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Having just finished a year living and working in China where I picked up a fair amount of Mandarin, I've decided to try and do the hard part and learn to read the simplified characters.
At least at first, it looks like I'll be doing it alone (i.e, no university). Can anyone recommend a book or program to work from? Ideally I want something I can work on for 1-2 hours a day for the next 3-6 months.
I already have Rosetta Stone, but would like something more systematic or just generally better put together. I've tried looking at the Chinese HSK books, but they're just horribly dry and seem to rely on rote memorization which I'd like to avoid. I've already got burned buying recommended language learning stuff on Amazon, and Google searches aren't helping either.
Any other advice would also be fantastic. Some people have said that focusing on the radicals is the easiest way - is there any truth in that?
Cheers
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Reading the Chinese characters is probably one of the hardest languages to read, since you cannot just look at the word and "spell" it out. Radicals do help in a way because they do familiarize you with the characters.
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Baa?21244 Posts
I don't understand how you can avoid rote memorization if you want to learn Chinese.
Yes, focusing on radicals can help, but in the end, after you learn the basic radicals, what you combine it with still relies on rote memorization. There is no (well, minimal, which relies on knowledge of other characters) relationship between how you write it and how you pronounce it, so you kind of just...have you know it.
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Radicals don't help at all in terms of pronouncing the word. Sometimes parts of a word look like or are the same as another word so you can sorta guess what it means and how it's pronounced based on that, but there's still the initial memorizing that you have to do. Sooo yep good ol' memorizing
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Hyrule19202 Posts
Rosetta Stone is terrible. Flat out.
Also keep in mind I'm talking about Japanese kanji, so it's not going to be exactly the same, but here we go...
Focusing on the radicals can be tricky. For one, they aren't always radicals....sometimes they are just phonetic. They are how words are listed "alphabetically", ie in a dictionary. Knowing radicals will make using a dictionary a lot easier.
I learned a good deal of my kanji by knowing the simple characters. Sometimes they don't always make sense. For instance, 男 is made from 田 field (radical) and 力 power, ie man has power to turn the field into agriculture. Seems sort of random, but there you go.
左 and 右, both have 又 as a radical (it means AND typically). 右 is basically part of and and the generic symbol for item, rather than 口 which means opening. Together it's the arm that controls items, or right. 左 is more esoteric and is and with 工 (work), and is the arm that works with the right, left.
Other things are just ones you look at and can guess (take 中, 上, 下 for instance).
So there's not really a great way to learn them. I suggest just getting flash cards for all the rank 1 characters and drilling.
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rote memorisation is what makes you learn languages. there no way around it.
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Hmm. When I learned Chinese characters in elementary school, I just wrote them over.. and over... and over... and over...
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you want to learn to read chinese but want to avoid rote memorization? doesn't compute
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Rote memorization, as everyone has said. Technically, all Chinese characters are ideograms, abstracted from pictures. If you look at the shape of every character carefully, you can often see the resemblance between t he word and the object it represents.
Other than that, there is no way around the fact that mastering the Chinese script has traditionally qualified the common man to be a member of the Chinese literati elite. To master this script of thousands of characters, a man would work studiously for years: copying, repeating, and eventually memorizing the classics. The downside of so visceral a training? The Chinese as a race are very adept at copying and repetition, less successful in the creative pursuits.
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On March 31 2011 05:00 MoltkeWarding wrote:
The Chinese as a race are very adept at copying and repetition, less successful in the creative pursuits..
Haha! Grinned when I saw this. 
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Ah, looks like rote memorization then  Thanks for the comments.
With regard to the speaking, I've really enjoyed using Pimsleur - I found the spaced repetition and constant pressure to think on your feet really suited me and kept things interesting. But I guess by the comments that there isn't any revolutionary way to learn the characters except by grinding through them.
With that in mind, I guess my question still kind of stands - can you recommend me a good book or program work with?
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While you're memorizing the Chinese characters, pick up your local Chinese newspaper and read. Have a Chinese dictionary handy for those trouble characters and brute force your way to fluency.
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Germany2896 Posts
Some sort of spaced repetition software. Having the characters in a good order so you can link some new knowledge with what you already know will probably help too.
Mnemosyne and Anki are popular choices for SRT programs. No idea if there are any good Chinese datasets for them.
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Just curious, what were you doing in China?
I don't have much to add in terms of learning Chinese. I never got around to learning the write; I can only read and type using pinyin.
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I agree with MasterOfChaos.
Also, yes, know your radicals. Know that they exist and which ones are out there, but don't bother to think about how each picture means something.
I'm learning Japanese and I sure as hell don't really know what 襲 is supposed to look like, but I can identify all the radicals in it and look it up in a dictionary if I need to. Learn pronunciation in conjunction with full words and you're good to go.
FYI language is relatively dry no matter what textbook you use, until you get to a level where you can read something "interesting" then you usually have to do a lot of rote patterns over and over until you get to that level. But as you progress, try and find something interesting in that language and go for it.
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On March 31 2011 07:30 The_LiNk wrote:
Just curious, what were you doing in China?
I don't have much to add in terms of learning Chinese. I never got around to learning the write; I can only read and type using pinyin.
Like a lot of westerners, I was teaching English. There's a huge demand for it, so it's easy to get reasonably paid work. It was pretty cool (though surprisingly hard), but when I go back I'd like to either go as a student or try a different job. So I have some time in sunny England first where I want to try and get my reading up to scratch.
Thanks for the comments everyone
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Germany2896 Posts
A friend of me who learns Japanese loves Remembering the Kanji I. It uses mnemonic techniques to help you remember the symbols better instead of requiring you to remember abstract line patterns. It divides the characters into radicals and additional simpler characters so you just need to remember of which simpler characters a symbol consists.
But it's for Japanese Characters. I have no idea how similar Japanese and Chinese Characters are, or if there is a similar book for Chinese. But I'd look for something like that.
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Yeah... no. Chinese is just brute memorization. :/ I remember writing characters like over and over along with their pinyin to memorize them. >_< It's painful, but it's the only way to learn it. :/
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On April 03 2011 16:35 MasterOfChaos wrote:A friend of me who learns Japanese loves Remembering the Kanji I. It uses mnemonic techniques to help you remember the symbols better instead of requiring you to remember abstract line patterns. It divides the characters into radicals and additional simpler characters so you just need to remember of which simpler characters a symbol consists. But it's for Japanese Characters. I have no idea how similar Japanese and Chinese Characters are, or if there is a similar book for Chinese. But I'd look for something like that.
There is Remembering the Hanzi, in Traditional or Simplified.
I've done Remembering the Kanji in SRS but I'm not sure if I'd really recommend it to anyone.
As for Chinese, I'm not sure, but don't most characters only have one pronunciation? Seems like it would be more beneficial to learn that with the radicals. With Kanji, there are multiple pronunciations so learning radicals and characters without learning the readings makes sense, but I'm not sure if it's the same in written Chinese.
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EPT
