10 Questions You Should to Know about learn Chinese in chengdu

A couple of months ago, I sent out an asking what people’s biggest problems were or are with studying Chinese. I was overwhelmed by the responses I received from users of all levels and I have managed to whittle down everyone’s replies down to these 10 questions. Some of these learning problems came up again and again, and some even surprised me.

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I want to thank everyone who replied to my , and hopefully, the answers help other learners who are asking these questions now!

1. Chinese characters give me the fear! Where do I even start?

When I first started going to formal classes to learn Chinese, I said point blank that I was never going to learn Chinese characters. To me, learning to read Chinese appeared a near impossible feat, and so for years, and years I refused to even give a minute of my time to Chinese characters.

I remember being at a training course once where the trainer tried to explain how you might tell if a character was an ‘animal’ word. One of the people amongst our group, whose wife was Chinese, seemed to understand, but I sat with a blank expression, feeling like the BIGGEST. MORON. EVER.

So, as you can probably imagine, that didn’t do much for my confidence. It wasn’t until a few years later that my Chinese teacher who I’d been with for ages pointed out that we were reaching the end of the series of textbooks she used to teach with, and that it was time to move on.

To characters.

Fear gripped me. I felt sick.

My friend and I looked at each other with looks of dismay and unease, and finally after a lot of complaining and muttering and a considerable amount of convincing, we agreed. The next week, our teacher gave us each a pencil and the writing books with the ‘fields’, to teach us how to write some ‘basic’ characters.

She started with what are called ‘pictograph’ or pictogram characters. These are characters that actually resemble the word that they represent, as a picture would

For starters, she taught us 木 (mù), which is the character for ‘wood’. I don’t think I need to convince you that it’s a pretty good likeness of a tree. Then, she told us that characters that include ‘木’, probably have something to do with wood. This was an absolute revelation. The fact that characters actually had meaning was a pretty big facepalm moment for me. I felt as though a veil had been lifted and I could see everything more clearly.

After that class, my interest in Chinese was completely renewed, and I was excited to have the next class and even did some practising at home. Obviously, at that time, they were shoddy attempts, but attempts there were!

I’m so glad that I eventually started to learn characters, because it really made me feel like I could express myself much more than before, and I kind of felt smart too. If only I’d had more confidence in myself to start learning sooner.

So, for all of you out there, who have the same fears as me, that Chinese characters are too difficult, that you don’t ‘get it’ at all and that learning to speak is enough, just try this:

• – Grab a pencil and paper
• – Open the Online Dictionary, and go to the details page for 口 (kǒu). (You can search ‘kou’ in English or with a Chinese keyboard to find the character)
• – Follow the stroke order in the GIF and try it for yourself.

Of course, not all Chinese characters are as simple as 木 or 口, they do get more complex, and FYI, even MORE interesting! BUT, if you want to just stick your toe in the water, I suggest beginning with some of these pictographic characters.

You learn more about radicals and their importance in our article, The Radical Truth.

Also bare in mind, that it’s WAY more fun if you learn to write the characters, especially if you can get your hands on a magic water pad, or field paper. For a lot of people, writing also cements the meaning of a character more fully in their memory.

Finally, what I have noticed more than anything, is that once I began learning to read and write Chinese characters my spoken Chinese REALLY improved. I was still a wuss about speaking in general, but I was making connections between words I knew how to speak with the corresponding Characters. I felt like I was on fire with new vigour for this language.

Don’t think that learning to read and write Chinese characters is a pointless endeavour or whatever, until you’ve given it a go.

2. I’m having problems remembering characters! Can you recommend some ways to help me remember?

One of the ways in which most people try and remember characters is by staring hard at them, hoping they will somehow leave a permanent imprint on their brain. I’ve been there. I made my own (terribly written) flashcards, that were sometimes so bad, I couldn’t even recognize my own characters! Not only is this method slightly soul destroying, but it takes a lot of time.

One of most thorough ways to learn a Character is to look at the radicals that make up the character. Radicals, are the building blocks that make-up a character and often allow us to understand the meaning behind a character and remember it more easily.

Far too often, Chinese learners forget how to write Chinese characters that they have already studied many times before. Even native speakers get frustrated with forgetting how to write characters! If this has been happening to you, it’s time to stop beating yourself up about it. Instead, let’s pause for a moment and consider a new strategy for retaining Chinese characters in the long term.

To recall characters with ease, you must learn to use your brain as it was intended to be used. Your brain is not wired to memorize large volumes of meaningless shapes in the form of Chinese characters. To really make your character-learning stick in your brain (as well as make it more enjoyable) you must make your Chinese learning associative. To do this, create a sentence or “story” that depicts each character’s meaning. If the story is funny or interesting to you, it will not be burden to remember it.

When you create associative memory hints for learning Chinese characters, use the radicals in the character to construct a sentence that helps you associate the character with its meaning. You can even add a hint to the pronunciation of the character in the story, or multiple meanings for characters that have broader meanings. The point is, the story must be meaningful to you. In this way, it becomes hard to forget.

糕 (gāo) means “cake” and the radicals that make up this character mean “rice”, “sheep” and “fire”. To remember all of this information, you can put it into a sentence like the one appearing in the image above. Creating a silly image to go along with the character is also useful in remembering the story.

Look through the next few examples to get an idea for how you can create your own stories. If you haven’t learned any radicals before, check out the article The Radical Truth.

This one is nice and simple. We see a man radical and a tree radical combined to create the character which means “to rest”.

Here’s another nice and simple one, where it doesn’t take too much brainpower to come up with a story. You might also remember this character by thinking that a son and a sheep both need to be raised by someone.

In the example above, the pronunciation of the character is also hinted at within the story. The name “Gene” kind of sounds like “jin”, the character’s pronunciation. Decide whether this is useful to you and add hints to some of your stories to help you remember the pronunciation.

In the beginning, creating the stories to help you remember characters is a bit challenging. After you have done a few it gets much easier and eventually becomes second nature. Some characters don’t work quite as well as the ones mentioned above, so you need to get a bit more creative. Read all about how to create stories for any character here.

Add your stories and pictures to the comments section of the Learn More pages of the Written Chinese online dictionary. This way you can refer back to them easily should you need a reminder of what you created. You can also look in the comments section to see the stories that other learners have created. Click the Learn More button next to any dictionary entry and scroll down to find the comments section. We use Disqus for our comments, so you can even follow other learners and get notified when they add something to these pages.

It took me quite some time to realise how important context can be within Mandarin Chinese, in both the written and spoken language.

Since we’re primarily discussing characters here, I found that learning bigrams (2-character combinations) instead of characters was easier because you have the context of another character to help you remember. For example, I would also confuse 米 meaning ‘rice’ and 来 meaning ‘here’. Not only was it unlikely for ‘rice’ to pop up in a sentence when food hasn’t been mentioned, but I would often look for the characters before and after to figure out whether it was 米 or 来. Obviously, this doesn’t work for all characters, but it does help in the initial stages of studying. You can take a closer look at to remember these ‘similar’ looking characters in our article, How to Learn Chinese Characters That Lookalike.

Remembering Characters for Exams

This is a small addendum, but something I wanted to address about remembering characters for an HSK exam (someone mentioned they struggled with this). If you’re not sure what an HSK exam is, take a look at our article, Want to know how to take an HSK test? Here are 9 Tips!

As with all aspects of the HSK exam, the best way to remember the characters is to take practice tests beforehand. There is plenty of material out there, including on the official HSK website to help you prepare for the exam. Not only that, but the vocabulary you need to study is available for free, including on our site as downloadable PDFs.

Finally, there are HSK books available with several tests inside that also include CDs for the listening tests, and answers in the back of the book for you to check them later. We have several listed in our Chinese Book Shop that you can take a look at.

If you’re really struggling to prepare for the exam, you might also consider taking a class or two with a tutor, either in a classroom, or online by using a platform such as italki.

3. How do I remember the Pinyin?

Although Pinyin is the romanisation of Chinese characters, you still need to learn Pinyin, because many of the pronunciations do not follow the same rules as English. This can be a challenge for new students of Chinese, but learning the rules of Pinyin from the beginning will improve your pronunciation in the long run.

I’ve joked before about my first experiences of the Chinese language, and only really remembering words that I could connect to English. For example, I picked up 没有 (méi yǒu) pretty quickly, because I associated it with ‘mayo’, like mayonnaise. I also learned certain words faster because I either needed to use them a lot 要 (yào) ／ 不要 (bù yào) or because I heard them all the time 喝水 (hē shuǐ) ／ 快点 (kuài diǎn). However, for many learners, this kind of learning is impossible, because they’re not living in China, or close to a large Chinese population.

I have never come across a walkthrough for learning Pinyin, you just have to learn in, and learn it good, otherwise, your pronunciation will be rubbish.

So let’s start with the basics:

There are only so many pinyin to learn, similarly to the alphabet, and the best way to get these down, is by using a Pinyin chart and practising the pronunciation by listening to audio and speaking out loud. Ideally, having a native speaker correct your pronunciation is a good idea as they can also show you how to shape your mouth to make the correct sound.

As you can see from the chart, there are letters along the X and Y axis, and the words inside are combinations of those.

So, once you have learned that the rule for ‘b’ is that it is pronounced ‘buh’ like as in ‘ball’ and ‘a’ is ‘ah’ as in ‘apple’, combined together you can produce ‘bah’ for pronunciation of ‘ba’.

Listen to the pronunciation:

If you follow this link to our dictionary, I have added all the Pinyin in the first column, so that you can tap on the ‘audio’ button (red or black characters are best) and listen to the sound. Forget the tones for now, just get the sounds right.

When you get stuck with the pinyin, you can type it into the Online Dictionary, and listen to the pronunciation.

Some other methods to help you learn Pinyin is by watching Chinese TV that has Pinyin for you to follow. You can check out the Learn Chinese with Movies YouTube channel for videos like this.

I’m saving the best till last, and suggesting that you watch a video that was made to teach Chinese kids Pinyin. They’re ridiculously annoying, but catchy and helpful.

This one also has a fun bit for tones at the end