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Memorizing Language / Spelling Techniques?
NotesSensei writes "My kids are learning Chinese in school. While the grammar is drop-dead simple, writing is a challenge since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters. I would like to know any good techniques (using technology or not) to help memorize large amounts of information, especially Chinese characters. Most of the stuff I Googled only helps on learning speaking."
Flashcards are great for learning Chinese or Japanese characters. There are also many characters, or parts thereof, that have a mnemonic relationship to the idea that they are used to impart. I can't think of any decent books offhand, but they're out there.
Still, flashcards are awesome in this regard.
I'm no expert on this, but I don't see a relation between sound and shape of our letters either. So the answer is to study as hard as you can and also: repetition!
I'm learning Chinese right now too and I use http://www.nciku.com and put in all my vocabulary from each lesson and just continuously test myself every day on the vocab I'm learning and have learned to always keep it fresh in my mind. I think you're really at a loss here to do anything other than just practice, practice, practice as, like you said, there's no correlation between characters and sounds.
Date a native speaker.
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There are ideographic relationships between concepts and what's in the characters. Each of the elements in complex characters bears some of the meaning of the word. Dictionaries for Chinese and Japanese Kanji are in fact organized in this manner (by character radical). I can't recommend a particular manner of memorizing them (i failed abysmally at the task as a child, and am functionally illiterate as a result), however the relationships are there if you want to look for them.
There are lives at stake here!
Wouldn't this be something you could get best from their teachers? Not that there's anything wrong with asking Google or Slashdot, but the first place I would go is to their teachers. One would think - or at least hope - that they would have additional tools they could give you to help your kids study.
Any anecdotes out there regarding the helpfulness (or lack thereof) in changing your computer's default language?
I taught English to kids in Africa, and found very few natural connections between English sounds and letters. One of the few techniques that worked decently was to pick some words that could be formed into the letter. For example, the letter "k" can be drawn as a key. It's not great, but it makes a connection that otherwise wouldn't exist. If your kids are picking up words well enough, this might be useful. Good luck.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Flashcards. I would have never gotten through grade school math without them. I have terrible ( self-diagnosed ) ADD, procrastination, and aversion to doing anything difficult and repetitive. Math was beyond me. I would have flunked out of grade school if my mom hadn't sat me down with the flash cards every night.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
My wife and I have had success with making our own flashcards, each with a different character or compound word.
-- Conserve binary trees; recycle your email. --
As others have said, there's no way around the need for repetition and a lot of practice.
Also, diligence is extremely important. If you're not using them, then you forget the characters very quickly. If you're not careful you might actually find that you're forgetting characters as quickly as you're learning new ones.
When learning kanji, I found that mnemonics were far and away the easiest way to remember all of those otherwise arbitrary Chinese characters. If you make flash cards similar to what you find at http://kanjidamage.com/howto and go through them every day, you'll plow through them at a steady pace. The mnemonic in that example incorporates the English meaning, pronunciation, and component radicals all in one sentence. If you can remember that sentence and recognize at least one of those components, it becomes easy to figure out the rest.
I've developed my own flash card software, I've used it for Japanese characters so I suspect it will work fine for Chinese as well. You can get it at http://www.helixsoft.nl/project_page.php?file_name=higgins.proj, some language files are included
there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters.
This is wrong. Many, if not most, Chinese characters give an indication to both meaning and pronunciation. For instance the Mandarin word for "same" is pronounced "tong". The Mandarin word for copper is also "tong", and the ideogram for copper contains two radicals: the "metal" radical, which indicates meaning, and the "same" radical, which indicates pronunciation.
Once you learn the basic radicals, learning Chinese characters is not that hard. I can read Chinese much better than I can speak it.
Flash cards work well. Some computer programs work well too. "Rosetta Stone" works really well, but it is expensive.
There is really no relationship between latin characters and sound either, at least until you've learned them. Korean Hangul is the only character set that I know of in which a conscious effort was made to have the parts of the glyphs relate to the structure of the mouth when they are pronounced.
That being said, it is not entirely true that there is no relationship between sound and character in Chinese. Once you have learned the hundred or so base characters, these are re-used over and over as 'radicals' (parts) in the more complex characters. The main radical often gives a hint to the meaning of the character (for example, 'water' may mean that you are talking about some liquid or water-related thing) and other parts of the character often give a hint to how the characters should be pronounced.
In my experience, this is true for both Chinese and Japanese, but in very different ways. (In fact, the differences in the languages that originally shared a common writing system explains a lot of the divergence in their use of the characters.) Simplified Chinese (used for mainland Mandarin) has changed the shape of many characters without maintaining the hints that were previously embedded within the word.
My suggestion would be to learn the simple first-and-second-year hanzi for whichever dialect your children are learning... probably no more than a hundred characters or so. You can probably do so much faster than they can. But at some point the pace of their classes will increase dramatically. You may be able to keep up as they learn additional characters, but ultimately the only way to learn them is to use them: practice practice practice. It takes time.
I had to learn Kanji (albeit much fewer than you'll have to for Chinese) when I took Japanese in college, and the easiest way I found to learn the characters is to memorize what the simplest characters look like first. That way, the more complicated ones are just combinations of things you already recognize. Plus, their meanings are usually related in some way. Beyond that, a program named Anki helped me a great deal with learning the Kanji since I didn't have to spend a ton of time for characters that were easy to learn.
I started using the express version for free. Then went ahead and bought the deluxe version which included 150 lists. The vocabulary words in it already have sounds attached. It's some pretty slick software and they went out of their way to make it user friendly for managing/editing cards and lists of cards. For instance, I can make a list then do all the sounds at once if I want. Press record, speak my word/phrase, press record again to stop, check it with playback, press next for the next card in the list.
It has a variety of modes, from simply viewing the cards to self-checking recognition to actually typing the answer. I'm currently doing Japanese with these cards and I was very impressed with how well it handles the input methods. I can type in English one second and when it asks for a response in Japanese it switches to a Japanese input method automatically.
It also has a couple activities that you might find useful. I like the multiple choice activity.
t
while (MemorizedCharacterCount TOTAL_COLLAPSE && OfficialChineseWritingSystem != PINYIN) { cram(); cram(); cram(); /* ThinkAboutReturnOnInvestint(); */ cram(); }
forget (EVERYTHING);
Seriously, China will not own the 21st century, and they'll be even weaker in the 22nd. Demographics is everything. Sure, they're a big country (presuming they don't collapse like the Soviet Union did), but their per-capita GDP will be lagging, and China will grow old before it grows rich. And all Chinese people who are worth talking to are learning English. What matters is the ideas you can express, not how many languages you can express them in, and English will remain the most prestigious cultural, technological, and scientific language for the foreseeable future. And, phonetic insanity aside, English does deserve to be the global language by being the language of the culture responsible for modern science, the industrial revolution, and relative economic and personal freedom. The only reason China is doing so well economically is because they've abandoned Chinese ideas and made use of the ideas that were imported through places like Hong Kong (still the freest economy in the world, but thanks exclusively to its English influence). Of the top 5 Russian writers of the 20th century (and, yes, I'm counting Ayn Rand) 3 wrote in English, 1 fled to (eventually) Vermont! By the end of this century 70% of the world's 800 million remaining Chinese and 90% of the world's 4,500 million South Asians will speak decent English!
The only language that can supersede English is something like Lojban, and studying that would actually be good for children's mental development. The Chinese language is like an explosion at the irrationality factory that's been burning for 5000 years!
James W. Heisig, a researcher at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya, Japan, has released an excellent set of books for memorizing Japanese Kanji, traditional Chinese Hanzi, and simplified Chinese Hanzi:
Remembering the Kanji:
http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Vol-Complete-Characters/dp/0824831659/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269118367&sr=8-1
Remembering the Traditional Hanzi:
http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Traditional-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833244/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_5
Remembering the Simplified Hanzi:
http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833236/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b
While this technique focuses on memorizing the meaning of the characters (and how to write them yourself) and not so much on the readings of them, I've found it an absolutely invaluable technique for doing the former. I have an abysmal memory to the point that it's shocking, and yet using his techniques, I was able to easily memorize the meaning of about 400 characters and how to write them in a couple of weeks with only a couple of hours of dedication a day, which I was very impressed with. His technique is based on building up from simple radicals and employing visual memory to make everything stick in place, which basically means concocting an elaborate and often ridiculous story for each character to tie the correct radicals into their correct places. The story is usually so silly that it cannot be forgotten, which is, IMO, in where the trick lies. As your skill in recall develops, you can let go of the stories and move to natural recall.
Also, the use of timed memorization software is essential when we're talking about this amount of information. Here are two great free software packages for this that were largely based specifically at learning Japanese (and thus are quite suitable for other languages, especially Chinese):
Anki:
http://ichi2.net/anki
Mnemosyne:
http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/
(Personally, I prefer Mnemosyne a bit more, even though Anki has many more features, but this is because I'm making a set of cards to memorize all of Heisig's Kanji, traditional Hanzi, and simplified Hanzi, and I'm using HTML tables to store all the information. Mnemosyne preserves my HTML exactly, whereas Anki futzes with it and ruins the formatting.)
For Japanese smart.fm's "Japanese Core 2000" series really helped me. http://smart.fm/goals/19053
They seem to have some lessons for Chinese characters too, so it's worth having a look.
> My kids are learning Chinese in school.
Quite the forward thinker, huh?
> While the grammar is drop-dead simple, writing is a challenge since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters.
You're doing it wrong, as far as I understand. Sound is very much important for anglophones; not so in other languages. Even in my own related Portuguese, the written form is fundamental to recognize etimology. I've found there's another mindset when dealing with some oriental languages. This is a problem in itself, because a few people seems to have a hard time at talking... from the usage of the word "dumb", it seems not being able to talk is not highly regarded among you.
Such is the importance of sound to you... Hence confusions about "their" and "there", "you're" and "your", "its" and "it's" etc.
Other cultures view refraining from speaking in a better light. "Uneventful is noble", a Japanese saying... or so I've read.
> I would like to know if there good techniques (using technology or not) to help memorize large amount of information, especially Chinese characters.
From what I've been shown regarding Kanji and Chinese ideograms, you can divide an ideogram in subparts, each with its meaning and then recall what their reunion would mean.
I can even give a simple example. Mind you, I can't speak neither Japanese nor Chinese. (Li, if you ever reads this, thanks... I hope you're well)
Up:
Down:
Stop: (i.e., cannot go up nor down)
> Most of the stuff I googled only helps on learning speaking.
I'd suggest it's a good starting point, as spoken Chinese may be orders of magnitude easier than written... After you get the basics of speaking and hearing, maybe writing could be easier... after all, this is how children start.
make your own flashcards and you learn to write the character at the same time that you are learning to read it and say it. Use them often and practice memorization. I studied Japanese for years and that helped me a lot. The characters are complete concepts that are added together to modify each other and the whole thing is visual, not phonetic. Even though Japanese has hiragana and katakana they are not an alphabet, they are patch sounds to blend characters or to be used as furigana to show how to read difficult readings of characters.
Chinese of course has no need for hiragana and katakana and the modern mainland chinese has simplified characters that are easier to draw.
I started studying Chinese in September too and I'm trying a lot of techniques to memorize it quickly and efficiently.
As others have already mentioned, Anki (http://ichi2.net/anki/) is the way to go for memorizing vocabulary, as it uses a psychological algorithm that helps you repeating things as often as you need to. If you then install the pinyin toolkit plugin for learning chinese it's the best thing to learn chinese vocabulary as it imports all your translations, pinyin and even sounds automatically when you just enter the Hanzi.
This pinyin toolkit also uses a nice colour system for the tones. Basically, every character is displayed in a color depending on its tone: red = first tone orange = second tone green = third tone blue = fourth tone black = no tone
You can go even further and WRITE the characters in those colors when practicing. The tones of each character will stay in your memory WAY better!
Another tip when trying to memorize chinese characters: try to grasp the meaning of their components and learning to read and write them will be way more easy. You can use sites like nciku.com or archchinese.com where characters are split up in their components. However, you won't find everything there. There's also an extremely good book called "Learning Chinese Characters" (http://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-Chinese-Characters-Revolutionary/dp/080483816X/) - it teaches you the 800 most common chinese characters by telling you everything about their components and even giving you stories to remember the components of each character. It's by far the best book I've found for learning how to write chinese.
Hi, i'm 18, and I can speak and write in 5 languages.
I tried to memorize 5-8 words every day, make sentences using those words, etc. I imagine the most difficult part is learning 5000+ symbols, well, when I learned the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets I memorized each letter by writing it and, at the same time, pronouncing it. It doesn't seem serious, but it helps a lot.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
The low-tech kind. When learning Russian I was able to memorize a new wordlist (40-50 words) in 10-20 minutes after having written them all out on flash cards. The writing itself was a major part of the learning process. As for retention once learned, a lot of practice is really the only way. Reading out loud is actually fairly helpful, and conversation is the very best.
"I am Dr. Freud, but you may call me.siggy."
This MMO was the subject of a previous /. story, and since others have commented on other useful techniques, I'll leave you with this:
Zon (http://www.massively.com/2008/06/04/zon-the-mmo-that-teaches-you-to-speak-chinese/)
I've also seen it said (in a comment on here perhaps?) that it is preferable not to use pinyin romanisation as that doesn't help as much with making the correct sounds. Whatever it was pointed at GR as an alternative. Don't take that as gospel though as I may have no idea what I'm talking about!
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
Write the characters as you review. The motion builds muscle memory so you don't have to think
I use flash cards with definition and/or pronunciation on one side and the character on the other. I write the character on a practice sheet (basically, a page of squares large enough to fit one character) and if I miswrite even one stroke, I count it as incorrect and practice it correctively several times before returning the card to the stack.
Others have said flash cards, in particular Anki, which I use. It's good for maintaining your vocabulary.
Also, zhongwen.com lists characters broken down by constituent parts (not merely radicals). If you need more, Wenlin (www.wenlin.com) is an ugly kludge of a program, but the content is well worth the investment.
I've been picking up some Japanese recently, via podcasts, torrented mp3s and the like but learning Kanji above Grade 1 isn't going too well. This is largely because I never get to use it in real life. My suggestion to pick up Kanki/Chinese Characters is to associate the symbol with the actual object. For instance, to learn the Kanji for "shoe" write the Kanji on a sticker and put it in your shoe, or all your shoes. That way, every time you put your shoe on, you will be reminded of the Kanji. Do this for everything around the house and pretty soon you will build up a healthy knowledge of Kanji for everyday objects. Once you can write the Kanji from memory, you can remove it from it's associated object.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
The complicated-looking characters are actually built out of smaller, standardized parts. If your kids want to be able to look up characters in a dictionary, they're going to have to learn to recognize the more common Kangxi radicals anyway. The 7 most common radicals are used in about 10,000 characters. Most characters are formed by combining a semantic part with a phonetic part. Once you learn a bunch of these, it makes it much easier to remember words made out of them. Lots of words are actually compounds of characters, e.g., "computer" is "electric brain." Once you know "electric" and "brain," it's not particularly hard to remember the two-character compound.
It sounds like in the short term your kids are having an easier time with the spoken language than with the writing system. My experience in terms of long-term recall is exactly the opposite. I took a Chinese class 13 years ago, and have forgotten the vast majority of what I learned. Of the part I do remember, the easiest to remember is characters. The part I really can't remember at all anymore is what tones the words are. E.g., I can remember that "red" is "hua," but I can't remember which tone that "hua" is. Because of that, I have no chance at all of being able to speak and be understood.
Find free books.
Import Chinese comic books.
The language is simplified. They're designed for kids and they're designed to entertain, though you'll be missing many of the cultural references.
There is absolutely no point trying to memorize something if you don't use it. It's like trying to hold water in your hands, it'll dribble away in weeks if not months.
Trying to learn any language without being immersed in the culture is extremely difficult. I reckon current language teaching methods are bizarre; defining grammar, memorizing words. No native speaker learns language that way. Learn by example and your brain will build the grammar and vocabulary as it goes. TV/Radio, newspapers, web sites all help and can be downloaded usually. Better, move to China.
Deleted
Disclaimer, I am not a teacher, I once explained this to a co-worker.
Instead of 26 alphabets, you have several hundreds of basic characters that represent BOTH meaning and sound. They are simple and often pictorial, but you do have to memorize their sounds (in Mandarin or Cantonese or other dialects :-).
Once you pass that, more complicated characters can be composed. Often one part gives the basic sound, while the other half extends the meaning. Together they form a new character of which the sound and meaning that you can guess or infer.
Figuring out the "magic" of how these compositions work can be entertaining and often leads to "ah-huh!" moments. Try to make it fun for your kid (and you), in a detective story/game sort of way. You'll often guess the sound wrong or fail to infer a new meaning, but your kid (who likely outplays you in Mr. Potato Head :-) has far better imagination and would be more often right than you do. So play it like a puzzle, only it is also good practice for you both.
Good luck,
one of the key reasons why the chinese don't need a large intelligence agency is because their entire population is actually their intelligence agency, having been trained from a very young age to memorise vast amounts of information - for example, the 10,000 or so chinese characters.
tony buzan's memetic learning techniques were the first popularly re-published discovery of the greek "mnemonic" memorisation techniques, and he adapted them to get you to focus on the use of the five senses and "familiar" or powerful emotive things, such as "home" or "naked person" or "funny picture" as "hooks" on which to hang the sequence to memorise.
the use of such "hooks" was well-known in medieval times. if you look closely at the top and bottom of the bayeux tapestry, there's a continuous but very small row of naked people in various sexual poses and performing various acts. the idea is that if you want to memorise the battle of hastings, and what happened, you get yourself all worked up "wha-heey!!" and _then_ you look at the pictures of the battle, and the pictures sink in.
daniel tennet, aka "brainman" has also developed a similar sort of technique, focussing specifically on helping people to memorise languages. daniel is approaching this from a different angle from tony buzan, however: optimising the actual language learning process.
tony's technique of "hooking" first gets you to associate numbers with familiar or exciting things. for example, the number 1 could be "red post box". the number 2 looks like a swan. 4 a sail-boat etc. etc. but you can equally as well use what works best for you (kinesthetics) - smells, movements, touch etc. it's _entirely_ up to you to use the right "hooks" which are appropriate for _you_.
so, you now have your "hooks". to memorise things by numbers, let's say the number sequence 412, you imagine a sail-boat on a lake, and it goes past a red postbox, and there's a huuuge white swan sitting on top of it. voila, you have just memorised the sequence 412. this technique of picture/thought association gives you the ability to memorise absolutely huge sequences which you otherwise thought you were incapable of.
so, if you were to use tony's technique, you would look at the character in one of two ways:
1) see what the picture reminds you of (for example, tree is blindingly obvious: it looks like a tree) and then "hook" that in, in some imaginative way, with the actual object (as other people have suggested here)
2) decompile the character by brush-strokes, both the sequence of the strokes (which is critically important for chinese calligraphy) and the direction, length and position, and assign each stroke's direction and position a numerical (or other sequence). you then cross-reference that numerical sequence against the "hooks". you also cross-reference the actual meaning at the beginning of the sequence, again in some imaginative way.
by recalling the pictures / hooks, one after the other, you can turn them back into numbers. you then turn the numbers back into brush strokes: voila, you have your chinese character.
it's a lot of initial work, setting up the "hooks" that are appropriate and creating the mnemonic interpretation, but if you're serious, you'll do it.
all that having been said: it would be much much easier to do sanskrit. if you look closely at the written form of sanskrit, you'll notice that the actual written language - the brush strokes - are a _phonetic key_ to the pronounciation! a vertical line means "plosive" (as in - you're going to close your mouth in some fashion). a horizontal line means "make your voice-box resonate". a slash on top going top-left to bottom-right means "close mouth" and a slash on top going bottom-left to top-right means "open mouth", thus you get "taaah" and "aaahht" respectively when combined with the horizontal and vertical lines. various curly-bits mean "do different things with tongue" and thus you get "kuhh", "puhh", "tuhh", "buhh" or "aabh", "aaakh", "aahhp" if the dia
The non-radical part is often pronounced the same in multiple characters it appears, particularly for newer words or characters. This happened in older times, too. But pronunciations diverged with time, particularly after the Mongols mangled the northern dialect. I can often guess the pronunciation of character I havent seen.
Unfortunately, I dont know if there a way to teach this. You just observe the sound patterns as you learn characters.
Someone above recommended Remembering The Kanji (and it's Chinese version, Remembering the Hanzi), so I'm going to leave that alone.
ReadTheKanji.com is a -great- site for learning to read Japanese words. It is the single best thing to help me read Japanese that I've found, and I've spent a lot of time looking. I even thought about writing my own version, but other than some fairly minor features that I'm not ready for yet, I can't improve on it.
I don't think anything like it exists for Chinese, but if it did, that would be my recommendation.
This is more of a long-term thing, though... If you expect them to learn particular characters -right now- instead of learning them more naturally over time, then a flashcard program like Anki is probably the way to go.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Try Tuttle's "Learning Chinese Characters" by Alison and Laurence Matthews. Very good imagination-driven way to memorize the characters. Depending on the age of your children, you might have to moderate between them and the book. Worst case, you tell them the memorizing stories yourself.
Nothing can spare you rote repetition of writing the characters. Methods like the above will improve efficiency a lot, but there is actually a "kinesthetical" or "feeling" dimension to Chinese characters that can only be learned by writing them over and over again. This feeling for the strokes helps in distinguishing the characters and reproducing them from your mind.
Also, have your children teach you. Studies show this improves their learning a lot.
Have your children repeat all the characters they know regularly. In Chinese you learn one new word and forget two old ones. Repetition is the only way out.
Having said all that, a classroom centered curriculum will tend to force students on the new material in order to pass the test. Passing tests has always priority over long term memorization, but once this basic need is met, spend as much time on repetition as possible.
There is also an excellent Nintendo DS game "My Chinese Coach", which covers at least 1000 words. Not good at adapting to different learning curriculums, but very good for repetition and deepening Chinese language skills, both characters and pronounciation.
And not just the radical (dictionary lookup) part. I wish all my teachers had named the parts from the start. But you gradually learn their names. Then you sort of remember character X is made up of the water and water and po-sounding part and so on.
After a while you dont think of parts, but the "gestalt" or entirety. Same thing happens in English reading. You see the whole word, its length, the ascending and descending parts, the first and final letters. Theres a trick text going around where the interior letters in English words are scrambled and its fairly easy to learn because you see the whole word instead of each letter after a few years of reading.
Having studied eight foreign languages (French, Spanish, German, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Japanese, and Finnish) in my life, and after talking this theory over with friends who have attained fluency in some really different languages (e.g. Spanish and Bahasa Melayu), I feel safe in stating this here in pretty strong terms:
The only way to learn a language is to use it.
The only sort of "classroom" language class that works worth a damn is an immersion class, in which during the class period you do not speak any language other than the one you're studying. Even classroom instructions ("Open your book to page 23") are in the language, once you've learned numerals.
The worst language classes I've taken have been ones in which the foreign language being studied is treated as a matter of abstract grammar and vocabulary to be memorized, not used ... and in which the teacher spends most of their time telling anecdotes in English about their experiences in the culture in question. I took two years of Russian in high school and a year of it in college -- and forgot more Russian than I learned in that last year, since the teacher spent the class time telling stories (in English!) about run-ins with the KGB, instead of helping us practice speaking and reading Russian.
As regards Chinese: I've never studied Chinese, but I have studied Japanese including kanji, albeit only to the extent of a couple hundred kanji. The above applies fully to kanji, and I expect it applies to hanzi (Chinese characters) as well -- in order to learn them, you have to use them. Write them. Come up with silly sentences and write those. Don't just use flash cards and memorization; come up with things that you want to say in Chinese (even if just to be silly) and say those things with hanzi.
The other half of the equation, of course, is to get someone who is fluent to respond to your crude childish attempts at speaking and writing. That's the point of a good language class: you get to make the sort of errors that a little kid makes, and they correct you. That method of language acquisition works for little kids, and it works for adults too if they're willing to be childish for a while.
since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters
Chinese characters aren't just pictures. Rather, they consist of about 200 radicals that are combined 2, 3, and 4 at a time. Many characters consist of just two parts: a sound indicator and a meaning indicator. There are plenty of books explaining this and using these relationships to help make Chinese characters easier to learn (look on Amazon).
I tried learning Hindi a few years ago, and apart from several Devanagari letters resembling English letters, such as the letters for ha, ra, and ka sounds, etc, the rest were completely foreign. However learning the alphabet was quite a bit simpler than learning the language, although Chinese characters might be different due to them not representing letters, or so I've heard. Anyways what I did to learn Devanagari was what presumably all school children do, ie fill page after page repeating the various letters-
A,A,A,A,A,A,A,A,A... ...and so forth and so on.
B,B,B,B,B,B,B,B,B,,,
C,C,C,C,C,C,C,C,C...
There is a great children's book, "The Chinese word for Horse and other stories" by John Lewis ( http://www.librarything.com/work/1564984 )which shows the structure of some (very few) Chinese characters. (Charles E. Tuttle co. published a small paperback that illustrated some basic Kanji in the same way, but I can't find my copy and I can't remember the name.) Look for a Chinese calligraphy guide that describes the meaning of the radicals as derived from pictures and you will be well on your way to binding the character with the meaning.
It can take as much as 15 years for something to go from short-term memory to long-term memory. (See "Brain Rules" by John Medina http://brainrules.net/ ) A program that helps bridge the gap between initial learning and structured recall is SuperMemo http://www.supermemo.com/ . Ignore the cruddy website and look at the idea behind it and the history.
Flashcards are good, too.
Major practice for writing Chinese is provided in "copy sheets" which can be found at Chinese shops that sell calligraphy supplies and school supplies. They have blocks with faint outlines of Chinese characters and you practice your calligraphy by tracing the character with your brush tip.
You might find "A practical English-Chinese Pronouncing Dictionary" by Janey Chen http://www.amazon.com/Practical-English-Chinese-Pronouncing-Dictionary-Language/dp/0804818770 . This book give an International Phonetics pronunciation (both Mandarin and Cantonese) next to the Chinese words. This is VERY important: One slight change in sound utterance and you've said something different from what you intended!
When learning Chinese, learn some patterns. I suggest "Chiang's Practical Chinese Language Patterns" http://www.amazon.com/Chiangs-Practical-Language-Patterns-Self-Learners/dp/9579727236 , "Practical Chinese Reader" (and the associated workbooks) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887271871/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=9579727236&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=14FXWRGNRW203JQ3QYZC , and an advanced monograph: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED280308&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED280308 .
Another resource, associating the sound with the character by typing it, can be found here: http://vpc-mandarin.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-and-why-to-write-chinese-by-typing.html
My ex-girlfriend and I used to watch a lot of Chinese movies together with the captioning on. The right channel would be Cantonese and the left channel would be Mandarin and the characters would change color as the actors pronounced them. You can find a switch to change the audio channel in most Chinese video stores. This is a good way to associate the sound visually with the language. Cartoons are great for kids and beginning adults because the language is syntactically correct but not too complicated. (Watch out though!; Jackie Chan has lousy Mandarin pronunciation and Zhang Ziyi has lousy Cantonese pronunciation.)
Side note: Japanese Kanji are derived from Chinese characters, b
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters
so it's sort of like in English then?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Mnemosyne, Anki, and SuperMemo are great learning systems. Although they are frequently used for learning a language, they can be used to memorize almost anything. Mnemosyne is simple, free, and opensource. SuperMemo is complex. I have not used Anki.
Everyone here seems to be missing the point. We have advanced powerful cheap technology that is infinitely better than a human brain at memorizing things like character symbols and vocabulary.
Don't memorize anything. Let the computer do the translating. That's what computers are good for. Humans are not good at this. That is why it is so hard. So do the obvious and let the computer do the translation.
Got a little camera like the one in cell phones? Plug that camera into your hand held PC/internet/MP3player/telephone iTurd whatever. Point the camera at the kanji that you want translated. Press the button on the iTurd. Glance briefly at the little iTurd screen. Trust the iTurd ap program to have done an optical kanji recognition on the characters that it just imaged and is giving you the correct English/Finnish/Thai//Wolof/Whatever translation.
Tech people seem to have this obsession with doing things that prove to themselves and other people that they are 'smart'. They believe that just because they have mastered technology, then they are under some obligation to themselves or their class that they must master all things that are difficult in order to recertify their 'smart person' credential. So they feel the need to memorize 5000 kanji, or play a difficult Bach invention on an aucostic piano, or run a marathon, or to get themselves killed attempting to 'win the hearts and minds' of people who have neither.
Don't waste your time, and abandon your hang-ups about your smartness. Let the $200 computer master 50000 kanji, let your $50 MIDI synth play Bach, let your car take 20 miles in comfort, and let the expendable fools go to the other side of the world and get killed.
Your 'smartness' is certified by your unwillingness to do these things yourself, the hard and dumb way.
I studied Japanese. It was about the time that personal computers were just beginning in 1979. The first time that I saw an optical-character wand read digits (in 1981) I knew that there was NO FUCKING WAY that I was going to spend 10000 hours committing 10000 kanji to memory. That's what computers do. I'm a better person because I didn't do it.
Please spare me the horseshit about how the discipline of memorizing and learning makes a better person and builds character. Look at those assholes who spend their life memorizing the Quran, and then go blow up a bus or day-care center.
Memorization lost its validity the day that computers started selling for $50. And that was a long time ago. So what that I can't pick up a Japanese newspaper and know what it says just by looking at it! I've got a $100 1GigaHertz 400MegaFlop microPC in my hand that does it just as well.
And I spent the 10000 hours smoking weed and fucking beautiful girls instead of memorizing kanji. Life is a series of difficult choices and hard trade-offs.
My girlfriends first comment: Yeah right, that helped...
Almost 5 years together, and she still hardly speaks a word of German because I almost automatically switch over to English when talking to her... ...which may be good for my English, but certainly isn't for her German... :-/
can I say that the best way is to get a well illustrated book with not a lot of words. If you go in trying to memorize how the characters look like, you will not succeed. You should think that there is a Chinese-writing "personality" then think of the actual act of writing as an after thought. No Chinese/Korean/Japanese/etc person complains that there is a lot of strokes. Remember that even personal names (including mine) can have characters going up to 12 or more in stroke count, and children are expected to write them correctly.
Not once above did I mention how the characters sounded...
"While the grammar is drop-dead simple". There is more to speaking the language well than just mastering its "simple" grammar. English suffers in many ways from the same issue. Many non-native speakers, particularly Germans, never learn learn the language properly once they in their on minds think that they have "mastered" the grammar. This is why Germans often come across as sounding like cavemen when speaking English.
I've studied Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, and now Dari. The thing that has helped me the most has been to read children's books. I start out with the ones intended for kindergartners, and work my way up. Once I get halfway decent, I start on newspapers. These days you can find online newpapers in just about any language.
I've also just found the International Children's Digital Library, which has digital children's books for many languages.
do not listen to anyone telling you that flash cards work. or rosetta stone. the likelihood of them working is very small
having been around many other linguists, flash cards are only good for very, very short term memory. rosetta stone is a joke. border line scam really
i'm not saying they never will work ... for some people they have, but, the number of people i know for whom flash cards and rosetta stone have worked is very, very small. about the same as the number of people i know that are referred to as "sponges" because they absorb language very easily
unless you are a sponge, you will have to work hard at it. it's not easy, and good luck finding shortcuts
Even though the characters don't match up to sounds, every character has a certain number "radicals" (or simple characters) that come together to form other characters. So once you know the simple ones, you can derive the meaning of more complex ones.
In Japanese, which uses the same Kanji, it's believe that you'll have 80% literacy if you learn the 500 most commonly used Kanji. After that it's a point of diminishing returns, so in Chinese you may want to do some research and find out which characters are used the most.
This is for japanese characters, learn by playing and gaining EXP points like in a role play game!
slashwhat?
Chinese is an easy language once you get the characters sorted. Check out Skritter.com - been using it for a while now and am making masses of progress with it. Allows you to write words/characters, tells you if they're correct and reminds you if you get them wrong etc. Get a pen tablet too. Helps!
When I was in college a second language was still mandatory to graduate. Basically this meant at the time that you have to pass one full class in a non-English language. Today I don't believe a second language is mandatory any more, and 20 years before I was in school, it was four years of a second language or no diploma, sonny.
Anyway, I took French like I had for four years in High School (we could also take German at our school, it was a bit easier to learn).
My buddy in College took Chinese. I asked him if he'd ever spoken it before ... not a word. Pure Rookie.
He would come to lunch and start doing these chinese characters for his assignment. Pretty much every class you had to write out some phrase in Chinese characters, and hand it in ... this was for class credit.
He had this book; look up something, write a stroke, look up some more, write another stroke, and so on. I asked if it was hard. Nope, but you pretty much have to look all this stuff up every time, he said. Too many to remember, although you eventually figure some of 'em out. Basically, you talked in class and wrote this assignment between classes. He said it was one of the easiest classes he ever took; everyone was getting 100% on the class assignments.
I asked about the prof ... doesn't he want you to do any closed-book exams (without the "little book" handy)? Nope, he said. The prof uses the little book too, all during the class.
Oh, I said.
So, you need to repetitively write the stuff down. Eventually you learn a few of them, but it's not expected that you learn them all. Apparently no-one does.
Characters are a bitch, no way around it. Your kids will have to dedicate a large chunk of their time to learning reading and writing in Chinese. After that it's a continuous chore to retain that knowledge, especially in writing. After several years study, it can seem like you're set to the Sisyphean task of building a mountain out of sand--focus on building up the peak with new knowledge and other memories decay. That said, there are a billion plus living examples it can be done, and there are things that can certainly help. Just don't think it will be easy.
With Chinese it's kind of hard to dive into new reading material. You either know a character already, or have no clue what it means or even how to pronounce it. That, and every character being unique, means reading/writing will be the limiting factor in your kids' language study and the most time-consuming to remedy. Below are some tips to break down the task.
First thing is to learn the radicals. There's a limited number of them, and at least one in every character. Learn how to draw them because they're used over and over again. Learn their meanings too, because a character's meaning is usually at least loosely tied to its radical. Learning to identify the radicals also helps greatly in looking up unfamiliar words, as Chinese dictionaries are traditionally arranged first by radical, then by number of strokes.
When you buy them a dictionary, get a beginner's dictionary so that they can have a larger font, usage examples and Pinyin pronunciation, all of which are sometimes missing in comprehensive dictionaries. A good choice that provides many example sentences and phrases would be The Starter Oxford Chinese Dictionary (sorry, Simplified version only). Get them a second dictionary later on if they can't find every word they need. For several reasons, I like Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary. You can try out the online version of it at Zhongwen.com to see how it's organized. This is also the only dictionary that you can use by looking up any part of a character, not just the radical (which can sometimes be hard to identify).
Many characters are comprised of radical-phonetic pairings, where the non-radical part hints at the sound of the word. They'll notice many more of these related character components at the intermediate level. However, given the ~4,000-year development of the written language, these links can often be tenuous. Thinking up elaborate stories trying to tie all the pieces of the character together can be quite useful. For instance, with the character for wrong () I remember it by thinking, "It would be wrong to bet money that sun sets underground." A little convoluted, but it was enough to jog my memory ever since. Useful as this strategy can be, it's just not always possible and you'll have to learn many words by rote memorization.
For this I recommend writing. A lot! Have your kids say the words aloud and think of the meaning as they write. After enough repetitions, hopefully it will become part of their "motor memory" and once started they will be able to finish a character almost by reflex. They'll need this level of ingrained familiarity if they hope to retain the knowledge for long.
It's essential then to review regularly and for them to brush up on what they forgot. Flashcards can be used as others suggested, but I'd recommend using a "3-sided" flashcard that shows the English translation, the character and the pronunciation all separately. You can do this by writing along the top and bottom of one side of the card and holding them so you don't see both at once. This way they won't depend on the Romanized pinyin to pronounce characters. To optimize learning, reorganize the cards based on how well they're known. This way time won't be wasted needlessly reviewing stuff that's already learned.
To help with this optimization, some people use computer programs to model their memory decay, bringing up the character flashcard only when it's likely to be on the verge of being forg
This can be generalized: Any technique that is usable for memorizing a vocabulary, are also good for memorizing Chinese characters. Since they are more words than letters.
Take the best ones, and you’re good.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Hm. /. ate my last post.
Anyway - check out www.skritter.com - been using it for a while now and am making masses of progress with it. Allows you to write words/characters, tells you if they're correct and reminds you if you get them wrong etc.
Way better than flash cards.
Being a linguist, I have some suggestions, sorry if i come across as condescending, but there are some things to be addressed first. Orthography NEVER, EVER, EVAAAR correlates to genuine sound in natural language because there is no direct analog to represent sound via writing (yes, even the IPA [international phonemic alphabet] fails to do this.) The reason is simple - We use a different part of the brain to process written language (The Visual Word Formation Area being one of them -- Posterior occipito-temporal lobe.) Chinese characters do however have a logic behind them -- Most of the basic (i.e. first few THOUSAND) characters use radicals which imply the semantic relationship and topic of the character. for concrete objects, these often have radicals which were derived from their sources (much like the latin alphabet and runes were once ideographs that closer represented real world items.) Dog (gou3) for example has two main radicals - the left most being "claw" the right being a variation of 'mouth' (probably closer to jaws or maw semantically.) My advice is thus multi fold: 1) Have the students learn the radicals in tandem with the character 2) Also stress the semantic side of the characters - Use antonyms (semantically separate) for adjectives/adverbs/verbs, as well as homonyms and semantically grouped items (i.e. chair, couch, etc. for things you sit on) 3) Learn some chinese with them, and use it! Chinese uses a similar syntax (not identical mind you) to English, so you can learn basic nouns and verbs and use them when communicating with your children -- This will reinforce their aural/oral skills, but also help improve the rate at which the VWFA can process information as the pathways between brocas, weirnicke's, audio processing and VWFA are all intertwined. 4) Have them label EVERYTHING in the house with chinese -- The more they read a character, the easier it'll be... and since the characters are generally composed of one or more radicals, it will help them process more complex characters.
I wonder what is the relationship between what "A" looks like and its sound?
The way to learn Chinese characters is through repetitive writing in addition to learning what each radical means. Each character learned/day needs to be written at least 100 times. There is also a standard way to write most characters, top-down then left-right. Prepare for sore hands and fingers. At least people outside China would probably write the characters in Latin order on a page--left-to-right then top down instead of top down, right-to-left. Writing in Latin order prevents the part of your hand that rests on the paper from getting ink/graphite smeared all over it.
The use of radicals probably don't apply if one were to use it to learn simplified characters.
I've been learning Japanese recently - http://smart.fm/ is great. Based loosely on the Mnemosyne algorithm to prevent you from spending much time repeating that which you know already, it does an excellent job of assisting rote learning thru games. Let's you add your own content too. Keep meaning to start 'goals' for cisco ios commands and gmat.
I'm not affliated honest, but do live in Japan.
There are a lot of different types of scripts, and most don't have a relationship between the shape of a character and its sound:
So out of those seven types, only featural scripts can be said to represent the pronunciation of the sounds--and this isn't as useful as you may think, because unless you know articulatory phonetics, you can't understand how featural scripts represent pronunciations.
Are you adequate?
I'm amazed no one has mentioned SuperMemo. It's based on an actual scientific theory of how to optimize the value of memorization effort. There's a Chinese character library for it already.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
I tried to post something illustrating a trick to learn the Chinese language (I learn the language that way) but when I post Chinese characters (double-byte Unicode) here everything messed up.
Slashdot doesn't support Unicode??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Ok, I know what you meant, but "relation between sound and shape of the characters" suggests to me something along the lines of the following: "see, o and u have this rounded shape, so you should round your lips when you make the corresponding sound; b, d, t, d, and k all have these big straight lines sticking out of them like spears sticking out of dead bodies, which suggest the violence of a plosive consonant."
Immerse yourself in the language. Write it and speak it every day. For some, this means living in the country; for others, date someone whose native language is the one you're trying to learn (and who doesn't have any other language in common with you; for example, my girlfriend speaks English, but my Chinese is much better than her English, so we always speak Chinese to each other, as it feels much more natural).
But yeah, do anything and everything that increases exposure. Flash cards are just one way. Set interfaces in Chinese, watch stuff with Chinese subtitles, etc. After spending a few summers in China, and spending much of my time with Chinese graduate students here (and having a Chinese girlfriend....), I often find myself thinking in Chinese, or mentally translating from Chinese into English, or pirating things with Chinese subtitles because it's faster for me to read Chinese subtitles.
I loved tokenshi's response :-)
My experience is fairly limited, but here are the things that helped me:
Practicing the strokes makes a huge difference in learning speed. My tutor provided me with a workbook that had pictures of the characters displaying the order and direction of the strokes, and I was asked to trace the characters at least 10 times each before copying them down. It seems monotonous at first, but pretty soon I built a frame of reference. The strokes became more familiar (even developing a sort of rhythm), which made the characters less intimidating.
Another thing that has really helped me is studying characters piece by piece. Once you know that the character for "rise"/"stand" combined with "sun"/"day" forms "sound", you can imagine how sound begins each day as the sun rises (birds singing, people waking, etc.) and use that to remember the character. Not all compound characters have such beautifully abstract logic behind their construction (some are a combination of theme and a phonetic, and some are just plain phonetic), but I find that most are adaptable to similar mnemonic devices.
Doesn't help. The kids complaining "Mother always wants us to sit and learn and it is no fun"
Bollocks to you, also.
If you're commuting, or only have a few minutes, that's what a smartphone is for, or the web interface.
Anki is basically designed to be something you spend only 20 minutes or so per day doing. It uses a similar algorithm to SuperMemo, and the original idea behind SuperMemo (and Anki) is to predict when you're about to forget a given card and flash it to you before that happens. The longer you do this with a given card (without forgetting), the longer the interval gets -- thus, a card you know well, it'll only flash every few months (or even years!), giving you more time to focus on the ones you actually need.
Plus it can tie to multimedia -- so, record yourself and compare it to a reference recording to check your pronunciation.
Even without the multimedia, this is something you really can't do with dead trees -- you'd be spending all your time calculating and scheduling cards, and none of your time reviewing.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Of course I talk to the teachers. However teachers are few, often not tech-savvy and might not know all possibilities. Crowd sourcing widens options. Btw. I forwarded the URL to the teacher, so she is following.
There is an online comic called Sinfest that occasionally has "cartoon-to-calligraphy" transformations that are interesting.
If you go to the archive and search for "calligraphy", you can pull up all the relevant strips. They will make more sense if you're a regular reader. Also, I probably wouldn't suggest using these for kids, but if you were creative, you could probably come up with similar types of drawings on your own.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Just tattoo the entire Chinese alphabet all over your arms. Then it's ready-to-use. Hide your lookups of hard-to-reach areas behind a cool Robot Dance.
Table-ized A.I.
People interested can check this project : http://code.google.com/p/laoshi/
It is a Chinese learning software that includes :
- Lessons viewer
- Flash card game
- A dictionary
- Characters viewer
- Tones recognition game
- Database of learned characters
I started the project a month ago and I am looking for interested people to contribute or give me feedback.
The code is in python using gtk for the interface, the dictionary database comes from the cc-cedict project : http://cc-cedict.org/.
The traditional way is to learn the 3 characters classic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Character_Classic
The modern way is to read chinese children books
I'm surprised no one has even mentioned this one.
Amongst the key features:
The basic useful features are free. Didn't see a need to sign up as a paying member, although I might break down and buy a one-time sub just to show my support.
Requires EVIL proprietary binary blob urrh hurrh hurrh Flash urrh binary hurrh hurhh EVIL urrh -- Fuck that, it's a fantastic resource. DO check it out!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I actually started learning the Hanzi using "Learning Chinese Characters" (http://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-Chinese-Characters-Revolutionary/dp/080483816X/) and bought Heisig's book to compare them, but even if they are based on the same principles, the first one is way better.
Matthews & Matthews book not only teaches you the meaning, but also includes mnemonics for the pronounciation and the tone of each character. Maybe it's not that important for Japanese, but Chinese characters give you a lot of clues about their pronounciation using phonetical components, so learning their pronounciation at the same time actually saves you a lot of time. Why memorize "man + lord" = "to live somewhere" if you actually know that "lord" and "live" are both pronounced "zhu" and thus can easily memorize that "live" is something that has to do with "men" and is pronounced like "lord"?
Also, the book comes with drawings to help you remember the basic building blocks AND has awesome crosslinks between the entries everywhere and a very good index that enable you to find what you are looking for so much faster. Of course, it only teaches you the first 800 ones (+ their components) while Heisig already takes on 1500 in his first and 1500 in his second book, but I hope there will be another Matthews & Matthews book for HSK B soon.
Hey everybody,
thank you very much for your contributions. I really appreciate the time you spend to discuss that question.
Some clarification:
So we are beyond the stage of the first 500 chars -- and it is still a chore. Therefor I was asking.
Summing up responses so far (in no particular order):
Again, thx a lot! (and sorry for the caveman English -- don't get it? Read the comments)
Quoted at length from Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. If you like this, go read the whole thing.
FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY AT TH
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
http://www.skritter.com/
Just draw the characters with a mouse and it'll remember your progress, returning to characters in short, medium and long periods that help reinforce long term memory.
check out:
http://www.smart.fm
This gets you a nice web-based flashcard-ish software.
And I can heartily recommend the technique used by James W. Heisig in remembering the kanji.
I've tried both repetitive (many iterations) and the meme way used by Heisig, and those words I learn by meme tends to stay in memory for longer.
Another thing that works for me is to picture the kanji in 3d in my mind and then perform a virtual rotation on any axis (x,y,z). Do this for a minute or two.
Stay away from chinesepod.com. They're a known scam outfit with shady owners.
Have them write the characters. Seriously. That's what worked (and still works) for me. I learned japanese and chinese, well enough to have become a translator.
If you write them following the stroke order, your hand and your brain will remember them.
It also helps to dissect them, as explained in "remembering Kanji" (that book is for japanese, though, so there are slight differences, but is still an interesting reading)
Learn to recognize the radicals, and you will be well off.
When I was learning Japanese we used flashcards that likened the shape of the character with an English phrase. Like "na", it looks like a nun kneeling in front of a cross. Things like that. But having never studied Chinese, I'm not sure if it has the same ability.
Flashcards are probably your answer.
There is only one way to memorize hanzi. Muscle memory! You must memorize the stroke order. You must write the word 30 times with the right order. Flash cards don't work. If you just look at words you will start to confuse similar words. For example and start to look the same. Anouther example is
in the digital age stroke order is important because writting recognition software relies on this stroke order.
The open source Mnemosyne flash card system is excellent:
http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/
It uses a spaced repetition algorithm and has some features such as not introducing more than a few new cards into the pool at a time (so that you are never overwhelmed).
Also - ChinesePod is an excellent source for spoken language lessons... some free.
Living in Sichuan, I have had good luck with the book "Learning Chinese Characters" by Matthews & Matthews, Tuttle press. [http://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-Chinese-Characters-Revolutionary/dp/080483816X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269201386&sr=8-1] It provides graphical illustrations and stories that combine to relate hanzi with meaning and pronounciation. Tuttle also publishes flashcards. See related books at the above site. I only which I had more time to learn. Good luck!
Beware: I believe all are created equal, and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Titled "Chinese Characters: Learn & Remember 2,178 Characters", by Alan Hoenig, and yes, I use memorization software both SuperMemo and Anki, yet I still recommend this wonderful book. It gets you on the right track by offering the characters in the order of increasing graphical complexity, in a way that nearly each following character can be constructed from the preceding characters as its building blocks,... and it does so by providing sufficiently short yet effective mnemonics.
I've found Skritter to be a wonderful service for refreshing my Chinese character knowledge. It has a very slick UI that has you draw the character, so you don't forget the stroke order.
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
There are quite a few more Chinese characters than that. The Kangxi dictionary, published in the early 18th century, lists 47 thousand (albeit many of them are not used commonly any more).
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
That is definitely true for traditional Chinese characters, but it breaks down with the simplified characters. Some simplified characters remove or change radicals, or the whole character changes dramatically, so the phonetic portion may no longer be there or is not apparent.
Ironically, the traditional characters are easier to learn to read and understand (maybe not to write) than the simplified ones.