Learning characters and learning words

[Xiaowang]

The following is vexing me: I have a passive vocab of maybe 3100 words which, I suspect, equates to maybe 1200 characters. Most of the vocab was acquired learning the standard HSK lists while doing a course. Starting from having completed HSK 4, new words come from graded readers and stuff I pick up elsewhere. I use Anki in combination with the Outlier Dictionary and don’t plan to learn hand-writing characters. I also have very limited spare time unfortunately.

 

Some characters I do know very well (pronounciation, meaning maybe less so) from having learned them  in the context of other words. Indeed, once in a while I have started being able to pronounce new words / have an idea of their meaning because I have seen the characters in other contexts. However, sometimes words don’t stick very well because I don’t see them regularly when reading - but maybe this is completely normal. 

 

However, I have listened to a few podcasts from successful learners of Chinese who have stressed the importance of learning characters (stand-alone, not just in the context of words) in order to be able to make sense of unknown words and as a foundation to reading advanced texts. The Mandarin Blueprint chaps seem to say that you should learn characters and then learn words through immersion.  One of the founders said that he learned over 8000 words before learning characters individually and it was a bit a of slog because of that and not very useful. 

 

What would be your advice - should I just continue learning new vocab as I encounter it (looking at the characters while doing so of course)? Or should I start to learn individual characters (focusing even more on character meanings, components etc.)? 

 

If I did the latter, it might be to the detriment of my reading given limited time available but maybe this would be worth it in the long run as new vocab might stick more easily?

 

Any advice much appreciated.

 

 

 

[Xiaowang]

Alternatively, I could ditch Anki, just read and see what happens….

[Lu]

Nooo, learn words, not just individual characters. Of course, when you learn a word you should also take a look at the characters it consists of. You may have encountered them in other words, and that will help learn the meaning (and of course the pronunciation) of the new word. This way you learn characters in a way that's actually useful.

 

(The same goes for radicals: do not first learn all 218 radicals and only then characters, it's a waste of time. It is useful to go over all 218 so that you have an idea of what radicals are there. And then when you learn a new character, find its radical. That way, you soon learn the most common radicals and what they usually signify.)

 

Contrary to what some people think, Chinese is built on words, not characters, and if you want to understand and speak Chinese you need to do so with words, not just characters. It doesn't work to learn the characters and then try to build your own words, or to use them without combining them into words.

 

Anyone can make a podcast, there is no test to take before one starts or editor checking if what a podcaster says is correct and useful before the podcast is sent into the world. Not everything a podcaster says is necessarily correct. (So it's good you asked here ? )

 

And don't ditch Anki assuming you'll learn through immersion by just reading. Progress will be less and slower. Books don't give you the words at just the right time, and by the time you do encouter a word again you may have forgotten it. Keep Anki.

[Moshen]

Quote

And don't ditch Anki assuming you'll learn through immersion by just reading. Progress will be less and slower.

 

I'm at the level of halfway through HSK 5 and do not use Anki or anything like it.  I have learned and remembered a lot of words this year by reading, and previously through dialogue-based courses.

 

My opinion is that you should pay much more attention to your own learning experience than to someone's podcast and even to my experience or advice.

 

Each of us has different learning preferences and abilities, and what enables us to stick to a learning program is different.

[realmayo]

I suggest you treat Anki simply as a tool to stop you forgetting some of the new words you learn. The problem with thinking you must put all the new words you learn into Anki is that might make you limit how much you read/listen to, which would be a big mistake.

 

Personally I found it helpful to drill myself on recognition of individual characters, making sure I got the pronunciation correct and also a vague or approximate definition of the meaning. For example, if you learn 你好 ni2 hao3 is basically hello, then it makes sense, perhaps a while later, to learn that 你 ni3 means you and 好 hao3 means good.

[cncorrect]

A Chinese character is a word. It is not a form of alphabet letters. Characters are the most basic words. It is essential for you to learn the characters. Fortunately, there are only 3500 common characters. For modern Chinese, a combination of characters can form another word. In ancient Chinese essays, every Chinese character was a word. For example, '是日也，天朗气清，惠风和畅，仰观宇宙之大，俯察品类之盛，所以游目骋怀，足以极视听之娱，信可乐也。'.

 

In Chinese schools, students first learn to read and write the characters in an article. Then the teachers usually ask students to give examples of words that contain the characters. This practice is called '组词', with which every Chinese students would be familiar. Students also make sentences with the words.

 

ANKI is a perfect mnemonic tool.
 

[Xiaowang]

Thank you very much for taking the time to share your experience. Much appreciated and very helpful. I think I now have a plan

 

I‘ll try not to increase my Anki load and basically continue learning words the way I have been doing so far. But for some selected words which don’t stick somehow, I will look at characters in a more structured way. 

 

I have downloaded a series of decks called Mastering Chinese from Mandarin Mania. This seems to contain most necessary characters plus example words - and there is room to copy the outlier explanations onto the card. 

 

Again, many thanks everyone. Learning Chinese is a great hobby, isn’t it?

 

Edited: Actually I have started to use the 800 basic character set on Anki (updated version)

Edited December 31, 2023 at 09:20 AM by Xiaowang

[lordsuso]

This might seem counter-intuitive, but to me the goal is to learn characters... by reviewing words.

 

For me personally, reviewing characters in isolation is pretty much impossible, I can't remember all of the different meanings at once, and even the pronunciation is hard to remember. Like others have said Chinese is built on words, and so they are way easier to remember and look up in example sentences. Tones are also way easier to master in tone pairs (aka words) than isolation. 

 

The thing is, as you learn more words, your brain will make connections. For example, 过敏 (allergy), 敏感 (sensitive) and 敏捷 (quick) will no longer be three independent words with three different meanings, but rather you'll see the similarities and gain a nuanced understanding of 敏. This is something that you should actively focus on: When you review a word, actively remember words that share the same characters, characters that share radicals/components, different readings/meanings of the characters, etc. At some point, you'll realize that you already know the meaning of most "new" words that contain characters you are already familiar with.

 

This exact same thing also happens with radicals and character components. You will learn them naturally, and at some point when you encounter a "new" character you'll be able to guess part of its meaning and the pronunciation. 

 

I believe that if humans needed >200k words to communicate (rather than <50k), Chinese would be one of the easiest languages to learn, because it is incredibly scalable. Sadly as things stand the entry cost is a bit too steep haha.

[Ledu]

I think it would be great if I could plug away at an HSK wordlist and in time get them. However, that doesn't seem to be the case with me. If learning a language is anything like the body you can get abs by doing multiple things at once. But if you try to focus on just your ab muscles, you won't find success. Some researchers say you can build implicit knowledge by studying Vocab with Anki (Irina Elgort, a collegue of Paul Nation). But I feel my greatest gains have came through graded reading. 

 

I'd rather say my vocabulary level is whatever level my graded readers are now. That could be 500,750,1000,1200,2000,3000. After that graded readers usually don't exist anymore so flashcards will have to be done to gain the other 2k to reach 5,000 for HSK 6. Some say you need double or triple that to do well on your HSK6 exam. Basically whatever is listed you need double or triple that vocabulary. 

 

If Pleco or Anki say you know a word or have learned it, I doubt you will be able to recognize it in the wild  instanteneously (implicitly). Maybe flashcarding must be done every single day to reap benefits. I am not sure? Having flashcarded HSK 4 most of 2023, I am not so inclined to do the same for the HSK 5 level.