Learn the Building Blocks of Chinese Characters

While learning to speak Chinese at a basic level isnt that much harder than learning other languages (its even easier in some areas), learning to write is definitely and without a doubt much more demanding. Learning to Read and Write Chinese Is Not Easy There are many reasons for this. First, its because the link between the written and spoken language is very weak. While in Spanish you can mostly read what you can understand when spoken and you can write what you can say (bar some minor spelling problems), in Chinese the two are more or less separate. Second, the way Chinese characters represent sounds is complicated and requires much more than learning an alphabet. If you know how to say something, writing is not just a matter of checking how its spelled, you have to learn the individual characters, how they are written and how they are combined to form words. To become literate, you need between 2500 and 4500 characters (depending on what you mean by the term literate). You need many times more characters than the number of words. However, the process of learning to read and write can be made a lot simpler than it first seems. Learning 3500 characters is not impossible and with proper reviewing and active usage, you can also avoid mixing them up (this is actually the main challenge for non-beginners). Still, 3500 is a massive number. It would mean almost 10 characters per day for a year. Added to that, you would also need to learn words, which are combinations of characters that sometimes have non-obvious meanings. ...But It Neednt Be Impossible Either Looks difficult, right? Yes, but if you break these 3500 characters down into smaller components, you will find that the number of parts you need to learn is very far from 3500. In fact, with just a few hundred components, you can build most of those 3500 characters. Before we move on, its perhaps worth noting here that we are using the word component very deliberately instead of using the word radical, which is a small subset of components that are used to classify words in dictionaries. The Building Blocks of Chinese Characters So, by learning the components of characters, you create a repository of building blocks that you can then use to understand, learn and remember characters. This is not very efficient in the short term because each time you learn a character, you need to learn not only that character but also the smaller components its made of. However, this investment will be repaid handsomely later. It might not be a good idea to learn all components of all characters directly but focus on the most important ones first. I will introduce some resources to help you both with breaking characters down into their component parts and where you can find more information about which components to learn first. Functional Components Its important to understand that each component has a function in the character; its not there by chance. Sometimes the real reason the character looks like it does is lost in the mists of time, but often its known or even directly apparent from studying the character. At other times, an explanation might present itself that is very convincing, and even though it might not be etymologically correct, it can still help you to learn and remember that character. In general, components are included in characters for two reasons: first because of the way they sound, and second because of what they mean. We call these phonetic or sound components and semantic or meaning components. This is a very useful way of looking at characters that often yields much more interesting and useful results than looking at the traditional explanation of how characters are formed. Its still worthwhile to have that in the back of your mind when learning, but you dont really need to study it in detail. A Writing Example Lets look at a character most students learn early on: Ã¥ ¦Ë†/Ã¥ ª ½ (simplified/traditional), which is pronounced  mÄ  (first tone) and means mother. The left part Ã¥ ¥ ³ means woman and is clearly related to the meaning of the whole character (your mother is presumably a woman). The right part é © ¬/é ¦ ¬ means horse and is clearly not related to the meaning. However, it is pronounced  mÇŽ (third tone), which is very close to the pronunciation of the whole character (only the tone is different).  This is the way most Chinese characters work, albeit not all. The Art of Combining Characters   All this leaves us with hundreds (rather than thousands) of characters to remember. Apart from that, we also have the additional task of combining the components we have learned into compound characters. This is what were going to look at now. Combining characters is actually not that hard, at least not if you use the right method This is because if you know what the components mean, the character composition itself means something to you and that makes it a lot easier to remember. There is a huge difference between learning a random jumble of strokes (very hard) and combining known components (relatively easy). Improve Your Memory Combining things is one of the main areas of memory training and something that people have had the ability to do for thousands of years. There are many, many methods out there that work really well and that teach you how to remember that A, B, and C belong to each other (and in that order, if you like, although this is often not necessary when it comes to Chinese characters, because you quickly get a feel for that and only a very small number of characters can be mixed up by accidentally moving character components around). The main takeaway is that memory is a skill and its something you can train. That naturally includes your ability to learn and remember Chinese characters. Remembering Chinese Characters The best way of combining components is to create a picture or scene that includes all the components in a memorable way. This should be absurd, funny or exaggerated in some way. Exactly what makes you remember something is something you need to figure out by trial and error, but going for the absurd and exaggerated often works well for most people. You can, of course, draw or use real pictures rather than just imaginary ones, but if you do, you need to be really careful that you dont break the structure of the character. Simply put, the pictures you use to learn Chinese characters should preserve the building blocks that that character consists of. The reason for this should be apparent at this point. If you just use a picture that is suitable for that character, but which doesnt preserve the structure of the character, it will only be useful for learning that very character. If you follow the structure of the character, you can use the pictures for the individual components to learn tens or hundreds of other characters. In short, if you use bad pictures, you lose the benefit of those all-important building blocks. Helpful Resources for Learning Chinese Characters Now, lets look at a few resources for learning the building blocks of Chinese characters: Hacking Chinese: Here youll find a list of the 100 most common radicals. We are mostly concerned with components here, not radicals, but it so happens that radicals are often semantic components, so this list is still useful.Hanzicraft: This is an excellent website that allows you to break down Chinese characters into their component parts. Note that the breakdown is purely visual, so it doesnt really care if its historically correct. You can also find phonetic information here, which is again based only on mechanical comparison of the pronunciation of the components and the full character (its not historically correct either, in other words). Also on the plus side, this site is fast and easy to use.Zdic.net: This is an online, free dictionary that offers decent information about the structure of a character that is also more in line with what we know about the development of a specific character (its manual, not automatic).ArchChinese: This is another online dictionary that gives yo u the ability to both breakdown characters and see the components in context (with frequency information, which is quite rare in other dictionaries).Semantic component posters from Outlier Linguistics: These posters show 100 semantic components and apart from being very informative, they also look great on your wall. They come with information on how to utilize them and accurate descriptions (manually made by people who know a lot about Chinese characters). That should be enough to get you started. There will still be cases you cant find or that dont make sense to you. if you encounter these, you can try a number of different methods, such as creating a picture specifically for that character or making up the meaning on your own — this is easier than trying to remember meaningless strokes.