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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."
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.
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Anki is based on an algorithm that reminds you of material just before you will have forgotten it, called the Forgetting Curve. The more times you are reminded, the stronger the pathways in the brain become and the easier it is to recall later. This algorithm was pioneered by a Polish man and implemented in a system called SuperMemo. You can read more about the inventor and his system in this great Wired article: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak
Anki used version 2 of the SuperMemo algorithm. The inventor writes his own software with Windows (called SuperMemo) and I believe he is on version 13 of the algorithm. Unfortunately, I can't much recommend SuperMemo software as it's very difficult to use, but Anki takes the basics and makes it usable.
Entertainingly, I used to date a Chinese girl. We spoke German to each other in England (as well as English) because it was a common language that most other people around us didn't understand.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
You've got the same amount of total information to memorize no matter what when it comes to learning a new language.
I don't agree with this.You could learn Mandarin entirely with pinyin--grammar and vocabulary. Pinyin is the most common method of transliteration for Chinese, and consists of a good chunk of the alphabet with some additional markers for tones (similar to accent markers in French). But you could learn it in a couple of days to a week, even if you didn't know the alphabet.
However, if you learn Mandarin using the Chinese script, you have to learn thousands of characters on top of that. Not only do you have to learn the characters, but you have to learn the stroke order and the stroke count (which is used to look up characters in a dictionary). This is substantially more information.
The precise problem with how East-Asian languages are taught is rote memorization. They present you with a character and simply say "this means language", and it's pronounced "go".
Likewise, Japanese tends to teach by patterns. Example: "*owner* wa *object* ga arimasu" means "owner has an/the object". Then later, they say "in order to say that someone has done something, use the pattern: *doer* wa *action in informal case* no ga arimasu."
The problem with this, is that people don't realize that the "no" particle above is being used to turn a sentence into a noun phrase, and you're simply saying literally, "the person has that action", the same as if you were saying that they have an object.
We present these languages, and scripts as if the only way to learn them is through rote memorization...
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