Some tips share with you
1.Try to make friends wz Chinese people
2.Learn from Chinese culture ,for ex:Nation Holiday,Chinese holiday
3.Go to Chinese grill to learn their traditional food
If you have any questions about learning,you can have my E-mail
Cantuck:
For writing, I swear by making up stupid, exaggerated, and preferably obscene stories about each character. I was never into alcohol or illegal substances but I could imagine those might help in this endeavor. 
It’s fine to say “I’ll learn the radicals and use those”, and there’s value to that long-term, but that means you’re up against memorizing 214 more signs. Right now, the problem is that you’re having problems memorizing how to write signs – why add to the task to try to solve it?
I’ll give you a horrible example. The character hou4 (shi2hou4, ‘time’) is 候, right?
Well, that part on the left there is a wall of a house (you can see the roof going up) and it’s double insulated because it’s wintertime. The top part on the right is Santa’s bag of toys sticking out of the chimney. The bottom right part is the hook for the stockings on the mantel, and then Santa’s legs and arms sticking out of the fireplace. Naturally, he would be saying, “Hou4! Hou4! Hou4!” at this point.
Stupid? You bet. Memorable? Definitely. I came up with that one in 1982, and I still remember both the story and the character. And I’m practically on the level of the mentally challenged when it comes to writing Chinese characters by hand.
It doesn’t matter what the story is (most of them wouldn’t fit the sound of the word so well) but if it’s memorable for you, that’s all it takes.
BTW, from the perspective of good testing practices, your teacher’s test method of giving you one sentence with “everything” in it proves very little. She would be better advised to write a test that would test various things separately. If you get the character wrong, for example, she can’t tell if it’s because you forgot how to write it but knew which one you wanted, you had no clue about what character to write, or you were “sure” ｉｔ was the one you wrote, but it turned out to be wrong. Test writing is a little more complicated if you want to be able to get results that will tell you something meaningful, and it’s definitely something Shida is not quite up to speed yet on. Their focus is on “traditional” testing methods that are teacher-focused and easy to grade, rather than on using tests as diagnostics. Of course part of the reason is the insistence on “standards” for visa purposes, plus a healthy dose of “we’ve always done it this way.”
Anyway, hang in there. If you know bopomofo, it would likely be easier to memorize the positions of the symbols on a computer keyboard than to make yourself mental memorizing 214 radicals at this point. But that’s just my opinion.
canucktyuktuk, you should be able to find radicals in almost any Chinese dictionary. If you want to save a few dollars, go to this website: chineselanguage.org/cgi-bin/ … ode=bushou
You should see a big table called “Bushou index”. Bushou (部首) means radicals (but don’t tell DB that). As you can see, there are 214 radicals listed in order of stroke count as well as “variants” listed below. This may seem a bit overwhelming at the beginning but not all radicals are important to know. If you look at the radicals with stroke orders 1 to 7 (no. 1 to 166) along with their corresponding variants, you will get a good feel for how characters are put together.
This is only one way for you to remember things. In fact, there are lots of subcomponents that are not radicals. Break them up as you see fit – whatever works for you is more important.
Since I don’t know what characters you are learning, I’ll just point out some common radicals.
言
(radical 149, typically left hand side of characters)
- typically seen on characters that have something to do with speech or language
- examples:
語
(language),
話
(speech),
說
(speak).
艹
(variant radical 140, always on top)
- often seen on characters that have something to do with plants
- examples:
草
(grass),
菜
(leafy veggie),
花
(flower).
氵
(variant radical 85, almost always on the left hand side)
- often seen on characters that have something to do with water
- examples:
海
(ocean),
河
(river),
游
(swim).
灬
(variant radical 86, almost always on the bottom)
- often seen on characters that have something to do with heat or fire
- examples:
熱
(hot),
熟
(cooked through),
煎
(fry).
扌
(variant radical 64, almost always on the left hand side)
- often seen on characters that’s related to using one’s hands
- examples:
推
(push),
打
(hit),
搶
(take away).
飠
(variant radical 64, almost always on the left hand side)
- often seen on characters that have something to do with food
- examples:
飯
(cooked rice,meal),
飲
(drink),
餓
(hungry).
女
(radical 38, can be on the left hand side or at the bottom)
- character for “female”, often seen on characters that have something to do with females, but lots of characters have this radical that are not related to females, but it’s a good one to recognize
- examples:
媽
(mother),
姊
(older sister),
妓
(prostitute).
Thanks, Ironlady. I actually had some FUN today making up some silly explanations for some of my more troublesome characters. I’ll try it. It’s important to have fun. Admittedly, I haven’t been having much fun with the focus on stupid test scores (something I have never cared about anyway).
I want to start writing on the keyboard, but my old mac doesn’t have the bpm on the keys. I’m not even sure about the software. I haven’t worried about it, because I haven’t needed to. It sounds like a good idea. Not yet.
I do my English writing on the keyboard. my handwriting is atrocious, and always has been.
Feeling much better now. Off to the funny farm.
You can type using pinyin, so having zhuyin on the keys shouldn’t be an issue. Alternatively buy a NT$300 keyboard and plug that in to your laptop - I have mine set up as a desktop with a big monitor, separate mouse and keyboard when I’m at home and then just unplug it when I take it out. Oh and I had to buy a NT$75 adapter to make the crappy ps/2 keyboard convert to usb, but if you buy a usb keyboard then you can just plug and play.
All you need to do right now is try to learn how to read and write the characters, so I wouldn’t worry too much about which part is or isn’t a 部首 bu4shou3 (also commonly called ‘radical’ :silenced: ).
All bushou means is that it’s the part that the dictionary uses to index a particular character. Since it’s not an alphabetic script, a graphic system like the bushou is necessary for indexing. An element like 日(ri4, ‘sun; day’) might be used as the indexing component for one character like 時 shi2 ‘time’, but not for another (in this case rarer) graph like 汨 Mi4 (the name of a river), which is indexed under its bushou of 水 shui3 ‘water’, which is abbreviated to three dots alongside. So just because 日 is functioning as a bushou in one case (purely for the purpose of dictionary indexing – this is entirely unrelated to whether its role in the character is semantic, phonetic or both) doesn’t mean it is always a bushou when you see it. When you look at characters in general, bushou is not a permanent characteristic for a particular element, but rather a function of whether it is chosen for indexing purposes on a character-by-character basis.
That said, all elements which are so used at least once can be put into a list of bushou, and any member of that list, including 日, can be called a bushou in the abstract.
To put it another way, 日 is a bushou because it is used to classify some characters. It is the bushou in 時. But it is not a bushou in 汨; instead, the three dots of water on the left, an abbreviation of 水 shui3 ‘water’ are.
For the purposes of learning to read and write, at first you don’t need to memorize which part is used for indexing in any particular character. Learning that will be useful later as you start to use dictionaries more, but that can wait. 
Each semantic or phonetic part of a character can be useful for creating mnemonic devices for learning characters. These parts can be termed elements or components. Or just parts. You don’t need to worry about which ones are bushou (‘radicals’) right now.
Ironlady’s idiosyncratic example for 候 is good; I made up many similar ones when I was learning, and found them very useful. Another approach, as sjcma indicates, is to start by learning just a few of the common elements like the water, fire and speech elements. It may also be useful to start learning when an element is playing a phonetic role (e.g., 馬 ma3 ‘horse’ is phonetic in 嗎 ma5, the question particle) vs. a semantic one (e.g., 馬 in 駝 tuo2 ‘camel’).
thank you all so much. On a lighter note, I figured out how to input using pinyin. I just didn’t have it turned on. Duh. Now I need to get a new computer with a brighter monitor. Always look in system preferences…always look in system preferences…btw, I’m on chaper 6 of the first book. It’s difficult, but with the help I’m getting, not for long.
I’ll probably have a bunch more questions later. Thanks for all the helps.
canucktyuktuk,
One thing you can do is to use the pages in your book that have only pinyin or bopomofo (whichever you feel more comfortable with.) You know, those extra pages after the Chinese dialogue that are transcribed. Write those in your head, on paper, or on your leg with your finger, as you read. Or buy an etch a sketch and save paper! 
For me when I was doing that I was thinking of the meaning and the character together, instead of just writing over and over. This helped me a lot in the beginning as I too struggled with that whole writing thing.
Thread of the year!
Thanks for all the tips
I have been listening to and copying Mandarin Chinese from my Taiwanese friends here in Taiwan for about 5 years now. I got serious about it a few years ago when I went on a 2 month holiday there, and even memorised a couple of cheesey karaoke songs.
Have been slack since then, but a few months ago have been trying harder to learn more. I will soon be in Taichung for 3 weeks, with absolutely nobody to speak english with.
Im hoping this ‘immersion’ trip will be a good way to learn a lot more chinese language. At this stage I will leave writing/typing chinese for a later stage in my learning.
For now I would be happy to be able to travel around by myself, order food, haggle for lower prices and catch a bus/train/taxi without getting too lost…
Miltownkid - some good tips man! I especially like the watching cartoons suggestion 
I can sit and watch them for hours, and the family where I am staying have 3 toddlers that will no doubt be happy to watch them with me.
Actually when I was there last time I learned the most from the families children. They seemed far more patient than the adults and even seemed to enjoy showing me new words and laughing at my messed up pronunciation
Have also made up some flash cards and take them everywhere with me. This has been the single best piece of advice that I have read so far.
Heres hoping I reach at least one of my language goals during the trip
This is a great thread, it should be a sticky 
A couple of things:
For example:
Fan-bloody-tastic, sjcma! Love it! 
Have you ever heard of Harry Lorayne, the memory expert? This is his link, or chain, system, it was discussed in Unger, J. (2004), “Ideogram: Chinese characters and the myth of disembodied meaning.”, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. I talked about this a bit in a paper I wrote last year about the Chinese writing system. I have to admit, I have not been using this method, I would probably go crazy if I had to do that for every character I have had to learn at Shi-da 
, but I do try to make some kind of connection like this when learning new characters made up of components I know.
Here’s a very easy one. 淡 dan4 as in 淡化 (to mitigate/weaken/ease) - This story isn’t obscure or creative (I just thought of it off the top of my head!) but I just think of the san dian shui radical as meaning ‘water’ and two 火 components as meaning ‘fire’. Since there’s two fire components but only one water, you don’t completely put out the fire, just weaken it. Contrast this to 滅 mie4 (to extinguish) - this only has one water component, and only one 火, so they cancel each other out, hence the fire is extinguished! Howzat?
I know the methods but not the man (Harry Lorayne that is). What paper did you write? For school or for publication? I searched Amazon.com for Unger’s book and it seems the book either gets a 5-star rating or a 1-star rating. I guess you either love it or hate it.
All very good taipei_swan. I submit that
滅
is a multi-faceted approach to putting out the fire. First, use your spear (戈 ge1 – literally lance, spear) to poke and break up the logs so you don’t end up with a big bonfire. Second, pour water (氵shui3, water radical) on the fire. Third, put a lid on the fire to starve it of oxygen and contain the smoke, hence the bar on top of the fire (灭). If you’re a simpleton, you only know one way of putting out the fire, which is just to cover it with a lid. Hence, the simplified version of
滅
is
灭
.
Some of my favourite ones are
尖
(sharp) for having a small (小) pointy end on top followed by a thicker end (大).
塵
(dust) is also a good one as it has a deer (鹿) running on top of earth (土), which of course will kick up dust. The simplified version of dust is “small bits of earth” or
尘
. And then there’s the simplified character for
舊
(old, outdated), which is
旧
– looks like “one day” doesn’t it? If it’s already one day new, it’s old.
I really admire you guys that can read the language as well as speak it. Im hoping artistic brain will help me pick up the characters fast…
Yesterday I have started to make my own flash cards, and its amazing how the words stay fresh in my mind after writing them out and then drawing a picture alongside them…
It was for school…wrote it about a year ago. It was an undergrad paper, I only read the chapters of Unger’s book that looked interesting, which would explain the ratings I guess!
I am impressed by your story for
滅
, I cannot compete with such creativity! This topic almost deserves a thread of its own - people’s crazy stories for remembering characters…
I started learning Chinese because there is this Taiwanese actor/singer I like and I wanted to understand what he was saying when I watch him on TV. I’ve been studying for three years now, its difficult cause I only get to talk to my teacher once a week (Mandarin is not widely spoken where I live). I agree with the suggestion here- talk to kids. They won’t know if you’re saying the right thing. hahaha…
Seriously, I translate the Chinese news about him to English so that the other fans can know news about him. That is how I practice and learn new words. The only problem now is that I read better than I speak or listen.
With all of the back and forth about where to study Chinese, I thought it might be nice to hear how people have actually learned Chinese. I think learners like myself who want to progress faster and more effectively would benefit from hearing from those of you who have acquired the language.
Did you go to a language school? Which one? For how long? Privates? LE?
How did you do it? We want to know! 
Busted my ass stuying like 6 hours a day for 8 months straight.
There is no best way. Spend as much time as you can finding out what works for you. It’s pretty much all down hill after that (or at least it is no longer a 90 degree free climb .)
There is no school that will do it for you.
No special book (I have them all anyway.)
No magic software (though I think supermemo is pretty magical.)
No “secret” techniques.
Nothing.
Just lots of elbow grease.
Don’t get me wrong. Some school, books, techniques, and software are better than others. The problem is, everybody is pretty different when it comes to language acquisition (from what my eyes tell me.) Some like books, others school, others software, others techniques and still others girlfriends that don’t speak English.
Study study study. Practice practice practice. That’s the secret.
I took a college-level beginning course in the US for a semester. Studied my ass off. Then I lived in Taiwan with Chinese people for 6 months, before going back to the US, testing into 3rd-year Chinese, and continuing to study my ass off.
Then I returned to Taiwan and lived for several years, speaking and reading Chinese on a daily basis, and working as a Chinese->English translator.
As a result, my writing skill is the weakest of the four skills, but fortunately I rarely have to use that skill. When I do, it’s with the aid of a computer.
[quote=“Chris”]I took a college-level beginning course in the US for a semester. Studied my ass off. Then I lived in Taiwan with Chinese people for 6 months, before going back to the US, testing into 3rd-year Chinese, and continuing to study my ass off.
Then I returned to Taiwan and lived for several years, speaking and reading Chinese on a daily basis, and working as a Chinese->English translator. [/quote]
This will be the theme of this thread. In a nut shell, study your ass off.
A year and a half at ShiDa, 2 years teaching myself, 2 and a half years with a couple of private teachers.
What Miltownkid said. Study your ass off. But I’d add that an intense initial focus on getting the pronunciation right is important, and this requires good audio materials as well as being frequently corrected by someone with good pronunciation themself. And immersion is useful too.
As for me, I learned Chinese by starting in an independent study program at Ohio State. It was an excellent program, with very well designed printed and audio materials which focused intensively on pronunciation at first, and I used the HELL out of them for about 2 months just working on pronunciation, before moving on to basic content. Because the pronunciation you establish at the beginning will be the foundation of your spoken Chinese for the rest of your life, I strongly recommend this kind of approach. Having live teachers and/or conversation partners who are willing to be ANAL about correcting you is a vital part of this first step. I can’t emphasize this enough. However, I’m not saying independent study is for everyone. To be honest, you have to be very disciplined and highly motivated for that to work. Most people are probably better off in a program where the class time and homework are more structured. For me that would have been a drag, since I don’t like learning at the class’s pace.
I continued independent study in a similar manner for over a year, then decided that if I really wanted to become fluent, I’d better immerse myself in the language for a while, so I moved to Taipei, moving in as a boarder with a young Taiwanese couple who spoke NO English, and living with them for five years. Even when I felt lazy, I had no choice but to use Chinese to communicate. To avoid s/sh-type pollution, since their pronunciation was pretty poor (by Beijinghua standards), I assiduously looked up every word I learned, checking the Pinyin so as to know whether to juan3she2. In addition, I studied books and tapes, and met with conversation partners regularly.
The result is that I speak fluently, with good pronunciation. By 3 years I could converse moderately fluently on a reasonable variety of topics, and in my 4th year or so I started teaching myself to read and write characters (using both bopomofo and pinyin, and learning simplified and traditional simultaneously). A couple years later I started calligraphy classes, which greatly improved the proportion and balance of my characters, although I can’t claim they’re beautiful. After 6-7 years, I was quite fluent. A few more years and I started reading adult materials. 12 years on now, and I’m still making mistakes, and am still learning, but I can eek my way through scholarly stuff in particular areas if adequately motivated.
I’m sure I could have achieved the same in classroom programs, but at a higher cost. However, I’d probably write more fluently if I had been forced to do writing homework more often.
When it comes down to it, the key factor in success will not be which method you use, it will be how much effort and discipline you put into it. But that initial focus on pronunciation (including tones) is IMO a requirement – otherwise you’ll end up speaking fluent yet unintelligible Chinese.