Difficulty remembering the Chinese characters

Anyone have any suggestions on how you remembered Chinese characters?

If I see some basic characters (like xie xie) I could recognize it but if you told me to write it from memory, mine will probably be missing a stroke or two, or a sub-character.

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For Japanese, a guy called James Heisig wrote a book “Remembering the Kanji”, which is a structured approach to breaking down characters into English-named component parts. The important part is the use of English names for the component parts, so you can remember them in your native language. Then remembering characters just becomes a task of remembering which component parts it consists of, and as you recall the part names (in English) in your head, you can write the character. With time, you learn to conceptualize the component parts graphically and/or in Japanese, so your mind then slowly lets go of the English component keywords.

Now, another guy, Timothy Richardson, wrote a similar book (in cooperation with Heisig I think) for remembering Chinese characters. That book is called “Remembering the Hanzi”: https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Traditional-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833244/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2WBALXKWMKBNV&keywords=remembering+the+hanzi&sprefix=remembering+the+han%2Caps%2C378&sr=8-1 .

This approach is however not a “traditional” Chinese language teaching approach as it relies on using cue words in English to remember the shapes. Personally, I think the idea is fine, but some people (especially native speakers) vehemently oppose this style of teaching, saying “we learned the characters by rote, stroke by stroke – you should learn it by rote also”. There is probably some value also in repetitive, rote learning, but I think a cue-word approach can accelerate the process for non-native learners.

I look forward to hearing what others think!

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I learned pinyin in an hour. Speaking Chinese is dead simple if you have an ear for tones

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But Taiwanese don’t use pinyin, right? My textbooks all use pinyin, but at some point I probably have to bite the bullet and learn bopomofo. Taiwanese use bopomofo on their phones to input Chinese text, right?

The moderator of this very thread has a phd in this stuff. She wrote a book called “TPRS with Chinese Characteristics” and also invented (is that the right word?) something called “cold character reading”.

Basically, you need to understand (have truly acquired) the spoken language before you try to read it. But if you read Chinese texts that are 100% comprehensible, you’ll learn and retain the characters with ease. (Sorry @ironlady, im oversimplifying things quite a bit). Go check out Terry Waltz’s work and research. It’ll change your perspective on Chinese learning forever.

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Mandarin is my first tonal language I’ve been exposed to or started learning. And the pinyin often does not give any clue to the hanzi, or vice versa. Sometimes it does (like question “ma” having the horse radical) but often not.

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In every baihuo, there are green notebooks for children to practise Chinese characters.

Buy them, start writing them over and over and over in those books.

This is another point of contention, which Heisig’s approach rejects. Heisig’s approach focuses on remembering the structure and meaning (one meaning) of the character using the student’s native language (English, but Heisig’s book has been translated to other languages). The argument is that learning to remember the structure of the characters for writing them, and learning to associate the characters with their sounds, are separate skills that can be learned separately.

As I said, it’s a non-traditional approach that has garnered controversy, but also a lot of popularity.

I’ve lived here a decade and my zhuyin is shit yet I have no trouble living my life (almost) entirely in Chinese. Zhuyin or pinyin makes no difference. You just need something for you to know what sounds to make. I recommend focusing on listening instead of trying to learn the details of either (or any other) phonetic system. Trying to sound things out that you’ve never heard before goes against common sense in language acquisition.

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Sure, you can learn them separately. My mother loves to point out things like 口,山,出口 ,and 茶 when she encounters them (airport, Chinese/Japanese/Korean restaurants, in movies, etc.) but she doesn’t know how to say them. “Mountain Mountain mouth” (出口) was easy for my mom to recognize as “exit” because she was seeing that all over the place when she was here and in HK. But that doesn’t mean she’s really making a connection the way she would if she knew how to say them. It’s like when I go to Japan and I can kinda order off a local menu if there’s enough kanji. But the meaning of a character quickly isn’t the same as the meaning of a word. It’s way easier to learn the spoken language.

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I use speech to text and check the pinyin

I just have the bopofomo keyboard for when other people need to use it (which doesn’t really happen much given most people use QR codes to add Line and such) and then I use the traditional character pinyin keyboard when I use it.

No, that’s a very good summary. I think I’ll probably steal it for my “elevator pitch”. :grinning:

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Remembering for what situation? For writing or reading?

For reading only, to be able to recognize when seeing… I wrote a lot of the first ones. Which helped imbed the concept in my mind.

Then I moved onto more daily useful usages like typing pinyin into computer, ipad, phone, etc. This is when I learned to recognize so many more.

Still can’t write. And no need to. I don’t even need to know how to write my own native language English. Just start typing.

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To become functionally proficient in Chinese. You don’t think handwriting is important? Just picking out the right Chinese characters after you prompt a computer for it?

Does this method (comprehensible input for reading) also lead to the ability to write the characters? That, I think, is one area where Heisig’s method has benefits, because it trains for recall (the ability to reproduce the written character), not just recognition.

I’m not trying to be argumentative, and am genuinely interested in this topic.

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No. I don’t write in my own language. I did 10 years ago but now everything is done electronically. So similarly, don’t need to hand write in Chinese.

Hand writing is like an archaic concept for the majority.

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Depends on how you need to function, I wot. My daily life in Taiwan requires 0 Chinese writing. Being able to read more would be useful, but mostly I just put on a sad/lost face and look for someone to talk to

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I went to grad school with Tim Richardson. It’s interesting that the two of us did sort of non-traditional approaches to Chinese literacy as the program we were in was decidedly traditional. I sat in classes with the guy (and it was just the two of us many times) but we didn’t really collaborate, and neither of us was doing that kind of thing yet back then.

But no one is addressing the OP’s actual question. It seems the OP wants to be able to recall and write by hand characters from memory with no aids. My first question, honestly, is “Why?” I lived in Taiwan for a good many years (and “back in the day” when the tech wasn’t what it is now) and never had the need to write Chinese by hand from memory, even when doing a graduate program in translation and interpretation in a Taiwanese university. The only things native speakers write by hand are greeting cards, shopping lists, phone messages and forms. (I stood in front of the Mitsukoshi at Taipei Main asking 150+ people once.) Most native speakers just pull out their phones to check. I’ve had to write things by hand, but I never had to do it without any reference allowed other than on tests (ridiculously, tests for audio monitor jobs, which did not involve any writing in Chinese, but whatever.)

So as an effort for reward equation, writing by hand from memory is basically good for taking tests and trying to impress people. You can do the former by reading well and extensively and using Skritter for a month or so prior to the test; you can do the latter by memorizing a couple of really obscure and difficult characters to quiz people on at parties.

If you still DO want to write by hand from memory, there’s a sweet spot somewhere between reading a LOT and not worrying about it, and doing rote copying. I’ve found mnemonics like Richardson’s to be very, very useful – and students consistently rated mnemonics as the “most helpful” or “very helpful” options on surveys, whether the mnemonics were for characters, tones, or other aspects of language. I taught a high school class in the US from Sept through Dec. without ever asking them to write by hand from memory (they wrote by hand by referring to their reading texts when they needed to remind themselves of how to form a character) and gave an unannounced test the first day after Christmas break: given the Pinyin and the English, write the character(s) if you can. The lowest score was around 20 characters out of 115; the highest was 60+. So if a student can “learn to write” half the characters without trying, the question is now how much and what kind of reinforcement do we add (mnemonics? rote? composition writing? dictations?) to optimize that level.

If, of course, writing by hand from memory is your goal.

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It does to some extent. See my previous response about the high school class experiment on “how many of these characters can you write?”

It’s a really interesting question. I think the “answer” is somewhere in between. Reading is the biggest factor, I think, because reading is basically flash cards in context as far as characters are concerned. Mnemonics are hugely helpful, and I see absolutely no reason not to leverage students’ native or proficient languages and knowledge to help them remember things about Chinese. Just because it’s not “genuine Chinese tradition” doesn’t mean it won’t work (probably better, in fact). The no-hesitation thing isn’t really an obstacle in writing the way it is in speech, so it’s okay to pause and “look up at the ceiling” to remember how something’s written, what the mnemonic is or whatever. Muscle memory is only going to come into play if the student also sticks to stroke order (well, really ANY consistent stroke order, though if you’re going to do it might as well do it the right way) and spends a lot of time writing each character either in context or out. Usually that means “out of context” to get enough repetitions, but then that’s time lost to acquiring language which will probably get most people farther than being able to write by hand from memory.

(So, in short, I don’t know. But it’s a cool question to actually research, with actual experiments on actual students. Theory is fine but the field of Chinese language teaching is dominated by, well, Chinese thinking. Which is fine, but a lot of us aren’t Chinese.)

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