This challenge is over a year old and the current one is almost over (just eight days left)! However, you can of course run your own challenge, keep ups updated. 🙂 There will be more challenges coming up soon, but since I just ran a character challenge, there probably won’t be more character-related challenges this year.

Hi Nancy,

You need to submit your goals before I can sign you up to the challenge!

All one thousand characters are unique so it has one thousand characters.

For me the most interesting part of learning Chinese is the characters, and it’s part of the reason I moved to Taiwan, because I love doing calligraphy.

I’ve found that so far memorization is easier if I break the poem into elements (each stanza is 8 characters.) and I’ve taken a tip from tim Ferris, and memorized a series of routes, with sixteen locations in each route. I use some sort of mnemonic to associated the first or second character in a stanza to a location on the route.

When I practice writing the poem, (I’m focusing on grass style characters right now, but I’ll also be going back to the block style and also the seal style) I use four colors, changing the color for each stanza. This is to help me remember where I am in the poem.

I’ve made a version of the poem for my kindle, and I’ve also included indexes with the characters sorted alphabetically by sound. I often use this index to see if I can remember the context for the character, and also to see if I can remember the caoshu form of the character out of context.

Also I’ve created several indexes. One divides the poem into quarters with each part of the index containing 250 characters (or there abouts), another contains the first 250, then the first 500, then the first 750 etc.

Also, I’ve been using Lean pub to made pdfs (and mobi’s and epub files) so for anyone looking for an alternative way to print out files, it may be a useful resource.