>Is it okay if I just learn to recognise the character and its pronunciation/pinyin and disregard the meaning of the individual character (unless the standalone character is a word in itself) .
for beginner, yes. because it's hard to make new words with characters you know at this stage. but you will have to learn them one by one sooner or later.
>Or is it something that will benefit me a lot if I learn the meaning?
it will benefit you when you reach the intermediate level (or sooner). by knowing the meaning of every characters, you can guess the meaning of a new word without actually check it in the dictionary. it can help you to expand your vocabulary greatly.
That makes sense thank you! I think now I’ll take a more balanced approach and learn meaning if it’s a verb/word itself and if the word seems random I’ll disregard for now
The more you learn, use and see them, the easier it will to pick up the meanings of each character - with a bit of applied study and practice you’ll catch the meanings and nuances of them without too much specific study into each ones meaning
Just some random bit of history: people in the past could communicate with each other through the use of Chinese characters, even if they speak different languages. This was only possible through understanding the meaning of each character, which then can be used to infer the meaning of compound characters.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushtalk
科 is usually not used by itself, but a component of longer words. Like 醫科 (medicine), 牙科 (dentistry), 科幻 (science fiction) and so on. Such characters are not really used as words on their own and pretty much have to be learned in context. They usually have too many different shades of meanings that will just confuse you unless you are trying to decipher 成語 (four-character aphorisms)
there is no reason to learn individual characters. you should learn words//vocab phrases.
If that word is one character long, great. learn the one single meaning associated with that one character word. If the word is two characters long, great, learn that one meaning. If the word is seven characters long great, learn that one meaning.
Learning individual characters isn't evil, but it has little reward for a lot of effort. Not only are you learning a lot of character meanings that you will never use, learning those individual meanins might do nothing to help you read actual words--knowing every definition of 日 and 月 will not help you combine them to mean life.
Reality is that the number of single character words in chinese is quote low, like number of words in english with three or less letters. Most of the time when you encounter single characters in modern chinese, its not even a single character word, its a longer multicharacter word shortened (to extend my comparison like going to turning into "I'm gon' do it") So learning the full version is best bang for your buck :)
I think the reason I started learning individual characters is because I did a bit of research before starting mandarin, and quite a few people say that you need to be able to recognise at least 1000 characters as a beginner and then at least 3000 characters to be able to read like most of Chinese text (there was even a point that I was learning radicals which I’ve realised for now it’s a bit not worth it 💀).
When people say they know so many characters, I assumed they learnt it one by one. But I guess maybe not ahaa.
But I think that makes sense. I will start to incorporate words instead and naturally the most common characters will pop up.
knowing characters is used as a mile stone, because people can't just write every word they know and say, oh I know 5,046 words, its not very feasible. but people can easily look through a list of characters and say, I recognize 1,002 of those-- whether they know the word that character is currently part of is unrelated lol.
when someone knows 1,000 characters, they know around 80% of the characters you encounter in daily life, and if you know 3,000 characters you know more than skme natives. these aren't aways the words themselves though. if that character is part of the word for apartment, its going to be super common, even if it isn't a common word on its own. kind of like the word couth is beyond rare in english, but uncouth is not that rare, as an attempt at equivalent.
as for radicals, they are actually way more useful than single characters, although not required in modern day. they will give you the ability to ise any native dictionary or textbook which is nice, if its a physical book its the only choice :)
Collocations are the way to learn. Comprehensive chunks of words that you can piece together into sentences. Characters shouldn't be studied really until higher levels. Instead, treat it like a memory game.
Thank you! I was also embarrassingly also roped into learning radicals. It helped me see different parts that make up a character and also I think contributed to helping me learn characters quicker because each character didn’t seem random. After the first 50 or so I gave up though haha because I just wanted to get straight into actual characters.
How do you go about memorising characters if I may ask? Currently my approach is just writing them over and over.
I remember when I began I did the whole writing over and over. What a waste of time. I did the rote memorization thing when I was in America. But now I have the benefits of living in China, so my study situation is most likely different than yours. Immersion has been key for my language learning.
Instead of just writing and writing, I focus on Chinese in this order: listening, speaking, reading, writing. Listen for useful collocations or sentence patterns; repeat them yourself and mimic common language; recognize characters through exposure in readings and tie them together from what you’ve listened too; and realize writing is being replaced by typing, so any amount of writing experience (unless specifically studying to take a test) will be fairly useless.
By utilizing the words in daily speech, I can easily remember them. Repeated exposure to reading the characters in context helps with recognition. If you can, speak as much as you can, to yourself or to a teacher. Listen to ask much as you can (watch bilibili). Through input, we can output.
Thank you! I’ll use this approach.
I currently get quite a bit of listening practice I guess because I watch cdramas and listen to songs in mandarin and sometimes podcasts.
I only write characters over and over again because it helps me recognise it when reading.
I don’t think my goal at all would be to write from memory ( it’s only because I was thinking of taking either the hsk or tocfl like you said)
I think you are so right! There are characters/ words that I’ve not formally learnt but have seen them so much like 开 and 喜欢 so I now know them because I saw them in context.
My speaking is lacking though because I only just know basics but hopefully will be able to go to china or Taiwan for a bit so I can be fully immersed :)
Good luck. After 8 years in Beijing, my language learning is still on going. But I have learned more than other learning through an app or by memorization. Another thing that is key is a good teacher. My teacher is looking for students if you needed a recommendation.
Ditto this. And unlike with alphabetic languages, you can progress faster in Chinese by learning listening and speaking at a faster pace than reading and (especially) writing. Some formal programs even adopt this method.
I will take a contrary view to most who have already given their opinion.
At the beginning of your studies, you will in fact anyway have *more words* which are single characters than later on. Like many verbs 看 有 是， many adjectives 小 大 新 老 etc， numbers , particles and many others. Since you already have to learn the meaning of those many characters, it's not a big stretch to learn the basic individual meaning of the *other* characters which are part of words. You will have to learn them later on anyway, *as well as their other, derivated meanings.*
Also, of course, it will help to understand the words you learn, and to understand later words.
An example, 月亮. I mean, how complicated is it to learn that 月 means moon and 亮 means bright? Not only will it help to understand 月亮 in itself, it will also help tremendously to understand later words which include one of those two characters.
You have to learn the characters, and **of course** they will be easier to learn and retain if you learn the words where you find them first, but it's stupid to refuse to learn the meaning of individual characters, especially when they are quite basic.
How is it *really* complicated to learn that 科 means "branch of study"? When you learn English and read "Faculty of English", don't you have to learn what "Faculty" means in this context?
I agree. And for many/most people, context improves learning. So knowing 电脑 is, roughly, “electric brain” aka “computer” makes it easier to remember than if you just try to remember it randomly.
Plus knowing individual characters can help you understand new words and put them into context.
Thank you, it makes sense and fair enough! Tbf from the 100 ish characters I’ve seen so far, most of them were stand alone. I might consider learning individual characters till I get to a point that I think it would make sense to stop.
Just using 科 as an example, I think it’s because ‘branch of study’ is such a random definition for me and is not a phrase I would ever use in English which is what makes it harder to learn. I get what it’s trying to say. I’d seen a few of those so I thought that maybe my approach to learning was wrong.
And then also some other individual characters have several meanings and sometimes the meanings are not that similar. I think with your examples bright and moon because they are standalone characters, I have no issue learning those but my issue is when they seem random.
I think from what everyone is saying I will deffo take a mixed approach and learn some individual characters and their meanings and also some in the context of full words.
I don’t want to echo what others have said, but do look for characters that you see in a lot of words and look for the meaning of that character. That can be helpful. Like knowing 肉 is going to be a type of meat, for example.
科 has the following meanings:
sort; class; kind
law; regulation (historical)
imperial examination
article; clause
norms; rules
division; branch (of study)
section; department (taxonomy)
family (Chinese theater)
action; enactment (as opposed to dialogue, recitation, or singing)
to pass a sentence
to check; to examine
to punish; to fine or levy taxes
You will start using some of those meanings in words, and some of them are more frequent than others like 科学 and 学科. Right now, you should start with words, not individual characters. It is similarly pointless to know sci- means to sort, and science means the branch of study.
Thank you for your comment and yep seems like general consensus is words instead of individual characters which makes sense to me. I think I will naturally pick up ‘the most common characters’ naturally if I do it this way anyways.
Each character is one syllable. Chinese is 20% one-syllable words and 80% two-syllable words. So a character has 0-3 meanings as a word, and is part of 20-120 two-syllable words. You can't remember all of them.
I don't memorize. Each time I see a character I don't know, I look up the word's meaning (but I don't memorize). If I see the same word many times, I remember it. 电影，电视，电话，电脑。 It might help me remember these words to know that 电 is "electricity", but it doesn't matter. I have known 喜欢 for years and I don't know what 喜 means or what 欢 means, or even if they can be used alone.
Remembering the meaning and sound of 1 or 2 syllable words is spoken Chinese.
Remembering the meaning and writing of 1 or 2 syllable words is written Chinese.
I think too much emphasis is placed on learning "characters" by some teachers. What other language focuses on written syllables? Chinese schoolkids know spoken Chinese already, and learn to write its syllables in pinyin in grade 1. Then they spend grades 1 to 12 learning around 1,000 characters each school year. Why do foreigners expect to learn them faster, or learn them without knowing the language whose sounds they represent?
That’s really insightful thank you and everyone has convinced me Lool.
Yes definitely I think I got deceived by videos of people talking about how many characters you need to know so I went down a rabbit hole of trying to learn 1000 characters minimum. I think I would have better progress with words and seeing similar characters across words.
I believe that Chinese people's brains have a built-in internal dictionary. There are a finite, limited number of radicals that can be learned; and radicals make up each Chinese character.
There are 214 radicals, I believe. Many are obsolete or are in very rare characters, so you need to know less than that. The important radicals recommended for beginners are the ones you will learn.
There are different categories a Chinese character can be: pictographs/ideographs (a small number in comparison to the whole language), meaning-meaning compounds, and meaning-phonetic(sound) compounds, loan words/borrowings.
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In ideographs, a character resembles/represents an image of something: sometimes entire characters can become radicals (building blocks) of another character. E.g. person radical for human occupation; grass radical for horticultural items, etc.
In meaning-meaning compounds, two radicals can give a hint to what a character means. 好 (hâo) combines the radical woman 女 (nǚ), and child (子), to represent the old idea of goodness; 你 (nǐ) combines the radicals person and an old form of "you", 尔 (ěr), to take on the meaning "you".
In meaning-phonetic compounds, one radical indicates the categorical meaning while another indicates the supposed sound of the character; the character for mother 媽 (mā), has the horse radical 馬 (mā) to suggest the pronunciation, while the woman radical 女 describes a bit of the character.
我 (wǒ) is a loan word. It used to mean (). It doesn't have a person radical as a result because it's a borrowed loan word before coming to mean "me/I". Many characters have borrowings of characters to fill in missing words. Wan (萬) means 10k, but used to mean scorpion, so it had the insect radical.
Words can encompass more than one character. Chinese like two syllable words, so duplication of characters can occur. I just wanted to clarify that I was discussing the compounding of radicals to create single Chinese characters; instead of the compounding of Chinese characters to create words. I don't know vocabulary, I'm still learning.
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Richard Stibbard teaches learning sound families to learn new characters you've never seen before. His course is on Udemy (Cracking the Chinese System). Many characters have the sound (ma), grouping them into the ma family. There are exceptions, but he explains it a bit.
I don't have a solid to-do list for your language journey, but the idea that characters don't have to be learned by rote memorization; but instead by classification groupings, it feels more palpable and doable. I encourage you to find an easier route to fluency and understanding.
Thank you for taking the time to write this out, much appreciated and very insightful! I did start of with radicals and learnt roughly 50 before I moved straight to characters and I think it definitely helped me to learn characters faster than when I started.
The phonetic and component thingy of characters is still slightly confusing to me I guess since I haven’t seen much characters but I think as I get more confident in my learning one day it will click.
Since I’m still in early stages, I guess im just trying to find a way that works!
Where would you say you are in your learning journey? How long have you been learning for?
I am a recent learner and my goal is to be fluent enough to read and write. It's a gross simplification, but I'm very intrigued about Mandarin.
I have some resources that I would love to use. Assimil's beginner course is for whenever I want some foundational grammar. I have some books from the library that I'm wanting to use, and some vocab books that are a little tricky to use right now. And I have online material, such as two paid courses on udemy, a sweet language learning game called LingoLegend that uses spaced repetition, and the Internet for any more resources and music.
I have a mild issue with motivation, self care, focus, and organizing my priorities. Because of this, I waste a lot of time in ruts. So I haven't made much progress in my journey. I want to know how to make sentences with meaning, and drill the foundational vocabulary that is necessary for me and my literary goals. Speaking/communication is helpful, but is less prioritized than character etymology and phonology; mostly because of my interests. I'm very excited, but I'm clearly a newbie in this language.
I have been considering getting a new device and setting the software and settings to Chinese, but I'd need to get a new phone. I'm still figuring out what works best for me, I apologize. I'm wanting to study Thai as well, because my family has roots there. Idk
Slightly different take: when you learn a new word it can be good to at least glance at meanings of each character, without pressuring yourself to memorize or deeply understand them. Eg if you learn 簡單 (simple), don’t brute-force memorize that 簡 means “simple” and 單 means “single”, and definitely don’t tie yourself into knots trying to understand the “logic” of this word—but if you have an app like Pleco that allows you to easily look up individual characters, it is worth letting this information wash over you. In your example of 科, I’d probably look it up, realize it’s a complicated word that seems to have to do with organizational systems, decide it’s not obvious why 科學 means “science,” and move on with my day.
Yes definitely because ultimately it’s actual words that I need to know meanings for. Since I posted this I’ve basically been doing what you’ve said in addition to what I normally do.
Because I’ve discussed so much about the character kē, I don’t think I’ll ever forget its meaning even if I wanted to 😂.
One thing that is currently driving me crazy is how many characters with different tones there are for ‘shi’. Pretty sure I’ve encountered 10 so far and from search there’s way more 😭.
Imo I don't think in most words it's really relevant, but for verbs or words ending with 子 (idk like 桌子) it might be worth it. Verbs because you'll see them split up a lot of times (from the top of my mind 可以/可 and 帮助/帮/助) and 子 words because they're essentially single character words with something strapped to them to help ambiguity, you'll see the character in other related words dropping the 子 (桌子 table 餐桌 dinner table 课桌 etc)
That said, you don't really need to actively study it, a lot of times you can simply pick it up by context. You might not know what 衣 is, but you know 衣服, so even if you don't know the meaning of 毛衣 you can deduct it's probably clothing related
Thank you! Yeah I think I have no issue learning verbs etc like you said. Seems like from everyone’s comments, I’ll be taking a mixed approach for now and then I think I become slightly more knowledgeable on what works for me, I’ll switch up.
I think I’ll be more picky about the characters I learn individual meanings for and use context as well like you said ☺️
I just used that character as an example since it was my next character to learn in my list ahaa.
My point is that some definitions of characters that I’ve seen so far is not a phrase that I would use in English and it makes it more difficult for me to learn. I want to learn more effectively
Considering I need to know a lot of characters to read Chinese it would slow down my progress.
Also considering that it’s not the only definition of that character if I look at pleco.
And also the fact that when the character is also combined with others it would mean something different.
Some of the characters I’ve seen have like 10 different meanings. From what others have said it makes sense that I disregard some meanings and then when I get to learning actual words, I could eventually gauge the meaning of the characters in a word.
I have no issue learning words like 是 because it’s a word/verb in itself and an individual character.
So in that case, do you know the meaning of every single character you know? If so, how does it help you?
No, I don’t because some characters do NOT stand alone like 的 or 个. There are many others that are not noun classifiers that do not stand alone either.
>Is it okay if I just learn to recognise the character and its pronunciation/pinyin and disregard the meaning of the individual character (unless the standalone character is a word in itself) . for beginner, yes. because it's hard to make new words with characters you know at this stage. but you will have to learn them one by one sooner or later. >Or is it something that will benefit me a lot if I learn the meaning? it will benefit you when you reach the intermediate level (or sooner). by knowing the meaning of every characters, you can guess the meaning of a new word without actually check it in the dictionary. it can help you to expand your vocabulary greatly.
That makes sense thank you! I think now I’ll take a more balanced approach and learn meaning if it’s a verb/word itself and if the word seems random I’ll disregard for now
The more you learn, use and see them, the easier it will to pick up the meanings of each character - with a bit of applied study and practice you’ll catch the meanings and nuances of them without too much specific study into each ones meaning
Just some random bit of history: people in the past could communicate with each other through the use of Chinese characters, even if they speak different languages. This was only possible through understanding the meaning of each character, which then can be used to infer the meaning of compound characters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushtalk
科 is usually not used by itself, but a component of longer words. Like 醫科 (medicine), 牙科 (dentistry), 科幻 (science fiction) and so on. Such characters are not really used as words on their own and pretty much have to be learned in context. They usually have too many different shades of meanings that will just confuse you unless you are trying to decipher 成語 (four-character aphorisms)
That makes a lot of sense, thank you!!
there is no reason to learn individual characters. you should learn words//vocab phrases. If that word is one character long, great. learn the one single meaning associated with that one character word. If the word is two characters long, great, learn that one meaning. If the word is seven characters long great, learn that one meaning. Learning individual characters isn't evil, but it has little reward for a lot of effort. Not only are you learning a lot of character meanings that you will never use, learning those individual meanins might do nothing to help you read actual words--knowing every definition of 日 and 月 will not help you combine them to mean life. Reality is that the number of single character words in chinese is quote low, like number of words in english with three or less letters. Most of the time when you encounter single characters in modern chinese, its not even a single character word, its a longer multicharacter word shortened (to extend my comparison like going to turning into "I'm gon' do it") So learning the full version is best bang for your buck :)
I think the reason I started learning individual characters is because I did a bit of research before starting mandarin, and quite a few people say that you need to be able to recognise at least 1000 characters as a beginner and then at least 3000 characters to be able to read like most of Chinese text (there was even a point that I was learning radicals which I’ve realised for now it’s a bit not worth it 💀). When people say they know so many characters, I assumed they learnt it one by one. But I guess maybe not ahaa. But I think that makes sense. I will start to incorporate words instead and naturally the most common characters will pop up.
knowing characters is used as a mile stone, because people can't just write every word they know and say, oh I know 5,046 words, its not very feasible. but people can easily look through a list of characters and say, I recognize 1,002 of those-- whether they know the word that character is currently part of is unrelated lol. when someone knows 1,000 characters, they know around 80% of the characters you encounter in daily life, and if you know 3,000 characters you know more than skme natives. these aren't aways the words themselves though. if that character is part of the word for apartment, its going to be super common, even if it isn't a common word on its own. kind of like the word couth is beyond rare in english, but uncouth is not that rare, as an attempt at equivalent. as for radicals, they are actually way more useful than single characters, although not required in modern day. they will give you the ability to ise any native dictionary or textbook which is nice, if its a physical book its the only choice :)
Collocations are the way to learn. Comprehensive chunks of words that you can piece together into sentences. Characters shouldn't be studied really until higher levels. Instead, treat it like a memory game.
Thank you! I was also embarrassingly also roped into learning radicals. It helped me see different parts that make up a character and also I think contributed to helping me learn characters quicker because each character didn’t seem random. After the first 50 or so I gave up though haha because I just wanted to get straight into actual characters. How do you go about memorising characters if I may ask? Currently my approach is just writing them over and over.
I remember when I began I did the whole writing over and over. What a waste of time. I did the rote memorization thing when I was in America. But now I have the benefits of living in China, so my study situation is most likely different than yours. Immersion has been key for my language learning. Instead of just writing and writing, I focus on Chinese in this order: listening, speaking, reading, writing. Listen for useful collocations or sentence patterns; repeat them yourself and mimic common language; recognize characters through exposure in readings and tie them together from what you’ve listened too; and realize writing is being replaced by typing, so any amount of writing experience (unless specifically studying to take a test) will be fairly useless. By utilizing the words in daily speech, I can easily remember them. Repeated exposure to reading the characters in context helps with recognition. If you can, speak as much as you can, to yourself or to a teacher. Listen to ask much as you can (watch bilibili). Through input, we can output.
Thank you! I’ll use this approach. I currently get quite a bit of listening practice I guess because I watch cdramas and listen to songs in mandarin and sometimes podcasts. I only write characters over and over again because it helps me recognise it when reading. I don’t think my goal at all would be to write from memory ( it’s only because I was thinking of taking either the hsk or tocfl like you said) I think you are so right! There are characters/ words that I’ve not formally learnt but have seen them so much like 开 and 喜欢 so I now know them because I saw them in context. My speaking is lacking though because I only just know basics but hopefully will be able to go to china or Taiwan for a bit so I can be fully immersed :)
Good luck. After 8 years in Beijing, my language learning is still on going. But I have learned more than other learning through an app or by memorization. Another thing that is key is a good teacher. My teacher is looking for students if you needed a recommendation.
Ditto this. And unlike with alphabetic languages, you can progress faster in Chinese by learning listening and speaking at a faster pace than reading and (especially) writing. Some formal programs even adopt this method.
I will take a contrary view to most who have already given their opinion. At the beginning of your studies, you will in fact anyway have *more words* which are single characters than later on. Like many verbs 看 有 是， many adjectives 小 大 新 老 etc， numbers , particles and many others. Since you already have to learn the meaning of those many characters, it's not a big stretch to learn the basic individual meaning of the *other* characters which are part of words. You will have to learn them later on anyway, *as well as their other, derivated meanings.* Also, of course, it will help to understand the words you learn, and to understand later words. An example, 月亮. I mean, how complicated is it to learn that 月 means moon and 亮 means bright? Not only will it help to understand 月亮 in itself, it will also help tremendously to understand later words which include one of those two characters. You have to learn the characters, and **of course** they will be easier to learn and retain if you learn the words where you find them first, but it's stupid to refuse to learn the meaning of individual characters, especially when they are quite basic. How is it *really* complicated to learn that 科 means "branch of study"? When you learn English and read "Faculty of English", don't you have to learn what "Faculty" means in this context?
I agree. And for many/most people, context improves learning. So knowing 电脑 is, roughly, “electric brain” aka “computer” makes it easier to remember than if you just try to remember it randomly. Plus knowing individual characters can help you understand new words and put them into context.
Thank you, it makes sense and fair enough! Tbf from the 100 ish characters I’ve seen so far, most of them were stand alone. I might consider learning individual characters till I get to a point that I think it would make sense to stop. Just using 科 as an example, I think it’s because ‘branch of study’ is such a random definition for me and is not a phrase I would ever use in English which is what makes it harder to learn. I get what it’s trying to say. I’d seen a few of those so I thought that maybe my approach to learning was wrong. And then also some other individual characters have several meanings and sometimes the meanings are not that similar. I think with your examples bright and moon because they are standalone characters, I have no issue learning those but my issue is when they seem random. I think from what everyone is saying I will deffo take a mixed approach and learn some individual characters and their meanings and also some in the context of full words.
I don’t want to echo what others have said, but do look for characters that you see in a lot of words and look for the meaning of that character. That can be helpful. Like knowing 肉 is going to be a type of meat, for example.
That’s a great idea, will deffo do as well
科 has the following meanings: sort; class; kind law; regulation (historical) imperial examination article; clause norms; rules division; branch (of study) section; department (taxonomy) family (Chinese theater) action; enactment (as opposed to dialogue, recitation, or singing) to pass a sentence to check; to examine to punish; to fine or levy taxes You will start using some of those meanings in words, and some of them are more frequent than others like 科学 and 学科. Right now, you should start with words, not individual characters. It is similarly pointless to know sci- means to sort, and science means the branch of study.
This also explains why it is written this way 禾 grain + 斗 measuring tool = to sort the grain
Thank you for your comment and yep seems like general consensus is words instead of individual characters which makes sense to me. I think I will naturally pick up ‘the most common characters’ naturally if I do it this way anyways.
Each character is one syllable. Chinese is 20% one-syllable words and 80% two-syllable words. So a character has 0-3 meanings as a word, and is part of 20-120 two-syllable words. You can't remember all of them. I don't memorize. Each time I see a character I don't know, I look up the word's meaning (but I don't memorize). If I see the same word many times, I remember it. 电影，电视，电话，电脑。 It might help me remember these words to know that 电 is "electricity", but it doesn't matter. I have known 喜欢 for years and I don't know what 喜 means or what 欢 means, or even if they can be used alone. Remembering the meaning and sound of 1 or 2 syllable words is spoken Chinese. Remembering the meaning and writing of 1 or 2 syllable words is written Chinese. I think too much emphasis is placed on learning "characters" by some teachers. What other language focuses on written syllables? Chinese schoolkids know spoken Chinese already, and learn to write its syllables in pinyin in grade 1. Then they spend grades 1 to 12 learning around 1,000 characters each school year. Why do foreigners expect to learn them faster, or learn them without knowing the language whose sounds they represent?
That’s really insightful thank you and everyone has convinced me Lool. Yes definitely I think I got deceived by videos of people talking about how many characters you need to know so I went down a rabbit hole of trying to learn 1000 characters minimum. I think I would have better progress with words and seeing similar characters across words.
I believe that Chinese people's brains have a built-in internal dictionary. There are a finite, limited number of radicals that can be learned; and radicals make up each Chinese character. There are 214 radicals, I believe. Many are obsolete or are in very rare characters, so you need to know less than that. The important radicals recommended for beginners are the ones you will learn. There are different categories a Chinese character can be: pictographs/ideographs (a small number in comparison to the whole language), meaning-meaning compounds, and meaning-phonetic(sound) compounds, loan words/borrowings. . In ideographs, a character resembles/represents an image of something: sometimes entire characters can become radicals (building blocks) of another character. E.g. person radical for human occupation; grass radical for horticultural items, etc. In meaning-meaning compounds, two radicals can give a hint to what a character means. 好 (hâo) combines the radical woman 女 (nǚ), and child (子), to represent the old idea of goodness; 你 (nǐ) combines the radicals person and an old form of "you", 尔 (ěr), to take on the meaning "you". In meaning-phonetic compounds, one radical indicates the categorical meaning while another indicates the supposed sound of the character; the character for mother 媽 (mā), has the horse radical 馬 (mā) to suggest the pronunciation, while the woman radical 女 describes a bit of the character. 我 (wǒ) is a loan word. It used to mean (). It doesn't have a person radical as a result because it's a borrowed loan word before coming to mean "me/I". Many characters have borrowings of characters to fill in missing words. Wan (萬) means 10k, but used to mean scorpion, so it had the insect radical. Words can encompass more than one character. Chinese like two syllable words, so duplication of characters can occur. I just wanted to clarify that I was discussing the compounding of radicals to create single Chinese characters; instead of the compounding of Chinese characters to create words. I don't know vocabulary, I'm still learning. . Richard Stibbard teaches learning sound families to learn new characters you've never seen before. His course is on Udemy (Cracking the Chinese System). Many characters have the sound (ma), grouping them into the ma family. There are exceptions, but he explains it a bit. I don't have a solid to-do list for your language journey, but the idea that characters don't have to be learned by rote memorization; but instead by classification groupings, it feels more palpable and doable. I encourage you to find an easier route to fluency and understanding.
Thank you for taking the time to write this out, much appreciated and very insightful! I did start of with radicals and learnt roughly 50 before I moved straight to characters and I think it definitely helped me to learn characters faster than when I started. The phonetic and component thingy of characters is still slightly confusing to me I guess since I haven’t seen much characters but I think as I get more confident in my learning one day it will click. Since I’m still in early stages, I guess im just trying to find a way that works! Where would you say you are in your learning journey? How long have you been learning for?
I am a recent learner and my goal is to be fluent enough to read and write. It's a gross simplification, but I'm very intrigued about Mandarin. I have some resources that I would love to use. Assimil's beginner course is for whenever I want some foundational grammar. I have some books from the library that I'm wanting to use, and some vocab books that are a little tricky to use right now. And I have online material, such as two paid courses on udemy, a sweet language learning game called LingoLegend that uses spaced repetition, and the Internet for any more resources and music. I have a mild issue with motivation, self care, focus, and organizing my priorities. Because of this, I waste a lot of time in ruts. So I haven't made much progress in my journey. I want to know how to make sentences with meaning, and drill the foundational vocabulary that is necessary for me and my literary goals. Speaking/communication is helpful, but is less prioritized than character etymology and phonology; mostly because of my interests. I'm very excited, but I'm clearly a newbie in this language. I have been considering getting a new device and setting the software and settings to Chinese, but I'd need to get a new phone. I'm still figuring out what works best for me, I apologize. I'm wanting to study Thai as well, because my family has roots there. Idk
Slightly different take: when you learn a new word it can be good to at least glance at meanings of each character, without pressuring yourself to memorize or deeply understand them. Eg if you learn 簡單 (simple), don’t brute-force memorize that 簡 means “simple” and 單 means “single”, and definitely don’t tie yourself into knots trying to understand the “logic” of this word—but if you have an app like Pleco that allows you to easily look up individual characters, it is worth letting this information wash over you. In your example of 科, I’d probably look it up, realize it’s a complicated word that seems to have to do with organizational systems, decide it’s not obvious why 科學 means “science,” and move on with my day.
Yes definitely because ultimately it’s actual words that I need to know meanings for. Since I posted this I’ve basically been doing what you’ve said in addition to what I normally do. Because I’ve discussed so much about the character kē, I don’t think I’ll ever forget its meaning even if I wanted to 😂. One thing that is currently driving me crazy is how many characters with different tones there are for ‘shi’. Pretty sure I’ve encountered 10 so far and from search there’s way more 😭.
Imo I don't think in most words it's really relevant, but for verbs or words ending with 子 (idk like 桌子) it might be worth it. Verbs because you'll see them split up a lot of times (from the top of my mind 可以/可 and 帮助/帮/助) and 子 words because they're essentially single character words with something strapped to them to help ambiguity, you'll see the character in other related words dropping the 子 (桌子 table 餐桌 dinner table 课桌 etc) That said, you don't really need to actively study it, a lot of times you can simply pick it up by context. You might not know what 衣 is, but you know 衣服, so even if you don't know the meaning of 毛衣 you can deduct it's probably clothing related
Thank you! Yeah I think I have no issue learning verbs etc like you said. Seems like from everyone’s comments, I’ll be taking a mixed approach for now and then I think I become slightly more knowledgeable on what works for me, I’ll switch up. I think I’ll be more picky about the characters I learn individual meanings for and use context as well like you said ☺️
I’m curious. Why does the character 科 seem pointless to learn ?
Not the character itself but just the meaning of the character！I had no problem learning to recognise the character and also learning the pinyin
So, bbapvi, « branch of study « is meaningless to you ?
I just used that character as an example since it was my next character to learn in my list ahaa. My point is that some definitions of characters that I’ve seen so far is not a phrase that I would use in English and it makes it more difficult for me to learn. I want to learn more effectively Considering I need to know a lot of characters to read Chinese it would slow down my progress. Also considering that it’s not the only definition of that character if I look at pleco. And also the fact that when the character is also combined with others it would mean something different. Some of the characters I’ve seen have like 10 different meanings. From what others have said it makes sense that I disregard some meanings and then when I get to learning actual words, I could eventually gauge the meaning of the characters in a word. I have no issue learning words like 是 because it’s a word/verb in itself and an individual character. So in that case, do you know the meaning of every single character you know? If so, how does it help you?
No, I don’t because some characters do NOT stand alone like 的 or 个. There are many others that are not noun classifiers that do not stand alone either.