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3 key principles to memorize efficiently chinese characters



The minimum number of chinese characters that you need to know to be able to start reading a newspaper is 1,500 . How is it possible to memorize so many different characters ? Needless to say that, if you don t have an efficient method and don t use the right tool, you will waste a lot of time and energy for poor results.

To efficiently and quickly memorize chinese characters, three things are important :

  1. learn only the useful characters (that is the 1,500 most used characters),
  2. know the category the character you are learning belongs to,
  3. Learn characters in a pedagogical order.



Key principle 1: Learn only the useful characters


There are roughly 50 000 existing chinese characters in use today. A native chinese speaker only knows 5 000 to 10 000 characters. But you will only need to know 1,500 to start to read a newspaper. So it is important that, at least in the beginning, you learn only these 1,500 most useful characters, and NOT any of the 48 000 other characters. MyChineseFlashCards dictionary contains only these most useful characters. With this tool, you will only spend time learning useful characters




Key principle 2: Understand where the characters come from and how they have been formed

All right, we know the 1,500 characters we have to learn first. But, these 1,500 characters, we still have to learn them, no ? learning 1,500 characters is a real challenge, how are we going to make it ?

Well, the trick is to be organised and logical. If you don t have a logical way of storing things in your garage, it will be extremely difficult to find any object when you need it. But if you store things by category, for examples, you put all the tools in one box, all the light bulb in one drawer, etc, it will be easier to localize things, since you will just have to remember where each categories of things are.

In the same way, if you try to learn each character as a whole through pure memorization, it will be extremely difficult and time-consuming to remember them. But if if you know the important thing about a character (by knowing which category it belongs to, its history, how it has been formed) you will then be able to memorize it much more efficiently. Any chinese character can be classified in one of the following six categories :

Depending on the category a character belongs to, you should apply a different strategy for learning it. Below we will explain the 5 main categories of characters and the corresponding learning strategy.



pictograms

A pictogram or picture is a stylised drawing of the thing it refers to. 207 characters out of the 1,500 most used characters are pictograms. Most of them appeared in the beginning of the chinese writing system. These characters are somewhat similar to the letters of an alphabetic writing system. That's why you will have to learn them as a whole, through pure graphic memorization, exactly like a young child learns how to write the "a" or "b" letters. Hopefully, these characters have generally few strokes and are very easy to remember, since they are idealized pictures of the thing they refer to.







Symbols

Symbols express an abstract idea by means of an arbitrary sign. 16 characters out of the 1,500 most used characters are symbols. Once again, you will have to learn them as a whole.












picto-phonogram

A picto-phonogram is a character composed of two components:





Roughly 600 characters out of the 1,500 most used characters are picto-phonogram characters. The good news is that the meaning or phonetic components that composes any of these characters are generally pictograms or symbols whose number, 220 is limited. By grouping characters that have a different meaning but contains the same phonetic component, (the different meanings being obtained by using a different meaning component in each character), you will memorize them more quickly and easily.




Ideogram

An ideogram is obtained from the combination of two or more meaningful components to create a new character with a new meaning.





Like for the previous category, these characters are composed of previously learnt characters. You will just have to remember their association to memorize them.



phonetic-loans

phonetic-loans, also called Borrowed characters or phonetic-loans refer to characters representing at the same time, two homonyms (words that pronounces the same but with different meaning, like too and two). It has been borrowed to represent the second homonym, the context making the meaning clear. For instance, the words "scorpion" and "10 000" were once , homonyms. Since "scorpion" was represented by 萬, this character was borrowed to designate "10 000". Today, "10 000" is represented by the character 萬.




Like for the preceding category, these characters are composed of already learnt characters. You will just have to remember the history and the category of these characters to memorize them.



Reclarified

Reclarified characters are characters whose meaning has been precised by the addition of a new component. It generally happened bacause the intial character were standing for different words. For instance, the character 萬, which initially meant "scorpion" but also "10 000", was reclarified by the addition of the radical 虫 (bug). Today, the character meaning "scorpion" is 蝎







Key principle 3: Learn characters in a pedagogical order

We have seen that most chinese characters are picto-phonograms, and that these characters are themselves composed of symbols or pictograms. Thus, it makes sense to first learn symbols and pictograms before learning more complexe characters like picto-phonograms, phonetic-loans or reclarified. Since in MyChineseFlashCards, new characters are introduced only in combination with characters already learned, the benefits for the learner are twofold :




The MyChineseFlashCards dictionary


MyChineseFlashCards's goal is to help beginners or mid-level learners in chinese to be able to read a newspaper. Instead of providing a traditional dictionary, we chose to design a dictionary specifically designed to reach that goal. This dictionary has the following features: