Glad to hear you found the character course over at Skritter helpful! 🙂 Regarding your question about unique words, I think it makes sense to learn the basic meaning of a character, because the other meanings are often related to this meaning semantically. There are sound loans and some characters have a very different basic meaning today than they did when they first appeared, but in most cases, there is a basic meaning you can use, and you will then get the others “for free” as it were. For this, the Outlier Dictionary is great, because it gives you the semantic trees for characters and you can see what meaning they think is the most basic one and how the others are derived from that meaning. I see very little utility in trying to remember all the meanings of a character. Sure, if you see no logical connection at all between two meanings and they both seem important and common, maybe, but this ought to be pretty rare.

I already did your Skritter character course and loved it, and the Pleco outliers dict is so great that I definitely want to take their course as well, just didn’t find the time yet.

I’m going to follow your advice to do character -> meaning only (even tho it will be hard for me to resist doing character -> sound at the same time also). Do you think linking one character to a unique word makes sense (as for example suggested by James Heisig) or would you say doing it more loosely is just as good?

Also just another big thanks here for all the great material you put out there, it’s truly incredible!

I think it certainly makes sense to invest some effort into individual characters, but I think there are many ways to do so beyond flashcards. I think the most important reason to focus on characters in themselves is that it’s the only way to understand how the writing system works. You can check out my building blocks series, for example, or check either the Skritter character course or the Outlier Chinese character masterclass.

The point is that knowing individual characters is required to be able to see them as building blocks, which will in turn allow you to learn words much more easily. I wrote about my experience focusing on individual characters here, but it’s pretty old and not very good. 🙂

You will probably know the meaning of many characters even if you’ve never studied them as separate units, and most of the rest you’ll be able to learn simply by looking them up when something doesn’t make sense. For example, if you struggle with a compound word, that might be a good time to look up the component characters. Did you know them? Do you understand how they contributed to the meaning of the word? This type of studying will teach most individual characters you need to know. You can of course create flashcards if you want, but I would think that character -> meaning is the only required card in that case, unless you want to include handwriting.

However I now use anki only for words. I have the front of the card play the audio and the back show the full word (also something I learned about thanks to Hacking Chiness! 🙏)

Now I am wondering if it makes sense to look at characters separatly from words? I think the ‘auidio type question’ would not work for them because there are too many individual characters with exactly the same sound. So I’d probably need an entirely separate deck.

Is that something you did / you would recommend, or does that take up more time than it’s worth?

What do you need help with?

One thing I didn’t see here is contextual learning of Characters. I’ve been through the “trauma” of studying flashcards endlessly but trying to read and write them in context is useful for breaking up the necessary vocabulary study. I wrote a much less detailed article about it here: https://explore-chinese.com/2023/09/14/study-chinese-characters/

Appreciate the depth and detail in this article, I will definitely recommend some of these people to my fellow learners.

Dear Irene,

Yes, I do offer such consultations! I have responded to the email you sent so we can continue the conversation there.

Best wishes,

Olle

Thank you for this very interesting website. I ordinarily work with Vedic, and my goal of learning Chinese is somewhat nonstandard, so both common sense and intuition tell me that I should consult you briefly, just to verify that I’m not missing anything essential. Do you do Zoom consultations? If so, please tell me how to proceed to set up a meeting.

Best wishes,
Irene

Hi! I think the character course I built with Skritter is a very good introduction, although I’m obviously biased. 🙂 There’s currently a vocabulary challenge on, which gives you a month of free access to Skritter, so you could check out the course there if you want! If you want a more advanced course, I suggest Outlier Linguistics, which is much more in-depth, but far from beginner-friendly (in my opinion). I have also written about how characters work in a series of articles starting here: The building blocks of Chinese, part 1: Chinese characters and words in a nutshell