How to learn Chinese characters as a beginner



I’ve been teaching beginner courses in Chinese for more than ten years, but I still remember what it was like to write my first characters.To get more news about https://www.shine.cn/news/in-focus/2202172014/ chinese alphabet for beginners, you can visit shine news official website.

When starting to learn Chinese characters, one of the first questions that pop up is how to learn them. I don’t mean what characters to study, how to make sense of Chinese characters or principles for stroke order, but what to do as a beginner to learn your first characters.

When learning almost any other language, writing by hand is not a challenge in itself. Sure, there’s spelling and other things to learn, but that’s at least in principle familiar from other languages we know. Writing Chinese characters is a different beast altogether.Before we start, I want to say a few words of encouragement. Learning Chinese characters as a beginner is challenging, mostly because everything is new and you can’t connect what you need to learn to things you already know. Writing characters is essentially like drawing stylised pictures.

The more you learn, however, the more extensive your web of Chinese knowledge will become, which also means that expanding it further will become easier. The more you know, the easier it becomes to learn even more. You will start recognising components and understand how the fit together to form compounds.

Thus, if you feel that it’s difficult and frustrating at the moment, don’t worry, it will become easier soon! It might feel like you’re drawing pictures, but as your understanding of Chinese characters increases, you will be writing characters soon enough.

For general advice about learning Chinese characters beyond the specific situation we’re looking at in this article, please refer to My best advice on how to learn Chinese characters. It contains in-depth discussions about how the Chinese writing system works, methods for learning characters, and how to remember and review characters effectively.
As a beginner, you don’t have time to read all that now, though, especially not if you have a test soon, so let’s talk about that! If you have time to spare, investing more of it into understanding Chinese characters is always good, but not always practical. I’ll return to this later, but let’s go through the basics first.

Study the character closely, including stroke order – Before you start to write, study the character you’re going to write carefully. How is it written? What does it look like? If your textbook or teacher didn’t provide you with information about stroke order, you can use apps like Pleco or websites like Archchinese. If you don’t know how to type the character in order to look it up, take a look here. Also, note how the character is pronounced, what it means and if it has any components. If this information is not readily available or doesn’t make sense to you, just ignore it.
Write the character until you get the feel for it – Once you know (in theory) how to write the character, write it until you can write the entire character without thinking too much. This is just to familiarise yourself with the hand motions involved and will help improve your handwriting in general, but it isn’t very good for memorisation. The number of times you need to write a character varies greatly depending on the complexity of the character, but don’t overdo it. Write the characters on a paper with squares of suitable size (a few centimetres). I’ve collected stroke order resources and tools to generate grid paper here.
Don’t copy characters stroke by stroke – If you can remember how to write the whole character in one go, that’s great. If you can’t, break it down into its component parts and peek at the stroke order only between writing each component. Copying stroke by stroke is next to useless, because you’re not even trying to remember anything. The more you try to remember something, the better you will become at actually remembering it.
Once you know the character, don’t mass your repetitions – Even though you have now written the character a few times and can write it from memory if asked to do so right now, this ability will fade very soon. If you want to be able to write the character tomorrow, or maybe even an hour from now, some reviewing is necessary. Some people (including most native speakers) write the same character again and again, hoping that they can etch them into their minds. This works, but it’s very inefficient. Instead, you should spread out your repetitions over time. Write other characters, do some listening practice or just do something else entirely for a bit. Spreading reviews out like this is several times more efficient than writing the same character over and over. While there is software that helps you schedule your reviews effectively, you don’t need to commit to any app or service right now, just do’t mass your repetitions. You can even create your own paper flashcards for your first few weeks of learning while you check out the spaced repetition software on offer.