Character recognition?

I'm certainly no expert on characters (only been learning them for about a month), but here's a little tool I use with my PDA that I love: Dragon Character Training This is a great tool for learning how to write characters. I think this is only for PalmOS, and is probably a few years out of date (my Palm is a million years old)...but I'm sure there's similar software for more current PDA's and cell phones.

This is my method: I learn how to write one character a day. I train to write this character in a 写字簿 which is a notebook where each square has four squares inside. To learn the right stroke order, I now use www.mdbg.net www.mdbg.net is also great to know the 部首 For future review, I save this character: in a word document in Plecodict in my Pocket PC as a flashcard I also look at all the definitions of this character in four different dictionaries + Chinepod dictionary (good way to review previous lessons) I also try to visualize this character during the day. Today was my 1123rd character: 抱 My goal is to go through the 6763 characters encoded in the GB2312 standard. So my objective will be reached in 5640 days. I began that method Wednesday, December 29, 2004 I will have finished Thursday, July 6, 2023 www.timeanddate.com/date/dateadd.html Today it was my

I actually don't have a Palm or any cell phone capable of something this cool (I REALLY need an iPhone), but that looks really cool! How do you see the characters, calkins? I mean... do you see the whole character at once, or... what?

It is really cool and so far has been the best tool I've come across. I also do character workbooks, but I can take this anywhere. Here's a screenshot of one of the tests: Each lesson/test has 20 characters. To get the character correct and move onto the next, you actually have to write the character in the correct stroke order. The other great thing is that you can download many different libraries, depending on what types of characters you want to learn. For instance, I want to learn traditional characters, so my first library I downloaded was 400 commonly used traditional characters. Oh, and it's free! And no, I'm not getting kickbacks from them:)

That's a great app Calkins! I downloaded it and have been playing it for the last few minutes. Great tip! The writing game alone is worth the download.

Since I'm usually learning new vocab (and thus new characters) in context, I tend to gravitate toward recognizing whole words, as opposed to individual characters. I've encountered several occasions where I didn't recognize a certain character (知, for example) by itself. However, as soon as 知 came together with another character to form 知道, I immediately recognized it as zhīdào (to know). This leads me to believe that, initially, I'm mostly recognizing characters (or more often, words) based on their overall shape, as opposed to their individual components. Over time, however, as I see the characters in more and more places, my ability to recognize them in isolation increases. Lately (i.e. the past couple months), this has begun to have a compounding effect. The more words I know, the more characters I learn. The more characters I learn, the easier it is for me to learn new words containing at least one of those characters. Thus, I learn more new words, which starts the cycle over again. I've got some flash cards and a character dictionary to help with individual character recognition, but I don't rely solely on these resources, as I can easily see myself getting bogged down with rote memorization. I use them only as a supplement to my normal studies. IMO, learning to write the characters by hand is probably the most effective way to learn them, because you spend so much time focusing on the components of each character. The process would seem slower, of course; but in reality, you would probably never have to worry about recognizing a character after you spend several minutes learning to write it. I would very much like to endeavor to learn to write 汉字, however I can't see how this would be practical without a local class, or a very patient 中国人. I don't know if that's what you were looking for, Frank, but hopefully you can make sense of it. ;-)

Wow, that was probably my longest post ever!

A good flashcard program is the ZDT program at http://zdt.sourceforge.net/ This has greatly improved my character recognition.

sparechange - That's *exactly* what I was looking for. This is what's happening to me, too. In fact, it was just yesterday that something snapped into place for me. I've never been able to hear or see the word 先生 and make it my own. When they use this as an honorific in addressing someone, I always draw a blank. Then I heard Ken offhandedly mention the meanings for these characters individually (first/born) and I realized that I have known both of these characters for a while now. I just wasn't *recognizing* them in context.

" As time went on, I began to realize that the characters weren't random brush strokes set forth by some ancient scholar, but a highly evolved form of hieroglyphics. The parts, or radicals, repeat over and over again and lend meanings or pronunciation clues. Making that connection helped me enormously. " Well Frank, I didn't fully make that connection until you mentioned it. I think your comment activated another one of my missing brain cells. I can say, however, that I did suspect this would be the case. Thing is that every time I guessed a certain word, it would turn out to have nothing to do with what I guessed, so I would dismiss the thought. I've obviously been struggling with hanzi, but the small bundle of characters that I can recognize, pronounce (not necessarily perfectly), and write are the ones that I've written down over and over and over. I'm sure we all know this works and I'll even be bold enough to say that it's the best method...(in my opinion anyway). One goal that I've made for myself is to be able to read, write, and recognize the first 1,000 characters on this "Most Commonly Used Characters" list that I found online by January 1st 2009. Having a goal always seems to help me. http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html What else can I say? I copy down the CPod dialogue by hand and try to translate as few words as possible when I do so. This way I force myself to think about each word instead of carelessly skimming through my notes. Online flashcards are also really good, but I've been making my own. The online flash cards make my vision fuzzy after a while anyway. All of that black and super bright white is too much contrast....back to my point though... Actually...that's about it, but I noticed I've also been memorizing certain words and thought's instead of just single characters" myself. That's definitely going to help in the long run. ^_^

In general though, I'm with you frank. I'm a visual person (you sound like you are too based on your profile) and I thought, because of that, learning characters wouldn't be so difficult. I was wrong...it seems so easy to make a mistake. It's a fun challenge though. I too would love tips that would make the learning process better.

Good points, RJBerki. One of my Chinese co-workers has begun to send me emails in 汉字 (which is just way too cool), and I've learned quite a bit from trying to decipher them. They're usually just a few sentences long, but she doesn't dumb it down as far as vocab is concerned. There's always plenty for me to look up.

I find that typing up the dialogues on my phone helps a lot, because of the input system and the small font you have to be able to recognise each individual character in order to get the right ones.

I'm really enjoying seeing people's different approaches to this. I've been operating under the assumption that I'll probably write as much by hand in Chinese as I do in English... which is to say not at all. I type nearly 99.95% of my communication. I can't stand the sight of my own handwriting. Butchering Chinese wasn't going to make me feel any better. I do see how writing the characters would improve retention, however, so maybe there's an exercise to be had there. The other way I differ from some of you is that I never made it my goal to completely absorb a lesson's characters before moving on. I didn't know what was going to be high frequency language yet and I didn't see the point in committing to memory a character that I'd see once a year. I have always assumed that I'd simply pick up the most frequent characters over time through sheer virtue of exposure to them. That's actually worked pretty well. Thanks for the input everybody! Keep it coming!

I too have never aimed at absorbing all of the words or characters in a lesson. I find that just being exposed to certain words and characters make you pick them up almost automatically, at least until you get to a level where you begin learning characters that look a lot like each other. :-) I also never use just one method. Depending on my mood and the time available I use electronic flashcards, I practise writing them or I just try to read as much of an unknown text as possible. I find it easier to remember the characters when they're part of a word so I'm using ZDT which allows me to create my own vocabulary lists for flashcards. I also use it because it allows me to use pinyin recall which works really well for me. Lately, though, it has begun to irritate me that just like Sparechange I don't recognise certain characters when they're on their own so right now I'm focusing a lot on the different elements of a character. Not just between the radical and phonetic but to all the elements that make sense to me as an element. E.g. 语. On the left there's 言 and the right you have 五 and 口. This helps me to visualize the character better and I especially find it helpful when trying to write a character but it also helps me to focus on the details that distinguish similar characters like 买 and 卖 or 牛 and 午.

Wow, Lunetta, I had to read those last characters about six times before I saw the difference! Yikes! I think I have a long way to go. :-D

lol....funny thing is that I've seen the last two characters a bunch of times before, but I still couldn't put 2 and 2 together until I saw them beside eachother. But yes.....umm.....what is ZDT. (maybe this is a dumb question, but really..what is it?)

Kerou, it's a program you can get for free. Just use the link Wolson left. It has an annotator, flashcards and an option to create your own vocabulary lists.

kerou85 - That was a great link. I've got that one bookmarked myself. Good luck with your 1000-character goal! Let us know how you're doing!

without a doubt writing characters helps them stick better than just viewing flashcards. But far and away the ones I remember the best are those that just happen to be associated with some word and/or interesting event or the repetition of events that happens to me and they just stick. This is how we learned language the first time and when it happens its beautiful and rather permanent. Its much easier to learn characters that interest you than those that dont. Find a way to make them interesting. Words are more interesting than the individual characters, so this can help. Once you know a few characters try to read. Filling in the gaps is a more natural way to learn than memorization even if you have to look them up. Read the same stuff every day until you dont have to look them up any more. Write entire sentences including a few characters you dont know. Rotation of technique also helps and keeps it fresh. Try this, try that and then back to this. Eventually it sinks in. Theres no easy way and everybody is different. Play to your strengths. Make it a game. The patterns and connections between characters will start to become obvious and then it gets a little easier. But it never ends :-)