The key to learning Chinese characters has been and always will be repetition. To start out Chinese elementary school children write each character a hundred or two hundred times, painfully learning how to recognize and write each new character. Once a student grows more familiar with an extensive base of characters, it is easier to form and remember more complicated characters. As a result, the more characters a student has learned, the easier it is to learn characters.
The same learning method that Chinese school children use is also employed by foreign students of the Chinese language. At any university where Chinese is taught, you can find students complaining about how much time studying Chinese requires. 4 Chinese credits can seem like 12 given the amount of time needed to write and rewrite characters hundreds of times..
However, in order to learn how to recognize characters, rather than write them, it’s not necessary to write the characters repeatedly. A very sore hand is certainly one method to increase one’s character recognition, but a student can avoid that painful experience by repeated, meaningful exposure to the characters. When a student studies abroad in China, learning characters becomes immensely easier for him or her since he or she will see characters repeatedly in certain situations where the meaning is readily apparent. For instance, a student will see the characters for 包子 every time she or he orders a steam bun. As such, riding on the subway, ordering in a restaurant, finding ones way on the street, all become activities that involve learning to recognize characters through constant exposure, rather than through filling one’s notebook with characters.
A way in which I extremely quickly increased the amount of characters I recognized was through online chatting. Since instant messaging forces a student to read what is being said to them, a student rather quickly becomes familiar with new characters even if they do not take the effort to actually look them up. I would often come across characters that I knew the meaning of, but for which I had no clue as to the pronunciation. This made it easier for me to pick up new words in class and on the streets of China, and when it came time for my teachers to force me to learn how to write them, it took significantly less handwritten repetitions.
The same learning method that Chinese school children use is also employed by foreign students of the Chinese language. At any university where Chinese is taught, you can find students complaining about how much time studying Chinese requires. 4 Chinese credits can seem like 12 given the amount of time needed to write and rewrite characters hundreds of times..
However, in order to learn how to recognize characters, rather than write them, it’s not necessary to write the characters repeatedly. A very sore hand is certainly one method to increase one’s character recognition, but a student can avoid that painful experience by repeated, meaningful exposure to the characters. When a student studies abroad in China, learning characters becomes immensely easier for him or her since he or she will see characters repeatedly in certain situations where the meaning is readily apparent. For instance, a student will see the characters for 包子 every time she or he orders a steam bun. As such, riding on the subway, ordering in a restaurant, finding ones way on the street, all become activities that involve learning to recognize characters through constant exposure, rather than through filling one’s notebook with characters.
A way in which I extremely quickly increased the amount of characters I recognized was through online chatting. Since instant messaging forces a student to read what is being said to them, a student rather quickly becomes familiar with new characters even if they do not take the effort to actually look them up. I would often come across characters that I knew the meaning of, but for which I had no clue as to the pronunciation. This made it easier for me to pick up new words in class and on the streets of China, and when it came time for my teachers to force me to learn how to write them, it took significantly less handwritten repetitions.
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