How many chinese characters per day?

toroshuko

October 12, 2008, 07:33 AM

at my class, 中級上, intermediate, we study at maximum 80 characters each 2 weeks

I usually remember the new characters by doing the textbook exercises

Purrfecdizzo

January 07, 2009, 07:21 PM

"I have a shower mirror for shaving that fogs up.  I use it to finger-draw the character(s) I've been learning.  Every minute or so it fogs back up and I keep drawing on it. 

I've found these "techniques" to fit with my lazy style of studying and enjoyment of long hot showers. :)"

Huai Houzi

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Ive got to admit that, although you say it is lazy, it is also quite clever. I might give that a try if I am ever able to get my mirror to fog up.

I am currently running at about a 10 - 15 character a day pace, but I am only doing recognition. I also try to read the words in context, and am finding that I can generally read newbie expansions with little difficulty, and elementary expansions about half the time.  Handwriting is difficult for me, regardless of which language I use. It is hard to write neat enough to make a word legible, so I haven't spent any time developing that skill. I might, like I mentioned earlier, try the fog mirror writing technique mentioned. Once my classes start up, I plan to cut the character learning back to about 5 or so per week

I have about 425 flashcards, with about 325 to 350 cards that I would say that I have 'learned'. My weak area is the speaking part. It is also the area where I am progressing slowly. I am learning about 1 podcast per 2 or 3 days, and working to increase it to 1 podcast every day. The 1 podcast per day is a pace I hope to maintain even after my classes start.

I look forward to participating in future discussions

nashry

October 12, 2008, 08:25 AM

Well, I think I've learned about 4500 characters this year. Having started in Nov 2007, I had to cram lots of new Hanzi into my brain to catch up with those students who'd started the year before.

100 Hanzi...that averages to 20 chars a day, so if you study each character for 3 minutes (writing several times, repeating the reading, looking up compounds, checking your progress with flashcards...), then revise the ones learnt earlier in the week each Saturday and take some time to revise the older vocab the next day, you'll need about 1 additional hour per day to keep up with your classes. I always take a little notebook wherever I go and practise characters throughout the day, preferably during useless lectures or lunchbreaks.

changye

October 12, 2008, 09:15 AM

Just for your information, in Japan, children learn about 2,000 Chinese characters in nine years. In China, I hear that elementary school students learn 3,000 characters in six years.

Students are very busy learning a lot of things, such as math, history, English, other than Chinese characters, so they don't have enough time to memorize 100 characters a week.

nashry

October 12, 2008, 10:41 AM

History in elementary school?

billglover

October 12, 2008, 12:15 PM

If these numbers are accurate, this really puts my efforts to shame. I don't think I even average 1 character a week, let alone 1 a day.

I should hang my head in shame. But instead I'm off to make some flashcards.

changye

October 12, 2008, 12:20 PM

Of course. History is a very important subject in elemetary school both in China and in Japan.

mark

October 12, 2008, 04:53 PM

My strategy has been to learn three characters a day.  I decided on this number, because I had heard that 5000 characters was about how many existed, it seemed like a managable number, and I gave myself five years to learn Chinese.

The five year mark has come and gone, and I am still encountering characters that I don't recognize.

I think the discrepancy is that I have tried to learn characters in context (I try to study enough material to encounter three unrecognized characters per day), and the infrequent ones don't stick.

It has never appealed to me to memorize characters out of context.  结果 I think I probably only recognize a couple thousand.

The good news is that I know enough to exchange IM or email with Chinese people without difficulty, and I can read the transcripts for most CPod lessons only occasionally looking up a character (usually for the advanced lessons).  A newspaper is still a challenge for me, though, especially a non-electronic one.

If I wanted to take the HSK, I would need to buckle down and study characters more systematically, probably.  Otherwise, I'm at least equally likely to encounter a sequence of characters that I recognize but don't understand their usage.  So, it seems like my knowledge of characters is adiquate for my current Chinese ability.  So, I haven't felt the need to put a more focused effort into character study.

I'm also not as fluent as I hoped I would be at this point in other ways.  Chinese is harder to learn completely than I thought it would be.

light487

October 13, 2008, 01:10 AM

@Mark:

"My strategy has been to learn three characters a day.  I decided on this number, because I had heard that 5000 characters was about how many existed, it seemed like a managable number, and I gave myself five years to learn Chinese."

When you say you "learn" 3 characters a day.. how do you prove to yourself that you have learnt it on the day that you learnt it? And what process do you take?

Do you sit down for an hour and write the 3 characters over and over? Or do you do something more like creating as many sentences as you can with those 3 characters until you are no longer looking (copying from a reference) at how it is written?

 

sideshowbob

October 13, 2008, 07:24 AM

Thanks for all the thoughts on the subject. I should be clear - at this rate, I'm simply not retaining many or most the characters. We get tested on a group of 20-30 characters (have to reproduce the hanzi after the teacher reads the word aloud in class). Every stroke has to be in place for the character to be right. If I study the night before, I can get about 70-80% right. But if asked those same words a couple of weeks later...poof...most are gone. 

      I appreciate the feedback from others- it also seems to me that this rate is just too fast for retention. Maybe there is a method behind it, but I'm not seeing it at the moment. Tried to switch out of the class today, but the admin. says there is apparently no "slower" class available. It may be that the class is  slowing down to 10-15 characters a day, so maybe that will be more my speed. 

 Not really posting to complain - just interested in what the average rate is, and any other techniques that are helpful.  A lot of this is fun, but I don't want to lose the fun part by being stuffed like a Christmas Goose. 

Thanks

goulnik

October 12, 2008, 07:54 AM

is the purpose to learn 100-125 characters as such, or to learn a number of words, which do imply learning their characters?  

anyway, at that pace you'll be at 5-6000 characters in a year at which point you won't need more :-)

williamp

October 15, 2008, 01:45 AM

I tracked my progress for about 10 months and found that I was learning about 2.5 characters per day. By that I mean being able to identify individual characters outside of any context.  But the last few months I was averaging closer to 5 a day.  I was not studying full time but in-between work and kids.  I don't think I could do much better.

I tracked this by maintaining a list of words that I was studying in a spreadsheet and then on a weekly basis I would pull all of the unique characters from the word list and test myself on them.  I counted the characters if I knew the pinyin, tone and meaning (or at least be able to think of a word that the character was used in).  I never tested myself of writing by hand.

I was adding about 60 new characters a week.  Of the new characters, I would be able to identify about 10% of them the first time.  Of the older characters that I missed the previous week, I would add about 25% of them each week.  And of the characters that I knew the previous week, I would lose about 10%. Oddly enough, these percentages remained pretty constant as the list of characters grew. By the time I stopped counting I had about 1400 characters, derived from 2400 words, of which I knew about 1000. (My goal was 1000 per year as well.)

The 10% attrition rate was partially due to the fact that I just forgot characters, but also due to the addition of new characters that look very similar to ones I already knew.  For example, I knew 错 in búcuò with no problem until I added 惜 in kěxī and 借 as in jiè to the list – then I would start to confuse them.

I finally stopped tracking because it was taking over 3 hours a week to test myself on 1400 characters.  Also, memorizing characters seemed to be taking too much time away from studying other important things such as grammar, listening and general reading skills.

williamp

david0000

October 16, 2008, 03:21 PM

I agree with Mark. Writing will help you learn characters.  I also think it is important to learn character in the context of phrases and sentences. You can check out  http://www.ArchChinese.com to learn more...

 

trevorb

December 15, 2008, 09:03 PM

Hmm maybe low numbers is a UK thing (billgloveruk),  I manage a new one a day but doubt I remember well until a week has gone by.  I'm up to about 560 but struggle to retain the old ones and there are only so many flashcards you can look at in a day when you are working and running a family.

I feel I need to be reading but most text is way to complex for me.  I'd love to find the chinese equivalent of Janet and John.  I can normally manage to read the dialogues for Newbie and Elementary but would like some simple story type input to work with, looking up bits I don't know as I go.  Trying to read xinhua with 500 odd chars is not ever going to work!

 

huai_houzi

December 16, 2008, 06:33 PM

The way I study characters is really strange, I think.

I try to learn at least 1 character a day or 2. I can keep up with slow and steady.  Anything too ambitious, and I won't keep up with it over the long run when I get busy with other things.

For recognition of characters...

I keep a stack of Tuttle flashcards on my desk and randomly cut the stack each day or so to bring a new character to the top.  Then, I occasionally glance at it during my time in front of the computer, until I recognize the character super easily.  The back of the card also has a sample sentence and sample words with the character.

For writing...

I have a shower mirror for shaving that fogs up.  I use it to finger-draw the character(s) I've been learning.  Every minute or so it fogs back up and I keep drawing on it. 

I've found these "techniques" to fit with my lazy style of studying and enjoyment of long hot showers. :)

(I also randomly look in textbooks to practice reading and use Cpod tools, but the above techniques I'm consistent with)

williamp

December 19, 2008, 02:53 AM

There is one trick that I found very useful.  I wrote an html script to scroll through my flash cards showing first the Chinese characters, then the characters+pinyin, then the charactors+pinyin+English.  It pauses three seconds on each step before going to the next.

 

Next, I added the script to run along the bottom inch or so of my windows desktop.   I then adjust all of my applications such that they bottom part of the desktop is always visible.  While I am working on spreadsheets, text documents, etc., I always have the flashcards in sight and can take a quick glance as they scroll through.

 

 

 

duncan

December 20, 2008, 03:33 AM

I see that some of you guys are learning at a very fast pace! But going that fast and then spending the additional time to retain them. It's a lot of work, especially if you go that fast.

One can learn a lot of characters but being able to retain them is an important aspect too. I'd rather learn just a few characters a day, but then retaining them very strongly.But in the end I end up forgetting how it is pronounced and written, but I can still recognize it and know what it means. Usually happens with characters that look very alike and are pronounced exactly the same but with a different tone.e.g. 照 召 沼 昭。

Where do you guys pick your new characters from?

huai_houzi

December 20, 2008, 08:39 AM

"Where do you guys pick your new characters from?"

Besides just adding vocabulary from the lessons on ChinesePod (Premium only, I think), you can buy some flashcards.

I recommend Tuttle's "Chinese in a Flash." They have 4 volumes...each volume has 448 characters.  The display both Simplified and Traditional versions with the simplified stroke order all on one side.  The other side has a sample sentence and sample words...all with pinyin.

http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Flash-Vol-Tuttle-Cards/dp/0804833613

doezeedoats

January 05, 2009, 07:20 AM

I can read at a high level but am in the first grade when it comes to writing. I just ignored writing too long.

I've noticed that repeated writing is the usual technique Chinese people use to learn Chinese, plus using them in sentences and paragraphs....getting them in your active, as opposed to passive, vocabulary.

I recently asked some students of mine in Taiwan how many of characters in the 字典 (about 7000 characters) they would need to learn before college. "All of them" was their answer.

mark

October 14, 2008, 05:08 AM

To tell the truth my study method is not that diligent for characters.  I write my 3 a day by hand a few times, and memorized the pronounciation and meaning, then review 2 or 3 times that week.