Learn Chinese Characters Pdf

[Melissa Alvarado]

Unfortunatelywe no longer offer the Cantonese/Mandarin audios on this website. We sincerely hope that you benefited from those lessons, and wish you the best with your continued efforts with spoken Chinese.

Simplified Chinese characters are used in China and Singapore, while traditional characters are used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. However, since the simplified system is based on the traditional one, more than half of commonly used characters are the same in both styles. Therefore, knowing one style definitely helps with learning the other.

The problem is that most people make learning harder than it needs to be, so in this article, I summarise the best advice I have on how to learn Chinese characters, based on fifteen years of learning, teaching and writing about Chinese.

The short answer is that it makes sense to focus on the spoken language first, thus delaying learning characters. Learning characters becomes easier the more Chinese you know, but learning the sounds of the spoken language becomes harder the longer you wait. Read more about this in: Should you learn to speak Chinese before you learn Chinese characters?

Apart from looking up characters in general, you also need resources to move up and down the knowledge web, either zooming in to look at the building blocks or zooming out to put the character in context. Some of these resources overlap with those mentioned above, but this is a separate way of sorting them and is quite useful if you need to zoom!

Now that you have some characters that you want to learn, how do you go about learning them? Below, I have separated the process into several steps, so this one is only about the initial learning, but as most of you probably already know, remembering and reviewing is where the real challenge is at (more about that later):

Some of these tricks have been known since ancient times, others have been discovered through research in cognitive science (a nice summary can be found here). Some techniques are hard to learn, but others are actually very easy!

The goal of this article is to provide a handy guide for all matters related to learning Chinese characters. There are probably things I have omitted or forgotten to mention, so if you have a question that is not covered here, please leave a comment below!

After many years of struggling with Anki I finally figured out how to use it successfully (I add exactly the same number of new words every day and review them every day. This keeps the review time commitment predictable)

The more you learn, however, the more extensive your web of Chinese knowledge will become, which also means that expanding it further will become easier. The more you know, the easier it becomes to learn even more. You will start recognising components and understand how they fit together to form compounds.

Just about everyone can look in a Traditional Chinese character dictionary and see that the most complete radicals are 17 brush stokes, but has anyone every shown you how many total brush strokes there are are in the longest of Traditional Chinese characters?

Use the whole dictionary and ALL the indices provided. Spend an afternoon exploring and writting those 33 stroke characters, just to get an idea of the look and feel of the densest of the Chinese characters.

High frequency approach is quite common teaching 2nd language lexicon in any language. But the problem with such an approach in Chinese is that it completely avoids the written lexicon for names or more fancy characters used in advertising.

When one turns to reading real world Chinese signage and newspapers, the lexicon is a bit too limited. One can enjoy elementry school and middle school texts, but I am rather weary of being set apart from the mainstream.

Reading and Writing Chinese, revised edition. by McNaughton and Li is one of the older more established texts for study of the written characters, based on the Yale University texts for learning Chinese.

This is why I think 2000 hanzi for Chinese language is not a feasible basic set since, in my opinion, Chinese text requires more hanzi than Japanese text requires kanji. But I could be wrong since I just started learning Chinese recently^^.

Some words are linguistically transparent (easy to recognize their meaning), other words are lingusitically opague (specialized, used less often or less widely) and difficult to find out their meaning.

2nd language teaching generally starts out with the transparent words (the words most often used and most acceptible to general public), the opague lexicon we have to learn more from actually asking people what the words mean.. via social networking.

But just starting out with character recognition is a bit visually challenging. I strongly suspect English users and Chinese users develop different parts of the brain in recogizing written words. English users can easily recall long strings of letters, Chinese users can recall subtle differences in meaning that the addition or omission of one brush stroke indicate.

Many thought it is difficult to learn Mandarin Chinese. It is not quite true! In my opinion, Chinese is one of the most interesting languages in the world! Chinese is a picture language, which means ancient Chinese people draw different pictures as Chinese characters out of everything they saw in the environment!

Therefore, the best way to learn well the language, in my view, is to learn the radical of the characters first, which by itself usually has a hint from the writing (or drawing) and then forms the character.

Order depends on learning goals, of course, but being able to read some beginner graded readers would be an achievable milestone more quickly reached than if you dove straight into memorizing stroke order and the proper formatting of the hanzi.

Focusing on recognition and typing alone allows for written communication to be a reality much much faster. And in reality the vast majority of written communication we do nowadays (in our mother tongue or otherwise) is digital rather than handwritten. Thus deciding whether to spend months if not years mastering characters by hand is a serious question every beginner needs to consider.

Being able to reproduce the first hundred characters or so by hand helps massively with later recognition, learning and remembering because it gives the brain more mental hooks/reference points to work with.

Manually grinding through those first hundred or so radicals/characters helps to understand the logic of how the characters are put together. A tough but important rite of passage!

I did take a calligraphy class recently at the Taipei school!! It was super fun and actually did help me review stroke order (I can be a bit random with that otherwise ) it also meant we spoke about the characters we were writing (春满 龙 etc) in context and about Chinese New Year / calligraphy tools / radical names. Would definitely recommend

I find Skritter to be the best of both worlds because not only are they flashcards, you can practice writing. You can just use your finger, but I also have a touch pen I use on my phone. It uses SRS, so you can add new cards and and it spaces the review cards.

I went back to preparing lists of vocabulary to learn, and write lines and lines of characters in notebooks, which I now know is the best way for me to learn and remember them, although a bit time consuming!

There is a key difference between learning the language as a native speaker, and learning the language as a second language. Native speakers of all languages invariably learn speaking and listening skills first, and only start to learn reading and writing at school, after the age of about 3 or 4. Learning a language as a second language, reading and writing have more prominence and can expedite some of the learning, but this also depends on a person's 'learning style'. Generally, combining all four communication skills is better.

To clarify what I am trying to say, my own experience of learning Chinese (and other languages) mixes all four modalities (reading, writing, speaking, listening). I find that learning the characters sometimes gives insight into the relationships between words (the semantics), that are not obvious from how they are said. Sometimes the process works the other way, as I see patterns in the written characters that are reflected in the sound.

If you only want to travel in China or learn some daily Chinese or make some Chinese friends, I recommend you to learn Chinese pinyin first. Many Chinese learners chose learn pinyin first,but notlearn Chinese pinyin and Chinese character together.

Because Chinese pinyin is a very easy part and even easier than English learning, and pinyin can help Chinese learners'pronounce. But Chinese characters is a very hard part in Chinese learning. HSK1 and HSK2 didn't appear characters. If you choose learn Chinese pinyin and Chinese character together, may be you will give up learning Chinese very fast.

And for Chinese beginners, only focus on Chinese listening and speaking is enough. If you are a kid or teenager,I recommend you learn Chinese pinyin and character together.You can spend more time to practice characters and you don't need to work.

You eventually want to be learning characters and pinyin at the same time anyway, so you might as well start as soon as you can. Much of the reward you will feel whilst learning is in being able to read bits and pieces here and there.

If it is not, I would not recommend learning pinyin simultaneously as sometimes it just confuses you as to the sounds of the word. For example: while you continue to pronounce Q as queen in English, in Pinyin, you need to keep reminding yourself that "Q" is pronounced as "Ch" (Eg: Qing is pronounced as King)

One of my friends' native language is Hindi and he preferred writing the pronunciations in hindi, as hindi has characters for all those variations of the "chh" sound that cannot be distinctly expressed in English in daily language.

Even if English is your native language, you will have to do a lot of unlearning when you learn Pinyin. For example: Zh is pronounced differently (Eg: Zhong 中 is pronounced not as z-h-ong but rather "chong"). Ri 日 is not pronounced as "I-R" but rather as "R-I' keeping the tip of the tongue behind a palate producing a sound that is not usually used in English (Eg: Rizhao is rounounced as "Ir-zhao")

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