I would like to tackle Chinese Characters (or Hanzi). Traditionally these are memorised by either rote repetition, anki, or memory palaces and use of radicals. Perviously I’ve just used Anki and reading, but I was thinking about doing something different. There are only between 1-64 actual strokes used to construct a Hanzi characters. Although some people say there are only 8, 12, 37, or 64 depending on what they consider a unique stroke.
The Chinese character 永 (yǒng), meaning “forever” or "permanence, is often used to illustrate the 8 basic strokes of Chinese characters. They are:
I am considering using something like the Major system, where I assign consonants to a stroke and then create a word to remember the strokes. I’m not sure about this, so if anyone wants to chip in and tell me if this is a good or bad idea?
Rick learning any language (other than your given home language) is a mighty fine idea. Chinese is definitely not the easiest of languages for an English native speaker to learn, due in no uncertain terms to the fact that there is no such thing as a Chinese alphabet to start with. Chinese have characters. Logograms or single characters represent entire syllables, entire words, or entire units of meaning. For example, 漢 (hàn) means “China” and 字 (zì) means “character”. Obviously writing Chinese is different from speaking Chinese. What is your motivation to learn Chinese to begin with? Are you wanting to read, write and speak Chinese? I would say that question should be your starting point. Personally, I would rather be able to “just get by” speaking and understanding another language to enjoy things like traveling to different parts of the world and enjoying different cultures, etc. I am sure that Anthony Metivier who is in this group and can speak Mandarin would be a good person to bounce your ideas off. Good luck with your venture of learning Chinese. That is going to be one heck of a challenge!!
I probably should expand on this a little. I speak a little Mandarin, although I stopped studying it full time about 3 years ago, and I’ve since started up learning Korean. I have already taught myself Italian and French to a B2/C1 level of the CEFL. When learning Hanzi characters previously, I simply learned them by rote memorisation and by writing them out by hand. I did transcription drills by copying books and translating the characters as I wrote. Repetition was the main thing.
My interest here really is more focused on using mnemonics to speed up the process. I would eventually learn most characters simply doing what I was doing before, by reading and writing. I practice speaking with language exchanges.
Would this type of thing be a workable solution to memorisation of characters? Or would someone suggest a more effective method?
I know no Chinese but I’ve often speculated that English is just as challenging for a non native speaker to spell. Demonstrably even native speakers struggle. The internet was a lot more fun before spell checkers became standard.
So by analogy, were one to apply mnemonics to English spelling I don’t think atomizing the words down to individual letters and then brute force decoding the whole string from memory is the best approach. Even discounting the fact that English words probably use a lot more characters than the Chinese use basic strokes in their ideograms.
The Major System gives a method to encode every digit because, in general, digits are not correlated. Numbers look kind of anonymous and remembering part of the number doesn’t help to guess the remaining digits, in most cases. But words and pictures are usually much richer in their connections with other things. Perhaps here too mnemonics are only necessary for partial support - to hint at the image and to hold onto. any details that you find troublesome.
Also, based on experience with English, it might be useful to have encoding for important combinations.
I would try, if possible, to implement a system that doesn’t refer to another language. Rather try to do it all in Chinese. In learning a new language, one barrier to overcome is mentally translating back into one’s native tongue before comprehending. This may be more work upfront but, IMO, it would pay off.
Yes, I do agree with you. Translation is not the way to speak or use a language. For French and Italian, I don’t “look up” words in my head in order to speak. I’ve simply become so familiar with the language that my brain produces the language itself without an intermediate English step. But this did not happen quickly, I’ve spent years with these languages and read, wrote, spoke and listened for hundreds if not thousands of hours.
English orthography is actually a big challenge since there are silent letters, and other sound processes. But the problem I have with Mandarin, is the writing system has no actual tie to the sound system. Korean for example uses Hangul, and once you learn the sounds of the letters, you can sound out the word, and bar some oddities you’ll be able to pronounce it.
But given the fact there is no correlation between a Chinese character and the sound of the word, rote memorisation seems the obvious choice. I’m hoping that using mnemonics might speed up the process.
The problem is I wouldn’t be able to use the method I’m describing, e.g. use a major system with alphabetic characters to represent the strokes if I do it in Mandarin, but case it doesn’t have an alphabet.
The Hanzi Movie Method mentioned above is a type of mentally translate English->Pinyin->Mandarin so it doesn’t really appeal to me.
It is not a type of mentally translate anything English ->Pinyin->Mandarin.
Uses the pinyin components to place the mnemonic.
The initials to assign people, the finals to assign places (as a matter of fact they rearranged the pinyin chart to “use” less places and more people) and the tones to assign subdivisions in those places.
So you have there the pronunciation, the “scene” you create is for at least one meaning and the hanzi itself, which is kinda more complicated at least seeing it from outside, without paying because uses “props” for the strokes, I think.
So maybe is a type of mentally translate pinyin->mnemonics
Anyway, I don’t use this because I’m not studying Chinese, but if I do someday I’ll use this method.
This is incorrect. Hanzi have both phonetic and semantic components. See, e.g., this discussion. Given a previously unseen character, it is possible to make an educated guess on both the pronunciation and meaning of the character by evaluating its components.
My sense of your initial query–developing a major system for strokes–is that it would be highly inefficient, unless your primary interest is in calligraphy or the evolution of written hanzi over time. If your ultimate goal is language acquisition, you might find this focus on character strokes very tree limb oriented if you’re actually interested in the trees themselves and the forest in which they grow and have meaning.
I have studied Mandarin daily using Anki for over 4 years consecutively.
The main mnemonic devices I employ for learning single characters (I always learn them separately first in context of a word or phrase) so that spaced repetition isn’t doing all the heavy lifting are these:
Color-tinting pictures from Google images. I use the Pleco system for tone colors, which means 1 is red, 2 is green, 3 is blue, and 4 is purple. I find an image/photo and crop into a square and even flip them sometimes to visually correspond with what is going on in the character itself. This way the image becomes a much more vibrant living version of the character. Then tint the image to the desired tone color. Of course sometimes you need more than one image if a character has multiple tones.
Understanding character etymology and also being imaginative with relationships between character components. Outlier dictionary (paid) for Pleco and Chinese character/hanzi/kanji mnemonics (free) are my resources.
Concerning the above approaches, I have determined that any association of components and any image, no matter how far-fetched, is better than nothing. Once you have conjured up some explanation in your mind of how a character is constructed, it has a good chance of sticking long-term.
Review is still necessary though, hence the need to use an SRS program like Anki.
Phil from Mandarin Blueprint and I recently discussed using the Major for tones. Although Phil doesn’t think the Major should be necessary, I still use it for Mandarin, and use a mind mapping Memory Palace combo sometimes.
Anyhow, Phil has lots of great ideas, some of which I had not considered before and a substantial upgrade to the Heisig approach so you may want to look that up or into MB generally.
Heisig has some good ideas too, but they don’t escape 死记硬背 (Si ji ying bei, “death memory stiff back”).
And escaping 死记硬背 is what mnemonics is all about. For all all languages, all of which present measures of difficulty, especially time lost spent on “games of comparison” with other languages and their challenges.
@Slate, that’s a cool idea for taking the Pleco color system and enlivening it. You can use SRS in your mind, however, and for some people, it will be faster and more interesting.
Reminder to all: The Memory Palace technique is advanced SRS when used optimally.
You can use SRS in your mind, however, and for some people, it will be faster and more interesting.
@metivier I am intrigued by this statement. Can you please explain more? I have numerous memory palaces for other subjects, but I’ve never found them to have an SRS quality built in to them. I would be interested in knowing how you review memories in your memory palaces.
Means if you replay the “journey;” if you re-imagine the connections you’re doing the repetition, the “space” depends on you.
Ultimately you can have a reminder in your computer or phone, to remind you to re-imagine the connections in 2 months time.
In principle, yes. But there are specific ways to do it that maximize the primacy, recency and serial positioning effects.
When combined with sufficiently specific and concrete associations, it’s like kryptonite against the forgetting curve.
But when it comes to language learning, you still need sufficient doses of reading, writing, speaking and listening in order to fully enjoy the results.
because uses “props” for the strokes, I think.