Memorizing Language / Spelling Techniques? 237
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."
Not for English, either (Score:4, Interesting)
Once you learn some radicals... (Score:2, Interesting)
My wife and I have had success with making our own flashcards, each with a different character or compound word.
Re:Flashcards (Score:1, Interesting)
I thought this [amazon.com] was a good book for Chinese characters. I agree, flashcards are good as well (I like the paper type, if you can do it away from a computer I think you're more likely to do it)
Tony Buzan and Daniel Tennet Memetic techniques (Score:3, Interesting)
one of the key reasons why the chinese don't need a large intelligence agency is because their entire population is actually their intelligence agency, having been trained from a very young age to memorise vast amounts of information - for example, the 10,000 or so chinese characters.
tony buzan's memetic learning techniques were the first popularly re-published discovery of the greek "mnemonic" memorisation techniques, and he adapted them to get you to focus on the use of the five senses and "familiar" or powerful emotive things, such as "home" or "naked person" or "funny picture" as "hooks" on which to hang the sequence to memorise.
the use of such "hooks" was well-known in medieval times. if you look closely at the top and bottom of the bayeux tapestry, there's a continuous but very small row of naked people in various sexual poses and performing various acts. the idea is that if you want to memorise the battle of hastings, and what happened, you get yourself all worked up "wha-heey!!" and _then_ you look at the pictures of the battle, and the pictures sink in.
daniel tennet, aka "brainman" has also developed a similar sort of technique, focussing specifically on helping people to memorise languages. daniel is approaching this from a different angle from tony buzan, however: optimising the actual language learning process.
tony's technique of "hooking" first gets you to associate numbers with familiar or exciting things. for example, the number 1 could be "red post box". the number 2 looks like a swan. 4 a sail-boat etc. etc. but you can equally as well use what works best for you (kinesthetics) - smells, movements, touch etc. it's _entirely_ up to you to use the right "hooks" which are appropriate for _you_.
so, you now have your "hooks". to memorise things by numbers, let's say the number sequence 412, you imagine a sail-boat on a lake, and it goes past a red postbox, and there's a huuuge white swan sitting on top of it. voila, you have just memorised the sequence 412. this technique of picture/thought association gives you the ability to memorise absolutely huge sequences which you otherwise thought you were incapable of.
so, if you were to use tony's technique, you would look at the character in one of two ways:
1) see what the picture reminds you of (for example, tree is blindingly obvious: it looks like a tree) and then "hook" that in, in some imaginative way, with the actual object (as other people have suggested here)
2) decompile the character by brush-strokes, both the sequence of the strokes (which is critically important for chinese calligraphy) and the direction, length and position, and assign each stroke's direction and position a numerical (or other sequence). you then cross-reference that numerical sequence against the "hooks". you also cross-reference the actual meaning at the beginning of the sequence, again in some imaginative way.
by recalling the pictures / hooks, one after the other, you can turn them back into numbers. you then turn the numbers back into brush strokes: voila, you have your chinese character.
it's a lot of initial work, setting up the "hooks" that are appropriate and creating the mnemonic interpretation, but if you're serious, you'll do it.
all that having been said: it would be much much easier to do sanskrit. if you look closely at the written form of sanskrit, you'll notice that the actual written language - the brush strokes - are a _phonetic key_ to the pronounciation! a vertical line means "plosive" (as in - you're going to close your mouth in some fashion). a horizontal line means "make your voice-box resonate". a slash on top going top-left to bottom-right means "close mouth" and a slash on top going bottom-left to top-right means "open mouth", thus you get "taaah" and "aaahht" respectively when combined with the horizontal and vertical lines. various curly-bits mean "do different things with tongue" and thus you get "kuhh", "puhh", "tuhh", "buhh" or "aabh", "aaakh", "aahhp" if the dia
Re:Flashcards (Score:3, Interesting)
Anki is based on an algorithm that reminds you of material just before you will have forgotten it, called the Forgetting Curve. The more times you are reminded, the stronger the pathways in the brain become and the easier it is to recall later. This algorithm was pioneered by a Polish man and implemented in a system called SuperMemo. You can read more about the inventor and his system in this great Wired article: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak
Anki used version 2 of the SuperMemo algorithm. The inventor writes his own software with Windows (called SuperMemo) and I believe he is on version 13 of the algorithm. Unfortunately, I can't much recommend SuperMemo software as it's very difficult to use, but Anki takes the basics and makes it usable.
Re:Hmmm - Re:A proven technique (Score:5, Interesting)
Entertainingly, I used to date a Chinese girl. We spoke German to each other in England (as well as English) because it was a common language that most other people around us didn't understand.
Re:Same? (Score:4, Interesting)
You've got the same amount of total information to memorize no matter what when it comes to learning a new language.
I don't agree with this.You could learn Mandarin entirely with pinyin--grammar and vocabulary. Pinyin is the most common method of transliteration for Chinese, and consists of a good chunk of the alphabet with some additional markers for tones (similar to accent markers in French). But you could learn it in a couple of days to a week, even if you didn't know the alphabet.
However, if you learn Mandarin using the Chinese script, you have to learn thousands of characters on top of that. Not only do you have to learn the characters, but you have to learn the stroke order and the stroke count (which is used to look up characters in a dictionary). This is substantially more information.
Re:Incorrect assumption! (Score:5, Interesting)
The precise problem with how East-Asian languages are taught is rote memorization. They present you with a character and simply say "this means language", and it's pronounced "go".
Likewise, Japanese tends to teach by patterns. Example: "*owner* wa *object* ga arimasu" means "owner has an/the object". Then later, they say "in order to say that someone has done something, use the pattern: *doer* wa *action in informal case* no ga arimasu."
The problem with this, is that people don't realize that the "no" particle above is being used to turn a sentence into a noun phrase, and you're simply saying literally, "the person has that action", the same as if you were saying that they have an object.
We present these languages, and scripts as if the only way to learn them is through rote memorization...
Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (Score:2, Interesting)
Quoted at length from Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard [pinyin.info]. If you like this, go read the whole thing.
FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY AT TH