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I Hate Hanzi
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choisum -

To add my experiences.

I've been teaching myself to read and can now read some newspaper articles. So far I've relied on
rote memorization of characters and character combinations using flashcards.

It is more difficult now because as pointed out, there are diminishing returns and if you only see
a character a couple of times, it's easy to forget.

A couple of weeks ago I took on a private tutor and after the first lesson he told me to go off
and read on my own as there wasn't much he could teach me. This surprised me, as there are always
new characters and combinations to learn.

He did recommend going "backwards" and learn to write. Initially I opposed the idea as I felt it
was a retrograde step and it would slow down my attempts to learn reading.

Having thought about it and done some research I think he is right. I'm hoping to acquire the
knack that Chinese children acquire through disciplined study.

The outcome (if all goes well) will actually make it easier to learn more characters, making it
faster to push into the 3000-5000 range.

I'll post an update in a few months, if anyone thinks this might be interesting...



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nipponman -

The main thing to realize when learning hanzi is to not lose sight of the goal...the point is to
learn to read, not to evaluate the system. The system won't change so you might as well get used
to it. Practically, read, read, read. After your first 300 hanzi you should begin reading. You
won't recognize everything, but things will start to come together.










rezaf -

汉字帮我记住单词和单词的用法。汉字帮我自信地说话、写东西，不过因为�
��字阅读中文书和报纸太难了。i love hanzi and i think that they are all
beautiful(不过我更喜欢繁体字）,but it is very funny when 连中国人也 can not write a
chinese name without asking about the exact characters.










muppetwonder -

I'm coming into this thread a little late, but I wanted to throw in my $0.02, since I'm not sure
that anyone has brought this up in previous posts.

By way of background, I grew up in Canada, and attended Saturday morning Chinese school for a
number of years, abandoned Chinese learning for many years and am now, in my 30s, starting to pick
it up again.

The description in this thread of how non-native learners of Chinese acquire characters is
actually very different from how I was taught as a child (but alas did not learn well enough or
else my Chinese would be a lot better).

Here's what I learned: You should never memorize characters in isolation.

When we memory-practiced new vocabulary (生字）, we would always practice in two contexts: (1)
the entire word, and not the individual characters, and (2) the passage of text that the word is
used in.

Thus, we would never memory-practice 感情 as the characters 感 and 情 separately, as we would
learn the whole word itself. I suppose that over time, as we encountered words such as 感到，
感概， 感動, we would intuitively have learned the meaning of 感, from the context of the
passage of text we were reading, and at the same time have memorized how to write the character.
The important thing, from a pedagogical perspective, it seemed, was that we learned useful word
units.

I do agree though, that it's easy to forget how to write characters if you do not use it on a
regular basis, but I find that remember or being able to read characters is not that difficult,
again, because I learned in the context of words, rather than individual characters.










yelei_1981 -

I used to hate English When I was in college. But now I like it because I can use it to write and
read. So you always hate thing when it tortures you.










nipponman -

^ well said










Caidanbi -

I don't hate hanzi at all! Quite the opposite, I think they are really beautiful and fun to learn.
And yes, I would prefer to read everything in a beautiful script as opposed to something more
utilitarian - I am an artist, I want everything to be beautiful. But seriously, I don't think
hanzi are difficult or boring to learn. I really enjoy learning them.










shibole -

I only started seriously trying to learn Mandarin about 2 months ago, but I decided that I'd try
to learn everything (writing, reading, speaking, listening) at the same time even if one of those
was a huge bottleneck. (I'm learning on my mostly on my own.)

So far I think I've learned something like 200 characters and I'm only through lesson 3 in
Integrated Chinese. I'm going rather slow and I've slacked off for periods, but at least I can
actually actively recall and write all of the 200+ or so characters that I know

Part of the reason I'm going slow is because I'm still sort of trying to "learn how to learn." I
feel like I'm not good at learning languages in general and so I'm spending a certain amount of
time trying to correct that or otherwise become more efficient. Some things I'm noticing:
* Writing seems to be the major bottleneck. I feel like if I weren't determined to actually
learn to write everything I could learn to read much faster.
* I have trouble just learning words without trying to learn something about the meaning of the
individual characters in the words.
* The more I learn the more characters seem like little "square words" of a sort that are
composed of "roots." Once I know 木　羊　永　and can think of 樣 in terms of those
characters suddenly things don't seem insanely difficult. I still get a little discouraged when
I encounter something that just seems totally unique and one-off, but overall seeing patterns
makes things easier.
* I'm still sort of wondering how much effort it makes sense to put into learning parts of
characters. For example, if I have the new character 衛 does it make sense to spend time
learning 韋 and 行 even if I have no real "context" or use for those individual characters?
* On another note I wonder how useful it is to try to learn additional words just because
they're composed of characters that I already know. For example, I know 天, 安, and 門, so it
seems natural to put 天安門 in my flashcard system to help give those characters more
context. Later perhaps I learn 西 and wanting more context for it I add 西安 to the list.
Those examples are proper nouns though so maybe they're less useful?
* The whole "RTK" thing makes sense but I'm a bit disappointed at how the method doesn't really
follow textbooks and learning characters in context. I wonder how hard it would be to look up
characters in such a book as needed for a class or textbook lesson.
I am finding Anki SRS pretty helpful. I use the built-in Mandarin model that forces you do do
"production" (writing) before recognition. Lately I've been trying to add at least 5 words to it
per day, sticking mostly to the vocab in the textbook, and hope to increase that at some point.

Anyway just some random thoughts. I don't really hate hanzi even though they don't seem like the
most efficient form of writing, especially when it comes to learning efficiency. For Chinese they
are probably pretty appropriate though simply due to the large number of homophones. It's kind of
interesting to be able to write "he" and "she" without being able to specifically say "he" or "she"










yfx416 -

Chinese is very simple.
Now i am studying french. I think it is more difficult than Chinise










forrest19860923 -

amigo ,i complete disagree with you .i am chinese ,so i am using hanzi almost everyday .i think
every language is unique ,every language has stupid part and beautiful part .you feel bad about
hanzi ,i guess that is because you are so good about it .tell you what ,sometimes i feel learning
english is the most diffcult thing in the world and i also have fun in it . friend ,this is
language ,you cannot learn it in one day .be patience ,and if that is possible ,come to china .you
can find a job here .you can feel the amazing chinese culture .
good luck for you hanzi .try harder .[
my email :forrest19860923@tom.com












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