Hey guys!
I have always been willing to learn Chinese, and I bet many do. There have been many threads on this topic, but I wanted to create one for a certain purpose: creating a guideline, or rather a plan for learning Chinese.
If you have any ideas, contribute! There’s a lot of great minds here with awesome ideas, it would be awesome to combine our strengths.
When I think of memorizing Chinese words, there are 3 crucial parts:
1. Phonetics
2. Tones
3. Characters
Now, take the basic expression “How are you?”: Nǐ hǎo ma? / 你好吗？
My idea was taking a word whose first syllable is identical to the Chinese word, since most Chinese words are monosyllabic.
For instance:
Nicki Minaj hourglass macklemore
So I imagine Nicki Minaj squashing Macklemore with an hourglass, you get the idea. The problem is this: there was another method I’ve heard of, where you have a limited set of associations representing syllables. On one hand, you don’t have doubts as to what a word means, since you know which associations you use, but it can get really boring to use the same things again and again, hence you won’t remember it as easily. On the other hand, if you use the method I described below, you have more options to use, yet sometimes you might wonder what the associations actually represent, or encounter a “ghost”, that is, encounter difficulties in fully recalling the image, and not being able to guess since it could be any association in your head. Which method works better?
And then, the tones: any thoughts on that?
Also, the characters. Do you usually put them into the same room as the phonetical equivalent, or you create a completely different memory palace for characters? Sounds challenging I know.
As to the curriculum, I usually learn a language this way:
At the beginning, I take the most crucial topics like
- Greetings
- Professions
- Colours
- Numbers
… and so on. Then, allocate one location to each of these topics, to keep clusters of similar information. Later on, as I reach a good command of a language, I tend to distribute the words according to the alphabet. That is: if I have a word starting with M, I place it on a street starting with M, like the Moscow street.
What do you think? Chinese is quite different from European languages, and it’s a tough one due to many factors. Perhaps you have better ideas or suggestions or personal experience? Comment below 