Advice on the best way to memorize characters

abelle
 July 12, 2010, 10:08 AM posted in General Discussion

Hello, everyone:  I am taking Mandarin at a local university, Chinese 102, using the Integrated Chinese textbook.  My instructor noticed that I rely on pinyin too much and am very weak with reading the characters.  (That's funny to me because my previous instructor in Chinese 101 said I did just fine in that class.)  So is there anyway to better remember the characters without being too overwhelmed?  Xie xie.  --abelle

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go_manly
 July 12, 2010, 10:27 AM

If you don't want to write the characters, just read them, you can do what I am doing.

Pick a Cpod level, pick a lesson, and copy and paste the dialog and expansion sentences to Word (it will need a little bit of editing - a lot of rubbish gets pasted as well). Then type the Pinyin after each line. I found I needed to rely on CPod's Pinyin mouseover a lot early on, but I gradually recognised more and more characters. Now I recognise most characters at the Elementary level, and a significant number at Intermediate.

And the added bonus - you have a file you can print with characters and Pinyin for your own study - there is no printable Pinyin for the expansion sentences at present.