Memorizing Language / Spelling Techniques? 237
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timothy
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from the save-up-for-neural-implants dept.
NotesSensei writes "My kids are learning Chinese in school. While the grammar is drop-dead simple, writing is a challenge since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters. I would like to know any good techniques (using technology or not) to help memorize large amounts of information, especially Chinese characters. Most of the stuff I Googled only helps on learning speaking."
Flashcards (Score:5, Informative)
Flashcards are great for learning Chinese or Japanese characters. There are also many characters, or parts thereof, that have a mnemonic relationship to the idea that they are used to impart. I can't think of any decent books offhand, but they're out there.
Still, flashcards are awesome in this regard.
Radical Spelling (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Same? (Score:3, Informative)
I think what he means is that the same characters can be used for unrelated sounds in Chinese. At least in English, you can get close by writing phonetically, but in Chinese there's no equivalent. At least as far as I'm aware.
Re:Flashcards (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, use flash cards, but not the dead tree type. Use anki. I use it to study Japanese, and I'm sure it's almost as good for Chinese.
http://ichi2.net/anki/ [ichi2.net]
Re:Same? (Score:2, Informative)
Try flashcard software (Score:5, Informative)
As others have said, there's no way around the need for repetition and a lot of practice.
Also, diligence is extremely important. If you're not using them, then you forget the characters very quickly. If you're not careful you might actually find that you're forgetting characters as quickly as you're learning new ones.
Re:Same? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm no expert on this, but I don't see a relation between sound and shape of our letters either. So the answer is to study as hard as you can and also: repetition!
We've basically got 26 characters to worry about (plus numbers, punctuation marks and various symbols). To be literate in Chinese, you have to know 3-4 thousand characters--and there are tens of thousands of characters in all. There are also two different sets of characters, simplified and traditional. So while neither have any relationship to sound, memorizing any alphabet is a hell of a lot easier.
Mnemonics (Score:4, Informative)
Incorrect assumption! (Score:5, Informative)
there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters.
This is wrong. Many, if not most, Chinese characters give an indication to both meaning and pronunciation. For instance the Mandarin word for "same" is pronounced "tong". The Mandarin word for copper is also "tong", and the ideogram for copper contains two radicals: the "metal" radical, which indicates meaning, and the "same" radical, which indicates pronunciation.
Once you learn the basic radicals, learning Chinese characters is not that hard. I can read Chinese much better than I can speak it.
Flash cards work well. Some computer programs work well too. "Rosetta Stone" works really well, but it is expensive.
Re:Same? (Score:3, Informative)
That is true in Japanese, but much less common in Chinese. Chinese generally has a single one-syllable pronunciation for each glyph, though grammar rules can change the tone of character in a given word. There can also be several glyphs which share a single pronunciation (homonyms): there are more characters in Chinese than there are possible phoneme combinations (given the rules of the language for constructing syllables).
Heisig's technique (Score:5, Informative)
James W. Heisig, a researcher at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya, Japan, has released an excellent set of books for memorizing Japanese Kanji, traditional Chinese Hanzi, and simplified Chinese Hanzi:
Remembering the Kanji:
http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Vol-Complete-Characters/dp/0824831659/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269118367&sr=8-1 [amazon.com]
Remembering the Traditional Hanzi:
http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Traditional-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833244/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_5 [amazon.com]
Remembering the Simplified Hanzi:
http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833236/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b [amazon.com]
While this technique focuses on memorizing the meaning of the characters (and how to write them yourself) and not so much on the readings of them, I've found it an absolutely invaluable technique for doing the former. I have an abysmal memory to the point that it's shocking, and yet using his techniques, I was able to easily memorize the meaning of about 400 characters and how to write them in a couple of weeks with only a couple of hours of dedication a day, which I was very impressed with. His technique is based on building up from simple radicals and employing visual memory to make everything stick in place, which basically means concocting an elaborate and often ridiculous story for each character to tie the correct radicals into their correct places. The story is usually so silly that it cannot be forgotten, which is, IMO, in where the trick lies. As your skill in recall develops, you can let go of the stories and move to natural recall.
Also, the use of timed memorization software is essential when we're talking about this amount of information. Here are two great free software packages for this that were largely based specifically at learning Japanese (and thus are quite suitable for other languages, especially Chinese):
Anki:
http://ichi2.net/anki [ichi2.net]
Mnemosyne:
http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/ [mnemosyne-proj.org]
(Personally, I prefer Mnemosyne a bit more, even though Anki has many more features, but this is because I'm making a set of cards to memorize all of Heisig's Kanji, traditional Hanzi, and simplified Hanzi, and I'm using HTML tables to store all the information. Mnemosyne preserves my HTML exactly, whereas Anki futzes with it and ruins the formatting.)
You're doing it wrong, son. (Score:1, Informative)
> My kids are learning Chinese in school.
Quite the forward thinker, huh?
> While the grammar is drop-dead simple, writing is a challenge since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters.
You're doing it wrong, as far as I understand. Sound is very much important for anglophones; not so in other languages. Even in my own related Portuguese, the written form is fundamental to recognize etimology. I've found there's another mindset when dealing with some oriental languages. This is a problem in itself, because a few people seems to have a hard time at talking... from the usage of the word "dumb", it seems not being able to talk is not highly regarded among you.
Such is the importance of sound to you... Hence confusions about "their" and "there", "you're" and "your", "its" and "it's" etc.
Other cultures view refraining from speaking in a better light. "Uneventful is noble", a Japanese saying... or so I've read.
> I would like to know if there good techniques (using technology or not) to help memorize large amount of information, especially Chinese characters.
From what I've been shown regarding Kanji and Chinese ideograms, you can divide an ideogram in subparts, each with its meaning and then recall what their reunion would mean.
I can even give a simple example. Mind you, I can't speak neither Japanese nor Chinese. (Li, if you ever reads this, thanks... I hope you're well)
Up:
Down:
Stop: (i.e., cannot go up nor down)
> Most of the stuff I googled only helps on learning speaking.
I'd suggest it's a good starting point, as spoken Chinese may be orders of magnitude easier than written... After you get the basics of speaking and hearing, maybe writing could be easier... after all, this is how children start.
Use Colors + components + Anki (Score:4, Informative)
As others have already mentioned, Anki (http://ichi2.net/anki/) is the way to go for memorizing vocabulary, as it uses a psychological algorithm that helps you repeating things as often as you need to. If you then install the pinyin toolkit plugin for learning chinese it's the best thing to learn chinese vocabulary as it imports all your translations, pinyin and even sounds automatically when you just enter the Hanzi.
This pinyin toolkit also uses a nice colour system for the tones. Basically, every character is displayed in a color depending on its tone: red = first tone orange = second tone green = third tone blue = fourth tone black = no tone
You can go even further and WRITE the characters in those colors when practicing. The tones of each character will stay in your memory WAY better!
Another tip when trying to memorize chinese characters: try to grasp the meaning of their components and learning to read and write them will be way more easy. You can use sites like nciku.com or archchinese.com where characters are split up in their components. However, you won't find everything there. There's also an extremely good book called "Learning Chinese Characters" (http://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-Chinese-Characters-Revolutionary/dp/080483816X/) - it teaches you the 800 most common chinese characters by telling you everything about their components and even giving you stories to remember the components of each character. It's by far the best book I've found for learning how to write chinese.
Re:Same? (Score:3, Informative)
There a handful of characters that have different pronunciations in different contexts. For example the last characters of yinyue (music) and kuaile (happy) are the same, although in the first word it is pronounced "yue" while in the other it is "le". There are a couple others like that I've come across, but I hear it is more common in Japanese.
Hmmm - Re:A proven technique (Score:5, Informative)
My girlfriends first comment: Yeah right, that helped...
Almost 5 years together, and she still hardly speaks a word of German because I almost automatically switch over to English when talking to her... ...which may be good for my English, but certainly isn't for her German... :-/
My technique has been to read children's books (Score:2, Informative)
I've studied Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, and now Dari. The thing that has helped me the most has been to read children's books. I start out with the ones intended for kindergartners, and work my way up. Once I get halfway decent, I start on newspapers. These days you can find online newpapers in just about any language.
I've also just found the International Children's Digital Library [childrenslibrary.org], which has digital children's books for many languages.
Re:sounds familiar (Score:3, Informative)
since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters
so it's sort of like in English then?
You're right on the money. They call the complexity of a writing system's form-sound relationship orthographic depth [wikipedia.org]. English is a deep language, Chinese is deeper, Japanese is deeper still. Spanish on the other hand is orthographically shallow. So it's considered easier to learn to read and write in Spanish, than English, in English than Chinese, in Chinese than Japanese.
Chinese schoolchildren don't get much sleep. (Score:2, Informative)
Characters are a bitch, no way around it. Your kids will have to dedicate a large chunk of their time to learning reading and writing in Chinese. After that it's a continuous chore to retain that knowledge, especially in writing. After several years study, it can seem like you're set to the Sisyphean task of building a mountain out of sand--focus on building up the peak with new knowledge and other memories decay. That said, there are a billion plus living examples it can be done, and there are things that can certainly help. Just don't think it will be easy.
With Chinese it's kind of hard to dive into new reading material. You either know a character already, or have no clue what it means or even how to pronounce it. That, and every character being unique, means reading/writing will be the limiting factor in your kids' language study and the most time-consuming to remedy. Below are some tips to break down the task.
First thing is to learn the radicals. There's a limited number of them, and at least one in every character. Learn how to draw them because they're used over and over again. Learn their meanings too, because a character's meaning is usually at least loosely tied to its radical. Learning to identify the radicals also helps greatly in looking up unfamiliar words, as Chinese dictionaries are traditionally arranged first by radical, then by number of strokes.
When you buy them a dictionary, get a beginner's dictionary so that they can have a larger font, usage examples and Pinyin pronunciation, all of which are sometimes missing in comprehensive dictionaries. A good choice that provides many example sentences and phrases would be The Starter Oxford Chinese Dictionary (sorry, Simplified version only). Get them a second dictionary later on if they can't find every word they need. For several reasons, I like Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary. You can try out the online version of it at Zhongwen.com to see how it's organized. This is also the only dictionary that you can use by looking up any part of a character, not just the radical (which can sometimes be hard to identify).
Many characters are comprised of radical-phonetic pairings, where the non-radical part hints at the sound of the word. They'll notice many more of these related character components at the intermediate level. However, given the ~4,000-year development of the written language, these links can often be tenuous. Thinking up elaborate stories trying to tie all the pieces of the character together can be quite useful. For instance, with the character for wrong () I remember it by thinking, "It would be wrong to bet money that sun sets underground." A little convoluted, but it was enough to jog my memory ever since. Useful as this strategy can be, it's just not always possible and you'll have to learn many words by rote memorization.
For this I recommend writing. A lot! Have your kids say the words aloud and think of the meaning as they write. After enough repetitions, hopefully it will become part of their "motor memory" and once started they will be able to finish a character almost by reflex. They'll need this level of ingrained familiarity if they hope to retain the knowledge for long.
It's essential then to review regularly and for them to brush up on what they forgot. Flashcards can be used as others suggested, but I'd recommend using a "3-sided" flashcard that shows the English translation, the character and the pronunciation all separately. You can do this by writing along the top and bottom of one side of the card and holding them so you don't see both at once. This way they won't depend on the Romanized pinyin to pronounce characters. To optimize learning, reorganize the cards based on how well they're known. This way time won't be wasted needlessly reviewing stuff that's already learned.
To help with this optimization, some people use computer programs to model their memory decay, bringing up the character flashcard only when it's likely to be on the verge of being forg
Re:Flashcards (Score:2, Informative)
nciku.com an online flashcard learning site just for Chinese, with handwriting recognition to boot. It's also from my experience the most thorough online english chinese dictionary, with both audio and lots of example sentences.
As for non-web applications, heres a really good free Chinese deck:
http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/node/30