fitting the learning around the needs of the learner

Chinese holds a special place in my heart. It’s the third language I tried seriously to learn — German and a very half-hearted attempt at French preceded my Chinese studies — and is the only language save for my native English in which I consider myself proficient. Though the US government considers Mandarin Chinese a “superhard” language, it’s not really that bad once you get the hang of it (though “getting the hang of it is easier said than done”).

One aspect of learning Chinese that is without qualification difficult, however, is learning the thousands of characters (汉字, hanzi) that make up the language’s written form. Some teachers try to sooth students by saying that the 1500 most frequent characters make up about 95% of modern written Chinese. While this is technically true — for reference, see the work of Dr. Jun Da at Middle Tennessee State University — it’s not very helpful in reality, as the remaining 5% come in handy — or block comprehension — more often than their frequency would suggest. Even one of the characters in my wife’s name — 霞, a not terribly uncommon character — is #2021 on Dr. Jun’s frequency lists.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you’ll need about 3500 characters for serious adult fluency (forget for a moment that those characters make up tens of thousands of compounds that you’ll also need to know — that whole “Chinese is a monosyllabic language” thing is bunk). 3500 is a lot of characters, but not insurmountable. 10 a day for 350 days, if you stick to it (I never could, but you’re more motivated than I was, right?), and a while longer if you take breaks and slack off every once in a while like I did.

How should you tackle learning the characters, then? Whip out a pen and paper and start Lisa Simpson-like tenacity? Well, maybe, but there are some other approaches that can get you more bang for your studying buck:

1. Immersion: This is much easier to do if you’re in a Chinese-speaking country. Characters are all around you. After you’ve in China (or Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc.) for a few weeks you’ll start to notice you’re seeing a lot of the same characters over and over. Pay attention! These are characters you should be learning. My first few years in China I kept a PDA running PlecoDict in my pocket at all times and would write, lookup, and store characters I encountered (for the less technically inclined, a pad of paper and a good character dictionary is probably sufficient). The nice part about learning characters this way is they’re naturally frequency sorted for you — learn characters on signs in places you frequent and you’ll be sure that you’re learning things you’ll actually use.
2. Learn similar characters together: Though at the beginning the characters all look like crazy scribbles, they’re actually constructed using a finite number of components. There’s an official list of base components, called radicals (部首). Generally, though, I’ve ignored these components and focused instead on whatever part of the character was the most memorable/familiar. A good example of how this works is the character 青 [qīng], which means “blue” (and “green,” strangely enough). It’s part of eight of the 2000 most common characters — 情 [qíng], 请 [qǐng], 清 [qīng], 精 [jīng], 静 [jìng], 睛 [jīng], 猜 [cāi], and 晴 [qíng]. Learn one component and get eight more for (almost) free!
3. Flashcards: However you decide to learn the characters, exposure is key. If you’re unable to totally immerse yourself in characters, at least you can increase your exposure artificially through flashcards. I greatly prefer electronic flashcards like Anki, but again index cards and a pen will suffice. If you put the character on one side and the pronunciation and meaning on the other, you can test yourself both ways — recognition of the character and the ability to write the character given its pronunciation and meaning.
4. Read: Read. Read as much as you can. Read everything you can. Every day. Anything will help.

However you tackle it, learning the characters is going to take some time and persistence. But, if you put in the time and persist, you’ll finish. Of course then there’s all the words, and the idioms, and lots of grammar… but that’s all material for future posts.