#CHINESE CHARACTERS FLASHCARDS TV#

I agree it's nice to see people have different ways to learn this stuff - gives me more confidence if I'm not alone. So, while context is really important, and vocabulary is crucial, as is listening comprehension, there will come a time where you'll have to sit down and learn the characters you're missing, or you'll never get through a modern newspaper that transliterates foreign names, or mentions Chinese names. Onomatopoeic characters: е’Є, е–µ, е‘њ, е’Ї, е‘ј, etc. Characters used in names: зђі, жѓ , й№Џ, йёї, etc. And I found that, in my case, not doing this sooner hampered the learning of all other aspects of Chinese.ДЄlso, keep in mind that there are many commonly used characters which are not easily learned through words: Sooner or later, you will have to do some character-specific studying if you want to read, at least that's my experience. All I'm saying is that characters are a very special part of the Chinese language (something quite unique too) and they require special attention, regardless on what your learning strategy is. Learning words is clearly extremely important, as is listening, etc. People respond to learning differently, so I'm not prescribing how Chinese should be learned. I just read a lot and absorbed by osmosis. I didn't bother making a new flashcard for new words where I already knew all of the constituent characters as I generally was able to remember these new words without extra help.ДЄfter I knew 2000 characters I gave up formal study and making flashcards. In making flashcards, I focussed on trying to learn the individual meaning of every individual character, but always included it in a word to give additional context where a word was available. Sure, focussing on words alone may be the quickest way to get to a functional level in speaking and listening, but characters almost always have their own individual meaning even when they are not used individually and focussing on understanding that individual meaning as one learns should give a greater depth of understanding of the language. I was then able to read pretty well.ДЄs far as words vs characters goes, while focussing on words appears popular on this board, there are also benefits to focussing on the characters. So I went back to the textbooks, concentrating specifically on the example sentences given for grammatical constructions, and this time because I knew all the characters I was able to whizz through four levels of textbook in a couple of months. After that I knew a lot of characters but couldn't read.

Personally, if I had to start over again, the first thing I would do is rote memorisation of the most common 3000 characters, as I've found that this was the single biggest obstacle I've had to learning Chinese.ДЄfter getting to about 800-1000 characters using a textbook I gave up on textbooks because they all drove me bananas (all that foreign friend stuff) and rote memorised up to something over 2000. The 'learning characters with new vocabulary' approach simply didn't work for me.

Then, I brute forced them, and it opened up so many new resources for me, that I really improved rapidly. In short, I spent 5 years expecting for characters to 'fall into place', and they didn't, and it was holding me back.

#CHINESE CHARACTERS FLASHCARDS TV#

I rely on books, textbooks and TV shows for my exposure. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that I'm not in China, so developing conversational Chinese first is not an option. This is when I was able to do massive amounts of reading, watching TV shows (with subtitles), and other things. If I see characters that are familiar, it's much easier to memorise words consisting of them.ДЇor me, the great breakthrough came when I didn't have to worry about every sentence having characters I had to look up in a dictionary, and every word I don't know being composed of strange characters I didn't know. I find it extremely difficult to remember words where I don't know the characters, because it's many different things to remember, all at once. I guess it worked so well because it allows me to concentrate on one specific aspect and accurately measure my progress.

Chinese characters flashcards