There are multiple aspects of characters that must be learned. Not just what the character looks like and means, but also how to pronounce it, the correct stroke order for drawing it, and what compounds (words) that it is used in.
Children in China generally build their written vocabulary through copious amounts of repetition – writing characters over and over and over. But, most laowai who pursue learning Chinese as a second language do not have the time luxury or patience required to follow this path.
Some characters are easy to remember, because they are simple, distinct, and pictorially associated with their meaning. Here is an example of a character that is very easy to remember:
- 飞 - fēi – to fly
It only requires a few strokes to draw, it looks like a hummingbird, and it means to fly. Perfect.
Unfortunately, only a small percentage of characters are pictographs. And, many characters which technically are classified as pictographs have evolved over the centuries to the degree that they no longer look like the meaning they represent. For example:
- 月 – yuē - moon
This character doesn’t look like a moon to me.
Mnemonics
A variety of different strategies are used for learning and remembering characters. A common theme that most methods share is the use of mnemonics. This typically involves breaking each character down into components, labeling each component, and building a story or a picture that binds those components together to represent the meaning of the character. How well this works varies from character to character. Here is a classic example of the mnemonic approach:
- Character: 休 = to rest
- Component 1: 亻= man
- Component 2: 木 = tree
- Mnemonic: to rest, a man leans against a tree
Both of the components that make up this specific character are very common, and show up in many other characters. In this case, they also happen to be radicals (more on this later), and the meanings I supplied for them are the standard definitions assigned by the Chinese language powers that be. It is not necessary to assign components a name which is derived from their etymological roots – you can name them whatever you would like. But, I’ve found that for most radicals, it's easiest to use their official assigned name. Examples of a couple that I have given alternative names to include:
- 又 – yòu – again. Alternative mnemonic name: chair
- 夂 – zhǐ – go. Alternative mnemonic name: armchair
I created these alternative names because they provide a more tangible visual representation of what the components look like (to me at least), and because they were easier to fit into mnemonic stories.
OK, so what exactly are radicals anyways? I don’t really know, and haven’t found a good explanation of them. Theoretically, they provide the meaning basis for each character. But, often times the radical is only peripherally related to the character’s overall meaning, if at all. They are useful to know primarily because many of them show up as components in a large number of different characters. There are 214 official radicals. A good list is available at Yellowbridge. This list is helpful because it includes the Unicode representation of each radical and its common variants. This makes it ideal for incorporation into electronic documents, for the purpose of isolating and manipulating individual components.
Overall Method: Bottom-up versus Top-down
Most people use mnemonics in some manner, but there are many different ways they can be incorporated into a broader strategy for learning and remembering characters.
A somewhat famous language linguist named James Heisig promotes a purely bottom-up approach that focuses on building upward from components. It also focuses primarily on character design and meaning and leaves pronunciation and contextual usage for the student to pursue on their own. Heisig first developed this strategy when studying Japanese many years ago and recently collaborated with Timothy Richardson to apply it to Chinese. An extended excerpt from their book, Remembering Simplified Hanzi, can be found near the bottom of the page here in pdf format. It’s worth taking a look at to see if this method might work for you.
A top-down approach, on the other hand, focuses on studying characters simply as another element of learning new words and phrases.
Both approaches have pluses and minuses. I find Heisig’s approach to be too abstract and detached for my liking. I’ve determined that I need to learn characters within a broader context to stay interested and focused, so I embarked upon the top-down approach. The downside of the top-down approach is that it takes awhile to figure out the best way to break characters into components and how to build mnemonics from those components. Heisig has already tackled much of this heavy lifting for you with his approach.
Through trial and error, I’ve ended up using a hybrid of both the top-down and the bottom-up strategies. I find that it is best to build-up clumps of super-components so that any character can be represented using no more than just a few components or super-components. In most cases, super-components are characters in and of themselves, but characters which have not yet shown up in any of my studies to-date. Which super-components are worth creating and remembering depends on how frequently they show up in different characters you come across. An example of a common super-component is:
- 合 – hé – combine
Originally, I mnemonically referred to this combination by the names for each of the three radicals that form it:
- 人 - man
- 一 - one
- 口 - mouth
Man, one, mouth. After I started running into this combination of components in a variety of different characters, I made an effort to memorize the meaning of the aggregate super-component (combine), and now I use that to build mnemonics for the characters that incorporate it.
I find YellowBridge’s etymological dictionary to be an indispensable tool for breaking characters down into their components and super-components. A Unicode representation of most components is available within the breakdown they provide. This makes it easy to identify and then electronically copy and paste components into a document or spreadsheet for the purpose of building a vocabulary list that includes components and mnemonics in addition to the character itself. MDBG also recently added a somewhat similar capability to their site.
Other Items
Stroke Order. Is it important to learn the correct stroke order? I’ve found that it is helpful, because it is easier to remember how to draw a character or component if you always do it in the same way. And conforming with the standard method gives you a reference source to go back to for this. Using proper stroke order also improves the ability of handwriting recognition software, such as Plecodict, to recognize what you write.
Reading versus Writing. Since the typing of characters is accomplished using pinyin, is it necessary to be able to write characters, or is visual recognition enough? In most cases recognition is enough, and most people are able to recall many more characters than they are able to write correctly, especially when seeing them in the context of written text. A key question is: does gaining the ability to write characters help with long-term visual recall? I don’t know the answer to this, but it seems like it should. When using flashcards, I drill myself as much or more on writing the characters as on recognizing them.
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