Learning Characters in a Systematized Manner...

You could try http://www.zhongwen.com/ , although unfortuately that's only for traditional characters. Still, it should give you some ideas about character components.

italiana, zhongwen.com just lets you click on any Chinese character. You can see its components and often a list of words that contain that character. It's for traditional characters though, rather than simplified. Just click on any Chinese character (in blue) at http://www.zhongwen.com/ and watch the information in the middle section change. That's about it.

I know this is going to draw scorn from some corners, but... I can read about 3500 characters, and can write most of them, too, because that's how I learned them -- I just wrote and wrote and wrote. There are characters that I can read that I can't write, but I think there are no characters that I can write but not read. For me, writing, and a whole lot of it, was key. As for learning them by components, I didn't bother with radicals that much. Mostly I just broke the characters down into parts -- i.e., 替 is two 夫s and a 日 -- and learned them like that, finally pushing them through my brain through rote practice. I know lots of people learned to read by just repeating the characters using flashcards, but that never worked for me. Constant writing repetition is what finally cemented it in my head -- it took forever, but all good things in life are hard :)

I found the book Remembering the Kanji very helpful. The technique is for learning the Chinese characters in Japanese, but the method works equally well in Chinese. I find that if I put enough mental effort into the memorization of a character, I don't actually have to write the characters over and over to learn them.

You can take some shortcuts... If your goal is just to read, you don't really have to memorize how to write characters. It's enough just to be able to recognize them when you see them. In fact, you don't even need to learn how to recognize individual characters: it's sufficient to learn how to recognize words. For instance, you might be able to recognize the word "尴尬" when it occurs in context, even if you'd be unable to recognize the individual characters if they appeared separately on flashcards (especially since these particular characters pretty much only ever occur in this one word). I actually took this route when I first started learning to read, and it saved quite a bit of time. Mind you, I eventually did break down and put effort into learning how to write characters. It just got to be too embarrassing on the occasions when I actually needed to write something on paper instead of using a word processor, because I'd be stumped by even basic characters.

Regarding the actual structure of characters, I sort of have to agree with johnb. The various folk mythology mnemonic explanations of character structure ("the top part represents a fish and the bottom is a stylized drawing of a bicycle, hence symbolizing 'antidisestablishmentarianism' when put together") never worked for me. Well maybe apart from a few obvious examples like 歪 and so on.

I'm sure there's more than one way to learn, but I'm with johnb on this one. I just established a regimen of initially writing new characters over and over followed by a periodic review to check what I'd forgotten. I found that even when I forgot how to correctly write the character, I still recognized it. There are some tricks that work most of the time but, based upon my experience there are just too many exceptions to blindly rely upon any one method. Sure, looking at the context helps but, as Kyle says, at some point it comes down to brute memorization.

Thanks so much, everyone. I have tried the repetitious writing out of characters, and it does work, but i was hoping to find a way to pick up the vocab more quickly as I go over each lesson, reading and listening on the train ("oh, that character has X or Y common component in spot A!"). I was probably just spoiled by Korean and their phonetic system. I'll check out your suggestions and keep going at it the hard way. Thanks again!

deoksu, Actually there are quite a few cases where one character contains another or contains similar elements. For instance, 他 and 地 share 也 as a component, and all three are very common characters. However, the presence of a common component provides no clue about the meaning of a character. The presence of a common component sometimes, but only sometimes, provides a hint about a common pronunciation, but this is very hit and miss. For instance, 他, 地, 也, all have completely different pronunciations. Also, the common component may be an obscure or rare character in modern Chinese. For instance, 过 is common, but 寸 is relatively rare 外 is common but 夕 and 卜 are relatively rare So there's not much point in trying to learn simple-to-write-but-rare characters ahead of time simply because they might be components of some more common character. Your best bet is just to learn the characters as-is as you encounter them, the most common ones first.

Learning Characters Through Pictographs http://www.chinabooks.com/cart/product.php?productid=19162&cat=0&page=1 is a pretty good book, it's only covers about 200 characters but it's a good place to start I think.

Deoksu, Some people will tell you that most characters are comprised of a radical and a pronunciation component. I've found this advice to be of little help. Unfortunately, learning the characters is almost all based on brute memorization. Your best bet is to find a good vocab database (I recommend ZDT) and a good flashcard program that can use that database (ZDT). Good luck!

This book is absolutely fabulous for building character knowledge, as it does so radical by radical, with great mnemonics and history notes. My retention on the characters has increased dramatically since I started working with the book. It's fantastic. Hope that helps!

Frank, Thanks for the suggestion. I bought the book and read the introduction over lunch. Just getting through the introduction has been enough to make me feel like I understand some things a little bit better.

That book has really been instrumental in helping me get a grip on the characters. I'm getting better at it day by day! Good luck in your studies!

I have both the traditional and simplified versions of that book and I love them too.

I'm now up to character 169, I can't put it down, it's like a really good novel hehe.

I almost picked up the book in Chinatown (San Francisco) but I thought I might be beyond it. Now, I'm thinking of getting it anyway. CPod'er recommendations carry a lot of weight on these things. I attack character reading (and writing) from many angles. I try to read everything I come across. Usually that means missing most of the meaning (I don't go and look up the words I don't recognize). I find there are many characters I recognize that I can't recall the pronunciation or meaning for. These words just get an extra dose of practice when I hit 'em again in review. I also write a lot. I write out the CP lessons as I do them. Newbie and Elementary lessons have short phrases, so I write them multiple times. ANd the lessons repeat common words often. I started by learning to write the 100 characters on Chinese-Tools.com. I then went on to picking a couple to learn each day and writing the individual characters over and over. What's neat is now while I am listening to CPod in the car, just hearing some words bring the character to mind. If I can write what I hear, I'm confident I understand the word. I haven't finished experimenting. The journey is half the fun or getting there.

aeflow (or anyone else)~ I just do not understand that www.zhongwen.com !! How do you use it? Is it for learning how to write the characters?? Again, italiana

A book like that can be enlightening to some extent, exploring some of the ways that character components can be structured. It's certainly good for showing stroke order. And it can be good for review in a flashcard-like way, albeit with the drawback that the "flashcards" are in a fixed, never-shuffled sequential order. But it's not a magic bullet, or a "royal road" to learning a lot of characters quickly. I don't think you can learn characters systematically one-by-one in sequential order out of a book like this, unless perhaps you have a photographic memory. If you start out at the newbie/elementary level, then at some point you'll just find yourself hitting page after page of unfamiliar characters, just far too many of them to try to memorize by force, and at that point you'll probably stop trying to go through it sequentially. I actually have this book on my bookshelf (an early paperback edition for traditional characters) but never really found it useful for study purposes. For me, the way to learn characters in a deep and lasting way is to learn words that use them, and then arrange to encounter those words repeatedly.

I think there's definitely some use to learning the components of characters as seperate characters themselves, although you're right, aeflow, 寸 and 夕aren't so common (i'd argue that 卜, which appears in a lot of vegetables isn't so uncommon..) it made it a lot easier for me to remember how to read characters when i could say that a given character is a 寸 plus some radical or something like that. The new practical chinese reader uses exactly that approach for teaching characters and it's one of the only methods I've found that really helps me to learn them faster. That being said, as far as learning to write characters goes it's a matter of brute force. In the end even if your head remembers that 过 is Zou3Zhi1Di3 (the "hurrying" side my book tells me) + 寸. or say 外 is 夕 + 卜. you have to remember what Xi1 and Bu3 look like and you have to remember the proportions so it all comes down to writing..a lot. Anyway, learning the character components as memory aids isn't useless imo, and the new practical chinese reader is a useful resource for that, and is a decent textbook if you're interested in character acquisition and studying uhm... useful topics..like how to discuss traditional chinese painting. They teach you how to say 油彩 (grease paint? the paint used to do western oil paintings), before the word 蔬菜 (vegetable)..questionable choice...