posted by rsalc1 on March 17, 2010 | 6 comments
你好,
Is there a systematic method of learning Chinese characters?
What I've been doing so far is studying the Absolute Beginner lessons and some of the Writing lessons and memorizing the simplest characters.
My goal now is just to recognize the characters when I see them and I'm not too worried about stroke count.
Any hints on how to improve my Chinese character recognition?
Thanks! 谢谢你！
@rsalc1
I would say first start off with the 40 or so most common radicals. Since progression in writing will lag far behind speaking, listening and reading, you should treat this as a separate entity entirely. Spend a lot of time at first memorizing the radicals and their stroke order.
In University Chinese101, Chinese teachers will spend the first 2 days on radicals, and then move straight into writing characters alongside all the other course material. This leaves no time to build the strong foundational understanding of what characters are.
While studying the radicals it is important to simultaneously learn the stroke order. There are only 9 basic rules, that are fairly easy to internalize. You can find a list of the rules on this Wikipedia Page
Focus- Radicals + Stroke order= Solid Foundation
Then the rest is up to you.
I find that writing the characters helps me recognize, and more importantly, differentiate between similar characters. I am a visual learner, so character work for me is far easier than listening comprehension. Although I am a poor listener in my native English anyway - I prefer to do the talking.
ha
-rizzo
@rsalc1,
We also have a "writing pad" under the "Chinese tool" section on Popup Chinese. You can use it to practice writing and recoginizing Chinese characters.
--Echo
echo@popupchinese.com
Alvenchipmunk on April 3, 2010 | reply
How do you type in chinese characters on this website from your keyboard. Is this site limited only to the writing pad and radical selection by mouse? Also is there anyway on this site to "zoom" on the word.
@Alvenchipmunk,
You can type in Chinese right on Popup Chinese by clicking the green "en" button right above the comment box。 That will switch you to Chinese input mode. A box will appear that will show potential Chinese words whenever you type a word in pinyin. Screws up copy and paste for me, but is pretty useful.
To type Chinese in any program or on other websites, you'll need to install a Chinese input method editor (IME). I'm a windows users and recommend the free one released by Google and available here:
http://www.google.com/ime/pinyin/
Brendan has recommended QIM for Mac users in other threads. I've never used it myself, but have heard good things about it from other Mac users as well:
http://glider.ismac.cn/RegQIME.html