specific characters that take a long time to learn

[BlackMamba]

Hi,

 

I am using Skritter at the moment and some characters take a huge amount of repetitions till learned while others are learned much more quickly. What do you do with these characters to learn them efficiently?

 

I though about printing https://www.hanzigrids.com/ grids with them and hanging them on the wall and have some extra papers for writing them with a pen instead of just using Skritter for writing them to get them more repeated.

 

 

Best Regards

BlackMamba

[mungouk]

5 hours ago, BlackMamba said:

What do you do with these characters to learn them efficiently?

 

Personally I gave up trying to learn characters by writing them.  (I was also using Skritter for a while.)

 

It was just taking too long, and being able to write by hand isn't a priority.  

 

For me, for now, it's enough to be able to read them, and to type in pinyin with an IME. 

[BlackMamba]

22 minutes ago, mungouk said:

It was just taking too long, and being able to write by hand isn't a priority.  

 

yes I also think so but I want to take the HSK 6 in the end. Is it still possible to do it with IME?

[mungouk]

Yes, if you do the computer-based test. 

[BlackMamba]

9 minutes ago, mungouk said:

Yes, if you do the computer-based test. 

 

and what about the new HSK?

[mungouk]

We don't know much about it yet. It's still some way off.

 

 

[Dlezcano]

In my experience hanging them on the wall is useless since you need to use them actively to remember them. If you can't remember some character it means that you haven't practiced enough, so I encourage you to keep on writing it more times and maybe using some mnemonic.

[Shelley]

I think using Hanzi Grids is the most helpful thing I know to learn characters - easy or difficult.

 

I use it, its a surprisingly powerful little application and so cheap.

 

Characters that I learnt using a combination of Skritter and Hanzi Grids are the highest retained characters I have. I am a strong believer in muscle memory and how it ingrains the character on to your brain.

 

There is a new kid on the block (well relatively) take a look at TOFU learn.

Slightly less intuitive than Skritter but it works and once you get it sorted its a great extra.

 

I too encourage you to write and write some more.

 

 

[BlackMamba]

Yes I am using mnemonic when there are usefull ones in Skritter. Hanzi Grids i will use now more for writing.

 

 

Now I would also only learn Tone, Reading and Definition of new words and writing characters only later of these words to progress faster for taking a computer HSK 6 next year as it will be too time intensive for taking the HSK 6 next year including learning to write characters by hand.

 

What do you think about that? For that I would have to turn off characters in Skritter and then sometimes turn it on and add some words for learning the characters of already learned words (Tone, Reading and Definition)? Because Skritter would not add automatically new words if there are too many unlearned hand writing ones or?

 

 

just came across this article https://blog.skritter.com/2015/11/learning-10000-characters-with-skritter/ this is not about hand writing or?

[歐博思]

I'm mostly in the camp "we're digital now so who cares about writing" and hoping the new HSK still has a digital test.

 

But I once studied radicals pretty...radically, and I found it helpful in getting better at writing.

 

Even this beast can be tamed by knowing well its components:

穴、言、幺、幺、馬、長、長、月、刀、心、走（forget how to type this part）

[BlackMamba]

9 minutes ago, 歐博思 said:

But I once studied radicals pretty...radically, and I found it helpful in getting better at writing.

 

how you studied them?

[歐博思]

A little bit of brute force writing repetition combined with an Anki deck of radicals and their meanings.

 

Another member here wrote a whole program about learning radicals actually. Maybe someone can help link to it?

[Dlezcano]

It's not only about learning the radicals but also the components of the characters. You should not forget that a very high percentage of them are phonetic-semantic compounds, for instance 湖 葫 糊 蝴 瑚  have identical pronunciations because of 胡. Identifying those phonetic components will be very helpful in order to memorize many of the characters. In China you can buy some books that analyze and classify all phonetic compounds in characters, so maybe getting one would be useful. Actually this is a very good way of learning characters but unfortunately few schools emphasize it.

[mungouk]

1 hour ago, Dlezcano said:

In China you can buy some books that analyze and classify all phonetic compounds in characters,

 

Sounds interesting, do you have more information on these?

 

[Dlezcano]

This book is called 形声字谱, it's more for native speakers but you can get an idea of how it works. Many years ago I bought one which was more simple by just using diagrams even a child could understand, but since I gave it to a friend I am unable to recall it's name.

[BlackMamba]

What i do now is that i give the difficult words a star in Skritter and then I paste the starred characters into Hanzigrids and the Hanzgrids pdfs I paste in a Onenote page and then I write them with my Surface. So I only write the ones that make difficulties in Skritter. And no printing needed for this.