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Poll: Amount of time to learn a Chinese character
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View Poll Results: # of times, on average, you need to write out a character before you can
reproduce it
I am superhuman; I just need to look at them 6 13.33%
1-5 10 22.22%
6-10 9 20.00%
11-15 2 4.44%
16-20 5 11.11%
21-25 3 6.67%
26-30 3 6.67%
31-40 0 0%
41-50 2 4.44%
51 + 5 11.11%
Voters: 45. You may not vote on this poll



Page 4 of 4 First < 23 4






leosmith -



Quote:

Making funny stories like that helped me a lot. Did other people do that?

From a previous string:



Quote:

I recommend using the Heisig method. This is a combination of the excellent methods mentioned in
the other posts. It was designed for Japanese kanji, but will work for hanzi. There isn't a book
out yet for hanzi, but you want to learn in a particular order anyway, so a book wouldn't be as
helpful to you. Here is a pdf of the first 100 pages of Remembering the Kanji, by James Heisig:

http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/...RK4/RK4-00.pdf

To sumarize, you assign a name to each primitive (a primitive is usually a radical, but not
always; its just a recurring group of strokes), as johnmck suggested. Then you invent a story that
ties all the primitive names to the keyword (the keyword is the primary meaning of the character),
something like bianfuxia's method. Next you draw the character onto a flashcard, as Yang Rui
mentioned, remembering the story as you go along. On the other side of the flashcard write the
keyword. When you get a stack of flashcards, drill them. Drill from keyword to writing only;
you'll get plenty of practice in the other direction. You can read my review on amazon, which
includes my learning method;

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/4889960...530915-4478462

A couple notes:
1. You can include the pronunciation of the character in your story, and/or put it on the
flashcard with/instead of the keyword, but this is not advised. Most find it's better to learn
pronunciation by remembering a word that contains the character.
2. After you feel comfortable with a set of flashcards, it is best to put them into a good
electronic flashcard program like supermemo. You'll be making thousands of these things, so the
only way to avoid huge periodic reviews is to use a program that knows which ones you really need
to review and when. Every day the program will feed you only what you need to maintain 90%
retention, which greatly reduces your workload.

Good luck,
Leo





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self-taught-mba -

Good find leosmith Fixed link here










imron -



Quote:

I am flat out amazed at the number of people who say that they only need to look at the character
before considering it learnt. To those people I ask: does that mean you can recall it from memory
and produce it on the paper?

Yes, because I go over it until I can close my eyes and recall it from memory, and once you can do
that, it's trivial to write it out. I don't just glace at the character and then it's magically
learnt. Per character, I still spend approximately as much time as it would take to write it out
several times. However, because I'm actively visualising the character (i.e. drawing out the
strokes, or making it 'pop' into view with my mind), you don't get the 'autopilot' phenomenon that
occurs when writing the character out several times. Also, like any other skill or technique, the
more you practise it, the better you get, so the more time you spend improving your active recall
ability, the faster it becomes to recall individual characters.

However, similar to writing the character out, if you then don't use the words you've learnt, then
over time you do forget them. However, personally, I've found the forget-rate for characters
learnt like this to be far less than when I used to write the characters out by hand. Reading is
also great for helping to reinforce the active recall, because if you come across a word you've
previously 'learnt', but which is still a little bit unclear, you can pause for a second or two,
write the word several times in your mind to reinforce the memory, and then continue as normal.










muyongshi -

To post or not to post on a thread that has not been updated in 11 months....

A what the heck, I have two cents laying around (even though they aren't worth much).

I am able to carefully look at a character and reproduce it from memory. And even sometimes those
are able to stay in my long term memory and I never need to "practice" them. However, I also have
character that I have to write upwards of 10 times before I finally can remember it fully. But I
think on average it is 1-2 times for me. It's hard to say though as I have encountered many
different situations and I always wonder what other factors there are in my ability to reproduce
it. Sometimes ones with radicals I already know are the harder ones and the ones where I have no
clue about it's similarity to other characters I have looked at and never written it wrong (like
偷 I remember in my 2nd month of study I looked at this character and have never forgotten how to
write it). Also I think factors about how much you encounter in reading even has a factor.










calibre2001 -

Generally it gets easier once your character vocab has crossed the 1000 mark. It's probably
because you would have a grasp of the most common strokes and radicals within characters.
In the beginning, I struggled writing 報紙，雜誌 and I remember writing these like 50 times
each. Finally it sank in and I can now reproduce these words effortlessly. On the other hand, the
more complex characters like 繼續 ， 瞭解 or weirder looking ones like 矛盾 strangely
required less writing to sink in. I guess it's about how frequent and how distinct the characters
are. I relearnt writing 打噴嚏 3 times at different stages and guess what? I still cant
reproduce it by hand!










geek_frappa -

cool question.

i voted 51+. i don't consider a Chinese character "learned" until i can write it about more than
50 times in a composition without thinking too hard.

when i first started writing characters, i only cared about legibility, but now i am conscious
about penmanship for essays and report-writing (maybe too obsessive at times...).

just my 2 cents.










m.ellison -

You may be interested in a new book Matthews and Matthews, Learning chinese characters, which is
similar to the Heisig book but better. (I have started a separate thread for discussing this book).










magores -

I learned 下 after 1 try.

Worse than "super-human", but better than "just plain stupid".

I can accept that.


Seriously though...
-For most characters that I know, I know it when I see, even if I don't know how to write it off
the top of my head.
-Say a random syllable/character that I actually do know, and ask me to write it, and I'll have to
stop and think
-Ask me to write something in context that includes that character, and its usually not a huge task












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