – Regular thorn
说 – An alien with a walking stick, see his antennae?
拼 – Square-demon (see the horns) with his thorn-staff
常 – The demon prince. See his crown with thorns? He is smaller than the demon king.
Odd Humans
传 – Snowboarder, he is racing down hill, see his ski pole?
片 – Waiter, can’t you see him holding a tray with a glass on it?
开 – Square dancer. He is a square and he is dancing on two legs, get it?
方 – Gymnast / vaulter. Just…look at it. Its a running guy. Unmistakeable.
要 – Potion floats over a woman. The “potion” is a common symbol.
车 – Man jumping hurdle, man jumping into tree, man stuck in a tree.
市 – Cowboy scarecrow / sombrero scarecrow
式 – Juggler shading a child. See the ball the juggler throws? I use the “I” as a child character.
元 – Blank-man / the invisible man
你 – Warrior standing guard
成 – Warrior leaning on his axe, tossing a coin
气 – Long jumper
Crows, Bats and Eagles Flying Over Things
布 – Crow flies over scarecrow. The “flying-t thing” is a common fixture. Can’t you see the scarecrow’s arms drooping?
有 – Crow flies over the moon
在 – Diving over a grave / Crow flies over grave.
希 – Windmill over crow flying over scarecrow
Funny Hats and Crowns
宝 – A jade emperor wearing a square hat!
Snakes
返 – Snake crawls under cave with scythe
這 – Snake crawls unders stack of papers or stack of hats
Crooks
了 – Shepherd’s Crook
The Phoenix, Weird Creatures
家 – Phoenix wearing a square hat
像 – Ski-pole by-fish over phoenix
而 – A squid or octopus or elephant (see it’s nose curling on the right?)
用 – Wafflephant, a cross between a waffle and an elephant
革 – Cow-head stuck-on sun-spike
项 – Giant troll with his club
生 – The King Centaur, see his spear? The centaur character recurs frequently.
Expanded Meta-Story List
Ski-pole next to stacked-hats 信
Clam floats next to ant 联
Snake under corkscrew 还
Cross-stuck in face 支
Mouth-ghost wearing beanie by chipped-sword 就
Gold-crown on (shout-mouth stuck to spider leg), or maybe “demon king” 常
Scythe leaning on corn rows or waffle iron 准
Broken basket plodding on shaky legs 鼠
Tea Cup on ghost stuck by shade-t 新
Nail-hat over thorn by shining moon 销
Chipped cave water 应
Empty-head with one-eye 间
Cave crow-juggles over T 庞
Xbox by nail-hat man 欧
Thorny sheath-sword dancing on nails 热
Snake under chipped-scythe 这
Thorn-binding kick-leg 我
Tempest 互
Scythe leaning kick-leg / sword-belt 戏
Clam-legs kick-at shady-nail 斯
Centaur kickstand under-grave 特
Thorn next to tea-cup 拉
Treetop by sword wraith 秒
Windmill over ghost 杀
Shady ghost / ghost with hat 乐
Snakestaff next by clam legs 视
Juggles over wedge-head 发
Crow flies over spider legs/scarecrow 布
Roof over flattened cheese-wedge 会
Sheathed sword or sword in sheath 为
Faster Cheese Wedge 么
Skipole christ 什
Standing tree by snail (tree snail) 机
Running shout-mouth 只
Wetting Pagoda stuck in shout mouth 活
Bullet train leaving tunnel spike 年
Starburst 来
Splashing grave stuck in cheese 法
Owl sits-on cross-pole 苹
Birdie with nail hat 每
Splashing on nail-hat running man 买
The house with mouths to feed 器
Ski pole empty head 们
Chicken face 向 (chickens have a comb)
Pine tree on ghost head 系
Pine tree by tall gnome with wedge-head 统
Snake ignores stick wand 让
Skipole crushed-spider 他
Cheese-hat moon two-tees 能
Iron hat 个
Snakes under field hat 更
Field stuck on tree-top 果
Stickman shouts-mouth over-eye 智
Splashing tophat over triangle head 没
Crying sword 办
The post How To Rapidly And Efficiently Learn Chinese Characters appeared first on Rex St John | 雷克斯 聖約翰.