{"id":3331,"date":"2013-02-27T08:08:46","date_gmt":"2013-02-27T00:08:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/?p=3331"},"modified":"2016-06-12T08:32:36","modified_gmt":"2016-06-12T07:32:36","slug":"horizontal-vocabulary-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/horizontal-vocabulary-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Horizontal vocabulary learning in Chinese"},"content":{"rendered":"

When learning characters or words, or when failing to remember a character or word we have already learnt, most sensible teachers will urge you to deepen the knowledge of that character. Rather than simply copying it (which won’t work in the long run<\/a>), you should aim at understanding the character and its components. This is what my sensible character learning challenge<\/a> is all about.<\/p>\n

\"Web\"<\/a>

Image credit: sxc.hu\/profile\/kromo<\/p><\/div>\n

When it comes to words, it helps immensely to understand the characters<\/a>. However, focusing on depth isn’t enough to solve all problems, sometimes you need to expand your knowledge horizontally to neighbouring characters to solve a problem once and for all. This is what horizontal vocabulary learning is about.<\/p>\n

Horizontal vocabulary learning<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rather than going deeper, you need to switch focus from the character or word in question and look at similar pieces of vocabulary. This is especially true for characters, but it’s sometimes also necessary for words. In other words, it’s not enough to simply learn about a character or a word, you need to learn how it is different or similar to other words, otherwise the risk for confusion is high.<\/p>\n

Think of your knowledge as a web<\/a>. You want a web that is interconnected at all levels, not only at some very basic level. If you only focus on the components, you will end up with a root-like system. That’s still better than having no connections at all, but it’s not as good as having a proper web.<\/p>\n

Looking at similar characters or words is also a way of strengthening your overall knowledge and cleaning up bad mnemonics (more about this below). Let’s look at different kinds of confusing cases where horizontal character learning is a must.<\/p>\n

Characters similar in form<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are many examples of when it really pays off to study characters horizontally. The most obvious case is phonetic components, which sometimes will reveal patterns you weren’t aware of, but which make remembering characters very, very easy. Since most (<80%) of all characters are semantic-phonetic compounds, this is important. For instance, I thought it was tricky to remember if there should be a dot (\u826f) or no dot \u826e) in characters like:<\/p>\n

With dot (check all here<\/a>): \u5a18, \u6d6a, \u72fc, \u83a8, \u9606, \u7405, \u7a02, \u9512, \u7cae, \u870b, \u917f, \u8e09
\nWithout dot (all here<\/a>): \u8270, \u9650, \u57a6, \u5f88, \u6068, \u72e0, \u9000, \u57a0, \u54cf, \u6073, \u6839, \u75d5, \u773c, \u94f6, \u88c9, \u8ddf<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you study these characters one by one, you might never see the pattern, but if you compare them, you’re likely to notice this: The right part of all these characters is phonetic, either \u826e (gen) or \u826f (liang) and this can be seen in the pronunciation of almost all of these characters. Every character with \u826f ends with either -ang or -iang, and starts with either l- or n-. Most character with \u826e end with either -en or -in, and start with h- or g-. This is incredibly useful to know, because it means that several details of these character are suddenly related. For instance:<\/p>\n