A quick way to memorise Chinese Hanzi characters

Chinese has a fearsome reputation as being one of the most difficult languages to learn. One of the major stumbling blocks is the writing system. Unlike languages such as English that has an alphabet, or Japanese that has a syllable based writing system, the written Chinese language depends on thousands of pictograph characters called Hanzi characters.

The Chinese Hanzi characters occasionally resemble the item they are meant to represent. More often that not though they have become highly abstract and look nothing like the item they are suppose to represent. Furthermore, many words are composed of two or three characters.

Learning all these characters is a difficult undertaking, and requires much time. Living in China is a good way to learn Chinese, but not many people can do this. However, there are shortcuts that can ease the learning process.

The best system of remembering Hanzi characters I have found is to use Tuttle's Hanzi Flash Cards series. These cards display a single Chinese character written on the front. On the back is the pinyin pronunciation of that character, and hints for remembering that character. The cards also show some of the important words formed from that character.

The nice thing about the Tuttle Flash Cards is that they assist in memorising the appearances of each character. Being small, they are easily carried in a school bag or hand bag and so it's possible to practice the character recognition whenever you get a few minutes of free time.

The Tuttle Flash Cards come in 4 box sets of roughly 450 cards in each. They are ordered according to the frequency in which they appear in the written Chinese language, so the first box contains the most frequently encountered characters.

When learning Chinese characters it's important to remember that there are two writing systems in use - Simplified and Traditional. Simplified characters are used in the People's Republic of China. Traditional characters are using in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Tuttle flashcards show both types of characters should the character have both Simplified and Traditional forms.

My Chinese teacher thinks the Tuttle flashcards are expensive. However she is also impressed with my reading ability, so I think I am pursuading her that they are the best way of learning to memorise Chinese characters. I am the best in my class at reading Chinese characters, and I have the excellent Tuttle Flashcards to thank for that!

I have three piles of the Flash Cards. Pile #1 is made up of the cards I have memorised. I only put cards in this pile if I can recognise them, know the English meaning, the pinyin pronunciation and maybe one or two of the meanings of the character when combined with other characters.

Character Pile #2 is the pile that I can usually recognise but do not yet know the English meaning of the character or its Mandarin pronunciation. I try and concentrate on learning these the most.

Pile #3 contains the characters that I need to learn next. I select these on the basis of what I need to learn for each week of my Chinese class.

Once a week I look through all the cards in Pile #1 to make sure I can remember each character. I try to review Pile #2 every night. Once I remember a character it gets shifted into Pile #1. Once Pile #2 shrinks I put a few more characters from Pile #3 into it.

I am interested in brain training techniques, and believe they can be applied to learning Chinese characters. The tips I have found for memorising the characters include:

Try to devote a few minutes to memorising the characters each day.
Try to get into the habit of revising the characters at the same time each day.
The brain is sometimes good at learning while the body is tired, so try learning them before bedtime, or as soon as you get home from work.

The Tuttle Flashcards are ordered so that the most frequently encountered words are memorised first.

I have noticed that the words I have been supposed to learn in my Chinese course are mostly found in the first box of Tuttle flash cards. There are a few flashcards that I think appear way too late in the series of cards. For example, if you are taught to recognise characters by their radicals then you might be surprised to find that the character for sheep (a common radical found in other characters such as mei - beautiful) doesn't appear until the 3rd box of characters.

The boxes of characters are by no means complete. For example, there are only a few characters for colors, and there are only a few animal characters represented in the boxes. There are also a lot of verbs compared to nouns. I don't know how much Chinese it would be possible to read if you memorised all four boxes of characters. The law of diminishing returns certainly applies to learning Chinese characters. I only know the meaning of less than 200 characters, and yet I can already guess the meaning of a lot of the sentences my Chinese girlfriend writes to me on the QQ instant messenging system.

Finally, don't forget that Tuttle Flash Cards are also available for learning Japanese Kanji characters!

If you don't like the Flash Card system then another system is the Heisig method for learning Hanzi characters.