Writing Excercises
skedzinger
April 26, 2009, 01:46 AM posted in General DiscussionHi - i really enjoy Cpod. Hearing the lessons over and over again really helps me already with my biggest problem: getting the vocabulary WITH THE CORRECT TONES in my head.
But one thing makes me feel Chinese Pod is not complete: why don't you provide character writing excercise sheets? That is not too hard for you to do and would add a great value to those who are interested in writing chinese as well.
You know what kind i mean - a page with a charakter on top - showing the stroke orders as well as common meaning of the sign.
i just bought "my first 100 chinese characters" and think it's great fun. walking arround in guangzhou - and suddenly i see a charakter i recognise. it's really rewarding.
Tal
April 26, 2009, 04:17 AMMentioned here before but always worth mentioning again is Skritter.
Personally I also practise writing characters by hand, mostly using books of the kind you've mentioned, which show the character stroke by stroke in little boxes thus allowing you to copy and repeat, (many repetitions necessary of course!) Two excellent books for this are Tuttle's 250 Essential Chinese Characters for Everyday Use Vol. 1 & 2 but there are others easily available which are just as good. (The numbers 1 & 2 there are both links to previews of the books by the way.)
If you're in China every stationery shop has little exercise books filled with little squares used by Chinese children when they're beginning to learn writing characters. They really do make writing characters easier when you're just starting out in my opinion. If you're not in China I guess you'd have to draw your own little squares! (j/k!)
Finally I'd just like to say that CPod already gives us so much in the way of learning Chinese that I personally don't expect them to do everything! And they do help us a lot to read and understand 汉字 by the little pop-ups which appear when you run your mouse over them on the dialogue and expansion pages.
It's good to supplement what you can learn here by casting your net wider.
PS. A short while ago I also decided to invest in Chinese Writing Master 'cos I enjoy seeing the characters written in animation on my computer, and I still use it to study sometimes. You get a free trial and then you'd have to part with a little money to continue using it. Well worth it in my opinion but probably not for everyone.
light487
April 26, 2009, 04:23 AMI have a couple of books that show the most common, everyday characters.. so I just pick one and start writing them.. I bought a proper fox-hair brush, with ink and rice paper.. was extremely cheap to be honest. So I write the characters on a grid that is about 2 inches square and write each one about 50 times before moving on to the next one.. :)
It brings back memories of painting and stuff when I was a kid.. so yeh.. definitely worth doing.. but to get a decent "vocab" of characters, you really need to drill yourself on multiple characters.. like 20 or 30 a day.. rinse and repeat the list over and over again.. like start off with 100 (or 500) of the most common characters and just keep going till you can recall them all.. no point getting 80% or 90% recall.. you will need about 2,000 to 3,000 characters in the end.. so you really need to be able to recall 100% of the first 500 to 1,000 in your sleep.. hehe
mark
April 26, 2009, 03:59 PMI've started to copy the intermediate lesson dialogs by hand every week. They are short enough that it doesn't take that long, over time cover many common characters, and help me with the "exactly how do you write that character?" problem. (the number of characters I can recognize when I see is much greater than the number I can write for myself).
...just a thought.
skedzinger
April 26, 2009, 04:50 PM@reigau
my book is from the same publisher :) but the ones you pointed out look great, too. maybe i finish my two and move on to them. probably they cover many times the same - but as they are the most important, no problem in spending much time on them.
i agree that cpod offers a lot - but anyhow, from a pay service i think that could be expected. writing is an important part and offering those sheets to print out isn't such a incredible effort for them to implement.
skritter looks good - a great addition, too. but will not be the same as writing with pen and paper in terms of memorizing (not for me at least). and it seems to ignore stroke orders completely?
miantiao
April 26, 2009, 11:35 PM@mark
you are no loner in that dept. at a guess i'd say that that is the norm.occasionally i'll test myself and write as many characters as i can remember from 阿 to 做。
doing what you are doing will reinforce many common characters. of course, the less frequent characters will need individual attention.
搜狗输入法 and other pinyin based input software only serves to reinforce pinyin. i plan to try out a different one which my gf uses (as do many chinese) called 五笔输入法 which requires the writer to remember and input 部首. apparently its much quicker than any pinyin based input software once you have mastered it, and needless to say reinforces character makeup and therefore memory retention when writing with a pen.
if you are looking for a great way to improve both writing and listening comprehension, try some dictation using the lesson dialogue, and the banter.
tvan
April 27, 2009, 12:01 AM@mark, I think it's useful to drop down a level and, as miantiao says above, transcribe the lessons just by listening. I like the dialogue box of the lesson for this, since they hid the translation. That way you can play individual lines back for days when your memory is less than photographic.
My brother-in-law teaches/tortures my (American-born) nephew by reading a novel, then having him transcribe sentences read. I tried to follow once....
Tal
April 27, 2009, 02:44 AM@skedzinger - Skritter doesn't ignore stroke order completely. If you put a character together in the wrong order it lets you know by flashing on the bit you should have done first. It's still in beta though and is perhaps not everyone's cup of tea. I do find it pretty useful myself, if only for reinforcing what one knows. My approach to language learning is to try a mixed bag of different things, multiple sources reinforce each other I find, making one's ability that much stronger all round.
antony73
April 26, 2009, 01:57 AMThanks to chanelle77, character help on chinesepod should be on its way: http://chinesepod.uservoice.com/pages/general/filter/accepted
However, I absolutely agree with you, the provision on chinesepod to help write and understand Hanzi is sorely lacking. Lets hope it comes sooner rather than later.
I use Reading and Writing Chinese by William McNaughton along with archchinese.com. Every day I use pen and paper to practice writing, and use FullRecall along with WMDict on my mobile. I would be very intersted in knowing what others are using to learn Hanzi.