Lately I have been focusing mostly on just learning massive amounts of characters. I try to learn at least 10 new ones each day, and the following day I practice the characters from the day before plus 10 new ones.
I’m probably at about 1,400 character recognition level, but I want to be able to recognize a lot more than what I currently know. Therefore, if I go at for 10 characters a day, in “theory” I should be able to complete the 3,000 characters needed to read newspapers in a 160 days.
The only problem is that I feel overwhelmed already by how many characters there are that I still don’t know. I don’t know if I can keep up the pace of 10 characters per day either.
[quote=“Rabidpie”]Lately I have been focusing mostly on just learning massive amounts of characters. I try to learn at least 10 new ones each day, and the following day I practice the characters from the day before plus 10 new ones.
I’m probably at about 1,400 character recognition level, but I want to be able to recognize a lot more than what I currently know. Therefore, if I go at for 10 characters a day, in “theory” I should be able to complete the 3,000 characters needed to read newspapers in a 160 days.
The only problem is that I feel overwhelmed already by how many characters there are that I still don’t know. I don’t know if I can keep up the pace of 10 characters per day either.
Ye of more experience, how did you resolve this?[/quote]
you need some of that brain glue. if you do 10 characters a day continuously how do you make them stick? your revision time will rise and rise until your brainhead explodes!
Practice by writing, reading, or using in sentences? What about the ones from the day (and week, and month) before that? In my experience you need to keep reviewing all of them ad nauseam.
[quote]The only problem is that I feel overwhelmed already by how many characters there are that I still don’t know. I don’t know if I can keep up the pace of 10 characters per day either.
[/quote]
The “3,000 characters to read a newspaper” is a myth.
Reason 1: A lot of Chinese “words” are compounds. You might know that the character 東 means “east” and 西 means “west”, and you’d know how to pronounce the two of them together, but you wouldn’t know that 東西 means “thing” unless you learned that separately. Within those first 3,000 characters, there are a vast number of compounds that you won’t know if you just learn the characters singly.
Reason 2: There will always be a small percentage of characters used outside that first 3,000. If one of these crops up in the sentence you are reading, it will probably be important to the meaning of that sentence. Take the English sentence “The guinea pig is a crepuscular forager”. Knowing all but one of the words in the sentence doesn’t help much, because without understanding the word “crepuscular” most of the meaning is lost.
None of this should stop you from learning the 3,000. I went through the Far East 3,000 character dictionary some years ago and it was very helpful. It didn’t get me to newspaper-reading standard, though.
[quote=“Taffy”]The “3,000 characters to read a newspaper” is a myth.
Reason 1: A lot of Chinese “words” are compounds. You might know that the character 東 means “east” and 西 means “west”, and you’d know how to pronounce the two of them together, but you wouldn’t know that 東西 means “thing” unless you learned that separately. Within those first 3,000 characters, there are a vast number of compounds that you won’t know if you just learn the characters singly.[/quote]
Indeed, there are many characters that I recognize immediately when part of a compound, but which I find harder to recognize in isolation. Native speakers of Chinese have told me they experience the same phenomenon sometimes.
Read. Extensively. Recognize words in context. Use all the clues at your disposal (background knowledge, prediction, skimming/scanning, etc.) to read Chinese. Try to get reasonably easy reading materials. Repeatedly encountering words you know or are working on in context will help you to cement them in your mind for recognition.
Reading is supposed to be recognizing the written form of language already in your head. It’s a little harder with literary or newspaper Chinese, since it doesn’t sound like spoken Chinese, but still – I wouldn’t go with individual characters. Memorizing all the characters (or a certain number) and then reading seems to me like saying you won’t play a song on your clarinet until you can play all the notes it can make, even the ones that aren’t in the early songs you want to play. Or something like that.
Read a LOT. Read the same things repeatedly. Read things in English and then work through the equivalent Chinese (Wikipedia comes to mind, although it’s a bit hard sometimes).
You can also download the character recognition software extension to go with Firefox. Read online news articles and if you don’t know a character put the curser over it and it will tell you what it means. Helps a lot and you don’t get that sinking feeling when you don’t know a word or two.
Finding good articles to read is not always easy. I like practising with the Chinese pod conversations as the majority of the characters are very high frequency.
Get a copy of the free open source Stardict program.
It’s got tons of downloadable dictionaries for the program, in many languages.
Then you’d know what “crepuscular” means.
You wouldn’t find “crepuscular” in most paper Chinese-English dictionaries.
The Chinese Pera-kun add on for Firefox is based upon CEDICT and is rather limited in its vocabulary.
The only thing wrong with the Stardict program is that it conflicts with videos running at the same time. Then the graphics go haywire. :s
Instead of going for most frequent characters, you might go for most frequent words (character combinations). I think the Chinese-forums.com web site has such a list for download as a spreadsheet file.
[quote=“Chris”][quote=“Taffy”]The “3,000 characters to read a newspaper” is a myth.
Reason 1: A lot of Chinese “words” are compounds. You might know that the character 東 means “east” and 西 means “west”, and you’d know how to pronounce the two of them together, but you wouldn’t know that 東西 means “thing” unless you learned that separately. Within those first 3,000 characters, there are a vast number of compounds that you won’t know if you just learn the characters singly.[/quote]
Indeed, there are many characters that I recognize immediately when part of a compound, but which I find harder to recognize in isolation. Native speakers of Chinese have told me they experience the same phenomenon sometimes.[/quote]
That’s kind of what I was thinking. It happens to me quite often. Even to the point whee I can read an entire sentence, yet have no idea what it means…
I also advise reading.
[quote=“Bismarck wrote in another thread”]I bought three little books from a series called: Chinese Readers at Caves Books yesterday. The have three levels:
Level 1: Beginner
a. Do you love me? Aili’s adventures in Taiwan.
b. Yanzi - China’s little big man
c. Chinese jokes
Level 2: Intermediate
a. Journey to the West - The early life of the Monkey King
Level 3: Advanced
a. A nurse’s story
b. Chinese idiom stories[/quote]
I’ve found these to be quite useful.
Before studying sentences and then more real life content I used to put 25 a day into anki with mnemonics (remembering the hanzi volume 1 to start) and then adding as i went.
so 1500 characters from book
sentences/real content also adding characters individually as i go.
Been doing this for bang on a year now. 1st part took me about 3 months, after 6-9 months i was ok with reading some comics if they were set in everyday places (eg: not not about killer nano robots from space).
Alot of people dog it but learning characters first isnt the worst thing to do. If you can knock a few thousand out in a few months of dedication it’ll give you a push when you get onto real content study,.
Go more than 10 a day though if you can. say 20-30
Ok, I think everyone here agrees that reading is the best idea. To be 10000% honest, I haven’t been doing as much reading as I’d like to be doing.
I’ll give that a go.
Kobo, I’m going to give the program a go and see if I like it.
And as for now, I’ll continue with 10 characters a day at least until I get burnt out. At the very least I will know the pronunciation of the character even if I don’t know the meaning.
With that being said, time to go read some online articles.
This kinda stuff is great if you are sick of PAV text books. I tried the flashcard method for a while and it didn’t work for me, although I know others swear by it. You can get these books from any local library in the kids section Read, read, read!
This kinda stuff is great if you are sick of PAV text books. I tried the flashcard method for a while and it didn’t work for me, although I know others swear by it. You can get these books from any local library in the kids section Read, read, read![/quote]
I’ve got quite a few similar ones, but I would love the complete collection pictured in the link.
I’m currently working through the Anki “Taiwan All Grades” deck, (the 5568 characters Taiwanese children learn in school, in order, from grade 1-9" according to the description) and reading random kids books as much as I can.
One tip when choosing books is to make sure that the hanzi and zhuyin are aligned with the reading direction. i.e. so that you can cover the zhuyin column/row with a piece of paper while reading.
Quite a few books go [hanzi][zhuyin][hanzi][zhuyin]… so whenever you get to a difficult word you just end up reading the pronunciation instead of using proper reading skills such as breaking down radicals and reading ahead.
Edit2: btw, where did you get your “Taiwan All Grades Deck”? Is it the same one I have above? If not, do you have a link for the download to import the deck?
Another question, as I’ve never used Anki before. Do you have to save your import after you’ve started using it? I see if you exit and discard then when you open Anki again it just goes back to 0 of 0…
That sounds brilliant. Where did you get that?[/quote]
You just download it straight from within Anki.When you fist install and load the program, there’s a button labeled download. Click that and you’ll get a list of all the decks people have submitted to the Anki database. Just start typing a search phrase to narrow down the list.
If you already have decks installed, you can get to the download screen by going to File>Download>Shared Deck.
Once you’ve got the deck setup, you may want to follow the steps here: chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/6902
The deck is setup to show the English and pinyin first, these steps let you switch it so that you get the hanzi first.
That sounds brilliant. Where did you get that?[/quote]
You just download it straight from within Anki.When you fist install and load the program, there’s a button labeled download. Click that and you’ll get a list of all the decks people have submitted to the Anki database. Just start typing a search phrase to narrow down the list.
If you already have decks installed, you can get to the download screen by going to File>Download>Shared Deck.
Once you’ve got the deck setup, you may want to follow the steps here: chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/6902
The deck is setup to show the English and pinyin first, these steps let you switch it so that you get the hanzi first.[/quote]
Did all that and downloaded the pinyin toolkit. Noticed that it shows third tone pinyin incorrectly (when you try to edit it’s fine in the edit box, but wrong when you do the review); Eg: 小 xiǎo is shown as xilo
Do you have the same problem?
Edit: I see it’s set up that way and can’t be changed. Bummer. Looks shit. xiǎo looks much better…
Edit@: btw, does anyone know how to delete a plugin on Anki?
