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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 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.
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.
I think what he means is that the same characters can be used for unrelated sounds in Chinese. At least in English, you can get close by writing phonetically, but in Chinese there's no equivalent. At least as far as I'm aware.
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. --
IIRC, Chinese characters represent individual syllables. English letters are strung together to make syllables. I think he's lamenting that syllables in English that sound similar will generally look similar, but there is no such resemblance in Chinese.
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.
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!
We've basically got 26 characters to worry about (plus numbers, punctuation marks and various symbols). To be literate in Chinese, you have to know 3-4 thousand characters--and there are tens of thousands of characters in all. There are also two different sets of characters, simplified and traditional. So while neither have any relationship to sound, memorizing any alphabet is a hell of a lot easier.
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.
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.
You've got the same amount of total information to memorize no matter what when it comes to learning a new language. Any type of writing system has its advantages and disadvantages, though. When you're using an alphabet, it's true that once you know the letters you will be able to pronounce any word that you come across, but you probably won't have any idea what it means. When you're using ideographs, such as in Chinese, you'll probably have a pretty good idea what a new character means, but not how to pronounce it. I'd say that the latter is far more useful in everyday practice, personally. It's true that you can achieve a similar effect once you start to learn the etymology behind an alphabetic language (such as guessing meanings through Latin or Germanic roots in English), but if you've progressed that far it doesn't really matter what kind of characters are being used, anymore.
That is true in Japanese, but much less common in Chinese. Chinese generally has a single one-syllable pronunciation for each glyph, though grammar rules can change the tone of character in a given word. There can also be several glyphs which share a single pronunciation (homonyms): there are more characters in Chinese than there are possible phoneme combinations (given the rules of the language for constructing syllables).
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.)
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.
When you're using an alphabet, it's true that once you know the letters you will be able to pronounce any word that you come across
Not a chance in English. There are loads of rules involving combinations of letters (ce, ge, kn etx). There are loads of letters and letter combinations that don't have a set pronunciation (th, ough, etc). There are at least hundreds of downright exceptions to all the rules (get, acknowledge, etc). To learn English well, you need to memorise _all_ of these, and many of the exceptions are in common words. As an example, do you pronounce thought like though, but with a t on the end?
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.
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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
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.
There a handful of characters that have different pronunciations in different contexts. For example the last characters of yinyue (music) and kuaile (happy) are the same, although in the first word it is pronounced "yue" while in the other it is "le". There are a couple others like that I've come across, but I hear it is more common in Japanese.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
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!
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... :-/
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.
I feel like your post might be sarcastic, but I don't think it is. If it is you suck at sarcasm, sorry.
Actually, computers are rather bad at language translation. Handwritten and printed characters are presented with such stylistic variation that even the simplest aspect, optical recognition, is very difficult. Hell, even high-grade OCR software for roman character sets is still imperfect. And then there's translation. Some characters have both multiple meanings and multiple pronunciations, most of which is dependent upon context. Computers don't grok context well since it relies a lot on complex relationships concerning meaning.
So yeah, humans are actually really good at language and the memorization that goes with it, especially in the ways that the computer is not good at it. Nothing wrong with using a digital pocket dictionary or phone app that's a dictionary as an aid, but no practical computer can replace the wonder that is the human mind when it comes to language-related tasks.
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
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.
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 !
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.
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.
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!