I have tried a dozen-odd ways of learning Chinese. Few of them have worked very well . . . except one: the book Learning Chinese Characters (2007) by Alison Matthews and Laurence Matthews. The subtitle is “a revolutionary new way to learn and remember the 800 most basic Chinese characters” and I agree, if revolutionary means “a lot better than other methods”. The method is simple:
- Break combination characters — almost all Chinese characters are combinations of a few hundred simpler characters — into components.
- The simplest components, not divisible into others, are associated with a picture that conveys the meaning. Someone pitching a baseball, for example, when outlined makes the character for nine.
- Devise a brief story, a little picture, to help you remember that the components together mean what they mean. For example, the characters for white and ladle put together in one character mean of. The story is something like: “Look at that white ladle. It’s the special ladle of Chef Thomas. The book is full of drawings to help visualize the stories.
I enjoy reading it. Partly for the feeling of accomplishment — I can tell I am actually learning the characters much faster than before — and partly because the combinations are intriguing.
The book I have says “Volume One” so I eagerly await later volumes to read more of what these two writers, who are not identified, have to say. I never saw it in Beijing; I came across it in a Barnes & Noble or Borders.
I remember doing this for Hirgana in Japanese class. A classmate of mine had this book with cheesy suggestions for associations. They weren’t working for me, so I made up my own–usually something lascivious or bizzarely memorable.
At first I was going to ask if this works only for traditional characters. Then I realized that we’re not dealing with radicals–the stories you can make up are arbitrary. So perhaps it works even better with simplified, since the shapes are easier?
It adds to the misunderstanding when you call the script you’re learning “Chinese”. It’s a writing system for Mandarin, the official tongue of Beijing, Taiwan, and Singapore, so you’re learning the Mandarin syllabary. Shanghainese, Cantonese, and dozens of other Chinese languages spoken by upwards of a billion Chinese people have no, or poor, representation in this script.
You may have been told that it’s not a syllabary, but a system of ideograms. Many native Mandarin speakers have been taught that, and believe it. It’s false. A Shanghai speaker who reads Mandarin is bilingual. The symbols really do represent sounds. Therefore, it’s also wrong to say “the characters for ‘white’ and ‘ladle’”, because those characters don’t represent those concepts, but only the sounds used in Mandarin to express the words for those concepts. We aren’t tempted to make the mistake in English, because only “a” and “I” are written with one letter, but with a syllabary, any one-syllable word may be confused with the symbol that spells it.
What makes it more confusing is that Mandarin has only about 1200 spoken syllables, but many more symbols, so by convention words that sound the same must often be written with different symbols.
This system sounds very similar to James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji and Remembering the Hanzi.
The idea of making relations, as strange as possible, was developed by magician Harry Loraine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_lorayne
He suggest you make the weirdest possible relation between the symbols, and then it is much easier to remember. He was famous or his unusual capability to remember things, and he always said it was just plain technique. He had a chapter about learning languages in his bestseller book The Memory Book.
i have been learning english for many years. but unfortunately the ways for learning new words seems doesn’t work for me. i tried tried again, but still didn’t have big progress.
after i read the book called “how to remember the GRE vocabulary in 17 days”, by Yang Peng who is a teacher in New Oriental School, and “selectness of GRE vocabulary ” by Yu Min Hong who is the president of New Oriental School, Beijing.
after read those books i learnt much faster than before. the second book teach me how to learn and remember words. such as: “canvas” ——we can think canvas consists of a can and a vase.
the first book teaches me which way is the best for us to learn new words in very short time. and we need to repeat them according to the forgetting curve which discovered by H.Ebbinghaus. if we learn everything following thie rule. the effection will be better.
maybe learning new languages has common way ?
oh, and I would be remiss if I didn’t put a plug in for Wenlin.com, by your Berkeley colleagues, which can also generate flashcards and do much more, including giving you “just so” stories about why characters are written as they are, which I find to be a very useful elaboration aid to learning.