Chinese Characters Are Not Too Hard| 2 min read

A very important thing to know is that each character is composed of radicles. For example, the word father: 爸爸 is composed of two radicles: 父＋巴. Strangely, if you look at each character as being a compilation of many radicles, the more complex the character the easier it is to remember.

With the simple characters such as, 一, 二, 个, etc. they have to be memorized because there is not much to them. To keep it plain: learning to see characters as many different radicles put together can make them easier to learn and remember.

Unfortunately, there is no universal trick to learning characters and there will be an ample amount of memorization involved. Yet, there are ways to study characters which will cause them to stick in ones mind much better than writing them a hundred times a day.

When you have a list of words become familiar with the way the characters are said by reading all of them a few times. Then going back over the characters, draw each one with your finger, either on the paper or in the air. After some time of studying the words in this way, cover up the characters so you can only see the pinyin and/or the English and try writing it with your finger from memory. Eventually, you will be able to hear a word and see the character for it in your mind.

Learning the Chinese language and writing system can be frustrating at first, but by finding effective studying methods learning Mandarin in China will be both enlightening and fun.