Forgetting Chinese Characters

I thought the last post in the link had an interesting comment regarding Chinese, and the consideration that writing is part of the culture.

iteresting comments about the length of time it takes to actually commit a character to memory as well. When I was studying Chinese full time I could do 80 new vocabulary words in a night and have them memorized for the 听写 the next day. However, if asked a week later to write some of the same characters I would forget how to write them altogether. I think even flashcards don't help much in the writing department, that is all muscle memory for me. To memorize a character I have to write it over and over again, day in and day out.

First, my ability to recognize characters is a lot better than my ability to write them. So, I have something in common with the 提笔忘字. However, I think it is very helpful to look for patterns in characters. For example, . 街 is 行 with 圭 stuffed in the middle. 圭 is itself two 土 stacked together. For a longer sequence, you can start with 木， double it up to get 林， put a 广 on top to get 麻， then shove in a 石 to get 磨. Or, the characters 隹，昔 and 亥 are all not commonly used as stand-alone characters, but are all quite productive in regard to appearing within several commonly used characters.

I realize that I could set off a controversy just by mentioning this (in)famous book, but I find Heisig and Richardson's "Remembering Simplified Hanzi" immensely helpful in systematizing character learning - taking advantage of the patterns Mark mentions - and thereby greatly improving my retention of them.

CaoKai, I couldn't agree more with you.  I prefer the Matthew's book, "Learning Chinese Characters".  Exact same method as Heisig, but it includes more to the story to remember tones and pronunciation.  I use this method to learn all my characters.  After learning a Chinese character with this method I can retain it long term after only seeing it a few times.  That is both from a recognition and writing perspective.  I use this method along with Anki.  According to my Anki results, my retention of character production and recognition is 92% overall.  I'm currently up to 1,900 字 with a goal of 3,000 by the end of this year.  

I agree with mark~ It becomes much easier if you learn remembering them "component-by-component. Besides, lots of characters with the same component have similar pronunciations. Eg, 样、洋、痒、佯，these four have 羊 in them and similar pronunciations. By the way, you can choose HNHSoft Chinese Dictionary as I do, it has native pronunciation for every Chinese word.

I too sympathise with this, I have a much greater recognition of character using pinyin IME on the computer than I have recollection of how to write the character unaided.

I have not found any of the learning characters books as a help, but I suspect this is because I don't work visually very well, my brain works using logic.  Unfortunately this doesn't work brilliantly for Chinese chars as although some have logic others seem to just come out of the blue!  I have to just bulk remember.

I think that availability of reading matter is key to holding the chars in your head and those exposed through living in china must remember more quickly.  I'm a 汉字 junkie reading chars where ever I find them, which is not many places, but I'd love to find a news site that uses hanzi but is aimed at communicating with young people and thus discernible by me!  Xinhua is too depressing with the number of chars I don't know.