If you know Chinese 3,000 characters, you have enough vocabulary to read a newspaper or understand conversations in the workplace. The problem most people have is that 3,000 feels too far away or many of the characters look alike. Indeed, 3,000 is a lot, but Chinese characters are composed of smaller elements that make them easier to recognize and distinguish. Here are some tips to memorise them…Step 1: Learn Character ElementsChinese, like all languages, has root elements of meaning that are smaller than words. By breaking characters down, or by starting with the most basic and essential characters, we can begin to understand the character system. Keep in mind that while you hear about radicals are studied rigorously in tradition teaching methods, not all of the smaller components of characters are radicals. Radicals were invented to categorize characters for hard copy dictionaries, so while they can be useful identifiers for many characters, we now have very useful dictionary apps to look up characters by other methods.For visual learners like myself, it is useful to start with the visual elements. One of the most common building blocks of Chinese characters is 人, the character for people. When the meaning component人 forms part of another character, it occasionally appears as 亻, as in你 or 们. which indicates to you that the character has something to do with people, like (as in 我们, or us). Other times it appears as 人, like in 坐, which often means “to sit” and is a logograph of two people sitting down. Another element you are bound to run into countless times is the water radical氵, which is referred to in Chinese as “三点水”， or “three drops of water”. Characters containing 氵will usually have something to do with water or liquid, as in 酒, which means alcohol. While 人 and 氵 are very obvious in their meaning, some visual elements are more cryptic, and date back to ancient China. Take for example 给, or to give, which contains the silk radical (纟). In ancient China, gift giving usually involved silk. As characters have evolved over thousands of years, many no longer bear visual resemblance to their meaning, and the phonetic components of characters have become more useful in identifying characters. A whopping 80% of characters contain a phonetic component, which makes looking up unfamiliar characters in the dictionary easy to do if you can make educated guesses at their pinyin. However, phonetic components can correspond to multiple different pronunciations, so you have to approximate at the pinyin of a character in order to guess its meaning. For example, 屯 (tún) and 顿 (dùn) both share the phonetic element 屯, but one is pronounced tún and the other is pronounced dùn. As you can see, phonetic elements can have multiple pinyin Romanizations, as well as multiple tonal pronunciations, but they remain close enough to group together. Grouping characters by their phonetic components is a strong mnemonic device, and you should use your ability to recall characters that have similar phonetic elements to look up characters in your dictionary. Since characters are normally composed of one meaning component and one phonetic component, if you can identify a meaning component in an unfamiliar character, try to think of other characters you know that look similar to the character component you can’t identify. Use the pinyin of the characters you think of which share a likeness to look up the character. The trick to learning characters is to use the visual and phonetic elements of the character along with creative mental images of your own and give the character a unique place in your memory, yet one that is connected to knowledge of other characters. Learning by association is the best way to absorb characters, and the stronger the associations are, the better memory works. If a character is giving you trouble, you may have to get creative with it, either by giving it an explanatory image or a story. In once case, I remembered the compound character for music, 音乐, or music, by thinking about it like a big speaker box on the right, and a person standing next to it dancing on the left. While learning the real entomology behind characters is great, sometimes it is just quicker to make things up yourself. For example with 州, which means state or province, I like to think of it as a composition of the strokes that compose the character for rivers 川, and the little dots as cities which are springing off the banks of the rivers. This may or may not be how the character came about, but it works for me because I know that in ancient times, cities always appeared in river basins, and that is an image that I can associate with what I know about Chinese history being really old. Assigning meaning to characters gets easier the more characters you know, because picking out elements gets faster and more natural. Step 2: Spatial Repetition Software (SRS) |
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