At what point did you start having trouble learning new characters? What did you do?

You're certainly right that all well educated Chinese can do it - but they can also generally recite Zhuge Liang's 前出师表 from memory. In trying to duplicate a language education in a much shorter amount of time, some things that well educated natives can do have to be dispensed with, so it becomes a matter of figuring out what is nonessential.

In the end, I imagine this question of what is most important will differ from person to person - some might legitimately dispense with literary Chinese altogether, I choose to learn for comprehension but dispense with memorizing long pieces (except for a few classic lines)...when it comes to memorizing the numbered ordering of radicals to facilitate looking up in dictionaries, its quite nonessential for me. I'm already past the stage where I frequently encounter unknown characters - and when I was in it, I largely used electronic reading. All in all I think that's a much faster way to pass through that stage - even if you become good at looking up in a paper dictionary, its still going to take you a minute, require you to direct attention away from the reading material...whereas using an electronic program, its a one second click to look up an unknown. And once you get to a certain stage it is very rare to hit a new character outside of reading you specifically select for that purpose (ie classical Chinese) - so its not like you are limited to electronic reading, since eventually you pass that stage (and even while in it, you can just use an electronic dictionary that allows you to draw the character to look it up while reading your books - which I would think reinforces memory, since you drew it). Anyway, it's not like you would be walking around with a dictionary in your pocket everywhere (or rather, its just as easy to carry an electronic).

But then again - if someone were to say they prefer to study print materials, they like carrying around a dictionary, and they find the process of manually looking up reinforces their memory of the character (it certainly wouldn't for me, it would just add time, but I've heard others say this) - then maybe memorizing the numbers associated to all the radicals would be useful. I wouldn't argue with that. ;)

@tingyun, re: "...I've never tried to look up a word in a paper dictionary by anything other than its pinyin, and even that is rare given all the great electronic resources).

I would beg to differ. Looking up characters by their pinyin only works if you are reading electronic materials or you already know the character's pronunciation. When reading newspapers and/or books (i.e. print copies), radical lookup is the only way that you can find a character.

So, I would argue that learning how to recognize the radical of a character (including variants) is a key skill for reading... also, it is a skill that all literate Chinese possess.

I wouldn't bother. Only useful for using paper dictionaries (ones organized under the traditional system rather than pinyin, or for looking up characters you don't know the pinyin for), and that's a skill that's on the way out (or maybe already gone - I've never tried to look up a word in a paper dictionary by anything other than its pinyin, and even that is rare given all the great electronic resources).

Just figure how many characters you could learn in replace of memorizing a bunch of radical numbers - its got to be a better deal. ;)

Jenny,

That is pretty cool. Can one learn calligraphy if they are left handed?

Cool! I bet you have some beautiful family heirlooms of his calligraphy.

Please don't take it personal - I just have a direct method of arguing. ;)

And in that spirit - yes, of course there are coincidental similarities. When you can select anything you want from a rich cultural history, you can easily pick out some things that fit whatever story you like. Same thing with tens of thousands of characters - not hard to find some that fit whatever story you care to construct.

But this is the logic of conspiracy theorists. I live in a world where aliens didn't build the pyramids, and the Chinese developed their own writing. ;)

Tingyun

I think you were a little harsh in the attack of my post. I was using those as examples of 'current' characters which have interesting concepts. The history of the oracle bones is where the interesting analysis is, not in the characters we know and use today.

And historically speaking - the Chinese ancient boarder sacrifice to Shang Di (God) by the Emperor is very similar in design to the ancient Israelite high priest's slaughtering of an animal. Even ancient scripts depicting the creation of the world is very similar to ancient Hebrew texts.

I finally got it; I had to download a mandarin plugin then I could select Mandarin instead of basic when importing. Thanks for the help

mizugori, when you import into Anki you need to ensure the Anki model is set to "Mandarin" rather than "Basic". John explains how to do this on the Cpod blog at the following link:

http://blog.chinesepod.com/2009/03/18/new-export-functionality-for-chinesepod/

Rachel, thanks for the advice! I am new to this site so I did not realize I could export vocabulary from Chinesepod to Anki. One question, now that I did this, in Anki I am only getting the Chinese character on the front, and the English translation on the back - there is no pinyin anywhere. But I opened the file I exported from Chinesepod and I can see the pinyin is stored in there. Any idea how I can make it show up on the cards?

Hi tingyun

I must admit this made me smile; both the original post and your response. It made me reflect on how adept humans are in writing their history and worldview. Just like the various ingenious interpretations of the Bible, we can have ingenious interpretations of 汉字. Chinese characters could 'mean' just about anything if you set your mind to it. But I generally find the meanings attached to radicals ultimately disappointing or at least unenlightening. I love them purely for their looks.

It might be useful as a memory trick, but its pure silliness as any kind of historical explanation. Chinese writing does not have 'biblical' routes - it's quite older than that. Besides, whoever has been writing these books has about the same knowledge of Chinese as their brothers-in-spirit writing 'intelligent design' drivel have of science - the bottom of 義 is 我, but it didn't mean 'I' in the composition of this character, instead it is referring to an ancient weapon. 我 is 戈 and 戈 (ge1, haldberd) linked together, and 我's original meaning was an ancient weapon, and it was in this meaning that it formed together to 義. Now the lamb is indicating sacrifice, but it would be quite western centric, and silly, to think that the Judaism invented sacrificing animals. The Chinese managed to figure that piece of barbarism out on their own and still have time for paper and gunpowder later. ;)

Whoever is writing these books seems to be constructing an elaborate and baseless justification for a religious worldview that can't accept the limitations of its influence on history.

But hey, an explanation of a character involving aliens or unicorns can be useful if it helps you remember - just as long as you understand it is pure fiction.

There are some that I simply could not understand... ha ha...

Agree that I get the most value out of my CPod imports on Anki. With no context to my other decks, it makes learning them a real struggle. Where I need to improve in terms of admin is to only save particular words from each lesson to my vocab. Presently I automatically save all the vocab and supplementary vocab, which means my CPod vocab numbers almost 5000 now (note it would be much higher were it not for CPod's good function of automatically preventing duplicates). I have to smile occasionally though when one of CPod's more curve-ball words comes up. I can safely say there are quite a few that I will never use in conversation....

hehe, yep I have to agree with you there. A few of them have made me smile. Can't admit to having made much of a dent into it yet - but it is encouraging when I do take a look at the number of sentences I can figure out, even if not recognising all the characters.

yeah, but for the '20000 Mandarin HSK Sentences v2' deck, I think I need translations for some of the english!

Hi mizugori. I think making your own decks is much, much better than downloading decks. Being spoon-fed is counter-productive to actual learning, I think, because you're not as actively involved in your own learning process. For myself, I find that if I'm *choosing* the words to add, I'm more confident that I'm learning words in a context. So I'm not depending on the card alone to teach me -- ideally, the card is a reminder of a word I've recently encountered, and so I've got more input reinforcing the memory. I can't tell you how often a word in my Anki deck appears and I mentally "hear" the cPod voice actor speaking the word in the dialog I learned it!

The trick is finding a way to do it so you're not wasting your learning time on administrative stuff. I'll even undercut that a bit though by suggesting that knowing that I'm going to dedicate 30 minutes a week to keep my Anki up-to-date with my mostly recently learned words only increases my discipline.

Here are some tips that have worked for me.

1) As I learn cPod lessons, I carefully select the words I want to add and I add them to my cPod vocabulary manager. Since cPod makes this so easy and painless, I don't even count this as time spent on deck maintenance.

2) At least once per week I take all the words I've added to the vocab manager and give them a tag (usually the date). Depends on how many new words I've stocked up, but at most this should take 5 minutes.

3) Then I export all the words with that tag to an Anki file. Less than a minute.

4) Open my Anki deck, import the new file. Less than a minute.

5) Quickly review all the new words in the Anki deck browser and make any edits or formatting changes I want, takes about two minutes.

6) Done! The whole process takes less than 10 minutes. I've got time to spare to do other deck maintenance, like review cards I've marked or suspended to make decisions about whether to delete or modify them with hints.

I currently have my deck set to feed me 20 *new* cards a day (10 recognition, 10 recall). I've been following this method for just under a year and so I'm at a stage where, like some people have said above, it can be a bit daunting to see I have 20 new cards and almost 300 reviews a day. But so far it only encourages me to keep at it in a disciplined way and not fall behind.

Hi mizugori. I basically have three decks I'm using in Anki at the moment:-

1) My imported vocab from CPod (on your vocab page there is a convenient link that converts the Cpod vocab into an Anki file ready for import.

2) There is a free public download available through Anki (click on 'download decks' and then 'shared decks') called "HSK (Levels 1-4)" which I have found useful.

3) There is also a free public deck called "20000 Mandarin HSK Sentences v2" which, if you are at CPod intermediate level or higher you should have not too much problem with.

Thanks, Chris

For me the only way to do it is to sit done and write them out, the same way I learned the English alphabet. Some characters are easier to remember than others.

I'm using CP mostly for reading and listening comprehension.

I think that the most important factor in learning new characters is a willingness to work hard... =*)

Yeah, this is why in my opinion it's good to learn from a list that is arranged according to character structure, rather than frequency. For instance if you're working through the most common 2000 characters (for me a year-long project) instead of starting with 的，他，上，and moving up from there in order of usefulness for simple texts, you get chunks of 5 or 10 chars at a time with a similar component. The list can be arranged so you are basically building on your knowledge of components as you learn the chars. Of course, this means that 的 might be the 2000th character you learn... but you've probably already picked it up from doing newbie and elementary lessons on CP.

Learning the radicals is useful, but I found that it is easier to retain the radicals if I learn a related commonly used character at the same time. In this way, I can see the radical in application.

Jenny,

I agree with Bodawei. This is great to hear. I also totally agree with your advice about learning the radicals....so putting these 2 thoughts together gets me back to an old request. I'd love to see another shot being made at a radical programme. In the interim, equally importantly, I would also love it if we could have the full set of radicals available to add to our flashcards. I know this is available elsewhere [such as anki] but the main advantage as I see it is that it then means you can learn to write them using skritter in the writing practice section. For me this is the logical place to really start to get a good grip on writing. Would adding a set of 212 radicals not be an easy thing to make available?

Jenny

'.. I think this is definitely something we should explore more..'

That is good news; I have mentioned this at least a couple of times in the past - I would love to see more learning material.

I love the pen and paper task of thinking about and writing characters, and I am trying to improve my ability to talk about characters. About how they are constructed in broad terms (eg. 宝是上下结构的) and then to communicate radicals (eg. 是宝盖头) and if necessary stroke order. Useful for communicating over the phone if the spelling convention (say 宝宝的宝or 宝贝的宝) does not work, or if I am on the receiving end and I don't understand.

PS. I wonder if talking about 'how many characters you know' is a misguided learning goal (see post above) but I would like to know how many characters are used at each level of ChinesePod lessons (let's be specific: dialogue and expansion sentences) - your comment above leaves me wondering. Are you saying that all lessons from Newbie to Media draw from about 2500 characters? Can you count the characters that appear in all lessons at a particular level? Can you count the number of separate words drawn from in each level?

@everett, it looks like I'm going to have to try out Anki. Also, the idea of using character structure than the more traditional character frequency order of study is an intriguing idea, albeit a bit late for me.

I'm learning the characters individually but I find it useful to always find one or two common two-character words that the character appears in as a memory aid. Of course this doesn't work for characters that are only in the top 2000 because they're a common surname or are used for a lot of transliterations of foreign words.

Good point. I guess by 'character' I actually mean 'word'. My Anki deck at the moment - which is mainly CPod-imported vocab - predominantly consists of 2+ character words. Actually, it's interesting, I've noticed I find it much easier to remember the 2-character words than the 1-character words. Unfortunately, I think this is because I'm cheating in a way, e.g. I vaguely recognise one of the characters and then remember the sound of the other character that co-locates with it. What I am not doing is actually remembering each of the characters fully, such that if the characters were to subsequently appear individually I wouldn't have a clue...

Totally agree. Some days my speaking and listening comes really naturally, others it's non-existent and I'm left exasperated. Trying to measure my progress when my days are so random is very difficult. However, counting cards only ever goes up and gives that (slight) feeling of satisfaction!

I second the chinese breeze series. The stories are interesting and are written for a wide audience (ie. not just children).

what about "the adventures of Tintin"? (dingding in chinese) I started reading them before actually knowing how to read (it's not that it is too easy to read but really entertaining)...so I think I'm gonna go for this again once I reach a better level in chinese.

and for the plus the "Blue Lotus" and "Tintin in Tibet" does happen in China during the XXth century.

It might be a great opportunity for US people to discover it before the movie goes out as it is weirdly quite unknown there.

http://www.tintin.com/en/#/tintin/albums/albums.swf

Just have to be careful with the edition...the last one from Hong kong is in traditional signs if I'm right. You can find the books pretty much everywhere (online or libraries)

Yeah, this was a great tip. I just ordered a couple of Chinese Breeze books, thanks!

Thanks for the tip! Sounds perfect!

ptsmith,

For that level of characters there is a great series out there called "Chinese Breeze". Here is a link to a store that sells their books http://www.cheng-tsui.com/store/products/chinese_breeze

If you live in China, especially Shanghai or Beijing you should be able to find these books in the bookstore. If not check out Amazon or other Chinese forum's, I'm sure there is a way to get them overseas.

Maybe use a flashcard program that prompts you with the meaning and/or pinyin and then you write. Anki, for example, will space the characters out based on your performance. You don't need to write out characters every week to keep them fresh. After a while once every 6–8 weeks should be enough. So if you have 1500 chars you might need to just write about 30/day (if you've got the time). The convenient thing with the program is not having to keep track of when chars are due.

@babyeggplant: thanks for the book rec.

Correct mate, you can manually remove the cards. In fact, I've started doing that the last few days as words/characters I definitely know start to cycle around. I agree with tingyun that I am just wasting my time pressing "very easy" over and over again for those that are already learned. By "suspending" the card (an option in Anki), it removes it from the review, whilst not actually deleting from the deck. I'm hoping this will cut down the time I spend reviewing each day and focus on just those that are not sticking in my mind properly. I'm also going to try the other advice offered on this thread around reading other texts as well.

"Now, if what you mean is during an initial learning stage, which might last a few weeks, or even a month, use of flash card program and some kind of planned repletion is useful, I wouldn't argue - "

hehe, yeah I agree. Despite many good intentions I've been too lazy/busy to do any kind of review and so I think if I could get flashcards sorted this would be the aim...to look at words you've looked at once in a cpod dialogue....I'd never bother going over old words I'd learnt. So that's the trick, archiving your old flashcards. The SRS's I've looked at [anki...but I haven't got a full working knowledge of it yet] usually just blow out the gaps between reviews of words you know. I think you can manually go and remove them or something but it could be a bit laborious I guess.

I'm still convinced that flashcard programs of any kind are a bad choice for review/maintenance of already learned characters. Yes, you can limit it to a shorter amount of time - but ultimately well selected reading materials will give you more review during the same amount of time. If we say 5 seconds a flashcard, and reading 4 characters a second (both of which seem reasonable estimates), you get 20 times as many characters reviewed, plus the grammar/usage learning. You could point out that the review isn't as efficient in selection of the right characters, but on the other hand it probably does more for your knowledge of a character to review it in the context of a new sentence than to simply once again view its definition, and I believe the effects of such a review will leave you remembering it longer, so I'd say those two considerations about cancel each other out.

Now, if what you mean is during an initial learning stage, which might last a few weeks, or even a month, use of flash card program and some kind of planned repletion is useful, I wouldn't argue - during that stage if you read it you might have to look up its meaning anyway, or running across it in reading might give you pause and slow you down, or leave you in some doubt as to its sound - in that stage, I'm totally behind flashcard programs. So maybe our idea of what constitutes 'review' is different. But once you get past that initial stage, I'd say even spending 10 minutes a day reviewing flashcards of old characters is a waste - you'd improve matters by spending that time reading (or using the flashcard program to learn/do initial review of new characters).

But I definitely agree on searching around the internet for the kind of writings that might interest you - I was trying to make the same point in my reply to Ouyang. The RPG dialogues I mentioned are just my personal favorite. ;)

good advice babyeggplant. I have been a bit overzealous at times with Anki's SRS which I think is what's been throwing up the crazy number of reviews on certain days! (see my reply to Barbs above).

Barbs, I've found SRS a revelation recently, together with my focus on Cpod transcriptions. Really helped me to jump my first big wall in learning the language (I'm sure many more such walls are to come though!). However, as babyeggplant points out below, I think I've been over-eager with the SRS of late and have ended up trying to learn more than the SRS-dictated number of new cards each day which then very quickly builds up the number of 'reviews' you have to do on the following days. And heaven forbid if you miss a day or two - there is then a big backlog to review the next day you get round to it. I am learning that SRS is also an exercise in routine and forcing yourself to do it every day.

One other thing I want to add is that you don't necessarily have to focus only on books to improve your reading skills. One tip is to look for things you would normally read in your mother tongue and instead read those things in Chinese. For example, I have always enjoyed participating in forums and reading gossipy type blogs and advice columns (ok, I admitted it). I find some of the stuff on 贴吧 (tieba.baidu.com) and sina blogs (blog.sina.com.cn) really interesting. I know most people probably aren't going to find those topics interesting, but my point is that whatever you find interesting and want to read about is out there! And it's in Chinese! So again, my best advice is to think about what you really enjoy reading in your mother tongue and then try and find something similar in Chinese.

I know you addressed your question to Tim, but I thought I would also throw in my suggestion. The first novel I read in Chinese was 1988 by 韩寒. 韩寒 is super famous and has been talk about on Chinesepod before, but if you don't know him, his story is definitely worth a google. I am at a similar level with you character-wise so I guess that this level would be appropriate for you. Although 1988 is no literary masterpiece, I found it to be an interesting, fun read. It's a little over the top at times, but I thought that made it a bit more exciting.

I probably read half of it using my dictionary and half of it without, but reading without my dictionary didn't have a huge impact on my comprehension of the story. If you want to take a look at it online you can check it out here: http://vip.book.sina.com.cn/book/index_146642.html

If you really are reviewing over 500 cards each day, it's probably because you're inputting too much into your srs at one time. If you add cards slowly, you'll find that the review times aren't so much. Right now I'm at about 2000 cards (which I have built up to over the last 3 or so years) and I probably get an average of 50 reviews each day that I can get through in about 10-20 minutes. I would feel much too discouraged If I had 500 reviews to work through each day.

Although I don't think it's good to get rid of my SRS altogether, I do feel it's better to spend less time reviewing in my SRS and more time "reviewing" in a natural environment. And by that I mean spending time watching TV, reading books, or listening to music. I find that after I SRS a new phrase or vocabulary word, it's amazing how often I notice it popping up in daily life. Of course the phrase was always there before, rather I just didn't notice it. For me at least, this natural reinforcement helps me even more than my SRS.

Bababardwan,

McNaughton’s book is great – I can’t say ‘best’ as I lack knowledge of what alternatives are out there. Though, regardless it would be worth going through, it will probably provide some unique insight.

You’re probably right about rare characters – but still, given how much faster reading is for review over flashcards, I’d say you are better off saying ‘ok, maybe I will end up forgetting this rare character for now.’ If you aren’t encountering it regularly in your reading, then best to focus on reviewing others – and then continually increase the level of your reading material as your skill increases. Eventually, you’ll increase to the point where your common reading incorporates characters that were very rare before, and then that is the time to really learn it. Trying to carry a vocab bank around of rare characters learned prematurely isn’t cost effective – you are going to constantly be spending valuable time maintaining it, that could be spent advancing your knowledge in areas that is easy to maintain through your reading. Though, I still think flashcards and the like can be really useful for initially learning a character (including review during the initial week or two). Reading only becomes a fast review once you know it well enough that when you see it you know its meaning and sound without needing to check for confirmation.

Hi Ouyang,

What sort of things do you like? I think its really easy to find a lot of interesting reading stuff by searching on Baidu – I ran a search for child’s stories just now, and came up with this website filled with them: http://www.gushi365.com/ (or search for 儿童故事 on baidu). But you might found those boring also. You might try going to Baidu encyclopedia, you can just search for whatever topic interests you and then transfer the article to pleco reader or print it or whatever. Here’s a link to the article on your name, 欧阳 - http://baike.baidu.com/view/30589.htm

Personally I really like video game RPG dialogue transcripts – feels like I’ve returned to my childhood, and they tend not to be the most complicated thing. Here’s a clip of dialogue from the beginning of one of the most famous RPGs in China, 仙剑三 (which was also made into a movie), a conversation between the characters 景天 and 雪见 .

1.1 初识

景天：什么声音？……有贼？！

（观察一轮后）

景天：咦？！是我听错了？

（房门被推开，少女（名叫雪见）进入）

少女：呀！有人！

景天：小贼！站住！

少女：贼？！你敢骂我是贼？

少女：真是活得不耐烦了！！

景天：你！你！干嘛打人呀！

这什么世道啊！小偷也这么猖狂？！

少女：哼哼！可笑！敢跟我用这种语气说话？你知道我是谁吗？

景天：当然知道，你是小偷嘛！小偷也敢打人，就已经升级为强盗了！

少女：什么小偷强盗的！

Anyway obviously it’s a long story with lots of more exciting scenes than that one, but the above should give you an idea of the kind of language in it. If you like this sort of thing, you can send me a pm with your email and I’m happy to share some ones I found – though my main point is I think creative use of internet searching, aimed at whatever kind of writing most interests you, is a really great idea - you can find blog posts, transcripts, books...

Bodawei,

I agree in general – though I think its ok to let yourself forget how to write rare characters that you would never need to handwrite (ie you’d be typing anytime you used a word like that). I remember I was chatting possible baby names with a very well educated Chinese friend, a name came up that involved 睿rui4 (wisdom), and neither of us could remember how to write it. With characters like that, as long as you recognize it and would not get it confused with anything else, I’d say you know it. Though the later part is important – you might not need to know how to hand-write 祟sui4, but you need to have your mind clear on its difference with 崇chong2.

Tim

Tim,

Could you let me (us) know of any reading suggestions you have?

I'm at around the 2,800 character range. I'm currently reading Chinese books, but they are focused at foreigners. For example the book I'm reading has a lot of short stories and is focused at students who are studying for the HSK Level 6-8 (old HSK levels). The problem with these books is they are boring and I have to force myself to read them. I've been wanting to pick up real Chinese books for young adults that will keep me more interested, but yet not be so far out of my Level that I can't enjoyable read. Looking forward to your response.

Ryan

tingyun,

I always get so much out of your posts so thanks again mate. I'm not sure I realised that you could also guess at tone by looking at the characters [the phonetic obviously]. This book Reading and Writing Chinese by William McNaughton sounds interesting. I take it that in your opinion it is the best on the subject?

I feel a lot better about your advice re flashcards as I've been too lazy to ever bother with them much. Yeah, I've tried occas bit it's a little tedious. But what about if you got SRS working well? I can't help but think it might still be a good method for rarer words. But your point about reading is a good one. I'm thinking that it might be different when it comes to writing though.

Great advice mate, particularly re the flashcards. This is definitely the issue I'm now hitting. I couldn't believe the progress I made with formal SRS flashcards over the last couple of months, but now I dread each day's alert that I have "20 new cards to learn and 563 to review"! Will start to move onto children's books I think.